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The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 15
3. Special epistemological features and foundations of the sciences of man
Generally speaking, the experimental sciences appeared on the scene much
later than the disciplines based on deduction. The Greeks developed their own
mathematics and logic, and sought to resolve astronomical problems ; but even
with the promising speculations of the pre-Socratic philosophers and the find-
ings of Archimedes himself, it was not possible until modern times to build up
physics in a fully experimental sense. There are at least three reasons why ex-
perimentation lagged behind deduction; and they are also of direct interest to
the epistemology of the sciences of man, though their nature is even more com-
plicated.
I. The first reason is that the natural tendency of the mind5 is to perceive reality
intuitively and to make deductions, but not experiments; for unlike deduction,
experimentation is not a free or even a direct, spontaneous product of intelli-
gence; it calls for acceptance of external authorities requiring a much more
extensive, and psychologically more exacting, process of adaptation.
The second reason, a logical extension of the first, is that in the field of deduc-
tion the earliest or most elementary mind-processes are also the simplest: asso-
ciating, dissociating, arranging asymmetrical relations in a given order, linking
up symmetries, establishing analogies, etc. The experimental field is quite dif-
ferent : its raw material is highly complex, and the preliminary problem is always
to isolate the components from the tangled mass. In the domain of physics it
took the genius of a Galileo to work out simple movements which could be
expressed in equations, remembering that the fall of a leaf or the drifting of a
cloud are extremely intricate in terms of measurement.
The third reason, basically even more important, is that the so-called ‘reading’
of an experiment is never merely a reading, but implies an active dealing with
reality, since it means the dissociation of elements, and thus calls for building a
logical or mathematical structure. In other words, it is impossible to arrive at
the experimental fact without a logico-mathematical framework. Thus it is a
natural - if frequently ignored - requirement that a certain number of deduc-
tive patterns must exist before one can attempt or succeed in making experi-
ments.
These three reasons are even more applicable to the sciences of man: indeed,
they take on additional force as a result of the greater complexity of the prob-
lems involved and above all of the seemingly much more immediate nature of
the insights into the subject - all of which retards the need for systematic experi-
mentation. The result was that the tendency to deduce and to speculate out-
weighed for a much longer time the need to experiment, that the separation of
the various factors was and remains much more difficult, and that the logico-
mathematical, qualitative and probabilist frames of reference were much less
easy to construct (and are still far from adequate). If experimental physics lagged
for centuries behind mathematics, practitioners of the sciences of man need not
be surprised at the time taken to get them established and must regard their