The Psychological Record, 1979, 29, 155-163

PSYCHOLOGY: SCIENCE OR NONSCIENCE? l.R.KANTOR The University of Chicago

Many persons still regard it as a problem whether psychology is an authentic science or at best only a profession. The writer considers the many attempts and failures to provide psychology with a scientific foundation and the primary circumstances attending the difficulties of scientizing the psychological discipline. Further, suggestions are offered as to how psychology can take its place among the physiochemical and biological sciences.

Who can doubt that among the pillars of civilization stand steadfastly the institutions of science as structured by its numerous branches? What aside from the sciences speaks so eloquently for the maturation of mankind? Hence the crucial question whether psychology is to be included among the sciences. Although the centennial year 1979 marks the definite advent of experimentation, and the establishment of a laboratory tradition in psychology, one may still witness the following scenario. While introducing a series of seminar meetings at a prestigious college, the speaker remarked that the group was to undertake a critical analysis of the science of psychology. At once a member of the faculty raised his hand and asked why must we regard psychology as a science. Some of his colleagues in the audience apparently were surprised by such an obtuse question. The speaker, however, treated the question as a legitimate inquiry. Is psychology a science or non science? What basis is there for a decision? One who considers the many thousands of persons listed in the directory of the American Psychological Association and the reputed equally long list of practicing nonmembers may well conclude that psychologists constitute only a subset group of people who share similar interests and pursuits whether of a pecuniary, social, or charitable sort. On that basis psychologists would simply rank with members of other organizations like Rotarians, Masons, Kiwanians, and so on. Again, the great emphasis upon practical applications of psychology to behavior modification, relief of behavioral maladjustments, and the solution of This article is based upon a lecture delivered at the Psychological Colloquium at Indiana University, October 20, 1978. Reprints may be obtained at a cost of $1.00 each from The Psychological Record, Gambier, Ohio 43022.

0033-2933179/02155 + 009$00.10/0 © 1979 The Psychological Record

156

KANTOR

industrial and political problems points to the classification of psychology as a profession, and not a science. The speaker insisted that even if psychology is only a profession it still requires a solid and safe scientific foundation. CONTENTIOUS DIALOGUE Granting that psychology is or should be a science, does a critical inspection indicate that it is? The answers are both positive and negative. Those who say yes do so only on the basis of highly selective criteria or by simply expressing belief with insufficient warrant. The selective criteria point to the fact that among the persons listed as psychologists there are some individuals of superior capacity and diligent preoccupation, but who really work at applied mathematics, engineering of various sorts, electronic technology, statistics, neural anatomy, neural physiology, and so on. Opponents who claim to be more meticulous in their assessment of what a science is deny that psychology is a science or ever can be without more'realistic appreciation of the nature of scientific work and scientific institutions. What they argue is that any discipline that purports to be a science concerns itself exclusively with things and events that observers can confront within spatio-temporal fields. Anything that smacks of transcendent forces or powers, invisible and intangible things that exist only in the verbology of persons who utter them, are strictly banished from scientific psychology. Such critics insist that scientific psychology must depart radically from the tradition that is concerned with mind or experience or the behavior coupled with such entities. Scientific psychology, they hold, must be free from sensations, consciousness, thoughts, mental imagery, perceptions, and other psychic processes. Such essences belong to the transcendental realm. They assert, too, that if cultural habits continue the use of such words or terms they must be interpreted as the behavior of integral organisms with environing stimulus objects. SCIENCE SPECIFIED The decision whether psychology is or is not a science implies the specification of the nature and operation of science. Whether or not we sympathize with the view that psychology is or should be a science, we should have before us at least a tentative model to aid our judgments. I suggest that from the psychological standpoint science is an occupation designed to discover the nature of things and events either as they happen independently of the researcher, or as modified by investigative work. Since scientific work includes origins and evolutions, scientific objects and situations always involve relations with others; they are unit components in fields of smaller or greater amplitude and intricacy. Scientists, then, are always concerned with relational fields which they investigate both quantitatively and qualitatively. . Authentic science began with such relationships as those formulated by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and their successors. The details of scientific operations consist of analysis, dissection, measurement, and the synthesis of various fields.

PSYCHOLOGY: SCIENCE OR NONSCIENCE?

157

Scientific work may be generally described as (a) the observation of events. (b) the recording of the results of such investigation, and (c) the construction of propositions such as descriptions, hypotheses, theories, and laws on the basis of prior research. The objects of investigation consist of the interaction or inter behavior of various things plus the conditions which operate upon and influence the interrelation of the objects observed. The criteria and significance of scientific work may be formulated in two rules: 1. Interaction with things and events in order to ascertain their composition and behavior. 2. Constructions (hypotheses, theories, descriptions, laws) must all be derived from interactions with fields. THE URGE TO SCIENTIZE PSYCHOLOGY One of the most interesting lessons of psychological history concerns the many attempts that workers in succeeding generations have made to scientize the study of knowing, feeling, remembering, perceiving, and learning acts. As a matter of fact, what passes now as the scientific model of perceiving and other cognitive activities was formulated by the justly celebrated Newton in the 17th century. Unfortunately, however, the events observed were misinterpreted to conform to transcendental traditions. Physiologizing the Mind Among the historical attempts to bring psychology into the domain of science, the first effort, which we may refer to as the foundation for conventional physiological psychology, was to connect the soul or mind with physiological or biological processes. Since all such attempts to scientize psychology were centered in an interest in supernatural mental happenings, they could hardly bring psychology into the natural science family. Brain as Surrogate of the Soul An elaboration and extension of the physiologizing of mind was the proposal to support transcendental notions by making the brain into a surrogate or seat for the soul, or identifying the brain with the mind itself. The brain was variously purported to be the thinking machine, the depository of psychic states or processes, and the prime mover and director of all forms of action. This attempt to scientize psychology was not only obviously futile but at the same time a perversion of neurological science as well as biological science in general. Mentation as Evolved Organismic Adjustments. By the time of the Darwin-Wallace evolution theory, the general sophistication of scientists and educated lay-public was in favor of reducing the influence of a theological creator of the great number of things and events available for study. One of the primary results of this change of view was the breaking down of the barrier between the actions of human beings and those of so-called inferior organisms. A by-product of this change of view was the inception of more and more naturalistic study of biological

158

KANTOR

and psychological events. Since infrahuman organisms could be manipulated more radically than humans and the findings frequently applied to human beings, evolution appeared as a great aid to psychological science. However, the advantages accruing to investigation did not alter the basic notion that nonobservable processes existed. Evolution theory became of great advantage to scientific attitudes but it did not produce any radical diminution of super-naturalism.

Experimentation By the 19th century the study of human behavior had reached so high a level that students of psychological behavior assumed that they could take over directly the methods of natural science and build up a specialized discipline which allowed for elaborate manipulation of the organisms or individuals performing the behavior. Psychologists are planning great celebrations to honor Wundt and his cultivation of the style of laboratory investigation. The significance of Wundt's achievement is that he demonstrated the possibility that psychological behavior could be studied by means of apparatus in laboratory situations. This was the beginning of a great step in the progress of psychology along the path toward science. But it is clear to us, as it had not been to the early laboratory workers, that Wundt's fundamental interpretation of experimentation was that the mind or consciousness, the intangible and invisible process, could be manipulated by operating on the biological and physiological behavior of the subjects. It is fair to say that dualistic experimentation added little to the scientific character of psychological activities. Behaviorism One of the most successful and scientifically profitable developments in psychology centered around the process of conditioning. Hardly any of the historical attempts to bring psychology into the area of science can compare with the conditioning period. Basically behaviorism signifies that psychology can dispense with the lingering influence of soul doctrine which was never based on any observation, but only arbitrarily developed for socio-economic and religious purposes. It must be pointed out, however, that conditioning behaviorism covers only a very small part of the total behavior fields in which organisms and persons participate. If psychology is to be a science it must have a broader and deeper foundation in the observable behavior of organisms. Cognitivism What must appear as a reverse attempt to improve the scientific status of psychology is the movement that goes by the name cognitivism. Acting upon the mistaken notion that behaviorism could not contend with such complex and personal behavior as perceiving, thinking, reasoning, and so on, a number of psychologists are advocating that the discipline move back to a decided mentalistic age. They assume that beyond conditioning behavior there exist also psychic processes as basic to complex human activities. Not only is this movement the antithesis of science, but it also aids in reducing all the complex behavior of the cognitive type into mystical and specious brain action and consciousness.

PSYCHOLOGY: SCIENCE OR NONSCIENCE?

159

PSYCHOLOGY, NO SCIENCE, WHY? It is quite apparent that in spite of all of the historical efforts to make psychology a science, and the ambitions of psychologists to convert psychology to a science, this discipline cannot fully qualify as a natural science. This is not to deny that psychological enterprises include excellent workmanship and design without being full-fledged scientific fields. I propose two answers to the question of why conventional psychology is not a science. The first is that psychologists throughout the entire history of postGreek psychological work including current operations are dominated by transcendental presuppositions. Whether or not the individual workers realize the fact, they are assuming that the primary factor in psychological events is the reacting organism and that the organism is dualistic, that is, comprised of a body and a mind in some form. The other answer is that psychologists are more or less oblivious to the existence and operation of the events they work with. Consider the obvious fact that no datum of psychology comprises less than an interrelated field. However much psychologists may talk about the configuration and analysis of reactions, they do not realize that the unit event in psychology always is an interaction of the responses of organisms and the stimulus properties of stimulus objects. Here there is definitely a confusion of constructions (descriptions) and events. Instead of describing the event studied, psychologists describe the way they operate upon events. Hence what the organism does is called a dependent variable and what the stimulus object contributes is called an independent variable. This way of looking at events is based on a discredited ontology of cause. What is neglected is the total field whose place is usurped by the improper construction. Circumstances permitting, it can easily be demonstrated that all the socalled exact science became established when such workers as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and many others questioned the assumption that bodies behaved because of inherent powers, instead of dynamic interactions of the components of fields. The modern relativity theory confirms this view of scientific work and extends it to all types of events.

PSYCHOLOGY, A NATURAL SCIENCE, HOW? The inescapable conclusion is that there can be no psychological science unless psychologists feature vigorously the interbehavioral aspect of all events including the psychological. Of course there are further specifications to be set down; for example, there are usually many setting factors to influence the occurrence or nonoccurrence of interbehavioral fields. Then there are media of contact such as light or air vibrations in psychological interbehaviors, as in the cases of seeing or hearing. Any alternative view about events must fall back upon divine ordinance or some other religiously cultivated factor. T.o be a science psychology must rely exclusively on variables derived from the observation of interbehaviors like

160

KANTOR

perceiving, remembering, feeling, and so forth. It has already been indicated that constructions must be derived from observations of events and thus they will match events in descriptions and interpretations. PSYCHOLOGICAL AND NONPSYCHOLOGICAL EVENTS IN COMMUTUAL EVOLUTION Convincing evidence that psychological events consist of interbehavioral fields in all respects similar to all other events is furnished by the continuity in the evolution of all events. Scientists with varying interests specialize upon the study of particular fields with more or less attention given to neighboring fields. The model or plan of study is similar. Observers interact with the interactions of bodies with other bodies, or with the interactions of organisms with bodies or other organisms. The following succession of evolutionary stages is intended to illustrate the various types of events, that is, interactional fields as well as the interbehavior of observers with the particular events in which they are interested. Stage One symbolizes the interaction of inorganic things or conditions. It is an accepted scientific proposition that the origin of all the many things and complex events can be traced back to the existence of a primordial hydrogen gas. Atoms and molecules of this substance have generated more and more complex physiocnemical objects and conditions, beginning with helium. All this evolution, including the various constellations and galaxies, results in greater and greater complexity and variety of things. Newly evolved qualities or properties of things and events influence the further evolution of interbehavioral fields. Stage Two indicates organic fields, and now we may speak of reacting organisms together with stimulating objects. Although the organic phase of evolution is derived from events happening in the inorganic world, the interactions now include such complex processes as metabolism, growth, and life cycles incorporating reproduction, as well as gradual deterioration and return to atomic or molecular forms of chemical substances. Stage Three, the further development and evolution of interbehavior, depends upon the vast refinement of interactions between organisms and other organisms, as well as with the many other things and events that surround them. The fields of interaction now can be given the name of sensing, feeling, remembering, reasoning, and so on throughout the many categories of psychological interbehavior. Stage Four involves a unique inter behavioral feature, namely, a field in which an observer interbehaves with some event field as represented in the three preceding situations. As is to be expected this new type of event presents an additional scientific problem. Will the observer or investigator construct his descriptions and record what he interacts with on the basis of the event, or on the basis of certain historical and traditional circumstances? As the history of Western European philosophy and psychology indicates, workers in the field of science have given up the scrupulous investigation and report of events in favor of dogmas which they have derived from the scholars who established religious doctrines and traditions.

PSYCHOLOGY: SCIENCE OR NONSCIENCE?

161

SCIENTIFIC IMPEDANCE IN PSYCHOLOGY Although the evolution of psychology as a science is definitely adumbrated in the stages just described, the history of this discipline has not been without a number of impeding conditions. For example, it is unquestionable that what is evolved as a science, namely, the interbehavior of persons with things and events, has usually been turned in the direction of metaphor, fantasy, and other forms of construction based on the ability to speak and converse. Here is the origin of the mind-body doctrine, a refinement of the notion of spirit and flesh. Actual objects that one confronts become unstable and in some cases the components in action which psychologists call stimulus objects are made into just cues for action, sometimes of the body and sometimes of the soul or mind. It is in no wise a traduction of what passes for modern science whether inorganic, organic, or psychological that it is more inspired by cultural dogmas than by observation, testing, and confirming acts. St. Augustine, one of the great church fathers, is one of the primary formulators of the dogmas concerning the psychic nature of man that hover over the thinking of psychologists as late as the 20th century. From the following quotation we can learn the source of mentalism and the origin of mental imagery as well as the tradition of introspection: And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows ofthe sea, the broad tides ofrivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder, that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with mine eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars, which I had seen, and that ocean which I believe to be, inwardly in my memory, and that, with the same vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And I know by what sense of the body, each was impressed upon me. (Augustine, 1949, pp. 212-213)

PSYCHOLOGY AS INTERBEHA VIORAL EVENT FIELDS The discipline which is now generally called scientific psychology is certainly not a science despite its furniture of data, methods, and operations. But psychology should be and can be a science. What is required for psychology to be a science is to throw off the spiritistic shroud which conceals what is actually occurring, because of the reverence for outworn dogmas, and to abide by the investigation of confrontable events. In the remainder of this presentation I wish to contrast a few psychological fields: (a) when the reaction to events is based on mentalistic dogmas, and (b) when it is based exclusively upon the events observed and the conditions of the confrontation. Sensing and Perceiving We glance first at the universal and ubiquitious sensitivity to things, events, and conditions. We look back to the original source of current views about sensing and perceiving, which means the model constructed by Isaac

162

KANTOR

Newton in the 17th century. That model structures the famous experiment in which Newton demonstrated the production of the color spectrum. It is this model which has set the style of psychological thinking for centuries. A current example is the following quotation from a standard work on the human senses: Light impinging on any object meets one of three fates: it is transmitted, absorbed, or reflected. Whatever is transmitted or reflected produces no change in the object. If the object absorbs visible light it is, by definition, a pigment. Colored papers and other pigmented surfaces, commonly used in visual experiments of a qualitative nature, owe their "color" to the fact that they selectively absorb light, reflecting those waves which, whe!1 sensed, yield sensations of color. It is vital that the concept of •'color" be reserved for the sensation. Light, physically speaking, has no color; a color is not a color until it is seen. At the stimulus level we are dealing only with light waves which, to be sure, may vary among themselves in important respects, but color is not one of their physical properties. (Geldard, 1953, p. 17)

Clearly Newton's sensory-perceptual model has become the standard dualistic institution of psychology. Notice that without secure knowledge of philosophy, or biology, Newton localized color in something he called the sensorium. He overlooked completely the process of color production by intet:posing a prism in a beam of light. Sensing and perceiving may be regarded as fairly simple and partially overt interbehaviors by comparison with the more complicated and subtle behaviors of thinking, reasoning, and remembering. But they too can be analyzed and described as well as any other observed event. Essentially such intricate activities constitute interbehaviors with indirect confrontations with stimulus objects. This is accomplished by means of substitute stimulation, as when the original stimulus objects are not present. Substitute stimulation constitutes such implicit processes, whether the behavior is imagining, problem solving, planning, or reasoning. What is excluded from authentic scientific psychology are all distinctions of inner and outer, subjective and objective along with all other interpretations derived from historical soul-body, soul-brain, and similar verbalistic sources.

Feelings and Emotions Our next illustration we take from the field of feelings and emotions. Traditional psychology sought support for its soul-mind-consciousness subjectivity and duality in an inner world of feelings and emotions. Feelings and emotions along with sensations, ideas, willings, and purposes formed the pool of mentality which was· presumed to be correlated with the bodily structures of organisms. Despite the power of traditional lore, the conventional treatment of feelings and emotions shows clearly the transformations that mentalism has made of definite events. In the first place the interaction with stimulus objects has been converted into an imaginary dualism of the interacting organism. Next, the feeling behavior of an integral individual has been reduced to nebulous psychic process. This is the antithesis of scientific ways of working. It is suggested that inter behavioral postulation can provide descriptions of affective behavior as free from spiritistic traditions as all other activities.

PSYCHOLOGY: SCIENCE OR NONSCIENCE?

163

It is all a matter of the pattern of the interbehavioral field. Whereas in cognitive behavior the focus of the effect pertains to the objects or events interacted with, in the case of affective behavior more stress is laid upon the effect upon the organism. Because traditional psychology consists of a variation of historical faculty psychology, it does not differentiate between feelings and emotions. Affectivity is presumed to be a single psychic process although feelings and emotions are two distinctive types of behavior. Emotional behavior consists of fields or behavior segments in which the consummatory reaction system has failed to occur. By comparison the feelings-behavior segments are complete in their unit fields. (For a fuller description of affective fields, cf. Kantor & Smith, 1975).

Voluntary Behavior As a final illustration of the effectiveness of scientific psychology, we may consider its versatility in covering a large number of different activities. Since traditional psychology stems from religious sources, it is not surprising that behavior was presumed to be guided and controlled by a soul or mind. Hence psychology has been for long centuries involved with problems of will, free or enchained. Willing has been made a cause for freedom of action, or for the metaphysical impossibility of behaving in certain ways. Psychologists who have been sensitive to the problem of antimetaphysical discipline have then tried to avoid volitional problems and thus missed a large and important area of human behavior. Scientific psychology can take voluntary or choice behavior in its stride, since the only problem is to compare various types of interbehavioral fields. No faculties are involved and no choice of metaphysical action or freedom of adjustment. In case of willing or not willing, to do an act or the prevention of acting is a matter of concrete circumstance, for example the lack of means, legal enactments, fear of consequences and so on. It remains to be mentioned that acts of decision, planning, and those requiring forethought, when taken in actu with all the conditions, incline observers to a discipline requiring no hidden forces but based entirely on confrontable and observable behavior of organisms in their environing sites. REFERENCES AUGUSTINE, SAINT. 1949. Confessions of St. Augustine (E. B. Pusey, trans.). Everyman's Library. London: Dent. GELDARD, F. A. 1953. The human senses. New York, John Wiley; London: Chapman and Hall. KANTOR, J.R., & SMITH, N.W. 1975. Thescienceofpsycho!ogy. Chicago: Principia Press.