Science in Christian Perspective

Could There Be A Humanistic
Science of Man?
DAVID L. WOLFE
Gordon College
Wenham, Massachusetts

From: JASA 28 (June 1976): 77-82.

To decree dogmatic prohibitions of certain linguistic forms, instead of testing them by their success or failure in practical use, is worse than futile; it is positively harmful because it may obstruct scientific progress ... let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms. Rudolf Carnap¹

The Unity of Science Movement

Earlier this century, under the leadership of such men as Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, there was founded in this country what was called the Unity of Science Movement. As an organized effort this movement has virtually dissolved. Very few thinkers in the human sciences were ever explicitly influenced by the philosophically sophisticated efforts of the movement. Nevertheless, something of the vision of the group did rub off onto American social and behavioral science in the form of an ideal. The ideal held by the unity of Science Movement was the modelling of all of the sciences, including those dealing with man ' on the methods and language of the natural sciences. There was considerable discussion within the group as to how this ideal should be articulated, but this was unimportant to the impression conveyed to the unphilosophical spectators in the sciences.

Thus a mood was created which reached into the remotest comers of research, theory and professional education of American social scientists-a mood more-over which was the more influential and the less tangible (thus less available for criticism) because many were unaware of its source, and even those who were largely unacquainted with the details of the reasoning that had undergirded the ideal.
 
Rudolph Carnap

Rudolf Carnap undoubtedly did more than any other member of the movement to address the question of how the sciences of man were to be "unified" with the natural sciences. To get the flavor of his reasoning, it is necessary to say something briefly about his intellectual development.²

The author wishes to express thanks to the Wheaton College Alumni Association for a grant under which the research for this paper was carried out. This paper was read at the 1974 Psychology Colloquium  Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois.

Carnap's early training was in the physical sciences as well as in philosophy, yet be always remained inter
ested in discussing matters of common interest with colleagues in the humanities and human sciences as
well. It was as a member of the famous Vienna Circle of logical positivists that Carnap published his book,
The Logical Construction of Reality.³ Like the other positivists, Carnap held that all factual knowledge was
gained by experience, i.e., he was an empiricist. His book can be read as an extremely sophisticated version
of the same sort of thing attempted by the earlier British empiricists, such as David Hume. In it he attempts to show the way in which the basic units of lived experience (no atomistic sense data, unlike Hume) are orgainzed into useful constructs such as physical objects, other persons, and cultural reality, increasing degrees of complexity. For this early Carnap, physical things are constructs out of primary conscious experience. This view may be called mentalistic or phenomenalistic.

It soon became apparent that such a position would not do. Under the criticism of his colleagues, especially Neurath, Camap came to see that if the physical world upon which science operates is a private mental construct, then the so-called "public" nature of science is lost. If all experience is accessible only to the individual who has it, then each man lives in his own world with no notion of what others mean when they speak of the observations, or even that there are others, since all I experience is a construct out of my own experience. No "intersubjective check" is conceivable under this view.

The public reformulation of Carnap's view came in 1934 with the publication of his book, The Logical Syntax of Language.⁴ The thesis of the book (much simplified) is that language is a convention wherein we lay down rules for forming our terms, rules for forming definitions and propositions, rules for moving from one proposition to another as in arguing or reasoning. The job of philosophy is to render these rules explicit for any given language, and to explore the possible advantages of alternative languages for given tasks. The nature of any language depends upon agreement within the community where it is used, rather than upon some extra-linguistic "reality." Once, however, one commits himself to a particular linguistic scheme or convention, the syntactical rules for that language are prescriptive and binding. They include some expressions and modes of reasoning and exclude others. Their prescriptive character extends only to those who agree to talk this way, however, and are in no sense universally binding. We are now in a position to explore the consequences of the various ways of talking in which scientists engage, but always mindful of what Carnap calls "the principle of tolerance." The job of the philosopher, according to this principle, is to help in arriving at clarity concerning our linguistic conventions, not in setting up prohibitions against talking in certain ways.

In his first book Carnap spoke of "the things themselves," namely what was really given in experience. In his second book the focus is taken off of the "realities" which are talked about, and placed upon language in which any "reality" is described.

According to this view, there are a variety of languages possible (mentalistic, dualistic, physicalistic, etc.), but only the physicalistic language is suited for framing scientific theories. (The other languages may, however, be useful for purposes other than scientific). In clarifying his willingness to use language which talks about one kind of entity and excludes others, Carnap makes a distinction between "internal questions" and "external questions." An "internal question" concerns the existence of entities assuming a certain linguistic framework. Thus within a dualistic framework it would make sense to talk about introspecting private mental states, while for someone assuming a physicalistic framework such states would not exist. Within a physicalistic framework the observation of real physical objects that exist independent of the observer may be articulated, but for someone assuming a purely mentalistic (solipsistic) framework, no such entities exist. The particular employment of entity-talk within a given framework allows legitimate questions to be raised. ("Are there eight or nine planets?" "Was that red sense datum simultaneous with that pain sense datum?"). Such questions may be answered by someone from within an appropriate framework by an appeal to experience.

However, one might be tempted to ask "Are there really physical objects, or are there nothing but sense data?" "Are there really private mental states, or are there nothing but physical events?" To ask these are to raise what Carnap calls "external questions." They are questions about the status of entity systems (or linguistic frameworks) from the outside. Because such questions call for a comparison of a system of talking with "reality," and since "reality" is defined by the linguistic system one is using, such questions are in principle unanswerable. Acceptance of an ontological framework implies no answer to any "external question."

Note carefully that the issue is an issue about the choice of which language to use (i.e., it is a metalinguistic issue). It is not an empirical scientific issue (i.e., not an object language issue). This means that physicalism (and its derivative, behaviorism) is a choice about how to talk, about what sort of things we agree to talk about in scientific language. Note also that Carnap never construed physicalism as a metaphysical position. It tells us nothing about the "nature of man." It does not claim that man is only a material being, or anything of the sort. To pursue these questions is to run the danger of asking "external questions."⁵

Now we come to the sixty-four dollar question. During my doctoral orals, a psychologist who was on the examining committee asked me why Carnap changed from his original phenomenalistic position to physicalism. Fortunately be was merely trying to obtain some information for himself, and did not consider the matter crucial to my passing. And well he might have been interested, for the reason for the change supplies the rational grounds for the dominant mood in American psychology for several decades. While I had to admit my ignorance to the examiner, I think that the reasons can be found rather easily in Carnap. The principal reason for choosing physical language over any language which includes private mental terms is that in physicalistic language the talk exclusively concerns publically observable things. Scientific observations, being open to check by other scientists, must be framed in a language which is public. That is, in Carnap's view, they must be framed in a physicalistic language.⁶

But must they? Recent considerations of the nature of observation language suggests that Carnap was wrong at this point. If the issue of which language to use is to be decided on the basis of its usefulness to science, and if we are to be tolerant in permitting linguistic conventions, then the question of whether or not it is possible to use a given language for public purposes must not be decided in advance.

A large number of recent thinkers believe that observation is always contaminated by the frame of reference from which the observer speaks. Thus the observation statements that he makes are only "public" for one who shares his frame of reference. Thomas Kuhn writes:

Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer a picture of a terrain. loooking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events.⁷

Both Kuhn and N. R. Hanson⁸ argue that all seeing is a "seeing something as something," that is, every perception is already an interpretation. Merle B. Turner, after surveying the implications of this view for psychology in a discussion of factual language in psychology, states,

Historians and philosophers of science . . ., students of language and knowledge . . ., as well as students of perception agree that factual statements are conceptually contaminated. . . . How a scientist sees the world is no more a matter of veridical. observation, in any absolute sense, than is the way a culture-bound person sees the world that is unique to his frame of reference. The welter of pre-perceived events may be factually and theoretically neutral, but just how our events-as-experienced are precipitated from this neutral stuff is a complicated matter involving sensitivity, selectivity, and the entire epistemic apparatus of structuring which is prior to the experience itself. ⁹

What is to keep social scientists of nonbehavioristic inclinations from agreeing on a quite different language than the physicalistic language, provided that their linguistic convention consisted of talk about public events?

Clearly, if one is to take Carnap, seriously, a very large part of the "sensitivity, selectivity, and the entire epistemic apparatus of structuring which is prior to experience" is the choice of language convention, of how we agree to talk about what we see. To choose a language is tantamount to choosing the categories through which one will view the world.

Now the behaviorist follows Carnap in choosing the physicalistic language in which to formulate his science. As a choice of scientific convention, so far so good. Yet what is to keep social scientists of non-behavioristic inclinations from agreeing on a quite different language, provided that their linguistic convention consisted of talk about public events? It would, of course, be the case that those who failed to share their categories for viewing the subject matter would not "see" the "same thing" as they did. But this is true of all would-be public observations: public access depends on a shared frame of reference.

Suppose, moreover, that these (non-behaviorist) psychologists adopted a language in which personalistic terms were employed instead of physical objects or physical organism terms. Suppose, further, that in their use of these terms these (let us call them "humanistic") social scientists achieved remarkable agreement on the observation statements formulated in this language. We would have on our hands, I suggest, a language which meets Carnap's test of publicness, and which is physicalistic in no recognizable way. There would exist a way of seeing man through categories, rather than as an organism undergoing changes of anatomical position or modifications of the superficial musculature.

So much for the flight of conceptual and linguistic fantasy in which we supposed all of these mere possibities. Can such a language be constructed? At this point it ought to be made plain that the possibility of a humanistic alternative to behaviorism or near behaviorism in social science is at stake. If a "yes" answer to this question can be made plausible, then a humanistic science of man must not be regarded as a playground for the tender minded, but as an alternative hardheaded scientific language.

To render plausible the view that there is possible a public-event language using personalistic categories through which the environment is seen as populated by "others" is not so difficult as might be supposed. We use it naturally and almost constantly! While this may come as a shock to many positivistic, physicalistic, and behavioristic social scientists, the main message of the phenomenologists has not been that we need to reintroduce introspection into social science,10 but that our everyday way of seeing and talking about others provides a model of public knowledge of persons." (Much the same point has been made from another vantage point by analytic philosophers following the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.)12 Take the following quotation from the writings of the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz:

The social world is experienced from the outset as a meaningful one. The Other's body is not experienced as an organism but as a felIow-man, its overt behavior not as an occurence, in the space-time of the outer world, but as our fellow-man's action. We normally "know" what the Other does, for what reason he does it, why he does it at this particular time and in these particular circumstances. That means that we experience our fellowman's action in terms of his motives and goals. And in the same way, we experience cultural objects in terms of the human action of which they are the result. A tool, for example, is not experienced as a thing in the outer world (which of course it is also) but in terms of the purpose for which it was designed by more or less anonymous fellow-men and its possible use by others.¹³

Schutz maintains that observation reveals, not simply a world of behaving things, but of fellow actors and a host of social features. This experience of others and the meanings of their actions is not an inference from originally given information about physical objects. For Schutz the Other, his typical motives, and his typical actions are part of what is originally given in experience in the everyday social world.

Since human beings are born of mothers and not concocted in retorts, the experience of the existence of other human beings and of the meaning of their actions is certainly the first and most original empirical observation man makes.¹⁴

Therefore,

The student of the social sciences does not find himself placed before the inexorable alternatives either of accepting the strictest subjective point of view, and therefore of studying the motives and thoughts in the mind of the actor; or of restricting himself to the description of the overt behavior and of admitting the behavioristic tenet of the inaccessibility of the Other's mind and even of the unverifiability of the Other's intelligence. There is a basic attitude conceivable . . . which accepts naively the social world with all the alter egos and institutions in it as a meaningful universe, meaningful namely for the observer whose only scientific task consists in describing and explaining his and his co-observers' experiences of it.¹⁵

Crucial to this way of seeing and talking about man is how we are to regard language. The humanistic social scientist and the everyday observer regard it as action by which the actor says something meaningful, not just as "verbal behavior" (uttering varying pitches at various volumes from which we might make casual inferences about past, present, or future events).¹⁶

We regard a person who is talking, not as making sounds from which, knowing the circumstances in which such sounds have been uttered in the past, we can make certain inductive inferences, but as saying something. We regard what he says as having meaning, not simply in the sense in which a barometer reading has meaning.' i.e., as indicating that something has happened, is bappening, or is about to happen, but as expressing what he means. it would be misleading to describe this as a beliet on our part, the belief that people who use the words we use generally mean by them what we mean by them. It is rather a matter of attitude, of the way in which we respond to a person who is talking. . . . If this attitude were one of belief, we could inquire into the grounds of the belief. But this is just what we do not do. It is part of the expression of this attitude that the question of what justifies us in regarding what others say as testimony does not arise. We say "I heard him say that be will come," not "I beard him utter the sounds, 'I will come,' and gathered from this that he was saying that he would come."¹⁷

Granted that there is a language which embodies the categories for such a way of seeing, yet what about the evidence that such a language is a public-event language, that it can be used for framing publically checkable observation statements? The proof of the pudding here is society itself. The ability of men operating with the everyday concepts of the co-actors succeed remarkably well in coordinating activities in the mind-boggling complexity that we call the social world. Men succeed in understanding each other and interacting using the categories of personal action. They do not await the reduction of all personal terms to behavioral equivalents (if that were possible) or begin with the responses of organisms, and then make inferences about expected behavior. They successfully use a totally different language from the physicalist. A humanistic science of man may take over this language and refine the observations over the loose approximations of ordinary living, perhaps even having radically different goals than the everyday actor. Nevertheless the fundamental categories of the language might remain the same.

To summarize: Carnap's claim that a science of man must be physicalistic fails if a language of personal agency can be developed in which the observation statements are open to intersubjective check. We do seem to have such a language in ordinary language about the everyday social world, This language forms the conventional framework of a humanistic science of man, just as physicalistic language forms the conventional framework of behaviorism.¹⁸

Two Sciences of Man

We have then two possible sciences of man. Each operates under the auspices of its own chosen convention with its own brand of progress and satisfaction with its own success. Because of their radically different choices of linguistic frameworks the two sciences remain incommensurable. Given this situation, are there any considerations which might incline the scientist to one of these two alternatives rather than the other? I am not a scientist, but let me suggest two considerations that might influence me if I were to be in the position of a social scientist (or student of social science) who was about to make this fundamental methodological decision.

1. The physicalist language eliminates an enormous number of questions which seem to have high priority in a study of man. This makes a neater science, but it achieves neatness by a loss of profundity in addressing the human condition. It presents man with a picture of himself which, though precise, lacks the features by which he might recognize himself. It cannot be a mirror for man.¹⁹

This departure of behaviorism from the language of the everyday social world is belied by an embarraising compromise. For in communicating the results of research and in seeking inter-subjective check on their results, the behaviorists always revert to the language of the everyday social world.

All forms of naturalism and logical empiricism simply take for granted this social reality, which is the proper object of the social sciences. Intersubjectivity, interaction, intercommunication, and language are simply presupposed as the unclarified foundation of these theories.²⁰

In the following quotation substitute "conscious" for "intelligent", etc., to get the sense of Schutz's point.

It is not - - , quite understandable why an intelligent individual should write books for others or even meet others in congresses where it is reciprocally proved that the intelligence of the Other is a questionable fact. It is even less understandable that the same authors who are convinced that no verification is possible for the intelligence of other human beings have such confidence in the principle of verifiability itself, which can be realized only through cooperation with others by mutual control. Furthermore they feel no inhibition about starting all their deliberations with the dogma that language exists, that speech reactions and verbal reports are legitimate methods of behavioristic psychology, that propositions in a given language are able to make sense, without considering that language, speech, verbal report, proposition, and sense already presuppose intelligent alter egos, capable of understanding the language, of interpreting the proposition, and of verifying the sense.²¹

This does not prove that a behavioristic theory of communication could not be developed. (None has been shown to be adequate, and I am inclined to doubt that one could, but this is beyond the scope of the present paper.) It does betray a double-mindedness on the part of the behaviorist, since he makes use of the everyday social world to do his science, but refuses to take scientific cognizance of it. The fully-human man creates a less-than-fully-human science of himself.

2. A humanistic science of man is capable of handling the enormous complexity of observations involving man with greater simplicity than a behavioristic science. The neatness of behaviorism is initially misleading. It results from not attempting to deal with the complexities of actual human activity.

To see how a humanistic approach is simpler, take the following example.²² Suppose we try to imagine what is involved in seeing the world, not as physical objects, but as colored surfaces. A person who saw the world in this way might be able to describe a room. He might even be able to infer that it was appropriate to refer to physical objects (though he never saw the colored surfaces as physical objects.) He might even be able to infer that the inferred physical objects were causally interacting in various ways, even though he did not see them as interacting. But is it not clear that such a person would need an enormously large number of complex steps to infer that it was the case that "the cat knocked over the lamp"? It is much simpler to see the cat knock over the lamp than to inf er it in a series of steps from the movements of colored surfaces.

The behaviorist who insists on seeing man as only a complex physical system is handicapped in precisely the same way that the man who sees only colored surfaces is. He must make a large number of complex inferences in order to arrive at information that we see (noninferentially) in the everyday social world.

I arrive home and see welcome affection in my wife's face and manner. I anticipate that my coming home kiss will be warmly returned. I turn to my research assistant and ask him to corroborate my findings in a given experiment. He returns later and says, " My findings duplicate yours exactly." I take it that I may safely write a preliminary report of the experiment. I could describe all of the movements of the superficial musculature together with geometric patterns and their proportions on the surface of the front of my wife's head and then infer from these combinations what the muscles around her mouth will do if I perform certain behaviors. Likewise, I could regard the words of my associate as a complexity of noise which I must relate causally to a case of similar patterning in the past in the presence of certain experimental results. Such descriptions and inferences would be exceedingly complex and awkward.

The latter, physicalistic way of seeing my wife and associate suggest that the behaviorist's approach to man is analogous to the case of the man who sees only colored planes. Given enough knowledge, it is possible to construct correlations and form inferences. But I believe that the knowledge necessary would far exceed what is necessary to come to the same conclusion based on our ordinary way of seeing the world, or in the case of psychology, of the humanistic way (which is also our ordinary way) of seeing man.

I do not believe that these two considerations in any way "disprove" behaviorism (whatever that might mean). Behaviorism is a possible science. I do believe that these considerations suggest that a humanistic science of man promises to be a richer, more concrete undertaking. Beyond that there is no philosophical magic. One might raise value considerations about the appropriateness of controlling human behavior, but I will not pursue that path bere.²²

There remain some considerations which, while of little interest from a strictly scientific point of view, are of considerable interest to psychologists who are also Christians.

Neither a behavioristic nor humanistic science of man claims to be an exhaustive account of man, that is, they do not claim (in their clearer moments) metaphysical validity for their linguistic conventions. Yet both enjoy considerable success in talking about man within their frameworks. I suggest that the metaphysical problem ought to be posed_in the following terms: "What is man, that all of these scientific conventions can be successfully mindful of him?" And the inquiry is further sharpened when the neurosciences are included among the scientific conventions so considered.

Yet for now humanistic social science is clearly the science that deals with man in terms that are closest to his own self-understanding. To the Christian who is looking for some point of contact between the personal-agency view of man found in the Bible and what science says about him, a humanistic science of man appears to be the most fruitful present version with which to seek dialogue. To all appearances the prospects of Christian integration with behaviorism

A humanistic science of man is capable of handling the enormous complexity of observations involving man with greater simplicity than a behavioristic science.

look bleak, for the Bible and behaviorism speak different languages. In view of this it is tempting to suggest that all Christian social scientists, even if their training does not permit them to become humanists professionally, ought at least to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the world of humanistic social science .21 As for the humanistic social scientist, the methodological groundwork is there for developing a rigorous and hard-nosed science of man as man. Perhaps along this direction lies the proper way to fill out the notion of a "Christian psychologist" as something other than a technician who happens also to be a Christian. I suppose that now the really interesting question becomes 11 are the empirical results of a humanistic science of man compatible with Christianity?" I think the answer is positive, but perhaps it is too soon to say. In any case, that is the topic for another paper.

FOOTNOTES

¹"Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology," in Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity (2nd ed.; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 221. (Carnap's italics)
²See Carnap's autobiographical statement in The Philosophy of Rudolf Cornap, Vol. XI of the Library of Living Philosophers, ed. by P. A. Schillp (LaSalle, Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1963).
³Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, trans. by Rolf A George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
⁴Rudlof Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, trans. by Amethe Smeaton (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1937).
⁵See "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology," and Carnap's replies to his critics in Schilpp, op. cit.
⁶See the autobiographical essay in Schilpp, op. cit.
⁷Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed.; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), P. 111.
⁸Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), chapter 1, "Observation."
⁹Merle B. Turner, Philosophy and the Science of Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), pp. 191-2.
¹⁰A typical misunderstanding is evidenced by Gary R. Collins in "Nothing Really New," Journal of the American Scientilic Affiliation, 22 (1971), 43-45. Of course there are epistemologically irresponsible humanists, just as there are epistemologically irresponsible behaviorists.
¹¹ImportaDt here are the first two volumes of Alfred Schutz's Collected Papers (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962 and 1964) and The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1967). See also Maurice MerIeau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); Adrian van Kaam, Existential Foundations of Psychology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966) and Stephent Strasser. Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964).
¹²See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pholosophical Investigations (3rd ed.; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958). Helpful in getting into Wittgenstein's writings is Norman Malcolm, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Mind," American Philosophical Quarterly, Monograph No. 4, 1970.
¹³AIfred Schutz, "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences" in The Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers, Vol. 1, ed. by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Niihoff, 1962), pp. 55-56.
¹⁴1bid., p. 57.
¹⁵AIfred Schutz, "The Social World and the Theory of Social Action," in Studies in Social Theory, Collected Papers, Vol. II, ed. by Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nihoff, 1962),  p. 5.
16Cf. Carnap's remark that "the statements of an experimental subject are not, in principle, to be interpreted differently from his other voluntary or involuntary movements. . . .The movements of the speech organs . . . are not, in principle, to be interpreted differently from the movements of any other animal. . . . The movements of an animal are not . . . to be interpreted any differently from those of a volt-meter. . . . Finally, the movements of a volt-meter are not, in principle, to be interpreted differently from the movements of a raindrop. . . ." "Psycology in Physical Language," in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959), p. 195. Cf. B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior ( New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts, 1957).
¹⁷Sydney Shoemaker, Self-KnowIedge and Self-Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963).
¹⁸David Braybrooke states in his "Introduction" to Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), p. 9, "It is important to notice that . . . [both behavioristic and humanistic investigations] are capable of being equally empirical. The intuitive assessment of inner life which Skinner, on the one side, would dispense with can be dispensed on the other side too. Inded in the end they would have to be dispensed with. If an action investigator had a hunch that a certain action . . . [had a specific meaning], could he offer the hunch in evidence? His colleagues would surely wonder why the hunch had not been tested by fcrther observations. Intuition is not an optional way of establishing the significance of actions or the content of concepts and norms any more than it is an optional way of establishing the effects of various reinforcements. It is no way at all: at most it is a way of initiating investigations, which have to be brought to an end by public observation and public reasoning."....
¹⁹Cf. Schutz's remark in Collected Papers, Vol. I, p. 5.
²⁰Schutz, "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," p. 53.
²¹Schutz, "The Social World and the Theory of Social Action," p. 4.
²²This illustration was suggested by the ideas of Norman Malcolm in Problems of Mind: Descartes to Wittgenstein (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 91-102.
²³For an insightful contribution to this  "path-not-taken-here" see Hans Jonas, "The Practical Uses of Theory" in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. by M. Natanson (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 119-157.
²⁴For fruitful places to start see: Anthony J. Sutich and Miles A. Vich, eds., Readings in Humanistic Psychology (New York: The Free Press, 1969); Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1963) and his other books, especially The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1967), in collaboration with Thomas Luckmann. These books contain bibliographic references which provide a wedge into the literature. For those concerned about the relation of mathematics to a humanistic science of man, see Herbert A. Simon, "Mathematical Constructions in Social Science" in Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences, ed. by David Braybrooke (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1965), pp. 83-98. Finally, for a moving example of atheoretical humanistic sociology, see James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (2nd ed.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960).