In this respect, however, there is no _essential_ difference between
matters of external observation and matters of self-observation.
Suppose, for example, that, for the first time in your life, you smell
assafœtida. You say to yourself “that is a most unpleasant smell”. Now
unpleasantness is a matter of self-observation. It may be _correlated_
with physiological conditions which can be observed in others, but it
is certainly not identical with these, since people knew that things
were pleasant and unpleasant before they knew about the physiological
conditions accompanying pleasure and its opposite. Therefore when
you say “that smell is unpleasant” you are noticing something that
does not come into the world of physics as ordinarily understood. You
are, however, a reader of psycho-analysis, and you have learned that
sometimes hate is concealed love and love is concealed hate. You say to
yourself, therefore: “Perhaps I really like the smell of assafœtida,
but am ashamed of liking it”. You therefore make your friends smell it,
with the result that you soon have no friends. You then try children,
and finally chimpanzees. Friends and children give verbal expression
to their disgust: chimpanzees are expressive, though not verbal. All
these facts lead you to state: “The smell of assafœtida is unpleasant”.
Although self-observation is involved, the result has the same kind of
certainty, and the same kind of objective verification, as if it were
one of the facts that form the empirical basis of physics.
(2) The second proposition, to the effect that the physical sciences
are capable of affording an explanation of all the publicly observable
facts about human behaviour, is one as to which it is possible to argue
endlessly. The plain fact is that we do not yet know whether it is true
or false. There is much to be said in its favour on general scientific
grounds, particularly if it is put forward, not as a dogma, but as a
methodological precept, a recommendation to scientific investigators
as to the direction in which they are to seek for solution of their
problems. But so long as much of human behaviour remains unexplained
in terms of physical laws, we cannot assert dogmatically that there is
no residue which is theoretically inexplicable by this method. We may
say that the trend of science, so far, seems to render such a view
improbable, but to say even so much is perhaps rash, though, for my
part, I should regard it as still more rash to say that there certainly
is such a residue. I propose, therefore, as a matter of argument, to
admit the behaviourist position on this point, since my objections to
behaviourism as an ultimate philosophy come from quite a different kind
of considerations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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