Re: Comte and confounding isms

From: Keith Sawyer (ksawyer@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Apr 21 2002 - 13:23:18 PDT


Howard, I liked your comments!  Here are some thoughts in response.

#1 The paper on Emergentism lists Watson as a reductionist, although I would suggest his reduction to the physical sciences was more hype than a well thought out theory and behaviorism is inconsistent in its reductive stance.

In interpreting Watson I was drawing on his 1913 paper; that and the ensuing history of behaviorism were reductionist at least in the sense of reducing mental states to observable behavior, if not to the physical sciences.  But Watson was not the only behaviorist to write that "The findings of psychology…[will then] lend themselves to explanation in physico-chemical terms" (1913, p. 177); many of the "unity of science" theorists of the 1950s felt that behaviorism was quite compatible with an eventual reduction to physical sciences.  Why do you say that this is an inconsistent position? 

#2 You list Comte as an emergentist.  I understand Comte as a phenomenalist in some ways similar to the logical positivists and not a materialist.  How is Comte an emergentist?

(I'm not sure what you mean by phenomenalist.)  Comte is a complicated one to interpret.  I was still uncertain after I finished reading his two major works.  In my Durkheim article, I point out that both Boutroux and Durkheim were uncertain about Comte's position on reductionism (forthcoming, Sociological Theory).  Comte wrote some reductionist stuff, like (in Positivism, Volume 2) p. 112: “The subordination of social science to biology is so evident that nobody denies it in statement, however it may be neglected in practice” and at some point in the future, “biology will be seen to afford the starting-point of all social speculation.”  But then in System of Positive Polity he wrote the famous emergentist line: "A society therefore can no more be decomposed into individuals, than a geometric surface can be resolved into lines, or a line into points" (p. 153).

#3 Comte was influential on Skinner; and Tolman (speaking about positivism in a 1991 book) concluded that behaviorism was not materialist but phenomenalist. Could behaviorists be emergentist, but be stuck in methodological individualism?

I can't see how behaviorism could be interpreted as emergentist, but let me know what you mean by phenomenalist.

The above may be somewhat misguided, but I'll venture 1 additional question.  Is it possible that much science is firmly reductionist and individualist in methodology but, inconsistent in ontology (and, due to lack of philosophical thinking, may be not much interested in the question).  Can emergentism be a way of exposing and resolving some inconsistencies?

I obviously think that emergentism can help!  You're right that most scientists don't think about it too much.  But in my experience, they tend to be, at least implicitly, realist in ontology (thinking that the properties, laws, and entities that they talk about actually exist in the world, in contrast to logical positivism/empiricism).

R. Keith Sawyer

http://www.keithsawyer.com/
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO  63130
314-935-8724



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