In the late 19th century Henry James might have observed and then described an aristocratic woman and her daughter electing to take a few spins around the deck of an ocean liner newly docked in Liverpool before disembarking. He would have deduced and told us they did this in order to avoid the crush and the tedium of stationary waiting for their luggage to be retrieved from the luggage office and loaded onto their next vehicle. In the 21st century an experimental psychologist reports to us on Radio 4 on 26th November 2018 that it has been noticed and verified that air passengers prefer a mile's walk from the plane to the luggage carousel where their luggage has, by then, arrived rather than getting to the carousel quickly and tediously waiting around for it.
Both the novelist and the psychologist began from the same place and were equipped with the same human capacity which led them to see the same things and, not surprisingly, to draw the same conclusions. They were both endowed with cognitive powers and senses with which to take in the experience, reason to make deductions about it, and a common subjection to the human condition which allows them to understand and sympathise with the decisions of those they observe and imagination.
Having made the same deduction from the human capacity they have in common what happens next is where they diverge. The novelist puts his observation in his novel because he thinks his readers will enjoy such observations as they will add to the verisimilitude of the 'psychology' (used slightly differently here) of his characters. One could say that this helps him to make money from his experience but art can be its own reward. He would have enjoyed writing that description whether he sold his book or not and the scene could have been read to someone who was not paying for it in order to give them pleasure. Henry James by his nature will have made thousands of similar observations in his daily life that he did not put into a novel or short story. His action of observation and deduction could and did lie outside a monetisable model. It's just what humans do naturally.
The experimental psychologist, having made the same initial observation and deduction as James, will diverge by resorting to clipboards and scientific method to prove whether what she has observed is really a 'thing' in a discrete and special world of scientific truth. The deduction made using human sympathy and imagination will be relegated as having no value in scientific terms. It is merely a working theory that has to be proved or disproved. The scientist will now operate from a notional place where she acts as though she does not have such faculties to all intents and purposes. One may question as to whether it is really possible to, thus, suspend or put to sleep, as it were, important sections of our being for the duration of an experiment but that's a whole other question. She will now look at what she has observed, qua alien and inexplicable phenomenon which happens to occur in humans, as though she has disowned the shared humanity which linked her to her subjects and has forgotten her instinctive deductions. Like Lady Macbeth she will attempt to "un-human herself" for the period of the experiment. She will pretend her normal faculties are in abeyance and that she doesn't understand why people have such preferences. She has to set out anew to 'discover' the apparently hidden causes of such behaviour.
In what will her science now consist? She will approach passengers with her clipboard and questionnaire and ask them whether they prefer walking or waiting. People will answer and she will ask them reasons for their answer. They will say things that suggest if it's a choice between engaging their whole body in a little exercise and observation of the landscape and standing idle and bored in a shambling crowd they know what they prefer. All of this is elevated to the status of data which, etymologically, means simply what you are given. She then turns this into a study. Her working theory is confirmed and the study is lodged in a library. To turn to economic models she has been given a paid livelihood and the study is now saleable because it has had scientific status conferred on it. It can be sold to architects designing airports for example who are no longer able, authoritatively, to simply assume that people get bored waiting around by carousels. Henry James knew it but that wasn't good enough. The whole rigmarole of experiment had to be gone through for us to 'know' this fact properly. And for the study to be monetisable we all have to agree that its status as science is actually important and to participate in the choreography then decreed. Once we do, thus, consent then there is money to be made. If we don't we are thrown back on the common observation of other people we all find ourselves doing irresistibly by nature and reading novels.
This quasi-ceremonial process which christens findings as scientific truth is vital in material sciences where one needs such proof, authority, peer review etc But in the human and social sciences can we really divide ourselves into the human part and the scientific part and observe one with the other to any useful purpose? It sounds like a contorted form of schizophrenia or a particularly painful game of Twister. One group observing another group pretending they have no underlying links with and instinctive understanding of each other is equally implausible.
And what is the value of the study lodged in the Library of Psychology? It tells you things about, say 50 people questioned about their preferences on certain days in certain times. Human sympathy and imagination will tell us that such results are unlikely to vary much with different groups in different airports at different times. But conditions could change, other factors and contingencies could intervene. The weather might be different, the walk from the plane might be less pleasant because of the smell of aviation fuel on some days. Do we really need to raise such things to the status of science in order to 'know' them? Was all of that rigmarole and those few pages making up the study worth anything when the whole experiment might need to be rerun if conditions change slightly? And are the adjustments then made any different from the adjustments Henry James would automatically and instinctively have made to the new conditions. While the new experiment is set up James would have made a thousand other observations about a thousand other things all supposedly valueless unless 'proved' by experiment. But who has the money, time and interest and 'world enough' for that? You'd have to be Laplace's Demon to study the infinite possibilities the world throws up. If and while such experiments are being set up we'll be enjoying and laughing at James' books regarding a thousand other things. When some busy body comes along asking us to look at this new study we'll be too busy (possibly enjoying Henry James' latest book) to take an interest.
Couldn't we just have stopped with the gifted American novelist before the clipboards came out? For sure, a whole industry with which we all collaborate might have been lost if we had. But is the human, Henry James, not a much finer instrument for helping us 'know' things about ourselves than the clipboards?
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