In psychology it is a commonplace to glorify him [Gustave Theodore Fechner] as the first user of experimental methods, and the first aimer at exactitude in facts. In cosmology he is known as the author of a system of evolution which, while taking great account of physical details and mechanical conceptions, makes consciousness correlative to and coeval with the whole physical world.
William James, 1904 Introduction to the English translation of Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode
Of all those who hold a faith in materialism and scientism, admitted or not, those who believe in psychology have, in my experience, a place second only to those who believe in Darwinism in their irrational and information resistant anger when someone who does not share their faith expresses his skepticism and doubt. I've gone way past skepticism in the matter of the "social sciences" to outright conviction that their status as sciences is wrong, dangerous and inappropriate and it always was. Other than a few discoveries and things that are better considered possible hints of the connection of physiology with our consciousness than solid facts such as are found in physics and chemistry, the entire history of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and, Lord save us, these days economics, are far better treated as lore with all the dangers of condescension for the proclamations of such of those who make proclamations. If you think that's exaggerated, look at the past years assertions of "Darwinian economics, in advising the Trump regime and that in Sweden on how to manage the pandemic and the recently self-promoted editorial on the same of that Harvard meat head of way too much influence, Larry Summers.
The longer I read into the origins of the social sciences the more I think they are an (often ignorantly performed) act of ideological assertion and, in their history in universities and elsewhere, hegemony. First, perhaps in Germany and from their eminence in late 18th and 19th century, spread to the English speaking academic world.
Here is one of the times William James, speaking as a founder of academic psychology in English language universities declared by fiat something I think he, by the time of 1904, may have wished to revise.
Psychology is to be treated as a natural science in this book. This requires a word of commentary. Most thinkers have a faith that at bottom there is but one Science of all things, and that until all is known, no one thing can be completely known. Such a science, if realized, would be Philosophy. Meanwhile it is far from being realized; and instead of it, we have a lot of beginnings of knowledge made in different places, and kept separate from each other merely for practical convenience' sake, until with later growth they may run into one body of Truth. These provisional beginnings of learning we call 'the Sciences' in the plural. In order not to be unwieldy, every such science has to stick to its own arbitrarily-selected problems, and to ignore all others. Every science thus accepts certain data unquestioningly, leaving it to the other parts of Philosophy{2} to scrutinize their significance and truth. All the natural sciences, for example, in spite of the fact that farther reflection leads to Idealism, assume that a world of matter exists altogether independently of the perceiving mind. Mechanical Science assumes this matter to have 'mass' and to exert 'force,' defining these terms merely phenomenally, and not troubling itself about certain unintelligibilities which they present on nearer reflection. Motion similarly is assumed by mechanical science to exist independently of the mind, in spite of the difficulties involved in the assumption. So Physics assumes atoms, action at a distance, etc., uncritically; Chemistry uncritically adopts all the data of Physics; and Physiology adopts those of Chemistry. Psychology as a natural science deals with things in the same partial and provisional way. In addition to the 'material world' with all its determinations, which the other sciences of nature assume, she assumes additional data peculiarly her own, and leaves it to more developed parts of Philosophy to test their ulterior significance and truth.
William James: Psychology 1892
There is so much to unpack in only this one passage that demonstrates THAT THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE OF THE EXTENSION OF SCIENCE PAST WHERE ITS METHODS COULD GO that it would take a whole series of posts just to get to the second layer of the problem. I think it's possible to locate the origin of the problem in this statement about the general culture of academic Western thought then and, probably bereft of training in philosophy among most holding credentials in most fields, far more so today.
Most thinkers have a faith that at bottom there is but one Science of all things
This is a faith upon which both materialism and scientism are based, a faith which is generally entered into for an ulterior purpose, quite often that of atheism, or the desire that the entirety of the universe be knowable using familiar methods that are, in any case, intrinsically bound up with the abilities of people and, quite possibly, mitigated by our own biological limits as further complicated by the conditions of the consciousness which bounds our experience and our capacity to think about anything. Though it is true that even religious believers or skeptics of materialism can share in that faith as much as the most hard bitten 19th century style materialist would.
Why they should think that is inextricably bound up in the success of physics and chemistry and to a far lesser extent in other areas of study which are susceptible to the most basic methods of science, careful observation, careful measurement and careful analysis and thinking about AND MAKING CLAIMS ABOUT what is observed and measured. Why anyone should conclude from that that things which cannot be subjected to those methods could be believed to follow the same regularities that are discovered by science is certainly a matter of faith, and as I said yesterday, what people believe is WHAT THEY CHOOSE TO BELIEVE.
What is, in fact, the basis of the extension of what is ideally the limited and modest - though powerful - successes in the exact physical sciences were applicable to the enormously complex and largely unknowable experience of consciousness, what William James admitted in this same passage is the entirely unknowable consciouness of other beings who cannot articulate their experiences to us (as if people are really good at that, either) and even more irrationally the far more complex phenomena of human societies and even extending to allegations about what people "think en masse" and the only slightly more observable or measurable phenomena of what they do when considered as a whole (both of those as a "thing" being fictions).
There never was any reason to believe that there was any basic law that could be discovered by scientific method to make verifiable or refutable predictions to study human minds, human actions, human interactions on an individual or, greatly multiplying the variables and problems, small groups or entire societies and nations of people. That was all a matter of faith, for example, that of August Comte (often credited as the founder of sociology) whose lavishly bizarre materialism should have been a warning that he'd climbed up a nut tree instead of the one with such dangerous fruit as is found in the lore of Genesis 2 the fruit of which God warned against eating. Only that tree is generally considered to be explanatory lore by thinking people of faith, that of Compt and his like are to be treated as a natural science by those who deny they hold any faith.
I've long thought that William James was way too good a philosopher to have fallen for the building claims of psychology while realizing why someone like him may have done it. I don't know the extent to which he was aware of Freud's bizarre declarations of our minds as minefields of irrationality WHICH IN ITSELF SHOULD HAVE LED TO THE CONCLUSION THAT ANY SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF IT WAS A SELF-CONTRADICTION, but I suspect he may have regretted his work in it by the end of his life. But this is about the start of the problem, not the total mess that the "science" of psychology has been up to now, including the disastrous attempts to verify the published claims of psychologists in the past decade and earlier, the problems of non-verifiability, of appallingly bad methodologies and lavishly made claims published as science, and everything else that more than confirms the problems that will arise when corners are cut and liberties taken in the name of science. Considering the history of psychology after William James, not to mention that of modern physics, I think the same naive faith promoted in this paragraph can be seen in the end of it.
So Physics assumes atoms, action at a distance, etc., uncritically; Chemistry uncritically adopts all the data of Physics; and Physiology adopts those of Chemistry. Psychology as a natural science deals with things in the same partial and provisional way. In addition to the 'material world' with all its determinations, which the other sciences of nature assume, she assumes additional data peculiarly her own, and leaves it to more developed parts of Philosophy to test their ulterior significance and truth.
There is no way to reliably make that leap from the observable and physical to the unobservable, unverifiably attested to experience of consciousness, which, if we can make one reliable assumption is that even the person experiencing it will not be good at trying to make an honest description of it AND THERE IS NO WAY TO VERIFY IF THEY ARE BEING ACCURATE OR HONEST IN THEIR DESCRIPTION OF THEIR INTERNAL EXPERIENCE. There is no way to know if the same person would describe one event in their life the same way a week or a month or a year after they gave a first description of it, quite often time brings a different understanding of it. If I had described something that happened when I was in 4th grade the day it happened, ten years later or today, I would expect I would have a far different understanding of it now than I did then, though the experience was freshest then. Which of those would be the one worthy of scientific consideration? Which of those incidents would other people who were there describe differently? Which of those different incidents deserves scientific consideration as accurate?
I think Fechner, William James and the rest of them may have found some interesting and perhaps useful things in some of the more basic measurements of human perception but those are a very limited thing and hardly universal. But other than easily reportable and verifiable matters of basic perception of things like the numbers of dots on a piece of paper (where the dots could be counted and arranged reliably) and other things which are about human perception of a verifiable thing, psychology very fast goes totally beyond any reliable claims. It is quasi-scientific at its most reliable, it quickly becomes dogmatic materialistic, scientistic faith after that. Where the thing perceived cannot be reliably limited, described, controlled, they are trying to observe and measure the unknowable and the unreliably reported, it is a total fraud as is found when its claims are rigorously tested. I certainly think it is extremely dangerous to accept the claims of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists or, Lord help us, economists within the application of the law, giving their pronouncements power to decide life and death.
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