This section contains two brief essays: "What is Descriptive Psychology?", and "A Person-centered View of Science."

What is Descriptive Psychology?

Psychology prides itself on being a science. That is well and good. However, in many quarters, it seems not to have a good grasp on just what science is. We still hear statements like “Well, science is all about prediction and control.” On that account, both Mr. Darwin and Mr. Hubble might have responded, “Well, I guess that leaves me out.” Neither the theories of Evolution nor of the Big Bang is about predicting events or about controlling them. They are, one might say in contrast, about the postdiction of events that have controlled us.

One of psychology’s major misunderstandings is about empiricism. Science is empirical, right? Right. At the end of the day, it is about how things are in the world--about how we evolved, about why the moon prescribes a slightly elliptical orbit around the earth, about how DNA is composed of four elements in various combinations arrayed in a double helix configuration--and on and on and on. So far so good. But psychology’s downfall as a science, I submit, has much to do with a second, often implicit belief: “Science is 100% empirical.” To a very large degree, we value only journals that publish empirical findings (one has only to call to mind the most prestigious journals to see that this is true). We look dismissively on any report, written or spoken, that deals in the empirically undemonstrated, the philosophical, or the otherwise non-empirical. We assign all such reports to the benighted realms of the “anecdotal,” “speculative,” “undemonstrated,” or “philosophical” (pejoratively understood). Whatever the adjective, they are considered “unscientific” and therefore inadmissable as true knowledge.

But science is not 100% empirical, and it takes only the most casual observation of the broad scientific scene to see that this is obviously so. The following is an excerpt from a 1991 article of mine entitled “Proposal for an Eclectic Framework,” that speaks to this matter:

“The present framework is a nonempirical, conceptual framework comprising two systematically related concepts and the logical linkages these concepts bear to each other and to existing forms of explanation in psychopathology. Such conceptual and logical (vs. empirical) elements are very familiar and very central in other established sciences (Chalmers, 1982; Lakatos, 1974; Toulmin, 1956; Wittgenstein, 1922), but have received scant attention within psychology. A brief digression into such nonempirical elements in other sciences will serve both to remind the reader of their familiarity and centrality, and to help clarify the unorthodox (within psychology) nature of the present effort.

“Science includes concepts, and concepts are not truth eligible. The concept "vertebrate" is not true (or "verifiable") or false (or "falsifiable"). It is a distinction that a certain kind of scientist makes, which distinction has proven historically an apt and useful one. The same can be said of concepts such as "force", "mass", "gene", "quark", "mammal", "learning", and so on ad infinitum.

“Concepts, far from being incidental or unimportant, are indispensable in science. The scientist who lacks command of a concept (e.g., does not know that a vertebrate is a creature that possesses a backbone or spinal column) cannot study real world instances of that concept (except perhaps accidentally). Lyons, in discussing research on the topic of emotion, puts the point very well. Criticizing another emotion researcher who claimed that ‘any attempt to define emotion is obviously misplaced and doomed to failure,’ Lyons responded that, ‘One is tempted to say that the resulting situation must be like that of sallying forth to study rabbits while having no idea of what is to count as a rabbit’ (1980, p. xi).

“Science includes conceptual relationships, and conceptual relationships are nonempirical. For example, in the classical Newtonian system, there are conceptual relationships between "force", "mass", "acceleration", "inertia", and other concepts. A ‘force’ is ‘any influence that can cause a body to be accelerated’ (Hewitt, 1977, p.47); ‘mass’ is "the proportionality constant between force and acceleration in Newton's second law" (Hewitt, 1977, p. 29). In the Newtonian ‘net’ (Wittgenstein, 1922, p. 68), these are nonempirical, conceptual connections. One would no more do an experiment to empirically determine if forces accelerate bodies than one would to empirically determine whether bachelors have wives.

“Science contains even theoretical law statements that are nonempirical. Newtonian mechanics again provides us with a familiar example. Newton's first law states that unresisted bodies will travel indefinitely in uniform motion in Euclidean straight lines (Hewitt, 1977, pp. 25-28; Toulmin, 1956, pp. 55-59). Inasmuch as there are no actual unresisted bodies in nature, this could scarcely be considered an empirical proposition subject to falsification through empirical observation. Newton's first law, as Toulmin (1956) has pointed out out, is not an empirical proposition at all, but an ‘ideal of natural order’--a statement about an ideal (as opposed to real) state of affairs, which statement the physicist can use to considerable effect in the real world (basically, by accounting for deviations from this ideal motion).

“Finally, of course, and most familiarly, science contains propositions that are empirically falsifiable. ‘Light will bend in the presence of a gravitational field.’ ‘Individuals possessing characteristics advantageous for survival in a given environment will constitute an increasing proportion of their species in succeeding generations.’ ‘The universe originated billions of years ago with the explosion of a hyperconcentrated matter-energy point.’ All of these are propositions that could be falsified by appropriate empirical findings (Bergner, 1991, p. 3)”

So, where does Descriptive Psychology enter the picture? Isaac Newton, like all scientists, required a pre-empirical conceptual system (a set of systematically related concepts such as “force,” “mass,” and “acceleration”) before and in order to make the discriminations necessary to lodge any empirical claim (how could one claim that a “force” was inversely proportional to such and such if one did not first have the concept of “force”--one in this case that Newton himself invented). Indeed, leaving science aside for the moment, the same is true of any empirical claim. The bookkeeper, for example, requires the concepts “debit”, “credit,” “balance,” and so forth, in order to determine what actually happened to the company during the past fiscal year.

Psychology, having failed for over 120 years to provide such a conceptual system, stands radically in need of one. Descriptive Psychology is precisely such a system. It is a pre-empirical set of systematically related concepts designed to provide formal access to any fact or possible fact about human behavior. (Compare: “hue,” “saturation,” and “brilliance” provide such access to any color or possible color). The reader interested in pursuing this matter further is urged look into the accessible introductions found in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_psychology), on the web page for the Society for Descriptive Psychology (http://www.sdp.org/sdp/WHAT%20IS%20DP-Bergner.pdf), or in the following book by Peter Ossorio.

Ossorio, P. G. (2006). The behavior of persons. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.

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A Person-centered View of Science

A standard view of science, one that might be termed the “cosmic perspective,” goes loosely as follows. Some 14 billion or so years ago, there was a “Big Bang.” An unimaginably hot, dense and energetic singularity exploded, expanded outward, and became the universe. In time, matter clustered into many billions of galaxies, each with many billions of suns, and many of these in turn with their own planetary systems. In one otherwise ordinary galaxy, one ordinary sun formed and on one of its planets, earth, conditions came about in time such that life forms emerged. Over the course of some 14 billion years or so, these life forms evolved and exhibited ever increasing complexity, until in the very recent cosmological past an especially complex organism emerged, homo sapiens. This species, then, is a very recent, accidentally evolved, cosmologically insignificant organism that has existed for one second of cosmic time on one ordinary planet in the vastness of the cosmos.

A second, far more rare (but not unprecedented) view of science may be termed the “person centered” perspective, and may be characterized in the following way. As human beings, we engage in many different activities, practices, and ways of life -- different “games” if you will -- in domains such as romance, child-rearing, finance, music, athletics, drama, religion...and science. From this perspective, to borrow an old phrase, science is but one among many of the “games people play.”

As persons, we give accounts of many different kinds: historical, journalistic, biographical, political, fictional, personal-experiential, and more. Among these different kinds, some are scientific accounts -- accounts of how things are and have been in the empirical world -- about how the cosmos evolved, how we evolved, how characteristics are transmitted to offspring, and much more. Historically, we observe that some of these accounts such as those of the ether and of Ptolemaic cosmology have failed to survive, while others such as Einsteinian relativity and Darwinian natural selection continue to survive, for how long we can never be sure. We have seen fit to give such accounts a place of honor in our worlds. Still, they remain but one among many of the kinds of important accounts in the broad worlds of persons.

Pursuing a further aspect of the person-centered view, Kant pointed out long ago that we have no access to noumenal reality. That is, we have no access to reality conceived as how things are independent of us, our perceptions, and our conceptual distinctions. Scientific accounts, ineluctably couched in our concepts and based on our (aided or unaided) observations, must therefore of necessity always be accounts of how things are for us.

In the cosmic model of science characterized above, it is often said that, in the grand scheme of things, we are unimportant and insignificant. On the person-centered model, however, it is noted that, without persons, there is quite literally no such thing as importance or significance. Both are inescapably “our gig.” Nothing is important to planets and suns and dark matter. Without us (and other persons who may exist in the universe), it’s just mindless rocks in empty space.

On the person-centered model, if we may be permitted a dramaturgical metaphor, “all the world’s a stage,” and persons are the dramatis personae. We are center stage. We are Hamlet and Lear and Juliet, and all the rest our props and stories. Science is one human activity. Its theories, while extremely important, are but one of many human stories, and are important because we persons have given them importance, something we did not always do. They are conceived by human minds, based on human perceptions, and conceived in humanly constructed conceptual frameworks. Without persons, there would be no science. On the person-centered view, in a certain sense, psychology may be considered the queen of sciences: as the study of persons and their behavior (which necessarily involves their “props and stories”), it encompasses all else. As Santayana once observed, “Human life is a peculiar reality in that every other reality, effective or presumptive, must in one way or another find a place within it”.

Which of these points of view is the the “true” one? Obviously, unlike the case of claims like “dropped cats will land on their feet,” there can be no either-or test of truth here. Both are faithful to the facts, and both possible orientations to science. The one puts persons center stage. The other regards persons as an insignificant and derivative phenomenon. An understanding of Descriptive Psychology, however, will be aided by the recognition that it lies squarely in the person-centered camp.