Re: Phenomenological Continuity and Discontinuity

From: neepy (dsutherland7_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 06/08/04 

Date: 8 Jun 2004 04:37:11 -0700

"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<f36bb5a8b3279f6cc72f4ea16dc271b1@news.teranews.com>...
>
>
> Neepy: "Genes" and "quarks" (for example) are/were "unobservable entities"
> for a long time. If scientists were barred from hypothesizing about
> them UNTIL their physical nature was understood, then there physical
> nature would never have been understood.
>
>
>
> GS: I have written about this issue at length here. There is no question
> that the postulation of things that can't be observed, at the time there are
> postulated, has often been enormously successful. But this does not mean
> that one should necessarily do so in all circumstances. Obviously, there are
> a host of "things" that have not proven to be as useful as "genes" and
> "quarks." They had names like "vis anima," "phlogiston," "ether," etc. And
> that brings us to the central question: Is there a way to decide if a
> conceptual framework is unlikely to be fruitful before generations of
> scientists pursue questions engendered by it? I argue there is. The
> fundamental concepts of a science (or "science" as the case may be) can be
> evaluated, but they cannot be evaluated by experiment, for they are not what
> are tested. They must be evaluated philosophically. A general framework,
> can, I think, be offered that allows one to test concepts for their
> scientific utility, but I am not going to elaborate here. I will simply
> state that the metaphor is a double-edged sword, and one most evaluate them
> with a non-charitable attitude - the few that survive may be useful. But
> this is not the manner in which psychology, and the fields that it has
> corrupted, have developed. Mainstream psychology adopts metaphors
> promiscuously, and promotes them carelessly, all while pretending that doing
> so is simply what physics has done.
>

And what you say here is entirely reasonable. When you write like
this I can both understand and (to a large extent) agree with you.
The question of how/why "scientific" concepts like "genes" or "the
ether" are discarded or not is, though (IMO) at least partly a matter
of experimentation (certainly regarding the ether... predictions were
made and falsified experimentally).

I am not sure how you would go about deciding "if a conceptual
framework is unlikely to be fruitful" before it's investigated
empirically (since you don't expand on that), but the fact that you
say "unlikely" suggests that you at least recognise the possibility of
making the wrong decision. I agree that people have in the past (and
will in the future) offered up theoretical positions that (personally)
I would not waste my time investigating. I am sometimes annoyed by
the fact that others (IMO) waste time, money, resources investigating
them (if you want an example: so-called parapsychology). On the other
hand, I can accept the possibility that my own theoretical framework
could be wrong and so my judgement of what is scientifically "worthy"
could be wrong.

Anyway, I am not sure what you would count as a "generation of
scientists" (30 years? 40?), but at most there have only been two
generations of psychologists since the so-called "cognitive
revolution" of the 1950s. I would be interested in your view of why
so many psychologists who had been working (and progressing) in the
behaviorist tradition moved so painlessly to cognitive psychology
(e.g. Miller), but who is to say that "mainstream" psychology won't
swing back to behaviorism just as quickly? Though that view of two
diametrically opposed schools that could not exist in the same space
is also a bit of a caricature (at least outside of the US).

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