Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Science and the Studies of Man 53
the alternatives in a wholehearted way and not be complacent
about what they take to be the truth, when it is so obviously one
that cannot improve our desperate pr.actical situation.
II
To show that the disciplines of man are not sciences, all one
needs to do is to point to the fact that while the physical and the
biological sciences are each one science, or a constellation of disciplines
more or less interdependent in respect to subject matter
and in the process of reduction to one science through the extension
and simplification of their laws, this is not the case with the
studies of man. There is no such thing as Marxist physics as distinct
from capitalist physics. Pontecorvo can defect to Russia, but
the knowledge of physics he takes with him was developed in the
Western world. This is, true also of biology. When Lisenko, for
reasons external to the science of genetics, proposes. theories that
are in harmony with his political beliefs, there are means of showing
that his results are false-if, indeed, they are, which is something
experts decide. But this does not hold for the disciplines of
man. Among them we do not find a science or several'sciences, but
innumerable schools at bitter war with one another, aiming, as it
seems to the outsider, for total victory and the unconditional surrender
of the loser. At best these factions lack any kind of relationship
with one another; at worst, and not infrequently, they
actually contradict one another.
Take psychology. The work of the Gestalt psychologists has not
been integrated with that of Hull and of Tolman and of Lashley
and Eysenck and the hundreds of schools of psychology that make
up the chaotic domain of that discipline. When we turn to depth
psychology the factionalism is even more obvious, the partisanship
among the various schools more rife and more embittered, and
the possibility of integration seems less likely. Recently a psychologist
named Ruth Monroe published a book entitled Schools of
Psychoanalytic Thought) An Exposition) Critique) and Attempt at
Integration. 5 The one thing we can say in favor of this work, with.