What is the mind? Don't study brain cells to understand it

International Journal on World Peace, June, 2008 by Tom Kando

This epistemology is based on a deeper ontological assumption, namely that of materialistic reductionism: This is the belief that only physical reality is real, and that all other manifestations--the mental, the social, the cultural, the moral--can ultimately be reduced to physical building blocks.

The reason that such a positivistic and materialistic conception of science dominates the social sciences is that science itself has become defined as a materialistic enterprise. After all, the cornerstone of science is inductive empiricism. Science can only be certain of the reality (the existence) of those things which can be observed through tactile means.

While this conception of science is not problematic for the natural sciences, it presents so-called social science with a conundrum: Social science must (1) either severely limit the scope of its subject matter, or (2) it must admit that it is not a "science" in the current limited sense of the word.

The first option follows the doctrine of materialistic reductionism: The biologist believes that organic life is basically only a more complex version of inorganic chemistry. In other words, the difference between chemistry and biology is only quantitative, not qualitative. It is the same at the next level: The psychologist believes that his subject matter ultimately consists of biology. Psychology is just a more complicated form of biology. And so on up the ladder: the sociologist believes that his subject matter is just a compilation of psychological facts. He, too, is a reductionist.

The scientist must exclude a great deal from his research: phenomena such as freedom, choice, morality, good, evil, injustice, love, beauty cannot be studied positivistically. Reducing love to a chemical reaction renders the concept meaningless. Thus the scientist misses most of what is interesting and important in human life.

The second option is for the social "scientist" to admit that he is not a scientist--at least not in the narrow materialistic way in which science has come to be defined. For better or worse, science by the twentieth century has become synonymous with philosophical materialism. The definition of science is tautological. Science is defined as the study of phenomena which can be verified empirically. Concepts which can not be so verified have no scientific status. Thus, science says: only that which is scientific is part of science.

The behavioral disciplines--psychology, sociology--could bite the bullet and accept the fact that they are not "scientific" in this narrow, tautological sense. However, vested economic interests prevent this. Thousands of universities and hundreds of thousands of academicians' financial survival depend on NSF and NIMH grants.

Conformity to a dominant perspective is nothing new in the history of ideas. In fact, it is more often the rule than the exception. A power structure is generally wedded to a ruling belief system, and such a system is only dislodged through a scientific revolution (see Thomas Kuhn's classic book on this, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).