Extract From: Koch, S. (1964). Psychology and Emerging Conceptions of knowledge as unitary (pp. 1-39). In T.W. Wann (Ed.). Behaviorism and Phenomenology. New York: University of Chicago Press.

Psychology and Emerging Conceptions of Knowledge as Unitary

Sigmund Koch

I. Introduction

I can only believe that my title, submitted some months ago, was the product of a burst of sabbatical-induced euphoria. I would perhaps be well to neglect entirely what I had in mind by using this title, but that degree of sobriety I cannot achieve. Behaviorism is a position whose implications transcend psychology. It is also one which has leaned heavily on extra-psychological sources of support and indeed, owes its origin in large part to trends in the history of ideas that have formed modern man's general conceptions of the nature of knowledge. The career of behaviorism having thus been bound up with that of a widely deployed movement in recent culture, it is hardly likely that its fate will not be similarly bound. I propose, then, to honor the present title, if only to the extent of a few paragraphs which attempt to record what in some contexts is known to all of you but is not always sufficiently stressed in considerations of behaviorism: that there is currently taking place a sweeping redefinition by man of the nature of his own knowledge. An era in thought-about-thought is breaking up. A new one, with implications that justify the often abused adjective "revolutionary," is under way.

For more than a decade, processes of reappraisal have been going [p. 2] forward in almost every branch of intellectual activity which, taken together, lend more than modest credence to the diagnosis just made. In science -despite a rate of technological and even fundamental advance almost incredible relative to past history- a new humility has become evident....

In the scholarly humanities, there is a new and constructive intransigence: a determination no longer to accept the indifference of a society whose values derive from idolatry of science; at the same time, a resolve not to find consolation in a philosophy of contempt for the uninitiate, but to re-examine rationales in such a way as to promote the spread of the humanist perspective in a world which much needs it....

In philosophy, the indications are perhaps most compelling of all. An era during which philosophy almost voted itself out of existence in its fervor for security is almost ended. Its surrender of its history, its shedding of metaphysics and axiology, its flight from substantive problems to those of method, its reduction of those of method to those of language -all these have come increasingly under question. Logical positivism is no longer with us. Analytic philosophy, which, [p. 3] on the surface, seemed to broaden the purview of positivism by extending analysis from scientific to natural languages but which at times achieved an even greater constriction... is in process of inviting back many of the recently proscribed fields and problems of philosophy. Ethics and value studies in general are back. Contraries of virtually every canonical resolution of specific epistemological problems, of the sort that held sway for thirty or forty years, are back. And they have been brought back in the hands of former logical positivists and current analytic philosophers -as well as by others.

....[p. 4]

While this wave of interest has gathered, psychology and the social sciences have stood on shore, almost untouched by the spray. Those who know the history of modern psychology... will find little cause for surprise in this. We are not known for our readiness to be in the wavefront of history. It could almost be maintained that modern psychology ran out of its independence at the moment of declaring it. In every period of our history, we have looked to external sources in the scholarly culture -especially natural science and the philosophy of science- for our sense of direction. And typically we have embraced policies long out of [p. 5] date in those very sources. What is unique about our present lag relative to the rest of scholarly culture is that each branch of the latter seems to be either working toward or inviting into existence, a redefinition of knowledge based on an empirical analysis of inquiry of a sort which must largely depend on psychological modes of analysis. Indeed, extant efforts in this direction everywhere involve psychological commitments, often of a rough and ready sort. Yet psychology seems hardly cognizant of the challenge implicit in these circumstances. Or of the circumstances.

More curiously, still, the emerging redefinition of knowledge is already at a phase, in its understanding of the particularities of inquiry, which renders markedly obsolete that view of science regulative of inquiring practice in psychology. This can be said in utter literalness, for the view in question was imported, with undisguised gratitude, from the philosophy of science and related sources some three decades ago but, while remaining more or less congealed in psychology, was subjected to such attrition in the areas of its origin that in those areas it can no longer properly be said to exist. Psychology is thus in the unenviable position of standing on philosophical foundations which began to be vacated by philosophy almost as soon as the former had borrowed them. The paradox is now compounded: philosophy and, more generally, the methodology of science are beginning to stand on foundations that only psychology could render secure.

...

There is a strange circularity, then, in the predicament of psychology. Psychology has long been hamstrung by an inadequate conception of the nature of knowledge, one not of its own making. A world now in motion toward a more adequate conception begins to perceive that only psychology can implement it. Yet psychology is prevented from doing so because, almost alone in the scholarly community it remains in the grip of the old conception. But this state of affairs could lead to a happy consequence: should psychology break out of the circle just described, it could at one and the same time assume [p. 6] leadership in pressing toward resolution of the central intellectual problem of our time and liberate itself for the engagement of bypassed, but important and intensely interesting, ranges of its own subject matter. Moreover, it can find courage to do these things in the circumstance that the very sources upon which it has most leaned for authority -physics and the philosophy of science- are, together with the rest of the scholarly community, urgently inviting them to be done.

Perhaps the most important immediate thing that could be done toward breaking out of this circle would be to lay, once and for all, the incubus of behaviorism. In recent years, behaviorism has -reflexively as it were- almost accomplished such a maneuver on its own. But it has not gone at the matter with true élan. It needs help.

Behaviorism has been given a hearing for fifty years. I think this generous. I shall urge that it is essentially a role-playing position which has outlived whatever usefulness its role might once have had... I suspect that there is a class of positions that are wrong but not refutable and that behaviorism may be in such a class.... If behaviorism is advanced as a metaphysical thesis, I do not see what, in final analysis, can be done for a truly obstinate disbeliever in mind or experience, even by way of therapy. If it is advanced as a methodological thesis, I think it can be shown (a) the conception of science which it presupposes (especially of concept definition and application and of verification) does not accord with practice even in those sciences which the position most wishes to emulate, and (b) that its methodic proposals have had extremely restrictive consequences for empirical problem selection and a trivializing effect upon the character of what are accepted as "solutions" by a large segment of the psychological community. More than this, I think that for both metaphysical and methodological variants of behaviorism ..., the following can be aid: These are essentially irrational positions (like e.g., solipsism) which start with a denial of something much like a foundation-tenet of common sense, which can, in the abstract, be "rationally" defended for however long one wishes to persist in one's superordinate irrationality, but which cannot be implemented without brooking self-contradiction. The exhibition of such self-contradiction is I think, as close to a "refutation" of behaviorism as one can reasonably get. But the task is made cumbrous, of course, by the [p. 7] behaviorist's tendency to cover up such discrepancies.... The usual device is a shifting use of an extraordinarily non-particulate and crassly defined technical vocabulary.

I cannot, in the present paper, develop all of the preceding lines of consideration... I shall concentrate primarily on exhibiting the outmoded and inadequate character of the view of science to which most behaviorists still appeal in support of their epistemology and on certain of the pragmatic effects of that epistemology on problem selection and treatments. ....