Science and Great Experiments: The Search for Universals

The 1981 book Great Scientific Experiments by Rom Harré presents in popular format and in only 200 pages the gist of twenty influential scientific experiments, from Aristotle to the twentieth century.

Interestingly, none of the experiments cited uses statistical samples of any size divided into experimental and control groups. All samples are small and one is a sample of one! How is this possible?

And if true, may we conclude that Sigmund Freud and Jane Goodall were great experimenters?

It is the logical positivism of modern science that tells us a sound theory of induction does not exist, because universals do not exist, only statistical probabilities. Therefore, anything close to causal must be found through at least two groups of large samples to control sources of “extraneous variation.” Hence, all we can find through our many studies are “successive approximations.” This what John Stuart Mill’s followers called the hypothetico-deductive method that drives nearly all research today and condemns Freud and Goodall to the realm of “pseudo-science.”

Let us back up and define our terms. Science is a systematic study of an aspect of reality that explains its domain descriptively and causally, and if applied (as technology) provides guidance for human choices and actions to achieve specific goals.

The product of any science is a body of knowledge—a collection of integrated, universal concepts and principles the aim of which is to enhance life.

The second term to look at is experimentation. The Latin root of the word experiment means to try. Paraphrasing the Oxford English Dictionary, to experiment means to test or try something to identify what has previously been unknown. This means experimentation is trial and error. It may involve experimental and control groups (and the manipulation of one variable to determine its effects on another), but it does not necessarily have to. It also may involve an elaborate apparatus or it may be entirely conceptual—in the head, sometimes called a thought experiment.

Science historian John P. McCaskey has traced the history of induction and the role of experimentation in it  (1, 2). Up to the last couple of hundred years, McCaskey found, induction and experimentation were based on the work, among others, of Francis Bacon who based his work on Aristotle’s formal cause. And Aristotle in turn developed his theory of induction from what during the Renaissance was called “Socratic induction.”

Socrates, when taunting his know-it-all Athenian conversationalists, was looking for universal essences that apply in all instances.

Universals, those exceptionless concepts and principles, not correlations or probabilities, are what constitute the essence and foundation of science.

Thus, conceptualization, or concept formation, is the fundamental method of science, because large samples are often not necessary to identify the universals. McCaskey, as do I, gives the nod to Ayn Rand for understanding the role of concept formation in science, specifically the inductive process of identifying essential distinguishing characteristics.

Examples from McCaskey: Robert Koch’s identification of the comma bacillus (Spirillum cholerae asiasticae) as the defining, universal characteristic and cause of cholera, not such competing but correlational hypotheses as season or foul water; Charles Wells’ conclusion, after many small experiments to test a wide variety of independent variables, that water condensation was the essence of dew; and Lord Kelvin’s reasoning to describe tides by their definition and causes, namely “motions of water on the earth, due to the attractions of the sun and of the moon” (quoted in McCaskey).*

Harré acknowledges in his book (p. 191) that one or a few cases, with careful experimentation, that is, trial and error, can yield “defining properties of all samples similar to them.” He calls the small samples “intensive design.” In contrast, he calls the larger (and statistical) versions “extensive.”

The intensive design and sample of one in Harré’s book (chap. 2) is the nine years of experimentation conducted by army doctor William Beaumont on Alexis St. Martin, whose stomach did not close completely after a musket wound. Access to St. Martin’s stomach contents, especially his gastric juices, enabled Beaumont to answer the question, are gastric juices chemical solvents or is the process of digestion some vital force and the juices just “inert water”?

Feeding different foods to his subject and observing his digestive processes and by removing gastric juices to test its effects in a glass jar were the experiments that Beaumont conducted to make the well-respected conclusion of chemical solvency, even of “the hardest bone” (quoted in Harré, p. 41).

The concept correctly identified by Beaumont was that gastric juices were indeed—and universally so—chemical solvents, not inert water.

In my book Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 78-79), I praise Sigmund Freud for his work in clarifying and defining psychological repression and Jane Goodall for her discoveries about chimpanzees. Both conducted great experiments, the former in psychology, the latter in biology. They both used the method of conceptualization and deserve to be recognized as great experimenters. Science, in other words, is not confined to the fields of physics and chemistry, or imitations of those fields, as too many positivists are prone to assume.

Freud spent over thirty years in talk therapy with many different patients before he finally formulated the essential meaning of repression as an unconscious (or subconscious) response to anxiety that mutes the experience of or blocks entirely thoughts, memories, or emotions from conscious awareness. He also had to distinguish repression from defense mechanism in general, which for many years he tended to equate.**

Jane Goodall’s work, beginning in 1960, was to observe the behavior of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve (now Gombe National Park) in Tanzania. Over the course of many years, she discovered that chimps eat meat, make elementary tools to obtain food, can be violent and even cannibalistic, and have personalities. She gave the chimps names and interacted with them after they had gained her trust.

Goodall’s work required patient observation and, especially, application of analogous concepts from human psychology to the higher mammals, “patient observation” meaning testing and trying different ideas before drawing conclusions.

It is the logical positivists who dismissed Freud’s work as anecdotal at best, literature at worst. And it was the “men of hard science” at the beginning of Goodall’s career who dismissed her as an uncredentialed woman frivolously and anthropomorphically giving names to the nonrational, dumb animals. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, however, called Jane Goodall’s work “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements” (quoted in Goodall, p. xvii).

It is the logical positivists and many of those “men of hard science” who are not particularly scientific, or great experimenters!


* In the study of tides there may have been confusion over the difference between theoretical and applied science, or technology. Sea captains need to know the timing and heights of tides at a specific location, and statistics can help make these predictions. But this is applied science where the universals of theory are used to uncover correlations, tolerances, and averages to guide concrete, practical decision making.

** Repression is a defense mechanism, or defensive habit, as I prefer to call it, but it is not identical to it. Freud’s daughter, Anna, said it was in his 1926 book Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety when Freud identified the correct place of repression in psychology. The muting or barring of an emotion is accomplished by muting or barring the thought that stands behind it. Traumatic memories, I have suggested (fn 11, p. 146), are not repressed and should not be thought of as part of the definition. Subconscious is the more preferred modern term and is discussed in my appendix to Independent Judgment and Introspection.

On the Correct Roles of Induction and Deduction in Human Life: Two Sentences from Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts

Original thinkers often state their identifications succinctly.

Ayn Rand’s notion of measurement omission (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, chap. 2) in the formation of concepts is one such identification. Here is another (p. 28):

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

These brief and to the point sentences state not just the two fundamental methods of cognition, but more importantly, the correct roles of induction and deduction in human life.

And by “human life,” I mean science as well as everyday life.

Induction is the process of generalization, of forming universal concepts based on our observation of particular objects or events. The definition of a single concept states a principle—all humans possess the capacity to reason, for example—and the combination of several or many concepts and principles builds our knowledge of reality and, in some cases, establishes the physical, biological, and human sciences.

Induction is conceptualization. From an early age, probably before we can assign words to them, we all practice the inductive formation of universal concepts.

This was my example in an earlier post of our daughter, before she could walk or talk, laughing heartily at her first sight of a bouncing ball (Applying Principles, pp. 322-24). She identified a universal, because her mind, to quote Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, 100a13), “is so constituted as to be capable of this process” (though the universal is not “in the thing,” as Aristotle assumed).

Rand’s identification describes in general terms the true nature of induction and makes the biological and human sciences as exact and valid as the physical sciences.*

Deduction is the process of identifying particular objects or events as instances of the general knowledge we have already acquired. The process, more accurately, is one of application.

Deduction is what Sherlock Holmes did and what medical doctors do, and what we all do in our everyday lives. We apply general knowledge to specific cases to guide us in making choices and taking actions.

Technology and the applied sciences are sciences of method and therefore are largely deductive, deriving their basic principles from the more fundamental sciences on which they rest, for example, engineering from physics and chemistry, medicine from biology, and economics from psychology with several business disciplines drawing their basic principles from both psychology and economics.

This identification of deduction as application dispenses with the detached-from-reality deduction for the sake of deduction that has dominated the academic world since the Middle Ages. Deduction as application demonstrates how much deduction we practice in our everyday lives.

We all induce and deduce—some of us better (more accurately) and at greater length (in intensive study) than others. What Ayn Rand’s identifications mean is that induction and deduction are not a monopoly of scientists, philosophers, or academics in general.

Where then does measurement fit in the sciences? Conceptualization is universalization, which means its essence is measurement omission, which means the essence of theoretical science is measurement omission. This means that measurement is an aid to theoretical science, not its essence.

Measurement is crucial in the applied physical sciences when, for example, we want to send astronauts to the moon and back. Measurement in the biological and human sciences, however, is not quantitatively exact in the sense of constructing advanced mathematical equations to predict the behavior of animals or humans.

In the human sciences it is that annoying thing called free will—annoying to many human scientists, most of whom are materialists and determinists—that prevents the human scientists’ “elegant” equations from making any practical sense, or from being replicated in subsequent studies.**

The biological and human sciences are exact and valid, if the conceptualizations made by the scientists working in those fields have correctly identified the aspect of reality they are studying. The identifications are not equations, but they are quantitative. For example, psychological depression can be severe or mild.

“Measurement omission” does not mean that conceptualization ignores measurements. One individual case is quantitatively distinct from the next one, as two balls can be two different sizes and can be made of different materials.

Precise measurement is what technology and applied science, especially in the physical sciences, must critically pay attention to. Measurement in the applied biological and human sciences does not have to be so precise—because it cannot be.

“Truth,” to quote another succinct identification of Ayn Rand (Objectivist Epistemology, p. 48), “is the product of the recognition (i.e., the identification) of the facts of reality.” Truth, for Rand, is not a correspondence theory, but one that identifies facts. It is a recognition or identification theory.

And what is our guide to truth? Logic, of course, as “the art of non-contradictory identification” (Objectivist Epistemology, p. 36), not the mathematical or symbolic stuff that is taught in universities today or the medieval rationalism that permeates the older logic textbooks.

Induction and deduction are what we all use every day in our practical lives.

Induction and deduction, respectively, are conceptualization and application. Measurement is an important component of the two, but it is not their essence.


* See John P. McCaskey, “Induction in the Socratic Tradition,” in Shifting the Paradigm: Alternative Perspectives on Induction, ed. Louis F. Groarke & Paolo C. Biondi (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 161–192, on his efforts to revive Socratic induction, a tradition promoted and debated both before and after Francis Bacon, but eventually overtaken by the nineteenth-century positivistic, Millian hypothetico-deductive method, a form of rationalistic, propositional inference. Socratic induction—generalization from particular things or concretes to universal abstract ideas—is consistent with Ayn Rand’s epistemology as inductive concept formation through measurement omission.

** “Man is that which fits economic equations,” as Ayn Rand (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 7) so simply and aptly caricatured the very rationalistic, pseudo-deductive doctrine of pure and perfect competition in economics.