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Psychology 229
from the same view-point that Bergson contrasted pure memory, which he
thought could reach through immediate intuition, with motor mechanism or
habit, while contemporary studies reveal at least ten levels of transition between
the recognition of signs (form of memory linked to innate forms conduct and
habits and, while distinct from them, based on them) and conduct involving
reconstitution and then evocation. It is from the same viewpoint that Merleau-
Ponty sees in any form of behaviour an ‘incarnate consciousness’ and seeks to
reconcile the search for a primordial consciousness and for a continual activity
of ‘transcendence’, without being able to decide whether the individual is deter-
mined by all the different forms of behaviour, the whole of his past and the whole
complex of structures merely in so far as he is aware of them, or whether coa-
sciousness is but a completion that only full study of development can place in its
real context.
But if the differences between psychological science and philosophy thus
seem clear, it is self-evident that they are mainly a matter of orientation. In
practice, every psychologist remains to some extent tied to his own epistemol-
ogy, and it is to this that E. Nagel attributes the persistence of different ‘schools’
in psychology.3 Furthere, no writer on the subject dispenses with observations
made on his own ego, even if it differs somewhat from others. Pure positivists
such as R. Carnap and R. von Mises now go so far as to say that internal ob-
servation is ‘in principle’ no different from external observation,4 though it may
at the same time concern observables distinct from those of physics and even of
physiology. 5 However, there is the remaining difference that while psychological
science remains open to all problems and to all concrete facts, it is always with a
view to arriving at objective explanations while conforming to the general rules
relating to experimental verification and even, to formalization in so far as is
possible at the present time. Whereas the probability of assumptions and coher-
ence of ideas are sufficient for philosophical reasoning, the not inconsiderable
heritage that psychology has derived from this has become valid only subject to
such controls. Since the behaviourist revolution, in particular, introspection,
instead of providing an ‘in se’ conveyed by the speech of the subject, has become
one form of behaviour among others, subject to the laws of cognition and reinte-
grated into the overall behavioural context - so much so that with Stevens
psycho-physics itself has been able to use subjective scales and we now see a
great many methods of estimating qualitative data, attitudes and opinions being
developed.
2. Empiricism without structrrralism and the need for explanation
in psychology
When a young science is taking shape and is further obliged to break away from
philosophy not without some struggle, it generally takes time to discover its
main trends, because these are far from being conscious from the start (a further
example of the dificulties inherent in cognition) and are discovered only by
trial and error and often even by exaggerations of initial theories.