Reclaiming Scientific Thought

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The word 'science', for me and everyone I know, simply means natural science. We seem to think that there can only be one science. That science is, and can only be, the systematic study of the natural world. Hypotheses, experiments, theories, models, simulations, forecasts, predictions, prescriptions. All that good stuff.

But there was a time when the word science did not simply mean natural science. There was a time when the word science applied to many disciplines, including aesthetics, ethics, and history. Once there was a time when these disciplines could legitimately claim to be ‘human sciences’. Once it was possible to pursue knowledge about moral, political, and social problems and still be called a scientist. That is, they could claim to be legitimate sources of rational truth about the human world. Science once meant more than natural science. ‘Science’ is of much greater scope and importance than just the natural sciences. 

The word science, in fact, was once interchangeable with the word philosophy. As Collingwood argues, "The idea that philosophy and science are two different things or alternatively that philosophical sciences are sciences of a peculiar kind, is a modern idea of recent origin, later than the time at which these old-established names became traditional. When these names were established, science meant nothing more (and also nothing less) than organized and systematic thought, directed towards the discovery of truths concerning a definite subject-matter." Thus what we call physics once "was called natural philosophy... and what the same fashion calls ethics was similarly moral philosophy" ('Goodness, Rightness, Utility', in The New Leviathan, 391). To use the word 'science' to refer to the natural sciences is a mere slang usage of the term. Originally, it referred to any organized pursuit of truth about a subject.

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Many other disciplines deserve the name science. It is not only the natural world that needs to be studied. And it is not only the natural sciences that seek truth through systematic thinking.

Yet we refuse to dignify these disciplines with the term science. We reserve it exclusively for the natural sciences. We scoff at the arts and humanities, denying their claims to truth. We debate whether or not sociology or political science deserve the label. Madness. Absolute madness. But as Collingwood says, over "the past three centuries, the natural sciences have established themselves in a position of intellectual authority,” and that this authority “is the central fact about modern European civilization" (The Principles of History, 80).  We are the civilization that has sought to dominate nature. That has furiously developed technology. We are the (natural) scientific civilization.

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Limiting the use of the word science as such may lead to some negative consequences. I believe that the marginal position of moral philosophy and history may have something to do with our restriction of the word science.

I'm returning to my reading of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. MacIntyre is convinced that modern forms of morality are necessarily flawed. MacIntyre argues that the challenge of modern ethics was to find a rational basis for morality. The goal of this was to bring philosophy closer to the methods of the natural sciences. In seeking a rational basis for morality modern philosophers (he discusses Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume, and Smith) destroyed a fundamental component of ancient Greek morality, the teleological component. That is to say, philosophers were no longer conceiving of man in his practical daily existence, there was no telos, no definite moral end to which philosophy was working. Rather, philosophers pursued timeless truths about morality, hoping to create rational laws "that any rational agent is logically committed to" (After Virtue, 66). As soon as you start talking about 'Man' instead of 'this particular person or group' your philosophy is lost. As MacIntyre puts it, "Morality which is no particular society's morality is to be found nowhere" (Ibid., 265-66). In other words, while moral philosophy once explained action by “reference to the virtues and vices which they have learned or failed to learn and the forms of practical reasoning which they employ,” it gradually became about “laying bare the physiological and physical mechanisms which underlie action” (Ibid., 82). The natural scientific paradigm of mechanistic explanation thus infiltrated moral philosophy, destroying our conception of man as a being capable of inherently good action and instead forcing us to conceive ourselves as physical automatons. For the mechanistic explanation of human action is no explanation at all.

Moral philosophy’s attempt to bring itself closer to the method of the natural sciences thus resulted in the destruction of its foundation, in the end of its connection to the practical concerns of the world. 

History, too, suffers from this limited definition of science. Historical study is so often regarded as inaccurate or ‘subjective’, as a mere collection of facts, as something that fails to provide definite or useful knowledge about ourselves or our world. History, Collingwood believed, was faced with the difficult task of freeing itself from the pupilage of the natural sciences. He believes that the natural sciences have a “well-deserved reputation,” but that unfortunately that reputation is often “used to enforce exorbitant claims, now against the growing, but immature science of history, now against the ancient sciences of logic and ethics... into which that same prestige forbade inquiry, not only as to whether they were justified, but as to what they were” (The Principles of History, 88, my italics). I think I can grant myself the point that the natural sciences have a unique monopoly on ‘knowledge’ in the West, and that this has led to the reduction and humiliation of disciplines like history and moral philosophy. We no longer think of history and philosophy as sources of genuine knowledge. But parlor games, the asking of questions that might be fun to think about but which have no practical purpose. 

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The natural sciences, however, cannot answer the questions that history and moral philosophy attempt to answer. The reason for this is that history and philosophy are sciences of the mind, they deal with Man as a thinking being. The natural sciences can only deal with Man as a biological being. Body belongs to the realm of natural sciences. Mind belongs to the realm of history and philosophy. There are two further reasons the natural sciences are inappropriate for the study of Man. First, natural science is by its nature non-criteriological, it does not make judgements about right and wrong, which a human science must necessarily do. Second, natural science is focused on generalization, while the science of mind is more focused on particularization. 

The first reason natural science cannot handle the question of mind is because it is a non-criteriological science. That is, there is no need in the natural sciences to distinguish between what is good or what is bad. Nature is assumed to have its own organic unity. Scientist’s of the 1700s “believed in the universality and inviolability of ‘natural laws’ and the improbability of dividing nature’s successes from nature’s failures....” (The Principles of History, 83). Human sciences, on the other hand, are always criteriological, they always try to “distinguish successes from failures in the respective fields of theory and practice” (Ibid., 84). The task of the human sciences is thus unique in that it deals with the criteria by which we judge minds. Any understanding of mind has to go through this process of defining criteria. 

The second reason that the natural sciences are inadequate is that they are based primarily on generalization. Understanding mind, however, involves a focus on particulars, on why this thing is exactly what it is and not anything else. Collingwood sums up the argument well: Natural science cannot explain human action because “it explains every case of the kind indifferently, does not explain this case in its concrete actuality, but only those features of it in which it resembles the rest. In short, if I am content with a scientific explanation of a natural fact, the reason is that I am content to think of it not as the unique fact which it is, but merely as an example of a certain kind of fact” (Principles of History, 181). Any study of mind must therefore be concerned with practical criteria and valuation, and must be able to study things in their concrete particularity, understanding what makes them individual and unique, not general and classifiable. 

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The natural sciences, however, still attempt to lay claim to the study of thought. Psychology is probably the discipline that works hardest to study Man at the level of natural science. Collingwood is adamant, however, that psychology cannot be anything more than the study of feeling and sensation. Its contributions to the study of thought and mind are minimal. Again, Collingwood insists, “To study thought without taking into account the fact that people sometimes think truly and sometimes falsely; to study conduct without taking into account the fact that people sometimes act wisely or effectively or honourably, and sometimes in ways the opposite of those; this is no study of thought or conduct at all....” (Ibid., 85). To this day psychologists are insisting that the domain once belonging to history and philosophy will now be answered by modern scientific techniques. In particular, one company believes that we can only obey the Greek maxim ‘Know Thyself’ with the aid of a brain scanner. Ariel Garten, CEO of InteraXon, claims that the technology they are developing will for the first time give us insights into our subconscious patterns that will truly allow us to know ourselves. Madness, I say. Collingwood’s argument that psychology is the science of feeling seems to hold strong in this case. Because all Garten’s technology can supply is statistical information about our stress and anxiety, our heart rate, the connections between brain activity and sensory experience. These machines cannot tell us anything about thought proper. 

Garten’s claims, while shocking, are helpful in that they let me see that psychology is still indeed arrogantly trying to move into the territory rightly occupied by history, philosophy, and the humanities. It helps me understand that Collingwood’s concerns are still alive and well. History still needs to be justified as the science of human affairs. 

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This is the task I am slowly but surely pursuing. These days my thinking is revolving around the concept of the science of human affairs. That method of learning that would  help us deal with the social world. “How could we construct a science of human affairs, so to call it,” Collingwood asked in his Autobiography, “ from which men could learn to deal with human situations as skilfully as natural science had taught them to deal with situations in the world of Nature?” (An Autobiography, 115). That history is the science of human affairs was obvious to Collingwood. How, precisely, historical study was to be wielded to these ends, he was not able to fully say. His health was ill, his thinking not fast enough.

I am thus sitting here in the wake of Collingwood’s death. Wondering about how to do this. How to construct a science of human affairs. I am slowly but surely working on this statement. 

But one thing is clear, one thing has to happen if we are to construct this science of human affairs: We must reclaim, re-appropriate the word science. We cannot hope to vindicate history as the science of human affairs so long as we let the natural sciences distort the words true meaning. We need to reclaim scientific thought, assert to the world that we can have knowledge of the human world. That not all explanation is mechanistic explanation. And that mind, and not just nature, can be known. 

I am a scientist. A human scientist. Don’t tell me I’m not. Because I want to be. I want the title because I want to seek truth about a definite subject matter. And I don’t care that I am pursuing knowledge about mind and not nature. There is a science of mind. And it sure as hell isn’t psychology. We can indeed learn to know ourselves. Not with a brain scanner. But with historical study and philosophical reflection.