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The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 25
4. Experimental methods and the analysis of factual data
The epistemological difficulties encountered in the human sciences, of which we
have just given an outline, naturally center upon questions of method, since
the most outstanding result of interactions between subject and object in the
disciplines with which we are here concerned is to tender experimentation, in
the sense in which it is practised in the natural sciences, particularly difficult.
In psychology, which deals with the behaviour of individuals external to the
observer himself, experimentation is, in principle, neither more nor less complex
than in biology; the main difference lies in the fact that human beings cannot
be subjected to whatever experiment seems opportune, and that in contrast to
physiology, animals cannot in these particular cases be substituted for humans.
On the other hand, whenever collective phenomena are involved, as in sociology,
economics, linguistics or demography, experimentation in the strict sense (i.e.
the modification of phenomena through the free variation of factors) is ob-
viously impossible and can only be replaced by systematic observation based on
factual variations and the analysis of those variations in a functional - i.e.
logical and mathematical - fashion.
I. Before, however, going into these situations in detail, it would be appropriate
to recall that these particular difficulties with regard to experimentation are
not peculiar to the human sciences; nor are they all due to the fact that what is
under examination is a collectivity of which the observer is or may be a member.
The prime difficulty is of a far more general order, and derives from the impossi-
bility of acting at wil upon the objects of observation when the latter are on a
higher than individual scale: this difficulty in connexion with the scale of phenom-
ena is not, however, peculiar to the social sciences and may be found in such
natural sciences as astronomy and particularly cosmology and geology, which
are historical disciplines as well.
The case of astronomy is doubly interesting. In the first place, it shows that a
high degree of precision is possible without experimentation on the scale of the
object under study, through a convergence of theoretical patterns and actual
measurements provided the latter are sufficiently numerous and exact. Thus, for
example, Newton’s system of celestial mechanics produced a most remarkable
correspondence, of the order of a fraction of a second, between theory and the
metrical measurements, with a single minute divergence, concerning the perihe-
lion of Mercury. Such convergences make it possible to organize the equivalent
of experiments concerning a hitherto unexamined problem, in which measure-
ments are compared with novel theoretical conclusions : one such ‘experiment’
was that conducted by Michelson and Morley, when they measured the veloc-
ity of light in terms of a moving source and a moving observer. Their measure-
ments having shown that these mobilities were without effect, they were faced
with a choice between three conclusions: that the measurements were open to
doubt (they were, in fact, proved to be accurate); that the general principle of
relativity was erroneous (a conclusion that had been rationally unacceptable
from the time of Galileo); or that space and time were relative to velocity - a