Constructing the Person in the Scientific Culture

Social scientists are not only members of the culture at large, but of particular guilds or "interpretive communities" within the academic domain. These communities possess histories of textual formulation, internal understandings of the nature of human character. And to the extent that the scientist is to be intelligible, he or she must construct the person within the constraints of these traditions. There are a number of stories to be told about such constraints and their violation. However, there is one of special relevance to what many take to be the breakdown of the empiricist tradition in recent decades, along with the associated deterioration of boundaries between science and art (fact and fiction, reality and myth, the literal and the metaphoric). It is again a story of equilibrating between convention and counter convention in the construction of the person. Its special interest lies in the irony of outcome. For in the very attempt to transcend the consensus view, psychologists have succeeded in subverting the foundational view of empirical science. In generating "pleasures of the text," they have undermined the very warrant of the scientific text as objective.

To begin the tale, scientific psychologists have shared with the scientific community at large a particular view of the character of the scientist. This view, largely constructed within logical empiricist philosophy, paints a heroic picture of the scientist. In dramatic terms, the scientist is one whose skills in observation and reason enable him (as feminist critics point out, the role is traditionally gendered) to step outside the vagaries of common opinion ant political prejudice, to press beyond the frontiers of the unknown, and to carve truth from nature. (The similarity between this vision of the scientist-hero and Joseph Campbell's account of the heroic monomyth is hardly accidental.) In effect, by virtue of their training in the sciences, professional psychologists enter the research arena with a vision of the ideal person. And this intelligibility places significant constraints over the kind of portrayals that can be made of the human being within the research setting.

Given the close association between the empiricist construction of the scientist and twentieth-century modernism, the previous comments regarding the centrality of learning and cognition in psychology are apposite. Scientific psychology could not, in this sense, vindicate a romanticist view of human functioning because such a view is contrary to the image of the heroic scientist. For the hero-scientist to prove through reason and observation that people's rationality and perceptions are governed by unconscious, irrational forces is to undo the very image that sustains the scientific endeavor. It was virtually incumbent upon scientific psychologists, then, to develop a picture of human functioning that celebrated reason and observation. The work of personality psychologist George Kelly nicely illustrates this attempt to harmonize the scientist's picture of himself with his accounts of human character more generally. In one passage of A Theory of Personality, Kelly attempts to replace the romantic view of the deeply driven being with a precis to his theory of personal cognition:

Let us then ... have a look at man-the-scientist.... When we speak of man-the-scientist we are speaking of all mankind and not merely a particular class of men who have publicly attained the stature of "scientists." . . . It is customary to say that the scientist's ultimate aim is to predict and control. This is a summary statement that psychologists frequently like to quote in characterizing their own aspirations. Yet, curiously enough, psychologists rarely credit the human subjects in their experiments with having similar aspirations. It is as though the psychologist were saying to himself, "I, being a psychologist, and therefore a scientist, am performing this experiment in order to improve the prediction and control of certain human phenomena; but my subject, being merely a human organism, is obviously propelled by inexorable drives welling up within him." . . . Now what would happen if we were to reopen the question of human motivation and use our long-range view of man to infer just what it is that sets the course of his endeavor? Would we see his centuried progress in terms of appetites, tissue needs or sex impulses? Or might he, in this perspective, show a massive drift of quite a different sort? Might not the individual man, each in his own personal way, assume more of the stature of a scientist, ever seeking to predict and control the course of events with which he is involved? Would he not have his theories, test his hypotheses, and weigh his experimental evidence? (4-5)

Kelly goes on to build his theory of human functioning on the basis of the latter assumption. Yet, if the social scientist simply feeds back to the scientific community variations of its own image, he/she will ultimately be rendered invisible. Theoretical characterizations of the person would merely recycle "what all good scientists already know." The central problem for the theorist, then, is that of transcending the common intelligibility of the scientific community while simultaneously sustaining it. This problem is largely solved through the procedure of propositional unpacking described earlier. That is, the scientist dedicates himself to elucidating one or more of the ancillary propositions consistent with the dominant metaphor, but not a direct duplicate. Thus, for example, all of the above cited topics central to the cognitive psychologist are consistent with the more general myth of the rational scientist at work. They are sufficiently fresh that they appear to carry new knowledge; at base, however, they sustain the myth of the heroic scientist.

It is at just this juncture, however, that the seeds of subversion are inadvertently sown. For as the implicature is extended and new bodies of discourse are articulated, so do the boundaries of the dominant metaphor become fuzzy. Its initial meanings become distorted, diffused, and eventually threatened by opposing images. Or, in the Derridian sense, as the traces of the initial signifier are extended, one reaches a point at which the signifier is deconstructed. It is precisely this unravelling of the prevailing metaphor that has helped to undermine the empiricist conception of the scientist (and thus the privilege of scientific discourse).

More specifically, as the metaphor of the individual as computational device has been progressively unpacked in various research settings, an increasing array of proactive attributes have been assigned to the individual. The individual has become one who actively searches for solutions, scans memory, formulates and carries out plans, processes information, and so on, all according to internal design. As it is commonly put, human beings are driven by "top down" processes (rationality operating on the world) as opposed to "bottom up" (the world determining what is rational) processes. However, as the individual qua computer becomes increasingly automaton or top-down in character, the impact of environmental inputs is suppressed. That is, it becomes difficult to speak of the individual as reacting to the stimulus of the real world because the character of the objective environment is determined by the internal operations of the computerlike individual. Reality within the machine is that which is allowed or determined by machine configuration. It is in this sense that Greenwald (1980) has characterized the cognitive system as "totalitarian". That is, it is closed to outside influence, seeking only to sustain its own position.

Yet, we find, to the extent that humans are portrayed as automaton like computers, top-down in their determination of "what is the case," the traditional image of the scientist-hero cannot be sustained. For within the newly emerging story scientists no longer search for and reveal the nature of the unknown; rather, they can only reveal in their writings the character of their machine operations. They do not record and reflect the world as it is, but as their own systemic processes require. Thus, in the very attempt to sustain and elaborate the image of the human being as rational agent, the traditional concept of rationality — with successful adaptation to existing circumstances at its core — is undone. The wholly rational individual proves irrational.