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The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 19
inputs and outputs, without any attempt at explanation, we are forced again
and again to resort implicitly to introspective data; the ‘expectancy’ which
Tolman rightly stresses as a factor in all learning would remain incomprehensi-
ble unless we experienced it introspectively. The second reason is that problems
are not solved merely by burying them; any psychology which ignores the
conscious rules out the investigation of many facts whose interest lies precisely
in their factuality. That these facts are ‘subjective’ does not prevent the beha-
viourists from making implicit and frequent use of them, even if they are reluc-
tant to recognize them among the objects of their investigations.
The third solution, on the other hand, is of great interest to the general
epistemology of the sciences of man: it consists in acknowledging that intro-
spection is deceptive, but then in asking why, and studying the cognitive distor-
tions of the conscious, which are just as worthy of attention as any other phenom-
ena in that they can be expected, under study, to reveal the laws which govern
them and the factors which account for them. This, of course, within due limits,
is a process of relativization similar to that of the physician, who instead of
rejecting a time measurement made on our kinematic scale when he finds it
cannot be applied to other cases, incorporates it in a system of co-variations
which gives it its limited significance (the error having merely consisted in
regarding it as universal). With introspection, the situation is naturally far
more complex, because the systematic and general errors due to the variable
degrees or the shortcomings of decentered co-ordination (for example, rec-
ognizing only the results of operations and not seeing! them as a constructive
process, which is what happened to the Greeks in their mathematical thinking)
are heightened by individual errors due to the multiplicity of egocentric ap-
proaches. Even these, however, obey laws, which it is not! only interesting but
also essential to elucidate.
Thus, from the affective point of view, the great merit of the psychoanalytical
movements (even though their doctrines are not universally accepted down to
the last detail) has been that instead of ignoring the conscious it has tried to
work it into a dynamic system of larger dimensions explaining both the distor-
tions to which the conscious is exposed and the limited but essential activities
which characterize it (catharsis, for example, is not only a remedy for deviations
caused by the unconscious but also an appeal to conscious adjustment).
From the cognitive point of view, the psychology of ‘conduct’, by contrast
with that of mere behaviour, restores the conscious to its functional aspect; this
explains both its adaptive r61e as well as its shortcomings and errors. ClaparBde,
for example, used the term ‘the law of prise de conscience’ to describe the pro-
cess whereby the conscious concentrates on zones of action in which inadapta-
tion is a fact or a possibility and ignores mechanisms which function of their
own accord without need of supervision. Hence the fact that the conscious
proceeds from the periphery towards the central processes (cf. consciousness
of the results of operations preceding recognition of their constructive signifi-
cance) instead of focusing on the inner life, as introspection naively imagines,
and thence acting centrifugally. The psychology of conduct also accounts for
time illusions - which remain unexplained as the mere intuition of the period