Simply put, the problem with psychology lies in its "dark
corridor', as the nobel laureate Richard Feynman used to
call it- an inherently dogmatic and extremely non-scientific
obsession with a vaguely defined, ill-conceived, and poorly
formalised notion of 'the normal'. Some would
argue that the post-Chomskyan revolution, post-Cognitive era
psychology has matured and outgrown the pettiness that was the
hallmark of the field in the early twentieth century. But a close
examination of the so called 'scientific contributions' of
psychology, most of which are not remotely scientific to say the
least, would reveal a very disheartening state of affairs. It has
been said of Psychology, Cognitive Science and Neuroscience that
there are only two ways of making a name for yourself in these
fields: you either ally yourself with Noam Chomsky, or you join that
group of would-be debunkers who thrive on the 'what if'-ambition of
someday falsifying Chomskyan theories. The
latter group has a long history of producing immensely talented
individuals who have all been relegated to mere footnotes in the
chapter documenting the golden era of cognitivist research into the
mind-brain dichotomy simply because of a misguided and egotistical
obsession with disproving Chomsky, in spite of the numerous apparent
advantages of Chomskyan theories, not the least of which involve an
inherent compatibility with Occam's Razor and a
very high rating on the 'economy' scale. The
trend started, of course, with the vengeful followers of the
disgraced B.F Skinner, and sadly enough Psychology has fallen prey to
a sort of empty empiricism/empiricity more and
more with the passing years as these ex-Skinnerians have flocked to
the field and attempted to hide their old affiliations with an
unnecessary obsession with the laboratory, creating badly conceived
pseudo-scientific empirical methods with more free
variables than can be accounted for even in any of the hard sciences,
hoping to find a counter-point to something based purely on common
sense, in the dusty corners of the laboratory. A
hilariously misguided attempt, to say the least, but it also makes
one ponder the implications that the lack of an overarching theory
has on a discipline, and the kind of dangerous precedence that can be
set when practitioners of a supposedly scientific field of inquiry
either deliberately overlook the need to, or consistently
fail to place their research in a broader historical context of the
kind of intellectual tradition that has contributed to 'the
structure of scientific revolution', as Thomas Kuhn would put it. The
converse, of course, is a hallmark of Chomskyan theories. Over the
years, Noam Chomsky, has taken great efforts to place his theories in
a broad historical context, and gone to great details
in outlining the nature and historical development of the
romantic-rationalist tradition in which he has attempted to construct
much of his theories, and all of his linguistic theories. In reading
Chomsky's opinions and his theories regarding the nature of
I-Language, the Language Faculty (both
broad and narrow), the mind-brain dichotomy,
the nature of acquisition and the ever-present
Plato's Problem, a clear connection can be
observed descending from Aristotle, Plato, Rene Descartes, through
Charles Darwin, Ernst Myers and all the way down to the modern
day evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins. This gradual historical
evolution of a rationalist theory, profoundly
lacking in Psychology, is of course the hallmark of Cartesian
Linguistics. In fact, so much so that on that fateful
evening in 1966 when Noam Chomsky addressed the crowd at
Princeton University, a crowd composed primarily of Psychologists,
Psychiatrists, Philosophers, Mathematicians and post-Structuralist
linguists, fifteen minutes into his most famous lecture
the convener had to ask him to re-schedule for a three day
'training workshop' because the content proved too
difficult for the gathered crowd, as none other than the
grand old man of American Biology, Ernst Myers, himself
documents in his biography. This very confounding phenomenon,
pervasive throughout the history of Psychology, that represents
either the effects of the lack of an unifying abstract theory or an
unwillingness on part of the practitioners to cope with the painful
process of deconstruction, an essential
part of formulating an overarching theory that has been undergone in
all the sciences (Physics in the 15th century, Chemistry in the 18th,
and Biology in the 16th century), so far as I understand it (although
which is truer than the other, I cannot tell), has led Psychology
down the dark path of 'empiricity'. In
fact,'empiricity' might even be the key word to
this whole discussion. A careful examination of
the methodologies abundant in Psychological
research is immediately terrifying
in its complete lack of, and an even more frightening
unawareness of, the distinction between 'Scientificity'
and 'Empiricity', to use romantic,
naive-realist, analytic philosophical terminology. The distinction is
quite simple, as with most things that pose complex questions, and
does not require the employment of complex logical-mathematical
formulae and polysyllabic terminologies, but only of everyday common
sense. 'Scientificity' implies a necessarily skeptical questioning of
the Universe and its structuring, and a deliberate and
even labored attempt to gather rational, logical,
and empirical evidence for one's beliefs, with any two of
the three qualifiers filling-in for the third in the case
of unavailability of evidence representing the latter.
Examples abound in the hardest of all Science- Physics. Much of what
we know, understand and marvel about, about the structure of the
Universe that our pale blue dot of a planet is
placed in, comes from the extremely complex, and unnervingly
abstract, branch of theoretical Physics-
Cosmology. Cosmology employs observational
and direct realist empirical evidence only as a
last yardstick for any theory,
the unavailability of which is only taken to imply a
'momentary' confound which can be
accounted for by the internal logical consistency of
the theory itself, granted, of course, non-circularity of
arguments. Notice the profound elegance of such a theoretical
position- while utmost importance is attached to direct
realist, observational evidence, even
more than any other type of evidence perhaps, it is still
acknowledged that such conclusive evidence may yet prove elusive,
not because they do not exist but because
of the limitations placed upon us by the very nature of the type of
being we are. The Drake Equation, used to
calculate the probability of making contact with Extra-Terrestrial
Life Form, the fulcrum of NASA's SETI
program, is a golden example of such necessary abstractions. In
fact, as has been standard in Astrophysics, Astronomy, Cosmology, and
to a slightly lesser extent in advanced Quantum Mechanics,
logically consistent theories based on
rationalist, deductionist
reasoning are taken to be the default, or to use
a linguistic term, the unmarked
state-of-affairs. And for good reasons- there can
be no observational, direct realist,
evidence for Black Holes, or Worm
Holes, or why Entropy must never
break the speed of light. And yet, to dispute the
existence of Black Holes on those grounds is akin to disputing
Evolution because one cannot walk into the San Francisco City
Zoo and witness a chimpanzee stand up, shed its fur, pull on a pair
of Levis and walk out a homo sapien. Theories, in the hard
sciences, are formed to account for the default,
countering which amounts to making extraordinary claims
which, as Carl Sagan so eloquently put it, requires extraordinary
evidence. In fact, that statement (in its more
elaborate quantifying form), now known as The Sagan
Standard, is the yardstick employed by The
Norwegian Academy of Science to determine the scientific
validity of novel experimental claims. And Psychology, unfortunately,
more than any other field of study, consistently fails to live up to
The Sagan Standard. Perhaps, over the years,
this has led to some sort of antipathy among Psychologists
towards Cartesian Linguistics. That would, of
course, explain why most of the unsubstantiated criticism of
Cartesian Linguistics stem from Psycholinguistic circles. It is not a
new trend, however. The death of Universal Grammar has been predicted
many many times before. And Noam Chomsky, now in his ninth decade,
has a long history of outmanoeuvring and outlasting his opponents. I
am not saying that Noam Chomsky cannot be wrong. Anybody could be
wrong. We could all be wrong about the pink unicorn. But for the time
being, in light of the nature of the arguments
that have been supplied against Chomskyan theories in general, my
money is on Avram Noam Chomsky.
