Post-Renaissance science studied nature, the physical environment of man and the human body. Since the Greeks, a body of thought always persisted on the rim of the confines of the Church orthodoxy in Europe which saw the human being as a part of nature. Rousseau and Romantic philosophers revived sleeping ideas of natural law and natural right and made the study of man as a part of nature acceptable in ways which Christian orthodoxy rejected on grounds of supposed biblical infallibility about the superior status of ensouled mankind.

Though the new natural sciences often led to the improvement of material conditions generally including working conditions, health and productivity on the material front, they were incapable of altering the problems that arose from 'human nature'. This naturally led to the ambition of 'science of the human being', such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics and so forth. Therefore the methods of natural science would, if only applied on a large enough scale, tell us about human nature and enable us to understand and then eventually to eliminate the problems that arise from human folly. In the decades before the year 1900, academicians, philosophers and the like increasingly expressed the need for the sciences of man and began to lay various foundations for such. This work increased gradually, expanding rapidly mainly after the 2nd World War.

The social sciences have mostly contributed to providing a better fundament of factual information for government and politicians, and of insight into some human problems for social planners and health authorities. They have also by and large brought to light many kinds of negative social circumstance previously almost unknown or else ignored. At the same time, however, there has unquestionably been a huge global increase in violence (warfare considered apart) and in social problems of the most bizarre and gruesome kinds, in mental illness and a marked degeneration of values and behaviour in almost every society in the world. It must therefore be patently evident to anyone who is not biassed or whose own interests, work and prestige are not too fully invested in one or more of the human sciences, that the understanding of human nature requisite to solving the chief human problems has all in all not advanced on any major scale since the humanistic sciences became widespread.

It has been clearly shown, especially since Edmund Husserl's work, that scientific sense empiricism leads to paradoxes in the study of conscious human life and analytic fragmentation of our self- understanding. Further, he saw this as a crisis in science that was closely interrelated to the collapse in common cultural and spiritual values in the West. The main question here is therefore, what the proper limits of empirical method as used in the so-called 'social sciences' today are.

THE UNIQUENESS OF HUMAN ACTIONS

A major aim of the modern social sciences has been to try to describe human behaviour so as to discover 'general laws' about its causes and effects under given conditions. Both individual and society have been thought to conform to laws of development or change that must apply regardless of time, place and human circumstance operating similarly (or even identically) to the laws of physics. When generalisations are raised to the status of 'laws' they become ahistorical, which is to say that they are then believed to operate anywhere, on everyone and at any time. On the other hand, the view that human actions are germanely historical is to say that intrinsically bound up with the historical situation in which they arise, and which makes them unique and 'unrepeatable'.

We must note that the ahistorical view unavoidably implies that one in advance chooses to disregard the uniqueness of personal character and of individual destinies, and also to assume that volition is a miasma. The type of 'general laws' that holistic psychology (or sociology etc.) would attempt to establish deal instead in terms of types of motives and intentions (rather than causes and effects) and their corresponding consequences under known historical conditions.

The traditional or dominant approach derives from physical theory, which abstracts from specific physical events so as to reach the formulae that will permit prediction of discrete events under known conditions. The unique physical event is, for physics, only an instance of the operation of various general laws it has discovered, without specific interest for itself. This approach is wholly counter-productive when brought to bear on human life and history.

In social anthropology or sociology we find scientific work distinguished as either "nomothetic" and "ideographic". The former type of scientific system reaches (or aims to reach) valid generalisations (nomon = laws) while the ideographic approach simply describes what the investigator encounters, in part and in whole, in terms of general ideas on the basis of a well-ordered observation, usually so-called 'participant observation'. Such ideographic research, however admirably done and whatever its many potential uses, bears little resemblance at all to even the least-developed natural scientific discipline. As to the 'nomothetic' theories supposing to state universal laws in sociology, none are sufficiently verified either in whole or in part for general consensus to have arisen on them, even among most professional researchers.

Making the methods of physical science a model overlooks the fact that physics is not a holistic science, for it is overwhelmingly nomothetic. The implications of this can be glimpsed in considering two branches that have grown from traditional biology. Its scientific flagship is molecular and genetic biology, an exact analytical and nomothetic science. The study of the mutual interactions or ecology of a particular environment, however, has to be largely ideographic and is often necessarily qualitative and thus supposedly 'scientifically inexact' in method - always tending towards holistic understanding. 'Holistic' as applied to a systematic thought discipline or a science implies that both 'ideographic' and 'nomothetic' knowledge are unified in a comprehensive view which continuously relates the particular instance or individual to its environment within the world as a whole. Taking fullest possible account of the spectrum of historical facts and values on which the undertaking is based, holistic understanding does not confine itself to generalisations or universal theory.

One may see the introduction of 'ideographic research' as a way to redefine what is scientific, thus side-stepping the strict requirements of reproducible observations/experiments and of predictability. The basic epistemological dichotomy between the two approaches is not removed, however. Explanation from universally-verifiable laws on the one hand remains distinct from interpretation or understanding on the other. In human studies, observation is itself inseparable in many respects from personal interpretation, because to interpret in terms of one's own learned understanding and culture is second-nature to all of us and without it no sort of human action or social behaviour has any meaning whatever. Despite this, some scientists try to argue that all understanding is still only a special case of using scientific method.

The social researcher who uses hypothetico-deductive method isolates or abstracts some features of the unrepeatable historical situation - and subsequently often presents the results as if they had universal (rather than historically- and socially-conditioned) validity. One tries to produce ahistorical, universal hypotheses on an assumed cause-effect model to explain current human events and actions. It is an inherent problem of empirical research into humanity that the 'known and given conditions' from which conclusions were derived are lost to attention as soon as they are abstracted from the entire context of culture, social environments etc. The great range of conditions that individuals perceive, evaluate and consider (or ignore) cannot be known sufficiently for applying generalisations from aggregates of past experiences to present individual cases. This limitation can only be guarded against and partly counteracted by always viewing the results of empirical generalisations in an holistic perspective.

The researcher's assumptions and aims in using such models also invariably causes premature abstraction from the concrete context of life, the individual situation. This assumption, implying as it does that there are no voluntary actions, no free will, is seldom highlighted. In interpretation of results, however, the researcher equally and contradictarily can hardly avoid the 'reassumption' of volition, because of the dictates of common sense.

THE FUTILITY OF PREDICTION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

The hypothetical-deductive method aims to discovering underlying laws (or some would say 'structures') of observed behaviour. The crucial phase of it is deducing consequences from the theory so as correctly to predict future events. Scientists use this standard of predictability as the true measure of a theory's validity.

Predictability requires that the conditions under which an event takes place are fully known and remain the same. Only then can a cause-effect relationship be isolated from the multiplicity of events and surrounding circumstances. In studying even a single person, let alone a social system, the constantly changing circumstances - inner and outer - obviously are so many and convoluted in real life (as distinct from narrow laboratory set-ups) to make strict scientific methods entirely inapplicable.

Further, when people act consciously and with intention, such voluntary behaviour breaks with the cause-effect relation or stimulus-response model. This is an important assumption, namely that the development of the human psyche - and also the society which is its environment - is at least partially voluntarily-steered development as distinct from growth or evolution according to 'natural laws'. The assumption that all human activity is actually causally-determined and is thus involuntary is highly unacceptable for a variety of reasons already mentioned.

All data, once recorded, is past data. Whether it still represents any existing state of affairs will always be questionable. Empirical research tends to be 'backward-looking' compared, say, to participatory action-oriented research with a futureward trial-and-error experimentalism. If nothing whatever new ever happens or is done - if all history were essentially but an endless repetition of the same themes - past experience could be applied with scientific certainty to the future. This sort of positivistic vision, however, has never been achieved.

No map is ever entirely up-to-date for, even while being finally drawn up and circulated the ground is undergoing change. Further, and particularly where the human is concerned, Korzybski's well-known aphorism, 'the map is not the territory' applies at every turn. Psychology must take continuous account of the fact that individuals, including psychologists themselves, are influenced in many emotional, mental and intellectual ways by events in the surrounding society. Even a few years sees many considerable and unprecedented changes in attitudes, beliefs and behaviour in those who live in modern society. Such unpredictables as the vagaries of opinion, of policy-makers of the market and of many social trends combined with the unexpected interventions of natural events and world political alterations ensure that the future cannot be determined only, or even mainly, by looking to the past for trends. Some trends may well continue to develop, but more often than expected, a social or economic trend is altered, even reversed.

A vision of the future as a gradual continuance of existing directions, of course, is fatalistic. Such fatalism would make reformative social efforts seem vain and politics a mere charade, while any struggle to learn and practice values would seem futile considering the trends of the post-war years. Personal growth and change, whether made by choice or otherwise, fortunately provide are a rich source of correctives to any deterministic studies of the human psyche and society.

Some human acts (and group or mass events that arise from them) may be predicted, individually or in the aggregate, as long as people behave predictably. Hitherto even an inexact sort of prediction has proven to be a pipe dream. Were one to know enough about everyone, much of what is now unpredictable about them may become otherwise. But what one would have to know would amount to near-omniscience. It would be even more impossible than predicting from the study of dried laboratory specimens of butterflies the actual flight path through the countryside of the living insect.

The best one can hope for from methods modelled on the natural sciences are generalisations which give a very abstracted cross-section of some features of society and its' members behaviour. Even then, in principle (and in practice) causal predictions are unreliable here and no scientific precision can be achieved. It is not at all desirable that it should, for this would mean people behaving with the near-total automation of a machine. We may be well satisfied that the science of the human being and the attempt to know in advance future popular trends or fashions is fraught with uncertainty, not unlike the 'science' of backing horses!

So the future is an arena of the unexpected and of freedom to change and transcend the past radically, even if within the limits set by objective conditions at any time. Where the limits are actually drawn cannot itself be discovered except by trial and error, for they are seldom predictable in advance. Regular reviews of the ground covered are indeed useful, even necessary, but their relevance for the future certainly cannot be presumed. One would not drive a car exclusively by gazing in the rear mirror! To predict the future entirely from past trends can lead to the self-fulfilling prophesy effect, but only where the predictions are strongly believed in by those able to direct or influence events.

The limitations on predictions are the more evident the more crucial and comprehensive the issue. Certain changes in voting patterns or in economics at the macro-level are roughly predictable (on fairly short-term time scales) - provided that unseen circumstances do not intervene - which means that any prediction can be overturned by events (eg. political events like the removal of the Berlin Wall). Major and crucial events in the lives of individuals and society alike are notoriously unpredictable, and there is reason to be satisfied that it is so. Were accurate social predictions possible, then the awful 'positivistic' vision of a society ruled by scientists, a life predicted, ordered and thereby literally dictated by a central research authority, would be open for the future.

We may conclude that predictions made by psychologists, sociologists and political scientists are therefore hardly any better than personal evaluations. One may guess and happen to be right sometimes. Still, evaluations of future possibilities are necessary in guiding individual development, socialisation, educational influence, policy-making and political planning. Recognising their normative fundament and the limitations of the reliability of any predictions based of descriptive science, such evaluations are the highest type of generalisation toward which the humanities can aim.

'HARD' AND 'SOFT' SOCIAL SCIENCE

What are the chief reasons for this sad denouément of the high hopes that the social sciences raised? The answer most probably lies to a large extent in a fundamental error of thought or belief that underlay the enterprise, namely that the human being is - and can be studied straightforwardly as - an objective entity like any natural object. This mistake has brought with it wrong standards of social knowledge and misplaced methods and techniques for studying man and society in so far as these are not mere natural physical phenomena!

The scientific 'acid test' of all generalisations or hypotheses about our study of ourselves (humankind) is whether accurate/reliable predictions result, but this not achieved with high reliability in any human science. activities. Ergo, no sciences of society or mankind are comparable to natural science either as to explanation or applied results (i.e. to improve social behaviour). But some studies do attempt such explanation on the basis of systematic observation, even supported by comparative studies.

The sort of regularities and correspondences that most social studies in the 20th century have discovered by statistical analysis are overwhelmingly specific to the societies and eras in which they arose. Therefore, in most cases they are invalid as generalisations about humanity in general. Valid generalisations tend to be about trivial or peripheral details, not about questions of deep import or having broad application. Further, the less trivial generalisations about society or individuals are, the lower degree of likelihood of their holding true.

Hard science required that all hypotheses be tested at some stage and to some extent by observation. Observation is based on impressions by one or another of the five senses, or a combination of them. Implicit in this requirement of method is the assumption that 'only sensory objects are real' or else 'only sensory data is true information'.

The methodically stricter physical sciences require also that the observation be 'reproducible', which is to say that it can be made repeatedly whenever the same attendant conditions prevail. This amounts to applying the idea of physical causation strictly, such that whenever one given event always occurs after another given event, the one is the cause of the other, all other conditions remaining the same.

Now, it has already been indicated how the same conditions never prevail in society, for it is in flux. Human behaviour, ideas, fashions, opinions change. New knowledge arises, new technologies alter all kinds of activities. The same applies to human mental or psychic activities, these develop and differ from era to era and culture to culture. Therefore the same observations under the same conditions can not be made, that is, as long as one does not confine interest to relatively simple phenomena or trivial facts.

THE ANALYTICAL FALLACY AND COMPARTMENTALISATION

To chop big things into yet smaller and smaller parts, the better to study their elemental nature, is a recipe for compartmentalisation of understanding. This fact 'the separate sciences', has been a bugbear of all traditional scientific understanding and is only very slowly being dealt with since the need for ecological study forced itself into the sphere of unwilling physical scientists. The proverbial 'mad scientist' is the product of this basic methodological rule, first enshrined by René Descartes. The madness epitomised is like the inability to see further than one's own nose, such as through a microscope, telescope or other 'narrowing' method of observation, along with the propensity to draw, from what little is observed, sweeping conclusions bearing on all kinds of other matter. From rats to humans, from elementary particles to organic nature, from genes to personal character and our social activities, from observed regularities in matter to the denial of all human will power and choice. This is the kind of 'intellectual madness' against which so many people of life experience and good sense across the globe are reacting.

All science proceeds on the axiomatic method of splitting large problems into the smallest manageable units, then handling them piecemeal. Such analysis of a problem presumes that a final synthesis be made, or else one has forgotten the whole purpose of the enterprise. In the final summing-up, both thought processes must be equally subjected to the test of reasoned reflection and overall comparisons with experience.

Analytical methods were stimulated by emergent natural science as a reaction against the excessive bias towards metaphysical speculations that presented 'syntheses' based on insufficient empirical grounds. The one excess of the 'synthetical fallacy' was gradually replaced by its opposite fallacy, the over-reliance on analysis and the gradual, step-by-step loss of practically everything of value connected with one holistic perspective after the other in every discipline in the humanities.

In the interests of the struggle of the largely economically unproductive humanities to attain 'scientific professionalisation', weaknesses due to analytical methods borrowed from natural science have been obscured rather than freely studied and discussed. Academic schools of thought in the philosophy of science also attempt to justify the humanities as sciences by adjusting generalised models of (natural) scientific method to accommodate these 'social sciences', which are thereby legitimised in avoiding penetrating discussion of their epistemological fundaments and their intended involvement in influencing the processes of social change.

Psychological and social analysis has been biassed far too much towards objectivistic, causalistic and 'methodologistic' thought for science ideological, practical, professional interests and other reasons. The aim here is to show why it is necessary for the sake of society that the scientistic bias be counteracted strongly and human studies should be largely reoriented away from causal explanation towards understanding.

Analytical methods, used one-sidedly and thus fallaciously, not only helped radically to divorce in thought the realms of matter and spirit but also encouraged the sub-division of the humanities to the extent of their almost total insulation from one another as is witnessed in most academic institutions of research and learning today.

In the European tradition from Greece to the Renaissance, the human being was still regarded as a whole and integral entity or as part of a very broad reality in which the moral and the spiritual were at the focus of most thinkers' view of man. The humanities had not yet multiplied and split up into the almost 'watertight' sub-disciplines that later became legitimised in university administration the world over. The Newtonian-Cartesian dichotomy between the scientific study of matter and the religious study of the human spirit is still seen in the common division of faculties and research institutions into either natural science or humanities.

Firstly, the human sciences are divided against themselves into many disparate schools because any unifying vision of the wholeness of man and humanity underlying and giving synthesis to research policy is rejected by all empiricism. Secondly, the vast mass of researches in the social sciences are un-coordinated and non-comparative because each one thus aims to know 'more and more about less and less' (as Schopenhauer said of the professional academic bias).

The natural scientific requirement of reproducibility of results is impossible in any exact analytical way in psychology. This is due to the fact of historicity (see below) that makes every social and personal event irreducibly unique from the holistic viewpoint and essentially graspable through the experimental distortions and methodological contortions in construed laboratory-like situations.

The end result of all this, from the viewpoint of psychological theory and method; our unitary being is compartmentalised and divided mentally into parts, corresponding to the headless body of the science of man. The many analytic studies evidently cannot unite and bring together their partial findings into a whole, for they are largely incompatible or incommensurable. The 'body' of human science is many-limbed and many-headed too, with the consequent lack of consensus and lack of any really effective agency in helping to research realistically and prevent the decline of values visible throughout the world in contemporary life and society.

Building up more of the sort of information banks that define relatively-isolated human traits and relate them through statistical analysis to socio-economic or other impersonal factors, the psychological sciences have tended towards a fragmentary approach to the individual. That type of 'impersonal' study is justifiable only as a corrective to parts of an holistic understanding of the person or as a pointer and stimulus in investigating parts within the whole.

Scientific psychology is supposedly the science of the psyche or 'spirit', is often in a dilemma: does it study humans on a line with natural objects (such as monkeys, rats or genes) or can it be a science of the soul? As a strict science - as distinct from humanistic and other non-physicalistic psychology - it cannot study any entity that is not itself physically- observable so, it denies the soul and all its spiritual associations and existence from the start. Much of it thus becomes a hodge-podge of physiology and statistics, opinion surveys, 'psychological' tests and independent case studies. The remainder sacrifices full scientific credibility in favour of some kind of semi-empirical compromise such as psychoanalysis, object relations theory, humanism and other variants.

In principle, understanding must always start from and return to the direct and concrete insight into personality and character, through various forms of 'individual biography', case-study or personal observations of backgrounds including the relevant social practices, abilities, aspirations, beliefs, conflicts and so on. Psychology really becomes relevantly intelligible to the individual only in forwarding the holistic understanding of persons as persons living in their particular life-space or 'world', not as impersonal 'dissection' into categorical traits of personality or other parameters. In seeking dynamic kinds of psychology one must also view the person as the subject of human interaction and societal change, not as a static entity that 'fits into' or could be derived from some mental construct or 'system' of scientifically-observed propositions. The most basic datum is always what Heidegger outlined as that of 'Being-in-the-world', and social facts can only be properly and fully appreciated on the background of such a perspective and all that it entails about how meaning is endowed.

Good social thought should improve self-understanding in step with social understanding, and not only at the mental, abstract level or the 'uninvolved armchair philosopher'. This implies conscious, controlled involvement rather than disinterested, distant observation. Through the intelligent and disciplined application of definitive positive human values, both in theory and practice, psychology becomes a dynamic force for the good. This also involves a new approach to the subject of universal human values.

THE ATTEMPT TO QUANTIFY HUMAN QUALITIES

Physical scientism may tend to shed an aura of scientific exactitude on those humanities that would emulate 'hard-data' science by trying to quantify human interactions and their results, but it brings in its wake insurmountable theoretical and logical problems for the human sciences, and also thereby dangerous views and practices for the balanced development of knowledge and behaviour in society. The traditional biasses towards misplaced objectivism in emulation of physics have made many a mental labyrinth to confuse researchers. The resulting distorted depiction of human interaction and the contorted judgements that result have been and still are a long-term danger to society and the self-understanding of its members.

Any psychological investigation based primarily on statistical information, however intelligently gathered and accurately processed the data be, can simply not even approach the essential character of humanity because it reduces qualititative phenomena to quantity. Such reductionism is essential to the study of physical nature as in the natural sciences, but in the humanities it must have only a most secondary and supportive function due to the fact that the body is but an instrument of the human being, not the being itself.

The wholly divergent nature of quality and quantity is seen in that a new quality cannot be produced by a change in quantity. The biologist and epistemologist Gregory Bateson demonstrated that quantitative changes do not generate qualitative one.¹ Referring to the way a chain breaks at the weakest link, Bateson argues that, "under change of a quantity, tension a latent difference is made manifest". However, the chain was already weak before the tension was applied, the quality of weakness was only made apparent by an increased quantity of stress on it, it was not caused or created by the quantitative change.

Doubtless quantificatory studies increase the amount of information available of a particular but limited kind about many sides of experience, from physiology and neurology to the conditions of the physical environments in which the human being engages and which is formed through human agency. The increase in number crunching in all branches of social organisation and policy-making cannot but tend to eliminate the 'human element', that is, what pertains to the qualitative personal experience of being and the unmeasurable values this engenders.

The quantification fetish is well-established both in psychology and social psychology. The professional desire to be seen as 'scientific' has led to a variety of assumptions, methods and techniques inappropriate in the study of human beings, means that most university psychology studies the mind only, or primarily, from outward physical appearances (i.e. extrospectively). Thus it tends strongly to exclude normal ways of understanding people. Such understanding is seen as fallible, while at the same time the objectivistic approach aims for a misunderstood sort of 'object-ivity', using most ingeniously-contrived interviews, statistics, behavioural and semi-physiological tests so as to uncover factors that are seldom directly relevant to gaining insight into human nature. This applies to much statistical 'multi-variable analysis' and to the typical specialist studies of isolated factors such as in clinical testing or experimental behaviourism. Such 'factors' are isolated from their context and treated only within the researcher's own frame of reference, to test some nomothetic hypothesis or to search for correlations that might prove interesting.

Such results can sometimes provide tests for understanding and correctives to it, but however many generalisations are cumulated, they cannot generate a comprehensive theory of personality. No median can represent a whole scale of factors, nor can external observations of behaviour reach the knowledge of penetrative understanding based on direct insight into many people.

The attempt to quantify all or most observations (as 'hard data') - even to assign numbers to qualities (eg. judgement, interpretations, opinions) is a logically invalid transformation: quality cannot be expressed meaningfully as quantity without loss of the essential datum. For example; attempts are made in the measurement of public opinion to assign scores to different opinions placed along a spectrum that seems to be a continuum to the researcher. From this, such absurdities as the calculation mathematically of what is an average opinion, or a 'median' judgement, are made. The actual opinions, with all their nuances and consequences, precedents and inherent values, are steam-rolled into a series of graded standpoints without any regard for the inherent values that the opinion itself may primarily express. The 'meaning' in any act, word or thought is as a quality, not something that can be weighed or measured or otherwise calculated as can be done with physical objects. Meaning as such is intrinsically unquantifiable even though arbitrary methods do make it appear so. Generally, then, the use of quantification in the study of personal behaviour and human interactions leads to distortion of understanding. Its proponents develop some particularly abstruse and alienated opinions.

The desire to mathematicise human science - as in exact physics - is supported by the easy availability of computers and even because it is technologically modern and fashionable to compute. Even adult scientists have childish tendencies to prefer technological playthings to the old pencil and paper. Much more decisive, however, is the need for figures of all kinds of bureaucracy.

Quantified information is usually only consumable by large institutions like state bureaucracies, large business concerns, not least multi-national conglomorates. The fact of the all too widespread acceptance of the quantificatory approach in most contemporary institutes of higher education and research does not, however, justify it as being scientific. It only tends to increase its misapplication in work where it is epistemologically invalid, with consequences for society as a whole that can best be called very unfortunate, if not clearly unethical. It expresses how broadly the blind spots of physicalistic assumptions have spread throughout the science-related community.

OBJECTIVE DATA VS. SUBJECTIVE AND SHARED MEANING

The information involved in studying what people think and feel, or what they do and why, comes to the scientific observer in the form of physical sense data. Meanings are expressed physically - by speech, writing and other means - but it is not itself apprehended for what it is in the form of sense impressions. Meaning is directly apprehended and is understood or interpreted as such. Against this view it has been held that physical information alone is sufficient to build up a science of psychology. Yet the resultant body of information will only be, necessarily, a form of subtle physiology - studying the bodily behaviour in a material milieu so as to neglect systematically the intrinsically subjective or personal meaning of that 'behaviour'. But that misses what most people, including most therapists, see as the whole aim of psychology: to understand persons and how they relate to themselves, others and the environment or the circumstances of life altogether.

Similarly, in other social sciences such as sociology. The reason that observation is demanded is of course to avoid fictitious accounts, exaggerations, lies and other unfounded ideas. But the requirement of physical sense data to decide test a hypothesis is rather trivial if it serves to reduce what can be studied as the mere material artefacts in which society is expressed (buildings, tools, coins, paperwork, texts, images etc. etc.). They cannot be studied sensibly without attributing meaning of some kind to them, and meaning is not itself directly observable. It has to be understood, interpreted or deduced from the text, the artefact etc. In other words, meaning is subjective and, when many share the same meaning, it is inter-subjective. But it never itself becomes objective... even though it is 'objectified' in the form of written texts, symbolic images, tools, buildings and so on.

No social group or national society, say, is simply the sum of its physical manifestations. 'The State' is not a physical thing, but an idea in the minds of those who understand what it means. Practically no 'thing' we talk of in any inter-relational or social respect is simply a physical object. A coin is of no value unless it is thought or known to be legal tender. A building is only a home when one lives in it or regards it as the place one lives. A tool is useless unless it is known what it is for, the sort of products it can help make and why one bothers to make these products etc. etc. A document is only a piece of paper if the meaning it awakens in the 'subjective' understanding of the one who reads it is absent and so on.

Any social science that tries to stick strictly to sense empirical observations will end up as a mere description of the physical environment. In any other case, it relies on interpretation. Interpretation is the attachment of meaning to any phenomenon, whether this meaning is apparently given with the phenomenon or whether it is applied to the phenomenon by the interpreter alone. In this latter case, say, I may decide to regard a letter I receive as a threat, even though it does not state any threat itself. In that case I give it an interpretation. If the latter states "The sum of $1000 is owing to us" and I understand this to mean they want me to pay up, I have interpreted an apparently-given meaning, one which the writer of the letter presumably tried to convey to me.

The social sciences can be said to study objects in so far as they examine the objectified expression of previous acts. In this they are essentially historical sciences. The artefacts that make up society - what Sartre has concisely defined as the 'practico-inert field' where human action or praxis is concretely expressed in inert objects as exemplified in the preceding - are themselves imbued with 'objectified' meaning. The Bible contains many signs which symbolise certain ideas and assertions. These have to be interpreted for them to make any sense, of course, and the interpretations of various parts of the whole of it made by a wide variety of differently-minded people of diverse religion are often in much conflict. Much the same applies to the study of any artefacts from the past, whatever their sort.

Interpretations of the above sorts are completely unavoidable in any type of research into human activity for they are always being made every step of the way towards any sort of conclusion. It can be argued - as Edmund Husserl has done most cogently - that the same in fact applies in all scientific work. However, in the human sciences the role of interpretation is most crucial for various other clearly understandable reasons:-

FIRST REASON: The 'objects' of study are human subjects, who have themselves been involved in interpreting reality since the earliest childhood years. How or what the interpret - in other words - how the understand each other, things about them or the world at large, depends upon what they have learned in their particular culture and what else they may have understood besides.

The social or psychological sciences are therefore only making interpretations too. No claim can be made that a scientifically trained observer is for that reason a better interpreter or is somehow a 'more objective' interpreter than those whose actions and interpretations are being studied. All the social sciences can claim is that they have attempted to systematise and compare their interpretations carefully so as to hope to arrive at a better understanding than otherwise would be the case. Since there is so far no widely-accepted test of the truth of such interpretations that is generally agreed, social science is still at a loss to prove its way of understanding is superior to any other. To compound this weakness, very much social science fails to recognise or accept that it is making such 'subjective' interpretations in the first place. The personal understanding of the individual researcher and also that common to the culture and professional milieu he or she represents cannot itself normally be subjected to scientific criticism, is the crucial basis that makes and investigation possible and upon which any results will rest. A narrowly-experienced person will be unable to conceive of or at least accept what is quite outside their own range.

SECOND REASON: Unlike the natural scientist, the psychologist and sociologist etc. can and do communicate with the subject of or 'objects' of their researches, human beings. Hence, the subjects can themselves adopt an attitude towards the researcher and the research results. This creates an interactive relation between researcher and researched, usually mediated by society in various forms of discussion and debate. Politicians may disagree with the results of a social scientific survey for they regard its very assumptions to be too narrow too broad, too biassed or simply too inaccurate etc. Patients may sue the psychologists who diagnosed them as being schizophrenic, unstable or whatever because they feel - perhaps very rightly so - that this form of categorising and labelling of a person is an injustice.

With the above in mind it is clear why the social science cannot be seen as producing bodies of indisputable knowledge or objective truth since they are continually themselves simply engaged in an area where the new viewpoint, the changes of opinion and taste and the political inventions of societies are not only their object of study but also instruments that can alter the significance and validity of the social researches themselves.

THIRD REASON. While the objects of the natural sciences are 'determined' in the sense of being subject to empirical or natural laws, human beings are both subject to natural laws and determinate conditions (in so far as they have bodies) and they are self-determining.

Humans can interpret events as they choose to the extent that they have 'freed' themselves from the instinctive and inherited ways of interpreting their environments. Once they are aware of differing possible interpretations of their situation, they can choose to act in such a way as to try to affect it in a preferred way. Thus, they can react against natural, psychic and social tendencies that otherwise exert influence on them.

This, the undeniable fact of our having some degree of free will, makes it clear why the human and social sciences cannot normally predict events. To predict developments in a society one must assume conformity to rule and tendencies already known. Once people begin to behave otherwise - such as simply by voting unexpectedly - the predictions that otherwise might have been made (under 'ideal' totally-conformist conditions) will break down. This fact is borne out by the inability of any of the social sciences to make any but the most obvious and trivial of correct predictions, and then only under conditions where the persons' whose behaviour is predicted are kept in ignorance of the experiment.

WIDER OBSERVATIONAL METHODS IN HUMAN SCIENCE

The claim of being empirical has to be carried through to its logical fulfilment if it it to be rationally satisfactory. Observation should not be thought of as confined to what the senses can convey, but should include inward observation. The 'objects' of inner observation include what one understands from what one hears, sees, feels, thinks etc., independently of the physical stimuli themselves. The mind's reflection on itself, such as in memory, solving problems, deciding aims, forming intentions, questioning motives, examining feelings and a thousand other 'inward' activities yields data just as do the senses. Such 'internal' data or meaning is by far the most important in understanding and explaining people and society. Empiricism in the most whole or true sense therefore requires that what the 'inner senses' provide are also observables. Understanding the relation between 'subjective meaning' and objectively observable events is the key to understanding of human beings. Meaning is not 'only subjective' but is generated through an interaction with objective facts and itself involves recognition of inherent and latent meaning in the world of objective relations. The extended empirical method of observation developed for this is phenomenology. All inward observation in imagination, dreams, the dictates of conscience, plans and visions for the future and much besides, provides its particular type of 'data', meaning-data - not objectively measurable data - but crucial to understanding oneself, others and the world.

There is a growing number of schools of psychology which can be classed as humanistic or holistic, which so take subjective experience as their starting point or main focus. Psychoanalysis was of course the forerunner in this qualitative approach, and its various developments rely much on understanding, even though explanation by scientific hypothesis usually remains the chief aim. Scientific method, however, does not allow the validity of what comes from the inner sources of information, despite the fact that everyone relies on them in various ways all the time. No scientist can work in a vacuum of completely neutral methodical thought, that is, without any influence or inspiration from his own aims and hopes, his learned and culturally-conditioned interpretations of meaning, human emotions and human values. This was first shown very clearly by Edmund Husserl in his seminal work on science from the phenomenological viewpoint.²

According to many of the great philosophers throughout European history, our self-observing consciousness has the advantage of not being separated from its object of perception by the sense organs, with the consequent possibility of mistakes in sense perception. Nor is this self-awareness - where the mind directly apprehends its own inner 'objects' - prone to faulty interpretation of the nature or meaning sensory impressions. It is sometimes referred to as 'intuition', consisting in inward-appraisal. Inner observation of this kind largely forms the subject matter of the philosophical schools of phenomenology and hermaneutics. These do present their own problems, however, and these are among the authentic problems of philosophy proper. Questions of philosophic method include how and when a theory attains such standards as comprehensivity, consistency, relevance, tenability and truth.

Apart from the classical sources, the modern thinkers that apply most to methods of mental self-observation are those generally grouped as phenomenological, hermaneutical and partly also existential philosophies. Outside academic philosophy, these questions are increasingly dealt with in a number of new psychological theories and a broad field of studies relating to mental functions, holistic thinking, self-analysis, mind-changing and related techniques ancient and modern, including concentration and contemplation.

ANALYTICAL FRAGMENTATION OF THE HUMAN AS A PERSON

Often rejecting personal experience and people's own accounts of it as an unreliable 'subjective' basis, the volume of work in the human sciences goes to the attempt to deduce factors that influence behaviour, largely by statistical measurements of elements abstracted from the whole. The human sphere is thereby conceived as some system of co-ordinates, in terms of sets of 'multi-variable factors'. This encourages the technification of issues and hence removal of decisive debate from the public arena to coteries of experts and bureaucrats.

The 'prior synthesis' from which every analysis inevitably springs and takes its direction may be fairly clear, more often largely unexamined or even quite unconscious. Since scientific method relies overwhelmingly on analysis, it is without appreciable means to examine the syntheses presumed by its theories and by individual researchers breaking new ground. In other words, many attitudes, assumptions and prejudices that are unwittingly taken over from the family, society and culture in which one grew up are often elements in the 'prior synthesis' from which the psychological investigator induces an hypothesis.

The events and acts of human life are many-layered and amount to much more than a generalised cumulation of empirically-observable facts. This ought to be patently evident where we consider how one may know the truth about a person's actions; these cannot be separated from that individual's whole frame of reference from which he often judges even the simplest of events. Nor are individual judgements made in a social vacuum... others are involved in making those acts what they are or become.

Individuals cannot therefore be analysed as if the human psyche were the same as a chemical composite of constituent and separable elements, seen independently of a person's consciousness or of the intricate and shifting time-bound social context in which people act and interact. (Such a view of the human, based on physicalism, I suggest has itself contributed to self-alienation and even forms of schizoid self-compartmentalisation that are not least exemplified in and rationalised by the very scientific milieux that depend on a natural scientistic world-view).

Any psychology or sociology ought therefore to be aware that genuine, qualitative understanding cannot ever come only from the selective study and analysis of any number of 'empirical variables', for it will usually not represent with sufficient veracity the intrinsic nature of its subject matter. While quantitative factual information needs to be known, it is the person's values and human qualities that are here the crucial element that naturalistic scientism overlooks in its 'neutral' quantitative and physical strivings.

Freud modelled his theory of psychoanalysis, if not his therapeutic practice, on a naturalistic and analytical basis. His 'analysis of the psyche' was partly doubtless formulated thus out of considerations of the narrow way of that era's scientific respectability and the consequent social respectability that could confer. The kind of 'analysis' involved in this tradition often goes well beyond the empirical in the direction of the holistic. Yet it is also much hindered by the biologistic and determinist (pessimist) nature of its general assumptions and some key hypotheses, which strictly limit what is relevant how it is interpreted.

The generalisations that can validly apply in this area are, however, what have hitherto most often been characterised as maxims, ethical laws and codes of conduct and which have been excommunicated in the interests of a misunderstood scientific objectivity and ethical neutrality. The idea that the benefits of a positive neutrality can only be pursued by altogether avoiding value-judgements like the plague and by neglecting to penetrate, compare and test these judgements both in theory and through active research has removed the very basis from a practical psychology of how to live the good life and avoid the bad or how to attain the integration of mental equipoise, emotional benevolence and inner peace.

THE MIND-COMPUTER ANALOGY & ITS LIMITS

The mind is often compared to a computer, especially its subliminal subconscious functions. Many subliminal functions of the mind can fairly be compared to 'programmed' materials. Examples are various habitual ways of seeing, hearing or sensing things or of relating images and 'associating ideas'. When such patterns are learned thoroughly or at an early age, they may become largely 'pre-set', being habitual so that the mind can rely on such programs 'unreflectingly', i.e. without re-analysing or reflecting over them. The person concerned may no longer be fully aware of such pre-set behavioural responses and they may be so ingrained that they cannot be altered or reconfigured without considerable difficulties.

It has been said that the mind does not work 'digitally', in the laborious and strictly step-by-step logical manner of a computer, but 'analogically'. This is mainly because the mind can consciously organise itself, 'file' and find its memories and perceptions and evaluate them in any relationship, by manifold symbolic comparisons (eg. such as in analogies, parables, so-called 'lateral thinking' etc.). Further, the mind can make both subliminal-impulsive and consciously-intended decisions that are effected through bodily activity. No computer so far constructed or planned can approach a duplication of these aspects of mind. Therefore, the computer analogy applies more to the brain than the conscious mind.

The brain can certainly be trained to react at the subliminal level, or of what we here denote as the subconscious mind. Subliminal responses are those activated without our reflecting over them. Examples of subliminal reaction patterns (even flexible or 'self-adjusting' patterns) are the movements of the fingers - unperceived by the absorbed player - in playing on an instrument what one 'hears within', a completely new improvisation. Similarly, the flash reaction of a table-tennis player who 'unthinkingly' reaches a shot never before attempted, and so forth.

A computer can reproduce and employ any operation for which it is sufficiently programmed, but cannot itself make its own judgements, nor therefore 'evaluate'. The brain, representing the mind in its subliminal functioning, has been equated with a computer. If the mind is fed the appropriate picture (say, of oneself reaching for a ping-pong ball to return it) it will strive to produce what is envisaged for it. If, on the contrary, one thinks, 'I'm going to miss this ball', the subliminal 'mind' will tend to make one miss. The brain seems to tend towards producing any envisaged result of an action. Therefore, by feeding it what for us are 'positive' ideas or signals', it will tend to produce those desired results. It will equally tend to produce the imagined (feared) result of 'negative input'. This has been shown to be a very effective insight in improving many types of performance or skill, including the alleviation of psychic problems of negative self-images.

The foregoing model of the subconscious mind as a computer-like 'brain' that cannot distinguish of itself between 'positive' and 'negative' or, for that matter between desired/unwanted', 'good/bad', 'virtue/'vice' etc. - is highly misleading for the conscious mind. Not only does the mind, unlike the computer, distinguish physical pleasure from pain, but also supra-physical qualities such as positive and negative 'values'. The capacity of moral discrimination is a function of the human mind, which itself consists in interwoven desires and their many emotional and mental extensions. The mind evaluates, which means that it judges according to deep-seated values that are not systematically codifiable, for in understanding them we depend upon the higher faculty of conscience or 'moral intellect'. The essentially supra-mental character of human awareness here becomes apparent. In a lucid waking state, consciousness directs the mind and not vice-versa. Consciousness is itself formless, hence unidentifiable in itself... it is essentially rather 'for-itself'... an undifferentiated continuum which is ontologically and existentially prior to any of its 'mental contents'.

The cardinal difference between the human mind and computers evidently lies in motivation and/or volition. Computers are non-self motivated, whereas human consciousness is self-motivating, relating to the mind and the expression of its desires. The subconscious as described here does not itself motivate, but has to be motivated by some stimulus, as also computers have to be. By contrast to the subconscious, the conscious mind, however, is 'self-monitoring' and 'self-programming'. The phenomena of awareness and will are scientifically indescribable, for they are sui generis > going to make up the unreflected, transcendent background of all that figures on it, like the 'unseen' blank screen on which a visible film is projected.

UNDERSTANDING AND INTEGRATED PERSONALITY

It is the integrated and unitary (holistic) nature of the human being itself that is lost almost entirely to view by most officially-supported modern psychological and social researches and the individual is left unaided by psychology to make whatever overall picture he can of all this mass of disparate research fragments. Only when analysis is balanced by synthesis - reviewed in conscious reflection or by explicit means - can part and whole mutually fulfil each other in a science, which then itself becomes holistic.

The attempt to isolate certain factors or discrete elements about individuals neglects the fact that the authentic meaning of every aspect of a person's make-up is only to be derived from - and is relative to - the person as a whole. This includes not only body, mind and consciousness or spirit but also past, present and projected future. To grasp the essentials of personality we require again and again to start from something akin to a biographic understanding of the individual life and life-view and this must precede generalisations and analytical case-history. This does not exclude all generalising but it accents the breadth and depth and expansiveness of the subject, the human subject, about which narrow generalisations are far too easily accepted.

The fact of personality integrity (referring to the unitary nature of the conscious soul rather than to character integrity) is itself a basic fact upon which psychology must rely. It is also the key aim of psychological knowledge to examine how character integrity and personality integration is achieved, maintained, or lost. This matter has not, moreover, exactly been neglected in human cultures well before the advent of European science but is it one on which modern psychological science hardly throws more light, theoretical or practical.

The relative absence of character integrity in a person is an aspect of personality disintegration. The opposite pole from the perfectly integrated human personality is exemplified by extreme schizophrenic disorder. Yet all too often the phenomenon of integration is neglected and is very seldom studied at a broad and understandable level. The crucial connection between integrity as truthfulness and personality integration, for example, is overlooked. The same applies to all the positive and 'healthy' personal qualities that go to make up what used to be regarded so highly as 'character' perhaps because these are simply no longer sufficiently understood or valued in the modern Western humanities as they have been developed on the background of physical science.

The thesis that the human being is developing towards realisation of a latent unity and wholeness of personality, on the model of a perfected 'ideal type', ought to be considered more seriously and investigated as a counterweight to supplement its opposite thesis, the pessimistically-inclined 'animalistic' thesis that has been enshrined by the sciences since the incomplete (and oft misinterpreted theories) of Darwinian biology and of Freudian pseudo-physicalism. Major opposing assumptions such as these exemplify how understanding of the human condition 'strictly by analysis' from a neutral 'value-free' position can be self-defeating in failing to take into account deep underlying values and 'world-view' assumptions about who and what we are.

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