Psychology, Science, And Human Affairs

Essays In Honor Of William Bevan

Frank Kessel, Norman Garmezy, Richard Trumbull, Michael Sokal, Frank Kessel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367300050
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000308495
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

These original essays, written by prominent scholars, pay tribute to the work of William Bevan. In the course of his distinguished career, Bevan has exhibited an almost unique capacity to focus a clear-eyed, critical gaze on operating assumptions and actions—his own and those of others—and to initiate consequential, constructive steps forward, both

Part One
Philosophy and History

1
The Human Agency of Science

Sigmund Koch

Introductory Comments

William Bevan has won his way to a vision of psychology — and of science and scholarship in general -- that is uniquely informed. From a productive career in several branches of experimental psychology, he wait on to a fabulous web of administrative, organizational and advisory activities bearing on psychology and science in their manifold interrelations with public and educational policy. Reading Bevan's curriculum vitas is enough to put not only lazy persons, but most hyperactive ones, at mental risk.

During the last decade, he has brought this enormously comprehensive background to bear on the location, definition, and assessment of central problems raised by the history and status of psychology in relation to its societal and cultural context and to the human values that it might reflect and serve. He has written a series of papers that should at once trouble and inspire every literate reader in the psychological community (the others cannot be helped!). Never has one who has taken so long and tortuous a walk through the corridors of power emerged with a philosophy less smug. I am myself in large agreement with most of his doubts, concerns, and suggestions. I almost resent this, for my only claim to pride -- that of absolute idiosyncracy -- has been shattered!

Why this uncanny convergence? Bill and I have had little contact since those very early years when he was a young graduate student and I a young instructor in the Duke psychology department. I do not recall much contact even then -- but from me he could have only received a few falsetto asseverations of the Logical Positivist virtues. Both of us were, however, deeply influenced by a remarkable man at Duke: Karl E. Zener, a man who, though he published little, was, in the opinion of those who experienced his thinking, one of the most profound psychologists of the century.¹ I think that when we were very young, the deepest of Karl's Gestalt-informed arguments against the neobehaviorisms, and his visionary sense that psychology (especially perception psychology) must build bridges towards the humanities, managed to elude us. But perhaps Karl's was the influence that tuned our minds in such a way that a half century later it could become evident that Bevan and I had been independently working toward similar or broadly overlapping idiosyncracies in relation to matters so fundamental as those I shall now summarize.

1. The belief that psychology is not a coherent discipline, and that it is neither proper nor desirable to characterize many of its subdivisions as "science. "
2. The sense that much of the research "literature" of psychology (over too long a swath of our careers) has constituted a colligation of mindless, methodologically ritualistic "trivia"; and that pathetically little of the research has been animated by insightful, or even interesting "general ideas."
3. The belief that the hyper-specialism and parochialism of what I have called "the language communities" of psychology has led to a degree of fragmentation that divorces "research" from any penumbra of meanings of potential interest to the out-groups. Bevan analyzes the societal conditions (e.g., controlling impact of the funding agencies, etc.), and the institutional emphases (e.g., the mechanization of competition in the universities and thus the increasingly instrumental values of teacher and student alike) which have fed the trend toward fragmentation. He has addressed these matters in print more directly than have I. But he will know me to be sincere in my agreement when I remind him that I had derived feeble intimations of such matters when I was a Program Director at the Ford Foundation, and an Academic Vice-President at a large university (during the 1960s and 1970s).
4. The view that any pat distinction between "pure" Mid "applied" psychology (or indeed pure and applied science) involves a vicious oversimplification of the scientific enterprise and that an important direction for "fundamental" psychology would be a type of work which directly addressed pressing human, social or cultural problems. I applaud Bill for inventing a pattern of address which involves groups of scholars of widely different sensibility, training, and disciplinary affiliation focusing collaboratively on such problems of mental health as have been chosen for the Mac Arthur Foundation "networks." This work could well lead to theoretical advance in the context of helping the human race. At the very least, the well established tendency of "fundamental" psychological research toward evading a human subject matter might be somewhat inhibited, and such collaborative structures do inevitably lead to the formation of broader and more richly communicative "language communities, " than the parochial and sparsely populated ones within which the business of psychology is currently conducted. Here more than a principled agreement between Bevan and Koch is being registered. It is Bevan, who via his conceptualization of the MacArthur networks and his dedicated husbanding of them, has done something concrete, large and bold to reorient psychology toward its human context -- and responsibility.

As a truly uncanny token of our affinities, I must quote one of Bill's recent paragraphs (Bevan, 1987, p. 11) in full:

Behind all of what I say ... is — at least to the behavioral scientists -- . . . a generally disregarded fact: namely, that the sciences, and the processes that underlie their change with time, cannot be accounted for in purely intellectual terms; that, in the case of the sciences, our descriptions of them as formal systems of thought are based on assumptions, perpetuated at least since the 18th century, that are violated every day that science is practiced. For science is an intensely human enterprise and both its directions and substantive character are subjected constantly to shaping by forces outside itself and never separable from the considerations that motivate and direct the people who are its practitioners.

This paragraph could be taken as a summary of all that I have tried to establish in the past thirty-five years. In honor of what Bill has done, as scholar and administrator, to implement such a view (over a comparable time span) may I lay at his feet a story which could contain a parable. It is the story connected with one of my earliest and most ardent efforts to show psychologists (and possibly others) that science is not a disembodied, self-applying and "self-corrective" set of rules, but that it is an activity of human agents within a socio-historical context -- a knowledge-seeking activity continuous with other knowledge-seeking endeavors.

Part I

The "story" falls into the context of my work on Psychology: A Study of a Science. At the time of its design (1951-3), psychology had for several decades been controlled by something like an official epistemology -- deriving from the putative imperatives of logical positivism-cum-operationismand covert fragments of neo-pragmatism. To me, it seemed grievously clear that the attendant method-fetishism was acting as a stifling constraint on the ranges of curiosity asserted in inquiry, and that even the interesting work in progress (of which our field has never been devoid) was done at the price of punishing stresses against canon law. If liberation were possible, what better strategy than invite a large number of our most creative inquirers to test that epistemology explicitly and in detail -- against their own inquiring histories. And, by training analytic attention on a wider range of theoretical activities than had been customary among practitioners of the "methodological genre," the Study picked up -- and by reflection augmented -- many of the new interests which by now have carried fundamental psychology far past its frenzied preoccupation with "learning," Did it destroy the old meta-theoreticai armamentarium? That depends on how one reads! It has remained evident to me that to this very date some residual, but almost ubiquitous, substrate of the old method-fetishism has remained.

But the above is merely the context of the story. In the summer of 1959, an exhausted young man contemplated the daunting task of writing an introduction to the study of the status of psychology that he had been working on -- by mandate of the NSF and the APA -- for over eight indescribably pressureful years. It was clear to him that the delusional imperatives of what he was already calling psychology's "Age of Theory" had to be broken down: about 90% of his almost-ninety distinguished collaborating authors had, in their individual tongues, suggested precisely that. But how? How to separate psychology from the cozy imagery system of "hypothetieo-deduction," "theory construction, " "techniques of quantification, " with the attendant sub-vocabularies of "postulates," "derivations," "rules of inference," "theorems," "variables," "arguments," "operators," "functors," "intervening variables," "empirical definitions," "operational definitions," and so forth. Miles of abstract and reassuringly "rigorous" prose could be (and had been) constructed by almost random concatenation from such counters. My rather desperate response was to try to create a counter-rhetoric: a language that would seek to show by ardent metaphors, however mixed, that science (and disciplinary activities in general) were immensely complex human enterprises involving a largely disorderly confluence of myriad "extra-rational" as well as "rational" factors. It was not a language I wished anyone to use, or wished even myself to use in the future. It was a form of discourse that sought to shock the reader into broader vision.

I should like retroactively to dedicate a sample of this writing -- from a section of the "General Introduction to the Series" entitled "The Spirit of the Study" -- to William Bevan, for in it I think there to be an anticipation of the spirit of his current position (and of his manifold good works in the MacArthur Foundation and many other settings). He is, of course, free to dissociate himself from the semi-poetic patois (or is it swollen prose?) of this passage, but I offer it in token of what I think to be our spiritual affinity, and in appreciation of the altitude and breadth of his ardent effort to substantiate some such spirit.

It is tempting to search for a portentous metaphor to characterize the spirit of this Study after the years of hard work by many individuals. One can reach towards the faithful clichés of the building trades and define the Study as concerned with the "foundations" of psychology, or some other architectonic attribute. One can borrow the usual tidy images from the anatomist, geographer, or cartographer. One can look wistfully toward the logician and talk about the "logic" of psychology or its propositional or "postulational" structure. One can requisition from the philosopher the "analysis" of psychology, or petition the axiologist for the right to its "assessment." In more cozy vein, one can don the apron of the greengrocer and "take stock." Though in some sense applicable, we must reject all such metaphors. It is not merely that they are trite; they imply too orderly a subject matter and too orderly a result. In fact, they convey an attitude toward the study of a science which - to the extent that it "succeeds" could well render science less worthwhile.

Any metaphor which might characterize the incidence of a meaningful inquiry into science, however modest, must be a hopelessly mixed one. For a study of a science must hold science and its science in view, and the resources of metaphor break down before what even a superficial view discloses.

A science is not a body of sentences, a hierarchically ordered tissue of theory, or a collection of such "bodies" and "tissues." It is not an explanatory web, a predictive network, a descriptive grammar, an experiential map, a technological abacus, κ practical almanac, or a moral calculus. It is not a reservoir of generalizations, principles, or laws. It is not an arsenal of methods — logical, mathematical, or instrumentative.

A science is not a summation of restless human curiosities about the world, nor the resulting processes of search and observation; it is not that occasional gift of the world to cognitive desire known, in its private form, as understanding and, in public guise, as knowledge. A science is not a cumulative progression of attitudes toward knowledge-getting, of methodological strategies, cognitive and predictive ends in view, leading ideas, hypotheses, unifying insights, or the testing and codification of these. It is not a collectivity of persons, animated by relatively similar objectives, working on more or less common problems, as regulated by roughly uniform traditions of craft and largely shared rules for efficient inquiry. It is not a specifiable number of individuals inviting creativity in solipsistic privacy. It is not a group of problem-confronting organisms mediating the survival and enrichment of their species by a self-conscious, if fumbling, attack on the vicissitudes of nature. It is not an association of gourmets with an exquisite hunger for order, permanence, essence, necessity, truth, beauty, comprehension. It is not ε band of individuals seeking livelihood, personal significance, respect, and other answers to the human condition.

Science is not a congeries of laboratories, university departments, professional organizations, foundations, and other institutional entities. It is not an assortment of educational philosophies, traditions, programs, or devices, nor the administrative apparatus through which the educative process is shaped. It is not a lattice of institutional roles, expectations, suppressions, conceptual cant, culturally defined routes, constraints, and rewards. It is not a discontinuous progression of fads and fashions, or of such security and prestige symbols as favored patterns among the practices of other sciences, legitimate modes of observation, honorific conceptual categories, modes of instrumentation, research problems, and styles.

Science is not a tabula rasa for the grandiloquent scribbling of the Zeitgeist, nor is it a screen which catches the projections of a civilization, culture, or society. It is not a segment of the wave front of history.

A science is all of these things and much else. Any study, then, which comes to terms with a science requires a spirit, a style, which can he captured in no metaphor, however complexly mixed. Nothing less than a rhetoric will do, a rhetoric which must echo throughout inquiry, varying in volume with the given object of study, but always distinctly there...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Journey at the Dangerous Edge of Things: Some Reflections on William Bevan's Legacy
• PART ONE PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY
• PART TWO DEVELOPMENT, MIND, BODY
• PART THREE APPLICATIONS AND PUBLIC POLICY
• PART FOUR PSYCHOLOGY EVOLVING?
• Afterword
• About the Contributors
• About the Book
• Appendixes