###### FROM CHUCK TUCKER 951205 ######
Abbott's (951203.1645 EST) [Science or mush] inspires this
post. This view of scientific inquiry is (as I see it) much
closer to what Runkel proposes a "action research" or the
method of "possibilites." It is also (not strange for me)
a method consistent with the pragmatic method of inquiry. It
relieves one of the responsibility of pretending that anyone
can PROVE anything.
I would also like to point out what I believe to be the most
valuable lesson of Runkel's book which as he states: "Use a
method to do what it can do. Do not try to make it do what
it cannot. No one method is good for everything. But every
method is good for doing something worth doing."(186)
BTW, for the first time I had three students this semester who
did DEMO1 apparently reading the instructions written by Powers
who turned in their answer sheet with all .0000 correlations.
Questions: Are these human beings behaving as "Living Control
Systems" or not? Do these results "test" PCT?
Regard, Chuck
INQUIRY.DOC
SOME USEFUL PROCEDURES OF INQUIRY
by
Rollo Handy and E. C. Harwood
Great Barrington, Massachusetts:
Behavioral Research Council, 1973.
Original pagination in [ ].
I. ORIENTATION FOR THE READER
The extensive literature on scientific inquiry provides
many conflicting recommendations as to the most useful
procedures of inquiry to be followed. The tentative
conclusions we have reached in our inquiry into inquiry
are different in many respects from the descriptions of
scientific method usually found. The following summary
of some of our major, but tentative, conclusions may
therefore be useful to readers. Our immediate objective
in this short statement is not to satisfy the reader that
our views are useful, for that is the task undertaken in
the entire volume, but rather to provide orientation for
the reader before he grapples with detailed consideration
of the problem.
We have attempted to make this summary report immediately
useful to the reader by avoiding specialized terminology
and by stating our conclusions with a minimum of elaboration.
The full account of what we should both include and exclude
in the suggested procedures of inquiry will require detailed
consideration of the material provided in the rest of the
volume; the orientation summary below should indicate the
general direction of the advance we believe has been made
and thus facilitate the reader's task.
How Inquiry Proceeds
1. The inquirer becomes aware of a problem situation.
2. He observes some facts that appear to be pertinent.
Various aspects and phases of the situation are
differentiated, some changes among them are measured,
and a tentative partial description of what is
happening is begun.
3. In noting connections among some of the things
observed and measured, other connections may be imagined.
The inquirer focuses on what seem to be the pertinent
aspects and phases of the situation, and develops a
conjecture as to what may happen under specified
circumstances.
4. That conjecture may involve other facts to be observed,
perhaps including some facts originally not believed
to be pertinent. As the inquirer proceeds, he may find
that the original problem situation is quite different
than it first had seemed.
5. The tentative description of what happens is supplemented
and perhaps revised. Transformations via verbal or
mathematical logic may be used. What were earlier taken
as facts may be revised or rejected.
6. Perhaps another conjecture occurs to the inquirer about
possible connections among facts, including measured
changes.
7. Investigation of the new conjecture requires further
observation and perhaps results in the development of
a more adequate description. These procedures of
observation, reconsideration, renewed observation;
i.e., the interweaving or reciprocal stimulation of
what are sometimes called empirical observations and
the formulation of hypotheses, may be repeated many
times in succession.
8. Finally, if the inquirer is successful, a description
adequate for resolving the immediate problem situation
is developed.
9. Future inquiries may further supplement the description
of what happens; in some instances new inquiries may
reveal aspects or phases that force drastic amendment
of the best earlier description.
10. Inquiry has no necessary end. A COMPLETE description of
even a simple problem situation apparently never has
been achieved and may never be, but an adequately useful
description is the goal of modern scientific inquiry.
The actual order of successful inquiry seems to be: awareness,
observation, partial description, conjectures leading to
further observation, etc., until an adequate description has
been formulated. Descriptions of a small part of the full
sequence may be mistaken as the key to the whole process;
e.g., when inquiry is understood as beginning with a
"well-formulated" hypothesis and then searching for evidence,
or when mathematical transformations are assumed to be the
essence of scientific inquiry, or when logical deductions are
emphasized. If the interweaving of observation and tentative
descriptions that has been so productive in past inquiries is
departed from, the verbal and mathematical transformations used
by the inquirer may not be applicable to the data involved.
Many inquirers have endeavored to achieve useful descriptions
by means of extended verbal logic, or by mathematical
transformations not closely connected with observable data, or
by the computer models that recently have become popular
(by means of which so-called "theoretical constructions" and
mathematical transformations have been mechanized or automated).
Some of the displays of technical proficiency may be impressive,
especially to those less skilled in mathematics, but there is
little evidence that useful scientific inquiry has been advanced
thereby, and there is much evidence that such elaborate theorizing
lends a false appearance of authenticity to assertions that by
no means are scientifically warranted.[3]
..................................
ANTI-THEORETICAL VIEWS. From time to time writers can be found
who put far more emphasis on the role of the laboratorian than
on the role of the theoretician.[11] Sometimes such emphases
may tend in the direction of maintaining that scientific inquiry
is only data-collection, but more often those emphases are
protests against premature theorizing or insufficient attention
being given to testing. Thus Alvin G. Goldstein says: "In
psychology, most theories are stated before enough solid
information has been collected, and as a result there is a
ridiculous profusion of theories." A statement made in 1937
by George P. Murdock would find acceptance among many workers
today, and not only for sociology: "Sociology...has a plethora
of hypotheses. What it most needs...is more factual studies to
test them." 10 B.F. Skinner is an eminent behavioral scientist
often cited as anti-theoretical. Attention here will be focused
···
on an article in which he describes his early research methods. Skinner says:
This account of my scientific behavior up to the point at
which I published my results in a book called THE BEHAVIOR OF
ORGANISMS is as exact in letter and spirit as I can now make it.
The notes, data, and publications which I have examined do not
show that I ever behaved in the manner of Man Thinking as
described by John Stuart Mill or John Dewey or in
reconstructions of scientific behavior by other philosophers
of science. I never faced a Problem which was more than the
eternal problem of finding order. I NEVER ATTACKED A PROBLEM
BY CONSTUCTING A HYPOTHESIS. I never deduced Theorems or
submitted them to Experimental Check. So far as I can see,
I had no preconceived Model of behavior - certainly not a
physiological or mentalistic one, and, I believe, not a
conceptual one. The `reflex reserve' was an abortive, though
operational concept which was retracted a year or so after
publication in a paper at the Philadelphia meeting of the APA.
IT LIVED UP TO MY OPINION OF THEORIES IN GENERAL BY PROVING
UTTERLY WORTHLESS IN SUGGESTING FURTHER EXPERIMENTS. Of course,
I was working on a basic Assumption - that there was order in
behavior if I could only discover it - but such an assumption
is not to be confused with the hypotheses of deductive theory.
It is also true that I exercised a certain Selection of Facts
but not because of relevance to theory but because one fact
was more orderly than another. If I engaged in Experimental
Design at all, it was simply to complete or extend some
evidence of order already observed. 11
Despite Skinner's specific disclaimer that he did not behave as
Dewey suggests problem-solvers behave, Dewey described just the
kind of procedures Skinner tells us about in the case history.
Dewey's emphasis on the whole transaction in which a scientist
carries out his inquiry, including the role of the equipment and
technology available to the scientist at work in a given setting,
is also what Skinner emphasizes. Indeed, the "earthiness" Skinner
stresses is what Dewey, unlike many writers on scientific inquiry,
also stresses. Again and again Skinner mentions problems he
encountered in studying rat behavior, or in devising machinery to
aid his observations, or in improving that machinery to make the
experimenter's work easier, or resulting from his limited time for
experimentation under given life conditions. The detail Skinner
gives about his own case history fits with Dewey's methodological
advice: look at the full transaction, in which one organism (the
scientist) is involved with other things and events (in this
instance, rats and the equipment used to observe them), rather
than to adopt procedures in which the various aspects and phases
of a transaction are taken as separate "reals" existing
independently of each other.
According to Skinner's own words, he does make use of hypotheses,
in the sense of conjectures or notions about possible connections
among facts. To illustrate, let us consider one of the incidents
Skinner cites to show that luck sometimes plays a part in
scientific inquiry. He had constructed an apparatus for measuring
the delay between a rat's eating the food it gets after going down
a runway and the rat's returning "home." A wood disc, taken from
a store of discarded apparatus, had been fashioned into a food
magazine for releasing the rat's food. The disc happened to have
a spindle that Skinner had not bothered to remove. He says that
one day it occurred to him that "if I wound a string around the
spindle and allowed it to unwind as the magazine was emptied,"
then he could record the delays as a curve rather than as the
polygraph-like pips his earlier apparatus had produced. Skinner
notes that although the differences between the old type of
record and the new one may not appear great, "as it turned out
the curve revealed things in the rate of responding, and in
changes in that rate, which would certainly otherwise have
been missed." 12 Here we clearly have a conjecture being
formed about the apparatus and then tested, with useful
scientific results, which is just what Dewey was talking about.
To take one more example, when Skinner was working half-time at
the Medical School and hence had difficulty maintaining the
desired work schedule with his rats, he attempted to overcome
that problem by devising a way in which the rats could be kept
at a constant level of food deprivation. He conjectured that
if "you reinforce the rat, not at the end of a given period, but
when it has completed the number of responses ordinarily emitted
in that period," the rat "should operated the lever at a constant
rate around the clock" except when sleeping, and if the
reinforcement were set "at a given number of responses it should
even be possible to hold the rat at any given level of deprivation."
However, Skinner goes on to say, "nothing of the sort happens";
what he actually got was "fixed-ratio" rather than "fixed-interval"
reinforcement. 13 So here we have an instance of a set of
conjectures being formulated that did not have the consequences
it was first expected to have, but which did lead to useful
results.
Summarizing Skinner's early work, then, although he did not
usually formulate deductive hypotheses about rat behavior
before he carried out his observations, but rather observed
rats under carefully controlled circumstances to [12] see what
order could be discerned in their behavior, he did use
conjectures and paid great attention to seeing what warranted
generalizations ("laws" in his terminology) could be arrived
at on the basis of careful observation. His discussion of
technological and instrumental problems, often de-emphasized
in accounts of scientific inquiry, along with the constant
theme of the inquirer running into difficulties and solving
them, seems to us to illustrate neatly the account of inquiry
given by Dewey and Bentley.
...............................
To summarize some of Dewey and Bentley's main points: When we
observe humans we see organisms living in-and-by-means-of
their environment (not separated from, or merely placed in,
an environment), struggling to adjust behaviorally to a
multitude of things and events. Among the many transactional
processes men are engaged in are transactions that we call
scientific inquiry. The inquirer's behavior as a scientist
is continuous with other of his behaviors; his knowings are
behavioral adjustments, not god-like apprehensions of the
Real. Successful inquiries exhibit an interweaving of
notions about things and measurements of changes. Knowing
transactions are best investigated as they occur, rather
than by postulating actors, or actions, or other aspects
and phases of the transactions as separate reals that
somehow come together on some occasions.[13]
..............................
IV. DESCRIPTION OF PROCEDURES TENTATIVELY SUGGESTED
FOR TRIAL IN SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
The procedures suggested below [A RENDITION PRESENTED ABOVE
IN THIS DOCUMENT] have been selected as those believed to
be most useful in facilitating progress toward the
objective of scientific inquiry. [17] Those procedures
are based primarily on the work of Dewey and Bentley, but
we have not hesitated to make changes when that seemed
desirable.
Human beings have found that many problems can be solved by
ascertaining what happens under specified circumstances.
Therefore the first suggestion is that the objective of goal
of scientific inquiry is a description of what happens under
specified circumstances. Ascertaining what happens is part
of the scientific inquirer's job, but his task is not
completed until he has provided a scientifically useful
description of his findings. "Scientifically useful" as
here applied is a name or short-hand designation for a
description that can be used by others as well as the
inquirer concerned for rechecking the inquiry, or as a
basis for further inquiry, or as a means of modifying
either external events or internal adjustive behavior or
for any combination of such purposes.
The objective of scientific inquiry here suggested does
not include achievement of "knowledge" in any absolute or
final form, does not purport to establish "certainty," and
does not offer its findings as unalterable indestructible
Truth (whatever that may be). The goal is assertions
warranted by the procedures of inquiry but not guaranteed
to be fixed and immutable. The reports of scientific
inquiry are invariably provisional, always subject to
revision if and when better means of observation and
measurement or other improvements in procedures of inquiry
make possible more useful descriptions of what happens under
specified circumstances.
At this stage of the scientific inquiry into scientific inquiry
itself, no one inquirer or any group of inquirers has offered a
comprehensive and systematically organized description of the
procedures of inquiry that have proven to be most useful in
solving problems. Nevertheless, much work has been done, and
the procedures suggested for trial have been described in some
detail by certain observers, including Dewey and Bentley. For
the purposes of this report, rewording and rearranging has been
undertaken in the hope of facilitating application of the
procedures; but neither categorical verbal form nor apparent
finality of expression should be misunderstood as altering the
provisional status of the suggested procedures. The inquirer
who attempts to use these procedures is asked to regard his
use of them as an experiment in the conduct of inquiry.
Involved in any inquiry is the bundle of habits the inquirer
has acquired. All humans are subjected to enculturation from
the day they are born, perhaps earlier. Family living, formal
education, and other aspects of experience combine to influence
the habits of observation, of talking, of reading and writing,
and of responding in various circumstances. Much human
behavior reflects the gradual acquiring of such habits with
their tendencies to dominate action. For example, since the
publication of Ames' experiments at Dartmouth, who can doubt
that much of what people observe is determined by what they
have observed in the past, by habits formed in the course of
repeated "seeing" under certain circumstances. 16 And in
attempting to report their observations, to communicate, men
are greatly influenced by their habitual attitudes toward words,
by the ways of talking to which they have become accustomed,
however primitive from the scientific inquirer's viewpoint
those ways of talking may be. Consequently, readers should
not be surprised to find that applying the procedures of
inquiry suggested here requires concentrated effort, at
least in the beginning. Acquired habits can be changed,
but precisely because they are habits they usually are
not easily changed.
FOOTNOTES
10. ALVIN G. GOLDSTEIN, REVIEW OF G.M. SOLLEY AND G. MURPHY,
Development of the Perceptual World , in Philosophy
of Science , Vol.29, 1962, p. 326. George P. Murdock, ed.,
Studies in the Science of Society , New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1937, p. x.
11. B.F. Skinner, "A Case History in Scientific Method,"
The American Psychologist , Vol. 11, May, 1956, p. 227,
emphasis added.
12. Ibid ., pp. 224-225.
13. Ibid ., pp. 226-227.
15. Throughout this volume we emphasize the dangers of proceeding
by means of an elaborate extension of hypotheses in the
absence of observations of facts. Solving the vexing
problems of men-in-society typically requires many stages
of inquiry, and at each stage almost always more than one
conjecture is initially plausible. The crucial importance
of using each successive conjecture as a guide for
further observation and measurement readily can be understood.
Each time that progress in inquiry is blocked and a tentative
description of what happens under specified circumstances
remains inadequate, the inquirer in imagination conjectures
(develops hypotheses) about the possibilities. If the
inquirer selects the possibility that to him seems most
plausible and proceeds on to the next blockage, without
returning to observation and measurement, he is
confronted with rapidly increasing odds against the
success of his inquiry. To illustrate, if the number of
possible conjectures at each stage is 10, his chances of
selecting the correct conjecture 10 times in succession
would be only 1 in 10 billion. Even if there were only
two alternative possibilities at each successive point,
and 10 stages, his chances of selecting all the correct
or more useful conjectures in succession would be only
1 in 1,024.
Yet often we find the "free creation" of hypotheses being
advocated to help solve the complex problem situations of
men-in-society. The formidable amount of work required
in making the measurements of changes from which warranted
assertions could be developed apparently constitutes such
a frustrating barrier to those who want immediate solutions
that they prefer a "short-cut" via elaborate theorizing,
despite the overwhelming odds against achieving useful
results.
16. For accounts of these experiments, see William H. Ittelson,
The Ames Demonstrations in Perception , Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1952; Hadley Cantril, ed.,
The Morning Notes of Adelbert Ames, Jr., New Brunswick,
Rutgers University Press, 1960; Franklin P. Kilpatrick, ed.,
Explorations in Transactional Psychology , New York,
New York University Press, 1961. For an account of the
role of habits, see John Dewey, Human Nature and
Conduct , New York, Henry Holt, 1922.