It is hardly a novelty to assert that the problem of consciousness continues to bedevil inquiry in psychology and the human sciences. On the other hand, it is surely difficult to deny that consciousness, along with agency and action (as against movement) constitute the crucially relevant difference in the subject matter of the human sciences.
Within psychology, there have been various responses, but it may not be unfair to classify these under two main heads. One response sought to minimize consciousness as a problem, either by a behaviorist end-run, or by reductionist strategies. The other response, in practice if not always in intention, involved a rejection of the "causal model" altogether. This response is associated with clinical, humanistic, phenomenological and existential orientations.
It is not the present intention to assess the many arguments and conclusions current in the recent literature. From the present point of view, both sides were right and both sides were wrong, but more interestingly, this is because both sides of the argument have been infected by the mistaken assumption that it was the aim of a scientific psychology to explain behavior by appeal to something called "the laws of behavior" however, once this assurnption is dropped, we can see how both sides were right and both were wrong.
Humanistically oriented psychology was correct in insisting that because the phenomena of consciousness are real, psychology is autonomous. Moreover, and in consequence, they rightly saw that to explain action, one had to appeal to just those phenomena. But they were mistaken in supposing that there could be no psychological laws, construed here, let us emphasize, as statements about the causal properties of psychological structures.
On the other hand, the other side was correct in arguing that as a science, psychology should seek knowledge of psychological laws, but was mistaken in construing these as statements of invariance between antecedents and specific behaviors. Indeed, if we take our clue from the previous analysis and keep clearly in mind the distinction between discovering the causal properties and relations of structures in complex entities and applying this knowledge to explain, predict and diagnose the particulars of the world, we can readily identify a resolution. We turn first to an account of experimental (or theoretical) psychology.
To do justice the implications of the foregoing for experiment in psychology would require a separate paper. All that can be done here is to identify, if crudely, the appropriate tasks and limitations of experimental psychology as a science.
In general, experimental psychology is (Pace Skinner, 1950) a theoretical science which has as its special task the study of psychological structures and processes: e.g., learning, perception, cognition, motivation, etc. There will be nothing surprising in this. Indeed, it seems true of the work of the great names of "classical" psychology: Helmholtz, Wundt, James, Koffka, Kohler, Goldstein, Lashley and Vygotsky. But we believe that an enormous amount of recent work coming from different quarters is best seen as aiming at an understanding of those particular structures which taken together comprise the powers and capacities of humans. Included here is recent work in neuropsychology, neuropathology, cognitive psychology, learning theory, comparative psychology and ethology, developmental psychology and recent work in psycho-linguistics.
These efforts are best understood as concerned with the structure of our competences, and not, as frequently misunderstood, with our performances. This suggests an alternative formulation: Experimental psychology aims at knowledge of those structures which in complex interaction give humans the special powers which they have (acquire and develop) and which they exercise in acting in the world (Taylor, 1973; Harre and Secord, 1973, esp. Chapter 12). So conceived -- and let us underline this -- experimental psychology does not explain behavior, even though, of course, it is capable of shedding light on the complex mechanisms -- metabolic, perceptual, cognitive, etc., which taken together "govern" performances by actors, acting in the world.
Experimental psychology is experimental for precisely the reasons that physics or chemistry is experimental. The acts of persons in life settings are open-systemic events which involve an enormous range of co-determining structures and systems. One needs knowledge only of physics to account for the descent of a person falling from a precipice; one needs knowledge of biological structures and processes to comprehend death or birth; one needs psychology to have an understanding of the processes which underly (structure) performances -- and of course, this is made more difficult, as the text quoted earlier from Campbell and Misanin suggest, by the fact that the relevant intrinsic structures of persons are complexly related and causally co-determining.
But in the experimental situation, led by our theory of the generative mechanisms under study, we intervene to create (approximate) closures. To be sure, this inquiry is at a very high level of abstraction; but neither should this be surprising. The point of an experiment is not to reproduce a situation that will occur in everyday life, nor is it aimed at studying the particular. The experimental psychologist wants to understand cognition -- not why some particular person scores well in a standardized test. The knowledge we obtain, when we are successful, is not knowledge of constant conjunctions by which we "explain" behavior, but is, instead, knowledge of those enduring structures which constitute human powers and which operate outside the artificial strictures of the experimental situation.[5]
Not all of psychology, however, is experimental psychology and not all psychologists need to have the same tasks and methods. In the remainder of this paper, three additional tasks and three commensurate methodologies are distinguished. In addition, then, to the experimentalists, there are psychologists whose concern is the understanding of concrete persons, of individual personalities and their life histories. These include clinical, humanistic and therapeutic orientations. A third group is the social psychologist and a fourth, less exclusively psychological, has quantitative interests, and aims at identifying and employing measures, correlations, and the changing rates of those phenomena which are amenable to metrical and statistical treatment . As is evident, these approaches take us directly into the realm of the sociological, concerned as they are with persons or aggregates of persons acting in life-situations. It Will be important first to discuss what Bhaskar (l979a) as the new heuristic in the social sciences.
Parallel and often complementary to the debate in the theory of the natural sciences has been a violent debate in the social sciences. While phenomenology, ethnomethodology, dramaturgy, action-theory, structuralism, critical theory and neo-Marxism, and the new heuristics constitute an enormously mixed bag, it is not untrue to say that each has contributed key elements to the new heuristic, preserving what was of central importance to mainstream conceptions and integrating them into a roomier and more critically defensible posture. Again, this story is much too large to tell here, but as before, it is possible to identify the central insights. (See especially, Bhaskar, 1978, 19793, 1970b; Giddens, 1976, 1977, 1979; Bourdieu, 1972).
Perhaps the most important feature of the new heuristic is the new integration of central themes of the subjective" versus "objectivist" approaches in social theory. This depends upon drawing a radical distinction between human action and social structure. Unless human action and social structure constitute radically different levels of description and conceptualization, with neither reducible to the other, their articulation and integration within a single system cannot be accomplished.
Action-theory, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and "interpretative sociologies" in general have emphasized the idea that action is meaningful and intentional and have insisted rightly, that such behavior is social behavior, that "meanings" are always social meanings and that intentionality necessarily involves "ongoing reflexive monitoring of conduct" in a socially managed milieu. Nevertheless, these orientations have tended, if subtlety, to deny the "objective" character of society.
An opposite tendency has prevailed in the "objectivist" camp. Structural functionalism (Durkheim, Parsons) , and recent continental structuralism (Levi-Strauss, AIthusser, Godelier, e.g.) have rightly emphasized the "reality" of society, but have tended to deny, again, if subtly, the efficacious causal role of society.
The new heuristic weds these perspectives by arguing that social structure is the relatively enduring product and medium of motivated human action. Thus, social structures (e.g., language) are reproduced and transformed by action, but they pre-exist for individuals. They enable persons to become persons and to act (meaningfully and intentionally), yet at the same time, they are "coercive," limiting the ways we can act. It is thus that action is social, for, as acquiring the particular skills, competencies, habits and forms of thought which are used in acting presuppose human capacities, it also presupposes society in the double sense that in acting we use and we express social structures. Social structures are accordingly, constituted by the motiviated human acts which either reproduce or transform the very structures which are its medium. Thus also social change and history is the cumulative product of the largely unintended consequences of our intentional acts.
This way of viewing the matter allows us to see clearly both the strengths and limitations of the opposing critiques. As Bhaskar writes:
Society is not the unconditioned creation of human agency (voluntarism), but it does not exist independently of it (reification). And individual action neither completely determines (individualism) nor is completely determined by (determinism) social forms. On (the transformational model of social activity) unacknowledged conditions, unintended consequences and tacit skills.....all place limits on the actor's understanding of his social world while unacknowledged (unconscious) motivation limits his understanding of himself (Bhaskar, 1979b, p. 10).
Similarly, as Giddens puts it,
the characteristic error of the philosophy of action [and one could add, of interpretative sociologies in general is to treat the problem of 'production' only, thus not developing any concept of structural analysis at all; the limitation of both structuralism and functionalism, on the other hand, is to regard 'reproduction' as a mechanical outcome, rather than an active constitution process accomplished by, and consisting in, the doings of active subjects" (Giddens, 1976, p. 121).
This way of putting the matter allows us to state a very clear distinction between the social sciences and the social-psychological sciences. Again, Bhaskar has put the point clearly and sharply:
The social sciences, abstract from agency, studying as it were the structure of reproduced outcomes, the enduring practices and their relations (Bhaskar, l979b).
By contrast,
the social psychological sciences, abstract from these reproduced outcomes, to focus on the rules governing the mobilization of resources by agents in their interaction with each other and nature (Ibid.).
Social psychology, then, begins with concept of the person as we know and understand persons in our everyday lives (Harre and Secord, 1972, p. 87); it is not an experirnental science in the way that experimental psychology is, since it is an investigation which must look to actual "life situations" (Ibid., Chapter 3). It is an inquiry which can usefully adopt the methodological orientation detailed in Harre and Secord's The Explanation of Social Behavior, even if at this point we would not want that title to be misunderstood.
In a crucial sense, social psychology is a mediating discipline that seeks to understand, not individual behaviors, but how individuals employ their competences in acting in the world. Thus, if the sociologist is interested in social structures, the social psychologist is interested in how roles are achieved and used, habits formed and employed, persona engaged and manipulated, rules, conventions and norms (as structures) mobilized, negotiated, altered, and transformed. In this sense, so-called micro-sociology, e.g., ethnomethodology, Goffman's dramaturgy, and much of what is sometimes called "existential sociology" is social psychology (or social psychological science) as it is here conceived.
We should emphasize also that on the present view, while social psychology can proceed independently, it assumes also that experimental psychology can provide a better understanding of the psychological structures which we may suppose, tentatively at least, are species universal.[6] But since all human powers are realized socially, the particular forms and contents of human competences will be culturally and historically variable. As Mead so well put it, "social psychology presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure (Head, 1934). Moreover, as this text suggests, the social psychologist must also be cognizant of the results of the social sciences regarding the structures being reproduced and transformed by individuals in their lives.
Engagements in social activities (practices) may be described and analyzed either from the point of view of the agent -- in hermeneutic terms involving her or his motivations, beliefs, competences, understandings, etc., or in terms of her or his place (function) in the social structures. Social psychology has, as it were, the onerous task of joining these two perspectives. It is in this sense that social psychology is generally thought of as an interdisciplinary inquiry concerned at once with the insights and contributions of psychology and the social sciences.
Until the last decade this would have sounded strange to most social psychologists) for they have regarded social psychology as an experimental discipline. Certainly from the 1950's into the 1970's the experiment has been the central method of investigation. The sense of crisis in social psychology that has prevailed for about a decade now, however, suggests that something is wrong with that conception. And our suggestion is this. To the extent that experiments are designed to discover and understand the social competencies of persons as well as the social constraints upon the exercise of such competencies, they are on the right track. In this sense they are continuous with the role of general experimental psychology as we have characterized it.
What such experiments do is to focus on behaviors that are more social than those studied by general psychologists. For example, where the general psychologist might study the perception of objects arranged in space, the social psychologist might study the perception of persons as social objects, under varying conditions. Or the social psychologist typically introduces into experiments social conditions that are excluded by the general psychologist (e.g., the presence of one or more other persons who interact in some controlled fashion with the participants in the experiment. Or the behavior under study might be entirely social, as where the participant is the target of persuasive communications having different structures or which are presented under different conditions.
But we must be wary here. The term "experiment" has been extended to all sorts of investigations, some of which do not have the aim that we have attributed to experimentation, and that has important implications for how such investigations are to be interpreted. For example, thousands of experiments have focused on the study of group process and structure in the laboratory (interestingly, only a trickle of such experimentation remains, and the disinterest in the subject is widely recognized by those who have followed that line). At best, perhaps such experimentation can be thought of as simulations -- the creation in the laboratory of analogues of group phenomena that sometimes occur in life situations. Too often, perhaps, they are nothing more than that, and how they apply outside of the laboratory remains enigmatic. But some group experiments may well throw light on genuine social mechanisms or processes that stand in the same relation to social interaction that generative mechanisms have to individual behavior.
What should be emphasized is that, whatever line is taken in social psychological experimentation, its fruits provide only partial knowledge of social behavior in life situations. Phenomena in open systems, as we have stressed, require knowledge of additional conditions and contexts, and frequently biographical/historical knowledge as well.