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The Natural History of Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

C. Judson Herrick
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Extract

“All experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams” an untravell'd world and through which come the joyous adventures of life and also grief and pain. Since all that we know and hope to know and think we know must come through this arch and since the primary task of science is the validation and enlargement of knowledge, science is vitally interested in this experience and its interpretation. This interest stems not from the philosopher's epistemology but it is strictly operational. We want to know what kind of experience yields reliable knowledge when checked against other experience and applied in practical adjustment to things as they are and to prediction of the probable future course of events. In short, the field of natural science (empirical as distinguished from normative science like mathematics) embraces everything that comes within the range of human experience. Its specific functions are to codify this mixed experience, to search out those uniformities which yield classification, verification and prediction, and from these observed uniformities to construct by sound reasoning verifiable laws, hypotheses and theories, that is, to find the meaning of the experiences had. First we want to know the facts, but what we are after in the upshot is the interpretation of the facts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 1945 , pp. 57 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1945

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References

Notes

1 George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense, New York, 1928, p. 104.

2 The time-worn practice of invoking mystic vitalistic unifying agencies is incompatible with sound scientific procedure and quite unnecessary, for we have ample evidence that “organisms really do build themselves through functional adjustments” in a perfectly natural way. For a convenient summary of some of the known mechanisms employed see:

S. J. Holmes, The Problem of Organic Form, Scientific Monthly, vol. 59, pp. 226–232, 253–260, 379–383.

3 This phylogenetic transformation of a relatively equipotential organization into a highly specialized body is repeated in the embryologic development of every individual animal. The complex interplay of preformed inherited factors and various epigenetic physiological interactions during growth is discussed by Dr. Holmes in the papers cited in Note 2.

4 G. E. Coghill, Anatomy and the Problem of Behavior, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1929 (also many previous and subsequent papers).

5 Davenport Hooker, The Origin of Overt Behavior, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1944.

6 Arnold Gesell, An Atlas of Infant Behavior, 2 vols., Yale Univ. Press, 1934; The Embryology of Behavior, New York, 1944.

7 G. E. Coghill, The Structural Basis of the Integration of Behavior, Proc. Nat. Academy of Sciences, vol. 16, pp. 637–643, 1930. See also a passage on page 87 of Anatomy and the Problem of Behavior, 1929.

8 Robert M. Yerkes, Chimpanzees, Yale Univ. Press, 1943, p. 194.

9 A. Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, New York, 1921.

10 Norman R. F. Maier, Reasoning in White Rats, Comparative Psychology Monographs, vol. 6, No. 3, 1929; A Further Analysis of Reasoning in Rats, Ibid., vol. 15, No. 1, 1938.

11 R. W. Sellars, An Analytic Approach to the Mind-Body Problem, Philosophical Review, vol. 47, pp. 461–487, 1938.

12 What is a self is too big a question to be entertained here. Whatever may be the philosopher's answer, for the naturalist the concept has a simple operational meaning. I experience myself in action as immediately as I experience things with which I act and things acted upon. It is doubtless true that “I am a part of all that I have met” and, as William James taught and as G. H. Mead emphasized, that the self can be understood only in terms of its relations within the total frame of experience—my body, my property, my neighbors, and all the rest—yet the empirical self is polarized as the me against the mine, the knower against the known. This clear-cut polarization of subject and object is perhaps a methodological artifact arising from the radical difference in the use we make of introspective and extrospective experience. It seems to appear rather late in psychogenesis. It certainly gives no empirical support to any philosophical doctrines of psycho-physical dualism.

The main thesis of this paper is the argument that every organism is a self in fundamentally the same sense that I am. In all cases integrative experience is operationally different from sensori-motor experience and the apparatus of integration resides in the individual living body, not in the environment. The quality of the self is determined primarily by the intrinsic organization of this body (see the preceding sections and note 7).

13 J. B. Rhine and others, Extrasensory Perception after Sixty Years, New York, 1940. Editorial, Ten Years’ Retrospect of ESP Research, The Journal of Parapsychology, vol. 8, pp. 89–94, 1944.

14 L. H. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, New York, 1913.

15 “What concerns a psychologist is the behavior of creatures—himself included—in so far as the behavior is indicated by a direct experience of it.”—Robert M. Ogden and Frank S. Freeman, Psychology and Education, New York, 1932.

16 Karl T. Compton, The Social Implications of Scientific Discovery, Published by the American Philosophical Society, March 15, 1938.

C. Judson Herrick, The Meaning of Science in Human Affairs, Denison Univ. Bulletin, Journal of the Scientific Laboratories, vol. 37, pp. 140–152, 1942; The Incentives of Science, Scientific Monthly, vol. 58, pp. 462–466, 1944.

Curt Stern, The Journey, not the Goal, Scientific Monthly, vol. 58, pp. 96–100, 1944.