Introduction

But in the field of social science the man who suggests self-criticism and internal systematic doubt of what we are doing often invokes the scorn and wrath of his fellows who feel threatened in smug niches of narrow expertness. l However, though we use the term "scientism" in a slightly pejorative and reproving sense, we do not think of ourselves as antiscientific. Scholars who are critical of scientism·· do not offer intuitions as the remedy. On the contrary, the word "scientism" conventionally describes a type of scholarly trespassing, of pseudo exactitude, of embracing incongruous models of scientific method and conceptualization. Scientism fosters not only the "fads and foibles" of contemporary sociology, but is also in itself a symptom of an insecure world view, of a negative social philosophy. Certain models of society, certain techniques which this volume evaluates, and for which we suggest the label "scientism," appeal sometimes to insecure individuals and groups because such use of science in human affairs supposedly would allow one to "fix," to freeze the world once and for all.2 Moreover, scientistic interpretation of the study of man throws the scholarly grasp of human nature and its volitions open to ideological manipulations when least suspected. Quantities can be ,as subjective an argument as a stress on qualities. But most people are less aware of this fact. If the public or fellow scholars are unwilling, for· prescientific, i.e., ideological reasons, to accept our arguments, statistical data and their expert manipulation will ix x Introduction not convince them. Indeed, we can always startle our positivistic friends in the social sciences by asking them to name just one major policy decision or law that came about, against the popular and political preferences for it, on the strength of quantitative data. Can we recapture the proper-i.e., most fertile-balance between elements of measurement, of quality, and of form in the study of social man?

Over a number of years participants in this symposium, and others, have shown, in their individual publications, increasing concern with the harm done to the true study of man, especially as a social being, by a form of scientism that takes various disguises of strict scientificalness. It is. not merely neopositivism, which, by the way, has been criticized by a number of· able men; it is also more than a cult of quantification. Scientism implies a cynical world view-in the original meaning of the word: it is a doglike view of man, or shall we say riatlike? Man is best understood, so the scientistic expert holds, when seen from th'e level of a rodent eager to learn the ins and outs of a maze. He can be conditioned to put up with almost anything the few wise designers of the maze have mapped out for him. And yet a critical attitude toward scientism is not to be con fused with an antievolutionary position. On the contrary, we see scientistic sociologists and anthropologists refuse to learn from research on animals because it might challenge their creed of en vironmental determinism. As A. L. Kroeber observed not long ago,3 many of his colleagues in America are studiedly ignorant of the work of the ethologists, including such renowned men as Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz, who explore species-specific innate behavior patterns.

Thus, we should ask just which aspects of the presocial and nonsocial sciences appeal to those afflicted with scientism.? And why are they enthralled and to what effect? The scientistic students of social man have isolated their field from meaningful •reality by an arbitrary barrier of methodology. "What we cannot study does not exist-for the time being." This was done partly 'by reserving the 'labels: "scientific" and "scholarly" (wissenscha/tlich) for a few approaches' to reality which laymen and social' scientists Introduction xi conventionally associate with the natural sciences. Scientistic doc trinaires chose to ignore the fact that these few methods were by no means the only approaches used in the natural sciences. Berta lanffy's paper cites striking examples of this naivete. Fritz Machlup blames part of this on a semantic confusion and remarks that in German-speaking countries certain excesses of scientism may not have appeared for the simple reason that the word wissenschaftlich embraces a larger number of methods and approaches than does, "scientific" in the English-speaking world. 4 And when we examine prenineteenth-century uses of the word Wissenschaft-from the Teutonic weight of which the word "science" obtained some additional glamor around the turn of the century-we find that learned men, around 1780, understood W issenschaft primarily to mean "worth knowing" or "worth noticing." When we are critical of a fashionable brand of scien tism, we do not intend to belittle the necessity and actual power of the method of obervation. We plead for more courage in ob serving phenomena, even if the .methodologist tells us that his tools are not yet ready for them, or never will be.

We might heed what so eminent an economist as Jacob Viner wrote about his field: 5 And for some time in the future there will be problems of interest to the economist which will be elusive of the application of the tech niques of precise nleasurement and which will have to be dealt with by methods of. inquiry which in the dogmatics of the laboratory scien tist have lost their respectability. It is true, however, even of the physical sciences, or at least so I gather from the recent writings of the more articulate physicists, that they are losing some of their late Nineteenth Century preference for naive as against sophisticated metaphysics, and also that until they have devis,ed quantitative methods of dealing with problems they proceed brazenly by means of inferior methods without much apparent injury to their self-esteem. And even John Maynard Keynes, in his General Theory of Em ployment;, Interest and Money (pp. 297 f.), was well aware ofa fact that most of his ardent followers seem to have forgotten. He warned: xii Introduction It is a great fault of symbolic pseudomathematical methods of formal izing a system of economic analysis ... that they expressly assume strict independence between the factors involved and lose all their cogency and authority if this hypothesis is disallowed; whereas, in ordinary discourse, where we are not blindly manipulating but know all the time what we are doing and what the words mean, we can keep "at the back of our heads" the necessary reserves and qualifica tions and the adjustments which we shall have to make later on, in a way in which we cannot keep complicated differentials "at the back"

of several pages of algebra which assume that they all vanish. Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere con coctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdepend encies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols. Adherents of scientism-as far as the study of man is con cerned-have turned the meaning of "science" (W issenschaft) into the art of selective "not knowing" and "not noticing." Today's sci entistic bias compels students to know the worthless and keeps them from searching for the knowledge of worthwhile bodies of data. 6 In 1953, the student government of Yale University pub lished its rather harsh "Course Critique," a booklet guiding new students to worthwhile courses. According to the specific critique of the course in social psychology, enrolled students seemed to learn little and became impatient because the professor's methodo logical zeal and rigor kept him from imparting knowledge of what makes human beings really "tick" in soci'al interaction.

We could be amused and simply wait for the eventual passing of this fad. Yet it is not so comfortable a situation. We probably know considerably more about social man, about our systems of social organization, than the fraternity of behavioral scientists and sociometrists allows us to admit. Many of the theoretical achieve ments, as well as the everyday routine work of the natural sciences, depend on subjective sensory experiences, evaluations, and judg ments of a kind that is strictly outlawed as "unscientific" or "unscholarly" in the official social sciences of today. Especially are we forbidden to use simple declarative, and Introduction xiii sometimes pejorative, terms without which a chemist or anatomist could not even communicate in his profession. If this, were because of a humanistic self-consciousness, we could hardly find fault with it, but it becomes ludicrous when the taboo is imposed on the ground that we have to follow the natural sciences.

Under cover of this confusion some social scientists foolishly or mischievously undermine forms of social (political, economic) life the defense of which ought to employ cognitive and evaluative means (and terms) that still constitute the major tools of many natural sciences. If social scientists really knew what natural scientists do, they could hardly derive a mandate for aggressive social reforms from their ambition to be scientists. Natural scientists are often compelled, in certain fields, to let the internal arrangement of their subject matter alone. A scientific grasp of, and approach to, the world around us is by no means synonymous with the wish to change things. There are several disciplines whose masters are committed to, and trained for, the most careful con servation and restoration of past structures. Archaeology, linguis tics, medical arts, plant and animal ecology, limnology, to name a few, apply scientific method and care in order to preserve or restore structures and arrangements which came about without benefit of a human planner. For instance, sociology could benefit from the morphological approach used in the life-sciences (e.g., com parative anatomy). Of course, there is no ontological congruity between the objects studied in these fields. What I should like to stress here is the heuristic value of this type of categorization, since I shall show this in detail later.

A famous archaeologist once complained that the advent of photography corrupted the young generation of scholars in his field. They no longer needed to draw ,\That they saw. They simply shot a picture, but in the process of doing this they forgot, or never learned in the first place, how to observe. Drawing with a pencil on white paper some glimpses deep down in a cave was hard schooling. It taught ho,v to see. Similarly, I am afraid, the arrival and pushing of quantitative methods in the social sciences corrupted young sociologists and social psychologists. They are so proud of the presumed power xiv Introduction of statistical tools, of measurement of attitudes, for instance, that they never learn how to observe significant phenomena in their field of study. They learn all about "measuring" attitudes before they can tell one attitude from another by looking at a human being in social action.

This helplessness of our social scientists is shown, for instance, by their failure to come to grips with the phenomenon of aggres sion. Learned teams have tried to discover what makes human beings aggressive. They have studied international tensions, hostil ities, frustrations, and other surface phenomena. It has hardly occurred to them to go beyond the terms "aggression" or "hos tility." If they had been as open to such problems as, were our students of man in the nineteenth century, it could not have escaped their attention that envy is a much more basic common denominator for various phenomena of "aggression" or "hos tility" than "frustration," although a less flattering motive with which to excuse the perfidy of a Hitler or a Castro. The frustra tion theory nearly allows one to put the blame on the alleged frustrator; in the case of envy, this is a little more difficult. w. T. Couch has made pertinent comments on this point: the developments we have come to call scientism are probably, in part, responsible for the facility with which social scientists circumvent crucial phenomena of human action that have tra ditionally form,ed a link between the empirical observation of man and normative philosophy.

NOTES 1. See) for instance, Sylvia Thrupp: "An audience of historians is not enough. Yet will the average sociologist join the audience? Will he be afraid, if he is seen reading a journal of 'Comparative Studies in Society and History,' of being thought unscientific, antiquarian, a deviant in his profession, maladjusted?" "History and Sociology: New Opportunities for Cooperation," American Journal of Sociology) LXIII (1957), 14. Probably one of the earliest uses of the term scientism in a critical and derogatory vein can be found in Max Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1926), p. 271. Recently one could note an in creasing use of the terms "scientism" and "scientistic" in scholarly and scientific writing. Here are a few examples. ". . . scien tism may be described as an addiction to science. Among the Introduction xv signs of scientism are the habit of dividing all thought into two cate gories, up-to-date scientific knowledge and nonsense; the view that the mathematical sciences and the large nuclear laboratory offer the only permissible models for successfully employing the mind or organizing effort .... One main source for this attitude is evidently the persuasive success of recent technical work .... The danger-and this is the point where scientism enters-is that the fascination with the mechanism of this successful enterprise may change the scientist himself and society around him. For example, the unorthodox, often withdrawn individual, on whom most great scientific advances have depended in the past, does not fit well into the new system. 'And society will be increasingly faced with the seductive urging of scientism to adopt generally what is regarded -often erroneously-as the pattern· of organization of the new science.

The crash program ... the megaton effect are becoming ruling ideas in complex fields such as education, where they may not be applicable." (Gerald Holton, Professor of Physics, Harvard University, in his paper, "Modern Science and the Intellectual Tradition," Science, CXXXI [April 22, 1960J, 1191.) Joseph R. Royce, a professor of psychology, writing in the December, 1959, issue of the American Scientist (XLVII, 534), offers this definition and warning: "... as men ... we tend to commit ourselves in an ulti mate sense to a particular structuring of the value universe .... Com munists ... have made this type of commitment to their political views . . . and have thereby made communism their religion. In my opinion, this same attitude can be taken in the name of science, and we may prop erly refer to this type of religious commitment as scientism. I do not wish to be misunderstood at this critical juncture. As I see it, we should apply the scientific method to any and all problems .... However, my point is that the final putting together of the segments of life will always be a highly subjective and individual task ... which cannot be scientized."

Michael Polanyi finds "that modern scientism fetters thought as cruelly as ever the churches had done. I t offers no scope for our most vital be liefs and it forces us to disguise them in farcically inadequate terms. Ideologies framed in these terms have enlisted man's highest aspirations in the service of soul-destroying tyrannies." (Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy [University of Chicago Press 1958], p. 265.) And Jacques Barzun, surveying the jargon of several of our "leaders of social science," speaks of the "enormous harm [that] has been done by heedless scientism to language, first, and through it to everyone's mind." (The House of Intellect [New York: Harper, 1959J, p. 230. 2. Kai T. Erikson, Psychiatry, XX (August 1957), 271 f., has shown how the scientistic models of certain psychiatrists tend to lure patients into an unrealistic attitude toward treatment.

3. A. L. Kroeber, "On Human Nature," Southwestern Journal of A nthro pology, XI (1955), 196 f., 200, 204. 4. Fritz Machlup, "The Inferiority Complex of the Social Sciences," On Freedom and Free Enterprise, Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises J xvi Introduction edited by Mary Sennholz (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1956), p. 165. 5. 1. Viner, The Long View and the Short (1958), pp. 42 f., reprinted from an article in American Economic Review) Supplement) XVIII (March, 1928). 6. See) for instance, William C. Boyd, "Has Statistics Retarded the Progress of Physical Anthropology?" American Journal of Physical Anthropology) XVI, No.4 (December, 1958), 483: H •••the use of statistical methods in physical anthropology, although no doubt useful ... has in the past retarded the progress of the discipline, by leading to a false feeling of security in the uncritical accumulation of great masses of measurements and by discouraging attempts at physiological and genetic analysis of human traits." If this can be said about physical anthropology, should we not heed such warning even more for the social and cultural dimen sions of man?