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Scientific Fundamentalism
To finish (at least for the time being) with this idea of Scientism vs. Science. I want to take it a little further so that I hope I am able to make clear what I percieve as a problem that arises sometimes (and not always) in the scientifically minded. As I attempted to make clear in my last post, I do not feel – at this point at least – that science itself is problematic. I feel that science is sometimes applied and generallized in ways that are problematic. This isn’t really a problem of science itself; if anything it is a problem of the philosophy of science. Getting back to this idea of Scientism, I believe that Scientism could also be called Scientific Fundamentalism. Science is a method of inquiry utilizing hypothesis and experimentation. Science is also the body of knowledge accumulated through that method. Scientific Fundamentalism is the belief that all knowledge gained through, and all conclusions drawn from, the scientific method are true. When this kind of Scientific fundamentalism is confused for the scientific method it creates a bounded circular reality in which things are true according to scientific fundamentalism (now confused with the scientific method itself) because they were produced by the scientific method. Conversely, knowledge which is not gained through the scientific method is at best suspect and often dismissed as illogical and untrue because it was not obtained through the scientific method.
Adherence to this scientific fundamentalist view over time can lead to the creation of what I see as a very limited worldview. In other words if you only believe in knowledge which is obtained through the scientific method, soon you only see as real things that have been, or conceivable could be, obtained through the scientific method. Your fundamental notion of reality becomes bound by what has been, and what you can imagine could be, confirmed through experiment, observation and measurement. The scientific worldview that results tends to have certain fundamental characteristics. It tends to be materialistic in the sense of seeing the world as made up of only those things that can be observed and measured. It also privileges the third person, objective, external perspective of reality to the first person, internal, subjective perspective of reality. And it sees the world as constructed from the bottom-up, with parts combining to form wholes, as opposed to top-down with wholes exerting influence over the development of the parts that create them. This leads to a view of an unintelligent process of creation proceeding blindly as opposed to a process guided by a larger whole.
The problem with any form of fundamentalism is that it inherently limits inquiry by establishing boundaries around what is possibly real. Christian fundamentalism limits what is real with a literal interpretation of the bible. There can be an argument made for the moral value of adherence to a literal interpretation of the bible, but most of us would agree that it creates a very limited, predetermined worldview. Scientific fundamentalism works the same way. By using the criteria that only knowledge that is obtained through the scientific method defines what is real, and then taking the even bigger step of applying that criteria (consciously or unconsciously) not only to the knowledge at hand, but to all possible knowledge, we draw a circle around not only everything that is real, but also everything that could ever be real. Both of the original Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, as well as their friend and mentor Chauncey Wright, were opposed to such scientism albeit for different reasons.
Chauncey Wright was too much of an empiricist to fall into scientism. He believed that only things that had been empirically measured were true and he did not believe in generalizing measured results to included as yet unmeasured instances. Peirce followed Wright in this strict empiricism. Both men would go so far as to say that just because the three angles of every triangle ever measured add to 180 degrees doesn’t mean that every triangle that could ever be measured would add up to 180 degrees. Further they would also say that because our ability to measure the angles of a triangle is limited by the instruments that we use to measure with, we can’t even be sure that the angles add to 180 degrees. They were in affect too scientific to believe in the superstition of scientism.
Peirce had an additional reason for avoiding scientism. Peirce’s famous motto and guiding principle was “Do not block the way of inquiry.” Peirce was by far the most accomplished scientist of the early Pragmatists, but he would never adhere to a scientism that would limit the ability of his expansive mind to encompass new and diverse information. William James was a trained doctor, and he was also the most mystically and morally inclined of the three. He avoided scientism because it ruled out the possibility of belief in mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that he was so drawn to and he felt held moral advantage for humanity.
The Pragmatism that was first conceived by Peirce and James was a magnificent creation. It was in almost equal parts an extension of the scientific method and especially Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection into the world of philosophy. At the same time it stood as a defense of the mystical and religious in the gathering battle with materialism of scientism.
Scientism commits a performative contradiction
If the scientific method is the only way of obtaining reliable knowledge, then the very assumption that “the scientific method is the only way of obtaining reliable knowledge” is unreliable, since it is not an assumption that can be verified using the scientific method
Very well written, Jeff, and has me thinking. What aspect of reality eludes the scientific method? The closest you come to an answer is the “first person, internal, subjective perspective of reality.” And Shermer’s outline of the scientific method which I posted here earlier says the same. I’ll submit however that these revelations are not included in the scientific method for good reason, not necessarily because they are invalid, but because they are not tranferrable to others, not useful in different situations, and history shows they are often misused to dupe the credulous.
Furthermore, if a new approach has utility it will be brought to bear because the scientific method is is self-correcting.
Two thoughts:
1. What is the definition of “truth” implied by this discussion of science, scientism, etc.? Or, stated another way, how do we determine what is true, in general?
2. There is very good science, following Skinner’s methodology and measurement approach, of “first person, internal, subjective” reality. Counting thoughts, feelings, etc. yields very orderly data that can be used to monitor the impact of various interventions or variables and guide application of such behavioral technologies as covert conditioning, systematic desensitization, etc. The only issue is that only one person can do the counting, so there could be some question about the accuracy of the measurement. But since there is typically around 10% measurement error, anyway, even when counting overt behavior, and the counts we obtain of covert behavior are very orderly, it’s not clear why we should dismiss those data any more than we should dismiss data collected by only one deep space probe (vs. two with comparisons between their two measures to establish “reliability.”) It’s only a very limited view of science, embedded in pre-Skinnerian behavior science called “methodological behaviorism,” that discounts inner behavior or places it beyond the reach of scientific investigation.
This is getting interesting now and I realize that I have to get clearer about what it is exactly that I am going on about. It is ironic, because this is one of the few forums that I engage in where I am on the other side from science. Usually I am the scientific one in most groups.
Brian, I am not totally sure that science will come up with the answer to the interior problems of reality – but it could certainly help, as long as it is in a healthy dialog with philosophy and religion. That is more what I am proposing than anything. Next week I will be in Melbourne, Australia at the Parliament of Worlds’ Religions. There are many people there who are promoting Science/Religion dialog. Philip Clayton is one of these. He is a professor of Theology from the US and he has some radical ideas about how Christianity must be in a true dialog with science which means ready to let go of its deeply held convictions. His position is not totally embraced as you can imagine. Interestingly, the ideas of collective dialog put forth by Charles Sanders Peirce are a big inspiration for him. I suppose our dialog here has turned into a science/spirit dialog that seems to be having an impact on many of the people who read it.
Carl, I think when we get right down as you are asking me to how we define truth. I was to pose that the kind of truth that matters most, is the kind we act on generally. Not the truth that we come to if we are pressed and forced to really think about it, but they one that comes out of our mouth without thinking, or that dictates our actions when we are not particularly aware. It is that truth that really matters because it is the one that is controlling human affairs and creating the world we live in. That is why a discussion like this is helpful even if we don’t come to final conclusions (which we aren’t likely to) because it pulls our assumed ideas about truth out into the open to be examined and that automatically makes us more conscious of what we believe to be true – and becoming more conscious is the whole point. One of the ideas of what is true that I am hopefully helping us question is the idea of Naturalism, which is the idea that eventually all of reality will be understood as an extension of fundamental principles of sciences like physics and chemistry. That is a belief that has been a strong force in human understanding from the age of the enlightenment through to the 20th century. Behaviorism is in many ways an extension of naturalism into the psychological domain. In the 20th century this idea has been challenged because many believe that reality is more complex than that. Scientific principles and the interaction of matter is a powerful way to think about things and brings us incredible results, but there are problems that it has never solved and many would say it never will solve them. Behaviorism is an interesting example. I worked in the field of psychology for some time with children. Behaviorism was always part of my toolkit and as many have found if you set up Behaviorist systems and stick with them, you can get tremendous results. In the end however you need to do more than that the create lasting change in behavior, or at least that is the conclusion I came to and if you take a look through the world of psychology that seems to be the conclusion that the majority of people doing that work have come to. If Behaviorism were truly the miracle guidance system for human activity that it sometimes appears to be, why hasn’t it over the last century completely dominated human efforts at creating change? Is it because human behavior and human being is more complicated than the ideas of Behaviorism can embrace, or are we going to find over the next decade that Behaviorism is really it, the ultimate way to understand human activity and all we really need to create a new human society? It is your enthusiasm (Carl) and my respect for you that has me taking Behaviorism so seriously again after having more or less put it in a box for a long time. In my upcoming posts I want to start to add some ideas of phenomenology to this conversation because there I believe many (including or American hero Peirce) began to produce a different view of an emergent reality that may help us as we continue onward.
What came up in connection with this blog is that ‘time and space’ are structures in the human brain that help us to understand reality. Quantum physics has shown that science has to go beyond that. It is quite sure that empirical science will never be able explain. It seems our thinking has evolved from one-dimensional into two- en than three dimensional, our brains might still evolve.. I read that ‘mathematics is the language of the universe’, so who knows. I still think that there are things in the universe that do exist, but that we aren’t able to perceive because of the incapacity of our brain..
Jeff,
I would never suggest that physics and biology and chemistry alone could explain or account for human behavior. That is why Skinner’s separate science of behavior, based on measurement of behavior frequency as the indicator of probability, is outside of those sciences. It has similarities in that it uses standard units and dimensions of measurement, experimental method, and systematic observation. But it has its own subject matter.
Because of all the fuzzy and horribly incorrect interpretations and communications of the experimental analysis of behavior and its applications that have occurred over the years, behavior science is also rather misunderstood, even by otherwise sophisticated scientists, philosophers, etc.
By measuring the frequency of so-called “internal” or “covert” events — thoughts, feelings, insights, etc. — we can, indeed, begin to understand the variables that influence our inner lives, not merely chemical variables (Skinner’s science gave rise to behavioral pharmacology), but also environmental factors of all sorts.
Phenomenology is troublesome in that it does not generally involve the measurement of things. If we count internal events and then monitor changes in those counts over time with the introduction of new variables, we can understand what affects what. But if we simply report the stream of inner events, as in introspection, then we tend to come to conclusions similar to what we would think if we saw the Indians dancing and then it rained. We develop superstitious explanations of things. Phenomenology often posits explanations that are, at best, explanatory fictions. Freud, for example, was a keen observer but a lousy scientist because he did not measure. His work resulted in explanatory fictions such as the ego, id, and superego — ways of referring to segments of our behavioral repertoires that seem to hang together, but not actually identifiable “things.”
Skinner’s goal was prediction and control of behavior — a pretty good goal for any science. It involves developing the knowledge to predict and possibly control the types of events being studied. It is how we got men on the moon, built bridges that don’t fall down, discovered vaccines, etc. It’s not a bad definition of “truth” if our interest is in making our way in the world and evolving. It is certainly very “pragmatic” in the common sense meaning of that term.
Carl here is where you can (and have) help me out. I definitely share your enthusiasm for the benefits of measurement in investigation and yet still I see the way you are expressing it here as potentially limiting. The reason for that is that even though I agree that reason without measurement can be baseless, I also see that measurement doesn’t ensure grounding in reality. I came to this conclusion when I was an engineer and realized that often we can fit almost infinite theories to our measured data, sometimes chasing fictions for months or even years. Measurements don’t lie, but what we choose to measure, how we choose to measure it and how we relate those measurements to a picture of reality can also lead us astray.
I am looking into Heidegger and, although I am sure there are many problems with phenomenology, I think his think is brilliant and it is helping me understand some of what you have presented as Behaviorism more fully. Here is what I don’t understand about Behaviorism even though you have tried to make it clear to me. I will illustrate with a metaphor that I have been cooking up.
Let’s imagine that Behaviorists from another galaxy were watching our planet from space. And for some reason they were only studying one particular intersection of traffic. They watched that intersection for a month and carefully made measurements of the size, shape, speed of direction of cars. They naturally determined the relationship between the color of the street light and the movement of cars. Perhaps over the course of a year they would notice patterns that would lead them to believe that they had discovered certain laws of behavior of cars. Certain color cars acted certain ways under certain conditions. Perhaps they also were able to relate the size of car to making either left or right turns. Now all of these laws, if they continued to study cars would eventually be proven untrue, but where they are now they believe them to be true and some perhaps have even forgotten that they will almost certainly eventually proven to be at least a limited picture of reality.
What the Behaviorists from space don’t realize is that in each car there is a human being who have an infinite number of motives and intentions that play a determining role in the “behavior” of each car. The motives of these human beings are connected to the unthinkable complexity of their human life including their jobs, families, lifestyles, moods, preferences, schedules, etc. etc. etc. If the Behaviorists from space came to see that this was the case they might realize that they will never be able to accurately predict car behavior simply from observing and measuring the behavior at that intersection.
I imagine you see my dilemma. I imagine that this is a problem that you have worked through for yourself (in fact I think we have talked about as much), and so I am curious to hear what you have to say.
Science by definition is confined to the past by the requirement to collect and analyze data.
Even the most accurate prediction of a future event by Science must come to pass before the prediction can be analyzed for accuracy.
Science is the study of the past…
The language of Science, Mathematics, is a collection of abstract concepts such as the number one.. When you apply context to the number one, you introduce errors.
One apple and one orange will never equal two apples nor two oranges.
Since the Universe is made of atoms, no thing can be nothing, thus 0.0 is a mistake.
The limited language of Mathematics, -∞<0.0∞MomentLife<Religion
the above post did not like the mathematical symbols… please delete
Jeff,
What you describe is not the experimental analysis of behavior, but some form of naturalistic observation — a little like Freud vs. Skinner. What behavior science seeks is to establish what are called functional relationships. That means there is a functional or causal relationship between two variables. One must systematically change one of those variables and then measure the impact on the other. Behavior analysts do this one organism or person at a time and look for regularities across individuals — what is called “replication.”
In the case of the intersection, if the aliens had control of the lights, I’m sure they could discover that changing the light from green to red precipitously reduces the probability (rate or frequency) of people driving through the intersection. If they could find a single car that often drives through the red light, and they could arrange for a policeman to stop and ticket the driver each time he ran the red light, they would likely discover the functional relationship between getting stopped by the police and decreasing the frequency of running through the red.
To say that we are dealing with “unthinkable complexity” is simply to say that we cannot control all the variables. This is true is physics as well as it is in human behavior.
However, we run experiments in physics to discover laws that then we can apply in engineering to build bridges, integrated circuits, jet planes, and so forth. To say that it is impossible to understand the complexity of nature more or less reduces us humans and our brains to drooling idiots, as far as I can tell. But we all apply “scientific method” on a regular basis to understand our environment and ourselves. This is how we humans learn. Scientists simply add the precision of measurement to be able to detect more nuanced effects and to add certainty and the ability to repeat experiments. I know that when I come into the house, my cat runs to see me. Why? Because fairly consistently when I see him, it is followed by food or petting. This is lawful, predictable, and I can use it to manage my cat. If I go out in the garage to watch my son play drums, and smile while he is doing so (because I am impressed by his skill, love him, enjoy the music, etc.), I can fairly well predict that he’ll play longer than average. These are simple laws put into action.
Just as in physics, where we cannot understand all the factors that cause the weather at any given moment, we can nonetheless understand enough of them to make predictions with some probability of success — even in such a chaotic environment as the atmosphere. That is prediction and sometimes control.
To dismiss measurement because it is not associated with proper experimental control is to throw out the baby with the bathwater — to dismiss experimental method and the remarkable degree of prediction and control we have as a result, when experimental design is applied correctly.
How else would it be possible for us mere humans to hit a heavenly body millions of miles away with a comparably tiny space probe? If that’s not complex, I don’t know what is. The ability to hit the planet reflects an astounding degree of understanding based on science that would be inconceivable without it. I’ll pit scientific method against armchair speculation any time.
I truly believe that as humans we are so impressed with ourselves that we think our own behavior is beyond scientific investigation. It’s a kind of profound egotism, at the species level.
I find it personally useful to try to align what I know from my own spiritual and personal investigations and what others tell me of their experience, with what we know from biological, physical, and behavioral sciences. It’s hard for me to think that these things would not be consistent. And if they are not consistent, it’s hard for me to think anything but that there is more to know.
Thankfully, science — like true spiritual investigation — is not knowing but wanting to know.
Sorry for the length of this. I guess I find it frustrating that we humans seem to do everything possible to wiggle around the possibility that we can understand ourselves as part of a single natural universe, using the same methods and tools that have allowed us to understand the other parts of that one universe.
Wow ! I come late again and what a dialogue ! I am really impressed and once again I find myself agreeing fully with Carl.
Many things have ben said. I would like to make just a few remarks. Like Carl’s, my vision of science is quite pragmatic. A physicist’s theory re-constructs the world around with two major rules which are
1. to have a theory logically consistent
2.and a set of experimental tools to check this theory.
That is the minimal requirement. Now why does it make science so important ? it is becasue the re-construction of the world that we obtain has tremendeous evolutionary power; it has RESULTS. I mean you can have the best possible theory of the atom and spend all your life checking the data, until you have built a nuclear reactor and un-leashed this energy, the new potential for humanity is not demonstrated.
Science is not static; it is in movement. It is situated at the interface between knowledge as a representation and action, and what it does is to produce tools for developpement of human species.
Let’s take some perspective. What do we see ? we see that a few human beings, with a few equations and an experimental method were able to deliver more power than ever in history, by unleashing the nuclear power. As a species we cannot help to be impressed, or terrified, by this.
My view is thus simialr to Carl’s. The situation is that science went too far, too quickly and took too much advance in the technological world.
Physics is stuck these days, in my view, because the progress made in the 20th century has not been extended to other domains, like spirituality. Spirituality is not as advanced, and our undertsnading of what happens in the human mind seems to be at the pre-modern stage (to be generous). We are extremely backward in this respect. So it is difficult for spirituality to say “ transcende and include” since it has not yet included the scientific method at all.
It is time to do so !
One thing I beleive is that our true knowledge as humans is the knwoledge of “doing things”. We are “faber” before being “sapiens”, or said in other words, our true knowledge is a knowledge of making things, of doing, of action. Science is no exception and is maybe the greatest example of this capacity of the human mind. If we see knowledge not as a static function of the brain, but as an ability to DO, then the perspective changes completely and our science is in movement.
One question which torments me these days is “ what are the fundamental actions of the human being ”? what does it mean to “act”, to “do” ? Carl, how much do we know about this ?
My personal feeling is that I am always “doing” something , consciously or unconsciously, but some actions look more fundamental than others.
Does behaviorism make a qualitative distinction in degrees between the actions ?
Catherine,
I don’t think that behavior science or behavior analysis (and I distinguish behaviorism, a philosophy, from behavior science) per se distinguishes in quite the way you are suggesting. But there are some important distinctions.
First, behavior science distinguishes between two huge categories of behavior: operant behavior and respondent behavior.
Operant behavior is behavior that operates on the environment to produce an effect. This was Skinner’s focus, and it encompasses most of the day to day “activity” in which we engage. When we teach or learn new skills, manage people, help change habits, learn disciplines, exert effort, gain self-control, etc., we are learning and adjusting our operant behavior by arranging new conditions for it to occur. The cool thing about operant behavior is that it produces an effect in the environment which then impacts the behavior which affects the environment, etc. This is where the most obvious non-dual or systemic nature of organism/environment is obvious.
Respondent behavior, made famous by Pavlov’s “classical conditioning,” is behavior that comes under the control of stimuli through a process of pairing. In Pavlov’s dogs it was salivation which came under the control of a bell after food was followed by the bell over and over. The bell came to “signal” the food, if you will. it became a “conditioned stimulus.” We learn to get excited when we see our lover, or to become nervous when a test approaches. Respondent behavior includes visceral and emotional responding that we learn, for example anxiety in response to certain situations that have been associated with pain or discomfort, excitement by our lover, etc. Behavior therapy, which helps people change their emotional behavior through such means as progressive relaxation, works on respondent behavior.
Much of our behavior combines operants and respondents, for example when we receive a hug for a particular type of behavior, that hug (consequence) might both increase the probability of the response and lead to emotional conditioning whereby the person who gave us the hug comes to evoke the respondent of positive visceral/emotional feelings.
Second, behavior science describes behavior functionally, not merely structurally. So it is not the form (or “topography”) of a response that distinguishes a response, but its function — the relationship it has with events in the environment, what it DOES to the environment and what the environment DOES to it. In the case of operant behavior — the type most relevant to day-to-day human learning and action — we can classify responses based on their functional relationships with events that come before and after a response. For example, in verbal behavior, there are many types of responding based on their functional relations with the environment. What are called “mands” (demands, requests, etc.) are verbal responses that are reinforced by the actions of others. I ask for a cup of water, you give it to me. I will learn to ask for that in the future. “Tacts” are naming types of responses, reinforced by others when we use them in a particular way. We say “cat” pointing to the cat and Mom reinforces that response by agreeing or saying “that’s right.” Other types of verbal functions include intra-verbals (“associations”), autoclitic responses (that modify other forms of behavior such as in “I think I will go for a walk” where the “I think” is related to the rest of the utterance), and so on. It gets very technical, way beyond the scope of this blog. But the idea is that we can categorize behavior in these ways, which enables us to analyze, understand, teach, modify, etc. that behavior.
Finally, and this is outside of behavior science per se in the field of behavioral instructional analysis and design, we can conduct component/composite analysis where we break down behavioral repertoires into smaller chunks. For example, when I worked with severely handicapped children during the 70’s, we pioneered work on “behavioral elements” such as reach, point, touch, grasp, place, release, squeeze, etc. The idea was to identify the smallest units of behavior that could be taught and practiced in isolation and then combined to produce more complex repertoires. The power of this is that if we could build “fluent” components, we could sometimes teach our students to do things no one had ever been able to teach them before, by building from elements to compounds. We did similar analyses and curricula based on gross body control movements, oral motor movements, and so forth. We built the elements to fluency, and then combined them. This is, by the way, what a good athletic coach or music teacher does. In other words, in the field of behavior analysis as it relates to instruction, we can understand the structure of functional units so that they can be built. (This, by the way, is a much more useful approach to deveolpmental psychology than the traditional stages of development approach, which focuses on structure but not usually on function.) We have applied this type of approach to working with corporate sales people, athletes and others in the ensuing years to produce remarkable improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of instructional methods. But, again, this is probably beyond the technical level I should be mentioning here. It’s just to indicate that underneath all this talk of “behaviorism” there is a very precise, detailed science that has produced powerful, breakthrough technologies and a much deeper understanding of human behavior and how it develops than any previous science that focused on the structure, but not the function of behavior.
One last distinction that might be related to your question is between covert and overt behavior, to which I have referred earlier in this blog. Unlike the “methodological behaviorists” who came before and who refused to consider subjective or inner behavior (thoughts and feelings, etc.) because they are beyond the view of an external observer, Skinner pointed out that EVERYTHING that we DO is behavior (thus the term “radical behaviorism” to describe his philosophy of science), whether or not it can be observed by more than the subject. Our thoughts and feelings are more difficult to study objectively because of the bias that a single observer reporting inner events might have. However, subsequent work showed that we can use the same measures of inner behavior (rate of response or count per minute), count those responses over time, and produce very orderly graphs of that behavior that give us a baseline for implementing changes, learning strategies, etc. aimed at changing that inner behavior. It is powerful, works as well as anything we can do with external behavior, and makes clear that our “inner lives” are as subject to the laws or orderly patterns discovered by behavior scientists as our external behavior.
I’m not sure if this helps, but I think these distinctions can at least form the basis for pursuing the kind of question that you raise, which sounds like it is about the relative importance or prerequisite nature of different classes of behavior.
There is something I would like to say again in this whole discussion. It is all very interesting to read but it seems to follow that very old discussion if science should be quantitative or qualitative. While I think we need both. To give a small example: I once did an assertiveness training, which is a kind of behaviourism training. I literally learned what to do when I was offended by someone, which words to say, it was taped and I could watch it, learn and see that in every conversation someone is above and someone is beneath etc.. This was very effective and when I read the examples given about behaviourism I thought wow, it must be great to really help people, to have tools to actually DO something. At the same time I know that -following my own example- it was also very useful to look into the question WHY I wasn’t able to be assertive. Sometimes that is useful, sometimes that is not at all necessary.
It doesn’t mean that the examples aren’t great, and that behaviourism isn’t great, that it isn’t effective. In the time that I studied it was fashion to say that all behaviourism was wrong, all pragmatism (I still have trouble hearing the name Pierce, it gives me a physical reaction of disgust..). It all had to be depth investigation, which is a narrow as well. I fully agree that this did not bring us on the moon and all other examples given.
At the moment I am reading philosopher Christian de Quincey. He describes his problem with the fact that all science had to be objective and he was interested in consciousness (he is now professor teaching consciousness at John F. Kennedy University) He writes: psychology was telling me that my inner experience didn’t count, that it just was an illusion, neurophysiology was telling me it was a by-product of the brain, evolutionary biology was actually failing to account for the origin or nature of life. ‘Science could not fit either life or consciousness into its worldview’. I have always been, just like the Quincey, interested in these kind of questions. I read his four books like detectives (Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter (Invisible Cities Press, 2002) ; Radical Knowing: Understanding Consciousness through Relationship (Park Street Press, 2005); Deep Spirit: Cracking the Noetic Code (Casablanca Press, 2008) ; Consciousness from Zombies to Angels: The Shadow and the Light of Knowing Who You Are (Park Street Press, 2009). For me it is an absolute necessity to find out more about this, even though I am now confronted with the question what use does it have, what can I DO with it. Maybe it is just wanting to know who I am.
Radical Behaviorism says that your inner experience DOES count, that it arises from the same source as your outer experience, and that the same laws that apply to all of our behavior also include that inner behavior/experience. We can understand and develop our inner behavior as well as our outer behavior. Because we have tended to take a sort of intentionally mysterious approach to it in the past (perhaps thinking that it is really beyond analysis or understanding), we do not have nearly as many good case examples or studies of our analysis of inner behavior. It’s something of a frontier. But approaching it as part of the same Universe as we see in the supposedly “outside” realm (which is outside of what, again?), I think we can take a truly non-dual approach to our own experience rather than separating it into these two supposedly different realms.
I read your blogs with great admiration. It is absolutely not my idea to say anything against behaviourism. I just think different fields have different focuses, that is why I love Integral so much. When I read about consciousness studies I see a different focus. I owe Andrew Cohen everything for explaining this in such a deep way. But now, reading this in a (kind of) scientific book, I suddenly understand it in a different way
There is one sentence I read this weekend, which makes probably clear what I mean. It is probably very known to all of us: consciousness is subject, it is no-knowing (which is different than not-knowing). Consciousness is what All connects: it is there on a micro level (e.g. on a cellular level) and it is there on a macro level (Cosmos). Somehow it makes my understanding deeper: I understand people who described their experience: everything being connected… literally experiencing the cosmos. When I meditate I see that the ever appearing I-thought as just on object in consciousness. I am only half way the books of De Quincey, but it is promising and I hope this can be part of the discussions within this blog.
It seems to me that all of “what arises” — which I think of as behavior, whether apparently inner or outer — occurs in the same field of Awareness. That seems equivalent to what you say, that “Consciousness is what All connects.” I think we are in agreement!
Thank you for your response. Probably we do agree, excuse me if I go to far, but I would be very interested to learn more about the connection between consciousness and behaviorism. The way De Quincey writes about it is that there is no scientific prove for cause and effect between for example a thought and the movement of the body which happens next. De Quincey says there is a shared consciousness in mind and body (micro level) and that is why movement follows the thought. What fascinates me so much is that it immediately becomes clear that that there also must be interaction between macro (cosmos) consciousness and us. I just listened to the tapes from the parliament of religions and the connection between science and religion is an issue there. Please do not feel obliged to response, (it must be clear I am very much a lay person in these matters, it would be fantastic if sooner or later Catherine would tell something about her vision on this..). I am just starting, I probably should first read more, before discussing it. But it doesn’t leave my mind for a second, it’s fascinating. De Quincey connects very much to Norbert Whitehead and Jung.
Liesbeth, I think it’s probably true to say that there is no necessary causal relationship between thoughts and bodily movement in general, although I would suggest that in specific cases there can be. One way of describing this relationship in some cases is to say that events cause me to have a thought AND they cause me to move in a particular way. But I believe that it’s also the case in other examples that a thought, such as “I need to get out of bed” increases the likelihood that I will get out of bed in the morning. And of course when we meditate successfully, there may be absolutely no relationship or even correlation between internal events and external movement (or lack thereof).
This may be one of those situations in which making broad generalizations rather than looking at specific cases causes us to over-state or under-state the truth.
Hello everyone, I am still in Australia, and although I haven’t been so active in participating in this discussion I have been reading from afar. I guess I wanted to pose one last question to Carl based on my earlier analogy of cars in an intersection. Assuming that the aliens do control the lights and give out tickets and are able to do controlled experiments as you say. Perhaps they really can in the end predict the behavior of the cars that pass through the intersection (although if a car comes from out of town for the first time I suppose they would not b e able to predict that one). Even if we grant this, isn’t it true that they will still never know anything about the lives and the aspirations and the thoughts and feeligngs of the people in the cars. As I see it, these are also part of reality and behaviorism doesn’t deal with them at all. You might say that it is only the behavior that results from them that matter, but isn’t that a position taken, not a fact? I believe that Peirce and later phenomenlogy was pushing into the fact that these internal things matter, not only in so much as they change behavior, but because they are an important part of reality.
I don’t think anyone but the drivers themselves would know anything about their aspirations and thoughts and feelings unless they told someone about it in one way or another — through written or spoken language, music, art, mime, etc. Of course THEY (the drivers, observing their own inner behavior) would know about it, could count, record, and otherwise study the relationships between their inner behavior and other events — either other inner behavior or outer events. They could also learn to manage or control, and maybe predict, their own inner behavior. So it’s not clear to me why there would be an issue of their internal things mattering or not. It would just be an issue of who could observe them — again, much like the space probe way out there that is the only witness to the explosion of a star. Just because no one else sees it doesn’t mean the event didn’t occur.
Likewise, the methodological behaviorists like Watson and Hull and others actually discounted inner or covert behavior because they couldn’t observe it. Skinner did not, and his Radical Behaviorism pointed to covert behavior with the only issue that it might be harder to study in a systematic way. However, Ogden Lindsley, one of Skinner’s students, encouraged his proteges to measure thoughts, feelings, urges, and other kinds of inner behavior to determine what factors influenced them and what other behavior they influenced. He developed an entire science and technology of inner experience, just as many behavior therapists and so-called cognitive behavior therapists have.
Jeff wrote: “…as opposed to top-down with wholes exerting influence over the development of the parts that create them.”(par. 3)
I see that this likely emerges from your teleological approach, but do you have any examples of this?
Meanwhile…
Thomas Kuhn has a lot to say on the scientific method and what you term scientific fundamentalism in his “The structures of Scientific Revolution”. Very briefly, one cannot work without a viewpoint – paradigm – that structures how you view things, and guides what questions you ask and the methods you use to answer them. This is how we as human beings *must* do it, whatever misgivings we may have about it. The current paradigm (those who use it, really, as a paradigm is not an entity) will *always* be resistant to change. This conservatism is both bad and good – good because it filters out false leads and forces paradigm-changers to mount a vigorous assault in order to effect a change.
On models & scientific fundamentalism – a quote from a Discover Mag. article Dec. 2009 (Roger Penrose is talking):
“..look at three of the biggest figures in quantum mechanics, Schrödinger, Einstein, and Paul Dirac. They were all quantum skeptics in a sense. Dirac is the one whom people find most surprising, because he set up the whole foundation, the general framework of quantum mechanics. People think of him as this hard-liner, but he was very cautious in what he said. When he was asked, “What’s the answer to the measurement problem?” his response was, “Quantum mechanics is a provisional theory. Why should I look for an answer in quantum mechanics?” He didn’t believe that it was true. But he didn’t say this out loud much.”
There, in my opinion, is a man who fully understands that “the map is not the territory.”
Hello Chuck,
I definitely appreciate your contribution here. You are addressing issues that I think about a great deal. After reading through many of your posts I think that you and I probably think very much alike (perhaps with a different emphasis.) In this comment for instance I think that fundamentally we agree on what scientific fundamentalism is – what you are adding is that many scientists – particularly the great ones – were beyond that. I believe also that was part of Kuhn’s point. I also do feel that there is something to the idea of scientism that is valuable to look into because I believe it limits our ability to discern reality more greatly than we might think. I look forward to going more into this with everyone.
Can we say that there are no absolutes, in science, truth, religion or anything else? Humans have that yearning for having truth nailed and absolutes established but as we see, beliefs–even long-held ones, can be swept into the dustbin of history giving way to new, more credible info. This process will probably continue as long as humanity continues to exist and continue to question and discover.
In the marketplace of ideas, religions and science included in it, I submit that all ideas are stories and submitted as mere offerings of truth competing with other offerings that claim to be equally if not more true. With respects to all, to be battling over stories and suppositions disguised as truth is a contest to see who can win the most over to believing in your story or supposition, IMO. Some of the stories and suppositions seem to have more credence than others and enjoy adoption of the intelligentsia and those who give them credence until other more credible information is offered in place of that believed as true till that point. And so it goes in humanity’s quest for ulitmate truth or what appears to be so.
This is how I view knowledge, truth and views of reality.