At the same time the behavioral sciences constitute one of the bugaboos of the modern world. Skinner's Walden Two, the most honest and straightforward account of what the present trends in the behavioral sciences would mean if applied to the social world, has received and is receiving a great deal of fearful attention. The subject of control of human behavior through knowledge gained in the behavioral sciences is of increasing interest to large groups of people. When Dr. Skinner and I held a dialogue in Duluth, Minnesota, in the summer of 1962, nine hundred people attended. Both Dr. Skinner and I felt that in ways perhaps unknown to us, we were touching some important nerve in the present day culture. The response and the interest were much more than a response to a dialogue between two individuals. It is quite apparent that the behavioral sciences constitute a real issue and often a real threat to many who know about them and their increasing power. It has become clear that psychology, like physics, can be used to enrich or to destroy our lives.
Since we are a boon to society, since we are growing to be a respected area of science, since we are a fearful threat to our culture, since we are a group of rapidly developing disciplines; perhaps this is a good time to consider some of our foundations. Perhaps it is a time to try to examine, at as fundamental a level as possible and in as fresh a way as possible, the presuppositions which underly our whole field of work and its relation to life and living. Perhaps we can anticipate some of the problems which in the not too distant future will face us and our society by asking ourselves some of the deeper questions. How do we know? What is "true"? What are the identifying characteristics of a scientist? What is science? What is the special nature of behavioral science?
I am well aware of my lack of qualifications for so fundamental an inquiry. I am a therapist, a student of interpersonal relationships, not a philosopher of science. But I hope I can raise some questions which will arouse discussion, questions which I believe are fundamental to our ongoing discipline.
In the first place, let me speak of me as scientist. I love the precision and the elegance of science. The simple law of the lever, that the weight times distance to the fulcrum at the other end, fascinates me. This whole question of balance and leverage has intrigued me enough that I love to build large floating mobiles which in their movement and balance express some of the beauty of the law of the lever. I can lose myself in the contemplation of this elegance. One of the most exciting books I have recently read is the book by Morris Kline (1953) on Mathematics in Western Culture. This is actually a history of scientific discovery in Western culture, the way in which significant new knowledge has been born. I regard the natural history of our scientific development as one of the most intriguing fields I know.
I like to create hypotheses and I like to test them against hard reality. I dislike fuzzy and personal emotional statements when they are given out as general truths, even when I respect them as expressions of the person. I am fascinated when I feel that I am close to an understanding of some principle of nature, an understanding which gives an opportunity for control of natural events by getting in tune with these discovered principles. (This of course is as close as we ever come to control of nature. We never control it in an arbitrary sense; we simply endeavor to put ourselves in accord with its underlying principles.)
I believe that psychological science will advance along the lines of discovering the lawful order which exists in human behavior and experience- in interpersonal relationships, in learning, in perception, in those experiences denied to awareness, and other psychological events. As a psychologist I am always looking for the invariant relationship, the statement that X always precedes Y, or is related to it in some invariant manner. I am sure that if these definite relationships exist and are discoverable, they can give us a deeper understanding of psychological events.
Despite my debates with Skinner, I feel that the elucidation of the process of operant conditioning is a great contribution which we have only begun to understand and use. I have the same attitude toward other recent developments in psychology. What I am trying to say is that I have, deep within me, a feeling for science, for that relatively new invention in human history by which we have come to have a partial understanding of the awesome order in our physical and psychological universe. Consequently I value the concepts which are near and dear to the heart of the behavioral sciences. The concern with observable behavior, the casting of all variables in operational terms, the adequate testing of hypotheses, the use of increasingly sophisticated design and statistics, all have meaning to me. I try continuously in my own research to see that it is conducted in a precise fashion with adequate controls and with sophisticated research design and statistical methodology so that we are not deceiving ourselves as to the findings. I mention all these personal attitudes because, in one part of me, I definitely am a scientist.
But I am also a person. A therapist. An individual who has lived deeply in human relationships. Here I come up with some other values and views which have equally deep meaning to me.
I value the person. Of all the incredible forms of life and non-life with which I am acquainted in the universe, the individual human being seems to me to have the most exciting potential, the greatest possibilities for an expanding development, the richest capacities for self-aware living. I cannot prove that the individual is most to be valued. I can only say that my experience leads me to place a primary value on the person of the human individual.
I am well aware that other views are possible, that one can, for example, place a primary value upon society, and only a secondary value upon the individual. But only in the individual does awareness exist. Only in the individual can alternative courses of action be most deeply and consciously tested as to their enriching or destructive consequences. The whole history of mankind, it seems to me, shows a gradually increasing emphasis upon the significance and worth of each individual. I not only observe this trend. I concur in it.
As a consequence it is not surprising that I object to the process of depersonalization and dehumanization of the individual which I see in our culture. I regret that the behavioral sciences seem to me to be promoting and reinforcing this trend. I am concerned when so astute an observer as Clifton Fadiman says, in speaking of the newspapers, that "this machine [the newspaper] . . . mediates between Technological Man (of whom we are the faint foreshadowing) and the Technological Order of which we will eventually be the computable Factors" (Holiday, 1963). I do not look forward with anticipation to being no more than a computable factor in such an order. It appears to me that many of the modern trends would indicate that we are moving inexorably toward a world in which men will be no more than conditioned ants in a gigantic anthill. I do not appreciate this prospect.
I have come to place a high value on personal, subjective choice. My experience in therapy confirms me in the belief that such choice, made openly by an individual who is aware both of what is going on with him, and aware also of his personal environment, is highly significant. I think of the confused psychotic man whose turn toward improvement was probably best predicted when he muttered, "I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm going to do it." In short, I believe that terms such as personal freedom, choice, purpose, goal, have profound and significant meaning. I cannot agree with the view that the behavioral sciences have made not only such terms but the concept of meaning itself, meaningless.
I turn now to some more personal, less general views, in the hope that they will help you to interpret the views of science which follow. I believe that the internal frame of reference, the subjective private world of the person, is one of the very best ways of understanding human being. Most of our significant hypotheses, even for our research, grow out of our own private and internal world, or out-of the empathic understanding of the private world of another. This personal reality- as-perceived is the source of the valuable hunches, beliefs, ideas, which prove to be fruitful. Without the creative, inner, subjective hypothesis, all the elaborate machinery of outward verification would, in my judgment, be sterile.
With less pride I must report that I feel real glee when I discover that a careful research on planaria (Best, 1963) - a highly objective research on these lowly flatworms- is scarcely understandable without the use of such terms as apathy, significant choice, rejection, desire for richness of experience. It would not concern me at all if I found that we had to allow for subjectivity even in lower forms of life.
But there are boundaries to my regard for the subjective. I find that the elaboration of the subjective alone, as in some of the more far-out existentialists, is as unacceptable to me as the rigidity of a closed, impersonal science. As I read some of these existential writers, I feel that here we are entering into a situation in which history is repeating itself. We have suffered enough from the dogmatism of an unscientific Freudianism which initially enlightened us and then bound us into a rigid straitjacket. I do not want to see us repeat this history with some of the newer elements of existential thinking.
I have tried to give something of this continuing dialogue within myself simply to indicate that as a person I stand in both camps- the world of the precise, hard scientist, and the world of the sensitive subjective person. I hope this may provide a background for a better understanding of some of the ideas I would like to put forth in an attempt to answer some of the naive questions which I initially raised.
If this seems to you to be an unwarranted undercutting of the solidity of our knowledge I would simply want to say that modern philosophers of science like Polanyi reinforce this view. I think it is not too much to say that knowing, even in the hardest sciences, is a risky, uncertain, subjective leap even when it is most "objective." We do no one a service by pretending it is not this. Instead we might look with awe at the scientific, philosophical, and artistic achievements which man has been able to build upon this very shaky base of personal experience. It speaks well for the essential trustworthiness of his functioning.
If it seems hard or difficult to give up the certainty of knowing which has customarily been related to science, perhaps we should recognize that the statements I am making put a firm emphasis upon science as a process, rather than upon science as a result. I believe there is a great deal of evidence to indicate that in many aspects of our culture, including science, we are moving toward a process conception of all aspects of living and life. Even in the teaching of high school science as the conduct of inquiry, we are endeavoring to facilitate an understanding of science as a subjectively guided process. To me it appears that our security is in this process, not in the scientific results, which may at any time be contradicted.
One of the best statements of the character of knowing, and also of the true scientist, is given not by a philosopher of science but by a choreographer. Agnes de Mille (1958, pp. 190-191) has this to say about the gaining of knowledge: "The moment one knows how, one begins to die a little. Living is a form of not being sure, of not knowing what next or how. And the artist before all others never entirely knows. He guesses, and he may be wrong. But then how does one know whom to befriend or, for that matter, to marry? One can't go through life on hands and knees. One leaps in the dark. For this reason creative technique reduces itself basically to a recognition and a befriending of one's self. 'Who am I?' the artist asks, and he devotes his entire career to answering.
"There is one clue: what moves him is his. What amuses or frightens or pleases him becomes by virtue of his emotional participation a part of his personality and history; conversely what neither moves nor involves him, what brings him no joy, can be reckoned as spurious. An artist begins to go wrong exactly at the point where he begins to pretend. But it is difficult sometimes to accept the truth. He has to learn who he in fact is, not who he would like to be, nor even who it would be expedient or profitable to be."
The parallel with truly scientific thinking is profound. The scientist trusts himself and his experiencing or, as she puts it so charmingly, "befriends" himself, as he searches for the perceptions of truth which are his, which really belong to him, which constitute his basis for taking the subjective leap. This process is beautifully illustrated by none other than Dr. B. F. Skinner (1961), in his subjective account of his process of becoming a scientist. Here his story is studded by such phrases as, "This was, of course, the kind of thing I was looking for;" "I can easily recall the excitement of;" "Of course, I was working on a basic assumption." These phrases indicate the kind of intuitive trust which he placed in his own experiencing, and the fact that it was those experiences which moved him, subjectively, that guided his scientific directions.
But let us turn away from these comments on the personal process of knowing, to the larger conception of science as a whole. How do we pursue truth? How do we discover new or generalized knowledge? What is it like to be a scientist? What is the essence of science? I should like to set forth a few statements as a basis for discussion.
It would appear that if I wish to become a scientist the first step is to immerse myself in the phenomena of the particular field in which I have developed an interest. The more complete the immersion, the longer it lasts, the more I love and prize the whole field, the more open I am to all the subtleties of my experiencing, the more likely I am to discover new knowledge. This means a tolerance for ambiguity and contradiction, a resistance to the need for closure. It means soaking up experience like a sponge so that it is taken in in all its complexity, with my total organism freely participating in the experiencing of the phenomena, not simply my conscious mind.
Out of this immersion in the phenomena, certain things "come to mind." I may find emerging some sense of pattern or rhythm or relationship. As I read the history of science and as I understand the thinking of men like Plane this subjective sense of pattern is something to be nourished, no matter how absurd such patterns may seem when scrutinized by my conscious thought. I need to recognize that my conscious thought is full of fixed constructs which may interfere with the perception of an underlying pattern. It appears that the discoverer of knowledge feels a trust in all his avenues of knowing, unconscious, intuitive, and conscious.
It is this intuitive sensing of a pattern which is all-important in true science. If I can lay aside rigidly held preconceptions, can forget for a moment the "truth," the clear-cut constructs already known, then the pattern may shine through more clearly. Here is an excellent statement of the attitude I am describing. "what you have to do is let go, let go every thought of your own, wipe your mind clean, fresh, innocent, newborn, sensitive as unexposed film to take up the impressions around you, and let what will come in. This is the pregnant void, the fertile state of no-mind. This is non- preconception, the beginning of discovery" (Flaherty, 1960, p. 20). This could certainly have come from a scientist. Actually, it is a statement by a gifted creator of documentary films, Frances Flaherty.
The great scientists, men like Kepler, Einstein, and others, have learned to trust this intuitive sensing. It may be clearly wrong and yet fundamentally right. For example, I have chuckled at the natives in the Caribbean who would not think of planting their crops except at the time of the new moon, when "the moon is right." All of us "know" that the moon cannot possibly affect this seed that is placed in the ground. The native is acting on a ridiculous hypothesis. Now, however, centuries after natives formulated their adages, scientists find to their puzzlement that rainfall during the week following the new moon is significantly greater all over the world than rainfall during the other portions of the moon's cycle. In other words, the hypothesis that the moon affected the seed is as wrong as we in our superior knowledge thought that it was. But the sensing of the pattern, by natives immersed for a lifetime in the growing of crops, was correct! This accords very deeply with my belief that the human organism, when operating freely and non- defensively, is perhaps the best scientific tool in existence and is able to sense a pattern long before it can consciously formulate one.
Bronowski (1956, pp. 23, 24, 32) sees these patterns or rhythms as "hidden likenesses," that is, a similarity between two objects or events which on the surface would seem to be totally unrelated. He says, "All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. . .the scientist looks for order in the appearances of nature by exploring such likenesses, for order does not display itself of itself; if it can be said to be there at all it is not there for the mere looking. There is no way of pointing finger or a camera at it; order must be discovered and in a deep sense it must be created. What we see as we see it is mere disorder. . .We remake nature by the act of discovery in the poem or in the theorem."
One of the great mistakes in the behavioral sciences today, in my judgment, is that since our science must deal in observables- the movement of a needle on a polygraph, a mark on paper, a sound emitted, a movement of a limb, and the like- we have assumed that the pattern we sense must also have to do with observables. This is where the freely functioning human organism is confined in its operation and permitted only a distorted perception. It appears to me that a pattern when it is sensed must be perceived in its own terms, whether those terms are internal, ineffable, subjective and invisible, or whether they are external, tangible and visible.
If I develop some sense of pattern regarding the perceptions and visions of individuals who have taken the drug LSD, my first perception of that pattern can best be cast in terms of the visions and hallucinations (which no observer can see) rather than in terms of the emitted words, tears, groans, writhings, of the individuals involved. We need not be fearful of perceiving the pattern in terms which are natural to it. Later, in testing hypotheses, we may have to limit ourselves to observable areas, but this is a different matter.
May I sum up this point about pattern by saying that I have come to realize that all science is based on a recognition- usually prelogical, intuitive, involving all the capacities of the organism- of a dimly sensed gestalt, a hidden reality. This gestalt or pattern appears to give meaning to disconnected phenomena. The more that this total apprehension of a pattern is free from cultural values and is free from past scientific values, the more adequate it is likely to be. The more that it is based on all sensory avenues, upon unconscious directions, as well as cognitive insights, the more adequate it is likely to be. I regard this sensing of a pattern of relationships as perhaps the heart of all true science. I believe this view would be supported by Plane and many others in the physical sciences.
Perhaps a quotation from Dr. Plane (1958, p. 6) would be in order here. He says: "To say that the discovery of objective truth in science consists in the apprehension of a rationality which commands our respect and arouses our contemplative admiration; that such discovery, while using the experience of our senses as clues, transcends this experience by embracing the vision of a reality beyond the impression of our senses, a vision which speaks for itself in guiding us to an ever deeper understanding of reality- such an account of scientific procedure would be generally shrugged aside as out-dated Platonism: a piece of mystery-mongering unworthy of an enlightened age. Yet it is precisely on this conception of objectivity that I wish to insist."
I do not propose to expand on this point because I believe the operational approach is fairly well understood. I will simply give an example from my own experience which could be duplicated, I am sure, in the cribable attitudinal sets in the psychotherapist- genuineness, acceptance, a sensitive empathic understanding- are the necessary and sufficient conditions of change in the client or patient who is involved with the therapist in psychotherapy. Simply as an assertion, this has about the same status as the assertion that the moon is made of green cheese. When it is recognized that the assertion grows out of some thirty years of therapeutic experience it has a slightly better, but not greatly better status. Unless I am willing to define these terms operationally, to design a research which will put them to test, or to encourage others to design such researches, unless the various extraneous variables are controlled, and unless the findings support the hypotheses, then we are only in the realm of pattern perception and not of confirmation.
Perhaps, however, the methodology of science and all its enormous modern sophistication is placed in a more suitable perspective if we clearly recognize that it is simply the machinery by which we try to determine whether we have deceived ourselves in the pattern which we have sensed in nature.
Even in the realm of confirmation the personal element enters in. In a recent discussion with Lancelot Whyte, the physicist who has become a historian of ideas and a philosopher of science, I was surprised to find that for him the truth value of a statement, even in science, could in the last analysis be evaluated by one criterion only. If I understood him correctly he was saying that his only criterion was as to how deeply acquainted with the phenomena, how non-defensive, how truly open to all facets of his experiencing, is the scientist who has perceived the pattern and put it to test. I realized after my conversation that if I tried to state in my own terminology the judgment of this physicist it would be that the more nearly the individual comes to being a fully functioning person (Rogers, 1963), the more trustworthy he is as a discoverer of truth.
In the behavioral sciences I think that one of our problems is that the methods of testing hypotheses come to be regarded as dogmas. These are, or should be, as unwelcome as dogmas in any other field. The rules and methods we have for testing hypotheses are creations of the scientists themselves and should be recognized as such. Thus we should realize that there is no special virtue to any one procedure. Some hypotheses can best be tested in one case. One such famous hypothesis had to do with the circulation of the blood, and the testing of it involved no statistics. Others can only be satisfactorily tested on a large population using all of the most elaborate statistical methods. Some very pioneering hypotheses should first be tested in rough ways before they are put to refined test. In all instances the method of testing should be appropriate to the hypothesis, the pattern, the "vision of reality."
Perhaps it will help us in achieving a proper perspective on our methodology if we recognize that we are always dealing with labels in our research work, never with the phenomenon itself. No one has ever seen a stimulus or a response or a reinforcement, for example, any more than we have ever seen a negative self concept. We do observe behavior which we interpret to be a stimulus or a response or a reinforcement to the animal or the human being, just as we can observe behaviors which seem to be reasonably interpreted as indicators of a negative self concept. But it is always true that the measures which we adopt or devise are based on external clues. We try to choose measures which bring us as close as possible to the underlying phenomena in which we are actually interested but our research methods never utilize those phenomena, only an external clue or interpretation of them. This is true in all the sciences, especially in the sciences we so admire as the "hard" sciences.
Are we creating a climate in our graduate schools and laboratories in which a confrontation with the mystery of the real in human personality and behavior can exist? Is the atmosphere such as to permit dimly perceived patterns to emerge and be tested? In the graduate departments which I know best, I would say that such a climate does not exist. We have a good environment for training technicians, but not a good climate for scientists.
Is it clear to us as behavioral scientists that our true task is to discern patterns, rhythms, relationships, which cut so deeply into the rationality of nature that the implications of our perceptions will only be fully evident many decades hence? Granted that such perceptions cannot be forced, and must emerge, is it clear that this is our central purpose? It appears to me that all too often the behavioral sciences are marked by a shallowness which bodes ill. When one small technical study is piled on top of many others, this is not science in its true sense. The effort to get two papers out of one study, the lengthening of publication lists by spurious co-authorship, thus spreading the kudos around, is too often the characteristic of our field. We seem, all too frequently, to have forgotten the nature of science.
In the first place it would tend to do away with the fear of creative subjective speculation. As I talk with graduate students in the behavioral sciences this fear is a very deep one. It cuts them off from any significant discovery. They would be shocked by the writings of a Kepler in his mystical and fanciful searching for likenesses and patterns in nature. They do not recognize that it is out of such fanciful thinking that true science emerges. As Bronowski says (1956, pp. 22-23), "To us the analogies by which Kepler listened for the movement of the planets and the music of the spheres are far fetched. But are they more so than the wild leap by which Rutherford and Bohr found a model for the atom in, of all places, the planetary system?"
A second effect would be to place a stress on disciplined commitment, disciplined personal commitment, not methodology. It would be a very healthy emphasis in the behavioral sciences if we could recognize that it is the dedicated, personal search of a disciplined, open-minded individual which discovers and creates new knowledge. No refinement of a laboratory or statistical method can do this.
Another effect would be that it would do away with many of the "oughts" in selecting hypotheses. For example, it is deeply imbedded in most behavioral scientists that we "ought" to be concerned only with the observables in behavior. Until recently this has tended to inhibit work on dreams, on fantasy, on creative thinking. It has made most psychologists small-calibre scientists.
Another effect would be that it would permit a free rein to phenomenological thinking in behavioral science, our effort to understand man and perhaps even the animals from the inside. It would recognize that no type of hypothesis has any special virtue in science save only in its relationship to a meaningful pattern which exists in the universe. Thus, a phenomenologically based hypothesis would have as much place in the behavioral sciences as a chemically based, genetically based, or behaviorally based hypothesis. We would develop a broader science (Rogers. 1964).
Another effect would be that it would do away with those hypotheses which are selected simply because there are tools to measure the variables involved.
Another effect would be that it would put the machinery of confirmation, the machinery of empirical testing of hypotheses, in its proper place. Method would not occupy a central place as the be-all and end-all of behavioral science.
Another effect would be that it would put the stress on meaning, not simply on statistical significance at the .01 level.
Another and more general effect would be that if the picture of science I have tried to suggest gains some general acceptance in our field, then it would give a new dignity to the science of man and to the scientist who commits himself to that field. It would keep the scientist as a human being in the picture at all times and we would recognize that science is but the lengthened shadow of dedicated human beings.
Perhaps most important of all, it would keep the subject of the investigation of the behavioral sciences in the picture as a subjective human being, not simply as a machine, not simply as a determined sequence of cause and effect. We would not be fearful of looking at man as an existing human being, to use Kierkegaard's term, with more to his life than can be compressed into a machine model. Unless we can make progress in this direction the behavioral sciences have, I fear, the capacity for becoming a threat to society more extreme and more devastating than the physical sciences have been.
Note:
First in a seminar at the Center for Advance Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California, 1962-3; second in a seminar of faculty and graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, in 1963; most recently in a seminar of faculty, graduate students, and scientists from other fields, at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, La Jolla, California, in 1964.
Bronowski, J. Science and human values. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956.
de Mille, Agnes B. And promenade home. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958, pp. 190-191.
Fadiman, C. Party of One. Holiday, 1963, 34 (5), 14.
Flaherty, Frances. The odyssey of a film-maker. Urbana, Ill.: Beta Phi Mu, 1960.
Kline, M. Mathematics in Western culture. New York: Oxford Univer. Press, 1953.
Polanyi, M. Personal knowledge. Chicago: Univer. of Chicage Press, 1958.
Rogers, C. R. The concept of the fully functioning person. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice, 1963, 1 (1), 17-26.
Rogers, C. R. Toward a science of the person. In T. W. Wann (Ed.), Behaviorism and phenomenology: contrasting bases for modern psychology. Chicago: Univer. of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. 109-140.
Skinner, B. F. Cumulative record. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961.
(This paper has been presented as it appeared in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. V, No. 2, Fall 1965, pp. 182 - 194.)