"But our empiricism is confined within our immediate interests"

I just got back and noticed in the post about Alfred North Whitehead's The Function of Reason, I posted the wrong passage, the second of the two I was going to use so I'll give it here.  

In talking about the dogmatic rejection of purpose in nature - though he could have said it about dozens, maybe hundreds of other thing evidenced in life - North Whitehead said:

As a question of scientific methodology there can be little doubt that scientists have been right.  But we have to discriminate between the weight to be given to scientific opinion in the selection of its methods, and its trustworthiness in formulating judgements of the understanding.  The slightest scrutiny of the history of natural science shows that current scientific opinion is nearly infallible in the former case and invariably wrong in the latter case. The man with a method good for purposes of his dominant interests, is a pathological case in respect to his wider judgement on the coordination of his method with a more complete experience. Priests and scientists, statesmen and men of business, philosophers and mathematicians, are all alike in this respect.  We all start out by being empiricists.  But our empiricism is confined within our immediate interests.  The more clearly we grasp the intellectual analysis of a way regulating procedure for the sake of those interests, the more decidedly we reject the inclusion of evidence which refuses to be immediately harmonized with the method before us.  Some of the major disasters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology.  Ulysses has no use for Plato, and the bones of his companions are strewn on many a reef and many an isle.  

He goes on to say:

The particular doctrine in question is, that in the transformations of matter and energy which constitute the activities of an animal body no principles can be discerned other than those which govern the activities of inorganic matter.  There can be no dispute as to the main physiological facts.  No reaction between the material components of an animal body have been observed which in any way infringe the physical and chemical laws applying to the behavior of inorganic material.  But this is a very different proposition from the doctrine that no additional principles can be involved.  The two propositions are only identical on the supposition that the sort of physical principles involved are sufficient to determine definitely the particular activities of each physical body.

That supposition is the foundational dogma of pretty much all of the so-called behavioral sciences and, I would argue, was imposed on the scientific study of life out of 

a. the envy of biologists for the kind of certainty which physicists and chemists could legitimately achieve, though their claims of being able to point the way to an absolute means of surpassing the necessity of empirical observation vastly exceeded the reliability of their methods.  

b. out of the general 19th century adoption of materialism as a social-ideological requirement to be seen as the best kind of scientist.  A general hostility to religion being a huge part of that.

c. out of other non-scientific desires of the scientists,  class interests of the scientists who were generally born to, or aspiring to material prosperity. 

The results of that supposition can reach enormous size when empirical observation is either radically incomplete or impossible, such as in the scientific study of evolution and in all of the so-called behavioral sciences.  It reaches some of its most ridiculous proportions in the pseudo-scientific study and academic assertions of atheists dealing with the "hard problem" of consciousness.   The absurdity North Whitehead pointed out, of scientists purposively designing experiments for the purpose of proving purposelessness is outdone by academics in science and philosophy purposely coming up with elaborate playing card castles to prove that consciousness is an illusion - failing , among other things, to notice that illusion is a state of consciousness.  

That any of the worst of that can be kept up in academic establishments, at some of the most renowned of our universities makes the old and inaccurate claims made about "angels dancing on the head of a pin" pale in ridiculousness. 

Which leads to something else North Whitehead noticed ninety years ago:

We are then led to consider the natural reaction of men with a useful methodology against any evidence tending to limit the scope of that methodology.  Science has always suffered from the vice of overstatement.  In this way conclusions true within strict limitations have been generalized dogmatically into fallacious universality. 

A friggin' men. 

*  I think organized Christian religion, religious denominations, churches get into enormous trouble when the original teachings of Jesus are replaced by church laws, church creeds, church dogmas.  The Catholic Church is only one such good example of this, something that Hans Kung has struggled against as he focused on The New Testament instead of medieval and, even more what in English is called Renaissance and romantic era church law and theology though certainly some of the theology of those times is not to blame for the excesses in those who love Cannon Law more than they do The Gospel.  That is at its worst when it replaces the requirement to love others as you love yourself, for mercy, for justice with the kind of legalism that the Catholic right so adores.

I think in psychology practically all of its methods could fit into this critique of confining their empiricism within their immediate interests, which begin with some of the worst, sloppiest and most absurd experimental design that is called science, some of the worst analysis of it claiming dogmatic and fallacious universality of the results - even when there is no demonstrable relationship between their claimed results and phenomena they claim it is related to.   I think that lacking any legitimate status of scientific reliability they replace the dogmas, doctrines, laws, claims, habits of their particular sect of psychology as their foundational authority to support all of that, falling back on the one truth of their field,  that studying the hidden, invisible minds of human beings - accessible almost exclusively through the unreliable reporting of people - is hard as their excuse.   Well, the truth is you can't do it with science, minds are not susceptible to the same things you can use to study falling and moving objects and the results of chemical reactions.  

I think that, frustrated as some of them must be with the antics (and funding) of psychology, lots of physicists and chemists and the more modestly legitimate kinds of biologists go along with letting the likes of psychologists, sociologists, good Lord, these days economists call what they do "science" out of their faith in materialist monism, they figure their successful use of scientific method for their field means that everything MUST! GODDAMMIT! be susceptible to those methods, at least in theory.

Update:  Rereading this in my habit of continual editing, it occurs to me that the reason that the Catholic right, the kind of people who Tim Busch invites to his lavish conservative, invariably capitalist "religious" confabs, which that notorious clerical ru Paul, Raymond Cardinal Burke adores, Canon law, medieval theology and, especially, the neo-medieval theology of the late Pius popes, their reincarnation in the JPII and Benedict XVI papacies, IS BECAUSE SUCH CORRUPT CHURCH LAW AND THEOLOGY WAS OFTEN, THOUGH NOT ALWAYS, WRITTEN FROM THE MOST WORLDLY OF MOTIVES.   The desire to recentralize power in Rome, in the Pope, in his court, the Curia, and the desire to fund that through donation from millionaires and billionaires is certainly implicated in that replacement of the Gospel, the teachings of Paul, The Law, and, most certainly The Prophets with corrupt legalism.

The same can be said in almost exactly the same way with those who replace the aspiration of egalitarian democracy, of economic justice, of the universalizing of a decent life - which to the best of our ability is the result of doing to others as we would have them do unto us - with the language of the corrupt U. S. Constitution.  That account for why the Republican-fascists are so enamored of "originalism" of "strict constructionist" readings of the Constitution.  Liberals who fall for that replacement, such as the lawyers and writers of the secular left,  are traitors when they are not merely suckers for it.   You will never get egalitarian democracy out of the words of the original Constitution because the corrupt founders intentionally excluded that possibility from the document.   Barbara Jordan was wrong about that.