The Metaphysical versus the Epistemological as Applied to Consciousness

In Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts (chap. 1, 2), influenced by Aristotle’s fundamental premise of the primacy of existence, Rand makes an important distinction between the metaphysical and the epistemological.
 
Metaphysics, in contrast to the special sciences, studies all of existence—reality, the universe as a whole. This includes consciousness, which is a natural, not supernatural, part of existence that is an attribute of many higher level animals, especially human beings.
 
Epistemology studies the fundamental nature of human consciousness, the mental processes by which we know, or attempt to know, existence. Rand identifies (chap. 6) the two primary, self-evident concepts of existence and consciousness—self-evident in the Aristotelian sense that they are implicitly known in every act of awareness and thus cannot be denied without having to be accepted in the process of denial. Hence, such denials are self-contradictions. She calls these two primaries axiomatic concepts.*
 
When Rand uses the words “metaphysics” and “epistemology” as describing adjectives, such as metaphysical referent and epistemological essence, she is narrowing the usages to draw attention to how her theory of concepts differs from the moderate realism of Aristotle and the nominalism (arbitrary subjectivism) of today. (For example, see pp. 21, 35, and 52 in the Epistemology.)
 
The metaphysical, in its older, traditional sense, is everything that is outside of our minds—termed objective reality—and everything in or related to consciousess is termed subjective. It would be better, however, to use the term “external” as modifier of “outer” reality since consciousness is our internal—and metaphysical—reality, especially when it becomes the object of study to formulate theories of epistemology and psychology.
 
In Ayn Rand’s theory, there are metaphysical and epistemological components of consciousness.
 
In this context, the epistemological is everything our minds do—the mental processes they perform to create accurate concepts and principles, to acquire knowledge of both the external world and the internal world of consciousness, as well as to guide our choices and actions.**
 
Rand here is emphasizing the difference (165–66) between perceiver, the method of using our minds, and perceived, the facts of reality. When the processes of our minds are the objects of study, our consciousness is itself the perceiver and the processes are the perceived.
 
We are at once both observer and observed.
 
“Epistemological” as the describing adjective means, in Rand’s words, for example, the method we use “to discover a causal explanation” (230), that is, to identify the facts. “Epistemological” refers to our use of the processes and products of our minds, such as conceptualization to form the concept “table,” or, for that matter, the concept “concept.” We are being “epistemological” whether extrospecting or introspecting, and this includes the formulation of those sciences of consciousness, epistemology and psychology. The objects of study, the referents of the concept “table” and of the concept “concept” are metaphysical, as are the consciousnesses of each one of us when under study by an epistemologist or psychologist.
 
For years, if not centuries, the subject-object distinction in both philosophy and science has plagued all those who work with consciousness.
 
It is not a contradiction to say that the processes and products of our minds are the objective and metaphysical reality that both epistemology and psychology study. They are “subjective” only in the sense they are “in the subject,” the subject’s mind, as opposed to being “out there” in the external world. Consciousness is our internal reality and is our means of knowing existence—all of existence, including consciousness.
 
Epistemologists and psychologists, in effect, perform a “double duty,” of using the epistemological methods of our conscious processes to identify the metaphysical nature of those processes. “Double duty” just means scientists of the mind must introspect, as opposed to the scientists of matter who extrospect.
 
It is equivocation to say that psychology is subjective because its object of study is “in the head” and therefore not objective, that is, false, arbitrary, or unknowable.***
 
This is precisely what the Kantians and post-Kantians assert, namely that because our consciousness has a nature, we cannot know, or know with certainty, what is inside or outside of our minds. Consciousness, they say, distorts awareness of reality. How do they know that? Yes, some people’s minds distort reality, such as the ignorant and neurotic, and everyone at times makes mistakes, but the solution to this alleged problem is to follow Aristotle’s laws of logic.
 
As I have written before (65), although introspection has been effectively banned from psychology for over a century, logic is “the introspective science” (my emphasis).
 
The criteria of epistemological objectivity are Aristotle’s laws, especially the law of non-contradiction. If I say that the contents of my mind includes seeing the object on my desk as a leprechaun, not a glass of water, there is a contradiction between what I am thinking and what the actual fact is.
 
A valid theory of concepts, or universals, as it is also often referred to, must answer the question, how exactly do the products of our consciousness relate to the facts of both external and internal reality? How do we know that what is “in our heads,” epistemologically, correctly identifies what is “out there,” metaphysically.
 
And in a more complicated fashion, how do we know that what is “in here,” in our own minds, that is, its processes and products, correctly identifies what is . . . “in here”?
 
Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts holds that concepts and essential distinguishing characteristics are indeed in our minds, not “out there” in the thing, but if we correctly identify what is “out there,” and “in here,” the essences and concepts are objective in the epistemological sense, but not intrinsic or metaphysical as both Plato and Aristotle thought.
 
Historically, most philosophers have exerted considerable effort trying to find essences “out there” in the thing, but never found them, often concluding that concepts or universals are subjective, “names” only, hence the theory of nominalism.
 
That the essences are not intrinsically embedded in the things of metaphysical reality does not mean that they do not or cannot have a valid existence elsewhere, epistemologically, in our minds. We are not condemned to skepticism, or to Kant’s and the positivists’ complacent skepticism.
 
Indeed, any doctrine of skepticism is self-contradictory, because its proponents, in effect, and often explicitly, say, “We know that we know nothing,” which is absurd. And the statements of the complacent skeptics—"we don’t need complete certainty to live our lives”—are equally absurd. The concepts of probability and uncertainty presuppose certainty as much as and in the same way as the concept orphan presupposes parent. Rand calls this the stolen concept fallacy.
 
To sum up, the metaphysical refers to existence, which includes the processes and products of consciousness. The epistemological refers to consciousness as an active processor, both extrospectively and introspectively, guided by Aristotelian logic, that correctly (or incorrectly) identifies the reality of the “out there” and the “in here.”
 
 
* Identity is a third axiomatic concept, which Rand points out is a corollary of existence.
 
** Rand sometimes substitutes the word “psychological” for “epistemological,” especially when talking about concepts of consciousness (chap. 4 in the Epistemology; see also p. 256.)
 
*** Note the two meanings of the word “objective” as Rand uses it: the metaphysical referents of existence, the outer physical world and the inner mental world, and the epistemological essences we identify to formulate objective truth and knowledge. If our concepts and essences—as well as our values—are true, they are epistemologically objective. Only if arbitrary or false would it be correct to call them subjective.

The Difference between Emotion and Attitude

For many decades social psychologists (1; 2, chap. 1) have viewed attitudes as the central concept that explains motivation. Where do emotions fit in?
 
The two are similar, yet different.
 
Emotions are automatic, psychosomatic responses to evaluations about objects, persons, or events that we judge, based on past knowledge and values, to be beneficial or harmful (Independent Judgment, p. 63).
 
“The firing of a gun can hurt me,” I might be thinking, “and the bang outside sounded like a gun. That makes me afraid and my heart race and my breath shorten.”
 
Four components to this experience are the fact judgment, “the bang was a gun”; the evaluative judgment, “the gun can hurt me”; the emotion, “I am afraid and need to hide”; and the physiological reactions of a racing heart and shortened breathing. Note that the emotion of fear generated a tendency, need, or urge to act and that the fact and value judgments each can be either true or false; the bang may in fact have been the backfire of an automobile.
 
Although the judgments about guns were learned earlier in our lives, they are not something we even think about on this occasion. The emotional reaction happens in a split second. The source and cause of this experience is subconscious.
 
Attitudes are settled, enduring composites of beliefs, evaluations, and action tendencies about some object, person, or event. Beliefs are fact judgments about what we believe to be true. Evaluations are positive or negative judgments about what we think is beneficial or harmful. And the action tendency is what it sounds like: a tendency, need, or urge to act.
 
Note that both emotions and attitudes are responses to something or someone and that we can feel emotions and hold attitudes about all kinds of things and people, including ourselves.*
 
Note also that emotions are integral parts of our attitudes—the beginning moment, actually, of what may become a new or developing attitude—that express our positive and negative reactions to what we have the attitude about.
 
In years past, to continue the above example, we may have formed an attitude toward guns through experiences of shooting them or from reading what many have said about them.
 
Both emotions and attitudes are in our minds and are not behavior, but they do explain and motivate behavior. We must choose to act on the felt tendency, need, or urge before action can take place.
 
Both concepts are what Ayn Rand would call (chap. 4) concepts of consciousness, not concepts of the external, material world, as the concept “gun” is.
 
Concepts of consciousness, such as thought, reminiscence, imagination—as well as emotion and attitude—are identified by the actions of consciousness, the contrasting psychological processes, that distinguish one from the other.
 
Thought, using Rand’s words (pp. 32), is a “purposefully directed process of cognition” and emotion is “an automatic response proceeding from an evaluation of an existent.” Reminiscence (my words) is the power to preserve and recall a thought, emotion, or experience and imagination is the ability to create and project in our minds how something or someone might be different.
 
The mental process of forming an attitude is the accumulation over time of emotional experiences, observations, and thoughts about something or someone such that the experiences and beliefs become established and lasting, often in conscious awareness.
 
We have attitudes but experience emotions is a familiar way of differentiating the two mental processes.
 
My attitude toward guns is that I love them, especially since I had positive experiences of shooting them as a kid. I have that favorable attitude toward guns and have held it for a long time. I am quite aware of the attitude.
 
The bang outside my house, however, might confuse or scare me, depending on how I evaluate it in the present. I know that cars can backfire, that firecrackers can make bangs like guns, and that I do not like criminals staging shootouts in my neighborhood. All of this might go through my mind in the split second that the bang has occurred.
 
The difference between emotion and attitude is that the emotion has a trigger, time-bound, that we perceive and react to immediately. The attitude is a lingeringly favorable or unfavorable expression, built up over time, and is something that we can even have a leisurely discussion about, such as should we be pro-gun or anti-gun?
 
The emotion calls for and sometimes produces action without our stopping to think about it. The attitude does not necessarily call for action, though it may.
 
Ayn Rand’s point about concepts of consciousness is that they are formed the same way concepts of the existential world are formed, except that we focus on the mental or psychological actions that distinguish one process from another.
 
After observing (i.e., introspecting) many instances of similar mental processes, we isolate the one we are interested in and omit its content and intensity to arrive at its essential distinguishing characteristic.
 
Emotions are instant reactions, attitudes are lasting, though neither is changeless. Both contain a wide variety of content and can be either extremely intense or not so intense.
 
Both can and do explain and motivate behavior.
 
Social psychologists are right that attitudes are central motivators but they could spend more time examining emotions as a crucial component and source of our attitudes.
 
 
* “Feeling” often refers to our experiences of physical pleasure and pain (or even of warm or smooth), whereas “emotion” refers to our experiences of psychological joy or suffering. Many times, however, the words are used as synonyms, as I often use them, or as in this case as a verb, “to feel an emotion.”

Preface to Independent Judgment and Introspection

My new book, Independent Judgment and Introspection: Fundamental Requirements of the Free Society, will be published on October 1. You can preorder it now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Information about the book can be found on its website books.jkirkpatrick.net. Here is the preface.


The boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is often admired for his independent judgment, that is, for his courage to speak a truth that the adults feared to acknowledge openly. Two questions, however, can be asked about independent judgment as a character and personality trait. One, can everyone really practice it (besides naïve children) or is it the province of true creators and innovators, such as Socrates and Galileo? And, perhaps giving rise to doubts expressed in the first question, a second asks, how does one handle the hazards of independent judgment, such as the prospect of offending other people, sometimes resulting in death (Socrates) or house arrest (Galileo)?

Independent judgment is correct perception of the facts of reality and courage to acknowledge and assert those facts. The two questions above arise because of complicating factors; intelligence and interest can affect one’s initial perception of facts and other people can affect both the initial perception and assertion of the judgment. Psychology plays a dominant role throughout.

Great innovators, especially those who challenge centuries of convention, are highly intelligent. They also are extremely interested and motivated in their areas of innovation. Those of us who do not possess the same intelligence or interest, whether college professor or blue-collar worker, can nevertheless use our intelligence in areas of interest to perceive and assert what we do see. Intelligence combined with interest determines who is likely to see ahead of others, and those of us who do not see initially can learn from those who do, but intelligence is not a prerogative of the highly educated. Independent judgment can be practiced equally by a garage door repairman as by a scientist.

So why don’t more people practice independent judgment? Which is to ask, why don’t they join the boy in the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? The answer is fear, real or imagined, of what might happen to them. The real fear of death or incarceration that can result from speaking one’s mind poses a needless moral quandary. We have no moral obligation to drink hemlock, as Socrates did, to preserve our independent judgment. Many in the Soviet Union managed to maintain theirs by expressing it to family and trusted friends, sometimes speaking in a foreign language to prevent nosy neighbors from overhearing their conversations and reporting them. They were conventional on the outside, in public, to preserve their lives, but independent on the inside, at home, to preserve their self-esteem.

Most of us do not face the real fears of a Socrates, Galileo, or citizen of the Soviet Union. Our fears of expressing independent judgment stem from what others might think of us. Disapproval, maybe rejection, is the worst that might happen, yet the anxiety caused by self-doubt can be so strong as to blur our perception of the facts, thus preventing any expression of an independent judgment. When choices based on self-doubt build up over time, habits of perceiving reality through clouded lenses become established patterns of behavior. Seeing the world through the eyes of others, whomever those significant others may be, becomes the norm. Conventionality is the result.

Can independent judgment be taught? Yes, but it must start at an early age. Children, of course, need to be given love and support, but they also need to be given freedom, within limits appropriate to their maturity, to choose their own values. And they need to be allowed to learn from their mistakes. Most parents are loving toward infants, but when the children move into their “terrible twos,” parents begin controlling and in some cases hitting. Often, the controlling continues throughout childhood and becomes a constant in traditional schools. Choice and self-assertion are seen as a disruption of authority and disobedience. In reality, they are signs of developing self-esteem and personal identity. When they are erased by the controlling, authoritarian behavior of adults, children quickly get the message that getting along means going along. It is a rare child who matures to adulthood with independent judgment intact. Perhaps this is why we tend to think that only certain people can fully achieve it.

Independent judgment is a fundamental requirement of the free society. Unless each adult citizen possesses a significant amount of self-esteem expressed as independent judgment, such a society cannot last.

The aim of this book is to explore the nature of independent judgment and its relationship to the free society. Throughout the journey, we will find that psychology, especially the skill of introspection, plays a significant role in developing and maintaining independence in the individual and in generating the desire to live in a free society.

The book begins by chronicling the historical war on independence, that is, how the character and personality trait has been ruthlessly destroyed in children from the earliest times of civilization and how it is routinely prevented from developing today. It next examines the nature of psychology as a science, psychology’s epistemological foundations and its relation to political individualism and moral egoism. The book further analyzes how independent judgment develops in the individual, probing the depths of psychology to demonstrate how seemingly uncontrollable subconscious premises guide our lives and how we can identify and change those premises through introspection.

Several mistaken conceptions of independence are discussed, including the Socrates question, “do we have to die for our independence?” along with a clarification of the meanings of autonomy and responsibility, the relation of independence to intelligence and epistemological certainty, and a comment on three well-known deference to authority studies from the mid-twentieth century. Finally, the book elaborates the meaning of introspection and the defensive habits we must identify and correct through introspective skill, and it then recommends to parents and teachers methods of teaching that skill to their children and students. The overall aim of “educating for independence,” as the last chapter is titled, is to correct, and preferably prevent, thinking errors that lead to psychological problems.

It is those psychological problems that prevent the development of independence and happiness and, in turn, the uncompromising desire to live in a totally free society. Independent judgment and introspection in each individual are the fundamental requirements of expanding personal and political freedom.

Chance Emotional Generalizations and Introspection

An emotional generalization is an emotion experienced in several or many similar situations that becomes a subconscious conclusion influencing our subsequent choices and actions. It is not formed by explicit conceptual identification and is therefore a “chance” occurrence.

Emotions, which exist in both humans and higher animals, are psychological counterparts of physical pleasure and pain. The process in infants and animals to generalize emotional experiences occurs automatically, but humans in later life, preferably beginning in toddlerhood, can use conscious thought to control part of the process, to make and identify generalizations and correct mistaken ones.

Most of us, unfortunately, leave our generalizations from emotional experiences to accident or circumstance, not explicit conceptual identification.

For example, a toddler who is yelled at by his father and called bad names for spilling a glass of milk may feel fear, anxiety, and hurt for the way his father reacted to the objectively harmless event.

The boy likely cannot name the emotions he has just experienced or determine why he feels what he feels, although he is presumably aware that his reaction is to his father’s response to the spilling of the milk. He feels pain and the threat of pain, drawing negative conclusions about himself. This is a one-time experience.

If similar situations of being yelled at and called names arise in the future, not just involving his father, but also his mother, other relatives, and teachers, the boy’s subconscious mind may generalize, having repressed the origin of the feeling, and draw the subconscious conclusion—what Edith Packer (chap. 1) calls a core evaluation—“I can’t do anything right. I must be careful around other people.”

As the boy grows older and becomes an adult, he may experience the same emotions to yelling and name-calling even when the sounds are not directed at him but nevertheless are within earshot.*

This scenario can be observed in higher animals, such as a dog who as a puppy was abused by a male owner through yelling and hitting. The puppy experiences painful feelings that become stored and associated with males, especially who yell and hit. When moving to a new family, the puppy and adult dog may still react fearfully and defensively when meeting the new, but kind, male owner and other males in the household or neighborhood. The dog may also run out of the house whenever a human voice is raised.

Emotional generalization in the higher animals is essentially how their behavior is guided.

The difference between the higher animals and humans is that we can identify the nature and cause of our emotions and correct the ones that are out of context and based on false underlying premises.

This is an important component of what the capacity to reason in humans means. Through introspection we can identify and regulate our cognitive mental processes by conceptualizing them, that is, putting words to them, as opposed to bouncing from one chance emotion to another.

The skill of introspection is what we all need to learn and practice and, especially, is what needs to be taught to children when they are young, probably as soon as they begin to speak.

Introspection is what psychotherapists—whether or not they acknowledge the validity of introspection in science—encourage their patients to learn in order to resolve the psychological problems and conflicts they are suffering.

Introspection in children, if it were taught, would go a long way toward preventing the development of many unfortunate problems and conflicts.

Emotions are psychosomatic responses to a situation—a person, object, or event—that presuppose a previous perception of what is factual about the situation, along with an evaluation of the facts. Either can be true or false. “That bang,” for example, “was a gunshot [fact], which constitutes a threat to me [evaluation]. As consequence, I feel fear.”

The emotional reaction is automatic, but every emotion rests on implicit, often subconscious, judgments of fact and value. It is the fact and value judgments that can be identified through introspection and changed. As it turns out, the bang was the backfire of a car [corrected fact], which does not constitute a threat to me [corrected evaluation]. This knowledge corrects my mistaken judgments. As a result, the emotion of fear disappears.

Conceptualization is the tool needed to identify the facts and values that stand behind all of our emotions. Introspection is the method by which we use the tool. Unfortunately, neither has been taught to us, certainly not in childhood, and, if at all, minimally in adulthood.

Without knowledge of how to introspect, we are left at the mercy of chance emotional generalizations, many of which we have formed unaware (subconsciously) in childhood and adolescence and which essentially determine and control our adult lives. Chance, unexamined emotional generalizations are what lead us to think that we are helplessly determined by our genes and environment.

The best advice here is Edith Packer’s (p. 278): “If parents and schools could teach children the connection between thoughts and emotions, if they could teach a child that when he feels something, he’s really thinking something—so that the child would learn to ask himself, ‘What am I thinking when I experience this emotion?’—it would be invaluable.”



* I hasten to add that not every child will react the same way to this father’s behavior. A rare child might say to himself, “What’s the big deal? I didn’t do anything wrong. Father is being ridiculous.” My example is not of environmental determinism, but of a serious influence that hampers many a child’s healthy development. The father needs to learn how better to relate to his son.

Genes vs. Environment: Anyone for Free Will?

Do genes cause behavior? If they do, one would expect to see evidence of criminality, genius, schizophrenia, homosexuality, and evangelical Christianity in infants. All of these behaviors, plus many others, have been said to be inborn.

To expect an infant to exhibit these traits is absurd. To say that an infant has inherited the potential to become a criminal, or evangelical Christian, says nothing. We are all born with that potential, plus countless other potentialities.

Does environment cause behavior? The trouble with this assertion is that there are always exceptions to the good and bad things environment does to children when they are growing up.

Some children reared in crime-ridden, slum neighborhoods become criminals while others do not, even if they are siblings in the same family. The same can be said for children reared in safe, wealthy suburbs. Others raised in religious families follow their parents and become evangelical Christians, while some rebel and become atheists.

The determinism of the genes/environment axis is a self-contradiction—determinists have to acknowledge that they are determined to believe in determinism. Yet they pretend to be making a logical choice to believe in determinism.

Something other than genes or environment must be operating to cause our behavior.

Here’s a novel idea. How about thought, that processor of genetic inheritance and environment that generates our motivation and directs behavior?

Thought, or more broadly, consciousness, makes errors and has to control itself in order not to make mistakes. Free will is cognitive self-regulation, which means we may choose to focus on the facts or evade them, allowing other factors, such as emotions, presuppositions, or political doctrine, to interfere with correct perception.*

Our guide to the correct perception of reality is the 2500-year-old science of thinking called logic. As the discipline and art that regulates internal thought processes, logic is the quintessential introspective science. The genes/environment axis, however, does not want to admit that logic is introspective, because then they would have to admit that consciousness controls behavior and that introspection is a valid method of science.

Psychologically, this means our personalities are self-created. The cause of behavior is the innumerable conclusions we have drawn—the myriad thoughts, logical or not, we have had—about our genetic inheritance and the environment in which we live, from the time we were able to process words right up to the present.

These innumerable conclusions and myriad thoughts accumulate and become the mental habits by which we live. As habits (or psycho-epistemologies), many have become so automated, buried in our subconscious with their origins largely forgotten, that they feel to us as if we were born that way, or that something external is making us act the way we do.

Lack of introspection, or more specifically, introspective skill, to examine our motivating premises—thoughts, evaluations, emotions—makes it hard to appreciate how much control we in fact have over our lives.

Habits can be good or bad, the good ones leading us to live a happy life, the bad ones not so happy. The examined life, to paraphrase Socrates, is worth living; the unexamined one leads to problems in living.

Mental habits are all learned.** We were not born knowing how to drive a car, for example, but in adulthood, adults can safely drive while carrying on a conversation and listening to music on the radio. All of our actions follow this pattern.

Certain habits, generated from core evaluations and other less fundamental but nevertheless significant evaluations, are usually acquired when very young, from toddlerhood on. We retain these early conclusions about ourselves (our sense of personal identity), the world, and other people and hold them as unquestioned absolutes.***

It is in toddlerhood that we begin to speak, which means we are beginning to think in concepts and words.

Young children do not usually form these important conclusions through explicit reasoning, but through a process of emotional generalization. At the risk of oversimplification, an emotion at this stage in life, if it could be put into words, might say something like, “That made me feel good about myself. I’ll do it again.” Or, “I didn’t like that and I’m not going to feel it again.”

Repeated many times over, the former, if based on a correct perception of reality, can lead to the development of self-esteem, the latter, which most likely includes errors, to repression and subsequent psychological problems.

If taught from an early age to look inward to identify our thoughts, evaluations, and emotions, and to correct errors we have made, we would grow up with healthy psychologies. Most of us, however, have not been taught much of anything about psychology, in childhood or adulthood.

Thus, when the genes/environment axis comes along, it makes perfect sense that our behavior is caused by something we have no control over.

The irony is that genes and environment do have an influence on us, in the sense that genes give us gender and skin color and environment can make life easy or difficult, but we are the ones who develop attitudes—conclusions, evaluations—about gender, skin color, and environment.

To help us correctly perceive and evaluate what genetics has given us and what goes on in our environment, teaching is crucial. Parents and the schools need to instruct children in the skill of applying logic to their own psychologies.

The unfortunate consequence of the genes/environment debate is that the axis devalues the environmental influence of an education in sound psychology. For that is what is required to help us use our free will to assess genetic inheritance and environment and thereby make better choices to live a happier life.


* This is Ayn Rand’s theory of free will as volitional consciousness.
** All habits, at root, are mental. I use “mental” here to emphasize their psychological origin.
*** The concept of core evaluations was identified by psychologist Edith Packer and presented in her lecture “Understanding the Subconscious” in 1984. Lectures on Psychology, chapter 1.

Look at Your Premises. Look. Look. Look!

The fundamental method of science is observation, so nineteenth century naturalist Louis Agassiz (pp. 40-48) stressed its importance in teaching and learning. As he told one student, “Take this fish and look at it.” Hours later, when the student wanted to know what to do next, Agassiz replied, “Look at your fish.” And still later, “Look, look, look.” For three days the student looked at the fish, then on the fourth, Agassiz presented him with a new specimen.  Observation means using our senses to perceive the world. Figuratively, it means opening our eyes and looking at it. The more one looks, Agassiz was encouraging his student, the more one sees.

In the human sciences, psychology in particular, observation is also the fundamental method of acquiring knowledge. It means not just looking at human behavior, but more importantly at the mental content of human beings. Introspection, as I have argued before, is a legitimate method of science, actually a form of observation. Looking at the premises people hold in their minds, that is, their beliefs, values, and emotions, is key to understanding why they act the way they do.

The word “premise” refers to a thought or proposition assumed to be true that supports a later conclusion. In the face of an apparent contradiction—such as, on the one hand, the attacks made on McDonald’s and Walmart as less than virtuous companies and, on the other, the amazing job creation of the former and wonderful, inexpensive products of the latter made available to the masses—Ayn Rand’s line to “check your premises” comes to mind. Look deep, as Rand would urge, at all conclusions that lead to other conclusions and go all the way down to the starting points of one’s beliefs, values, and emotions.

Thus, when critics of McDonald’s and Walmart are pressed for their reasoning, their response might be something like this. “McDonald’s and Walmart are just seeking profits; the profit motive and customer satisfaction, after all, are opposed to each other.” Why are profits bad? “Because profit seeking is selfish.” But eating and drinking are selfish; why is the pursuit of self-interest when it doesn’t hurt others bad? “People can’t be left free to pursue their own interests; the poor especially don’t know what’s good for them. They aren’t able to distinguish good food and good products from the bad. The government has to regulate business and guide the poor in their choices.” Don’t the poor have free will and the ability to reason out their own choices? “We’re all controlled by our environment and reason can only go so far; it’s limited.” How do you know? “We can’t really know anything with certainty.  In fact, people who claim certain knowledge are dangerous, potential dictators. We have to talk things over and let the majority vote for the best alternatives.”

Although many additional lines of questioning of these critics could be pursued, this example demonstrates the many premises (in this case, false ones) underlying a simple concrete conclusion. The more one looks at the premises people hold, the more one sees and comes to understand.

The same process can be performed on personal psychology. Although nothing in psychology is simple, consider the relatively uncomplicated phenomenon of stage fright, such as the anxiety an actor feels before going on stage or a speaker before delivering a lecture. Premises behind the fear might range from the thought “I can’t do it, I don’t want to do it, I’m going to be a failure and be humiliated, I have to get out of it” to “I hope I don’t make too many mistakes, I know I can do a good job, I’ll just keep working on my craft to polish it, I know that once I’m out there I will begin to relax.” Or something in between. Deeper exploration might find connections to similar premises that operated in similar situations in one’s early, formative years and might also reveal how choices made then produced feelings of anxiety that still operate. Looking at these earlier premises provides fuller understanding of how personal psychology develops, the role of choice in that development, and the role of choice in making corrections in the present—in this case, taking a deep breath, walking on stage, and delivering one’s lines or lecture.

Looking at a mind or looking at a fish, the process is the same. Observation is the method of science and the more one looks, the more one sees. Indeed, a modern-day Agassiz working in the human sciences might say to his or her students, “Look at your psychology. Look. Look. Look.”

And, of course, this directive applies not just to students, but to all of us. If we unfailingly “look, look, look” into our souls, we might be surprised by what we see.