Valuable insights from David Ingleby, re: "Ideology and the Human Sciences"
Submitted by Chas on Fri, 04/02/2010 - 12:50pmQuite a number of years ago I stumbled across this most excellent article and began quoting from it in various places, including on Duncan Double's old "critical psychiatry" forum. Once I even emailed David to ask permission to even more widely share his article (or something; I forget the actual reasons, now). He was totally okay with such (so maybe you'd like to re-print his article in your favority autonomous 'zine or international mag?).
Note: You may want to consult www.dictionary.com for some of the more heady jargon used here, even though such is happily minimal; i.e."hypostasized" or "stochastic".
Anyway, here are the excerpts i like most, with some basic editing especially to bring emphasis. From the article "Ideology and the Human Sciences: Some Comments on the Role of Reification in Psychology and Psychiatry" by David Ingleby. Online at: human-nature.com/free-associations/ingleby.html (if the link no longer works, try the "Wayback Machine" at www.archive.org!!)
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"My first task is to understand the situation in which the majority of human scientists will find it hard to recognize any connection between them and their own experience of science - if indeed they perceive any meaning in the words at all; for (they will say) what are 'ideological ends'? How can objective science be politically partisan? What does 'de-humanizing' mean? What concept of 'human' does it assume, and how can we posit a priori [latin for prioritizing, I think] any such concept? ...we are groping in an area about which we are only just beginning to learn to speak. Until these concepts are more adequately clothed with meaning, therefore, an ideological critique will be doomed to incoherence."[my emphasis]
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"...in the human sciences, numerous examples can no doubt be found of a reluctance to reach conclusions which might challenge a particular ideology's model of man. ...criticism in terms of undue bias is made from within the particular framework of scientific principles accepted at a particular time or place, and reinforces rather than undermines those principles themselves. We need instead to become aware of the extent to which the prevailing ideology dominates even the apparently 'nonconformist' researcher, and (which turns out to be the same thing) the sense in which 'good' scientific practice, rather than 'bad', is prey to ideological influences." [my emphasis]
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"...to the extent that the human sciences are taking over from religion the function of providing man with a self-image, they should be seen in the same light as religious myths.
"The search for a central motif in psychology [and, in turn, psychiatry--ed], in which its ideological significance may be found, is hindered first of all by the totally mystifying front under which psychologists work, which disguises by straightforwardly contradicting the true nature of their work."
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"Psychologists claim to be social engineers, but turn out to be really maintenance men: in this, perhaps they are only sharing in the fond aspirations of all skilled mechanics.
"Thus we might sum up the whole of our theme by saying that psychology manages to lose sight of [hu-]man[-ity] with the effect (politically) that having been lost sight of, he cannot assert the demands of his nature against the social system that encloses him." [my emphasis] "This conjuring trick is achieved by the process of reification, that is, the reduction of human realities to the order of things..." Goes on to discuss the "Anglo-American tradition of psychology, which mentions the opposition only to stigmatize it as meaningless, dualistic, pre-scientific, etc."
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"Reification, i.e., the misrepresentation of praxis [practice + experience--ed] as process, will thus be the inevitable consequence of the failure to study contexts; even when the justice is done to the context, the intelligibility of praxis may still escape the observer who fails to look for the right meanings in the right places. The aim of this essay is to show how many different fallacies in psychology and psychiatry [my emphasis] can be subsumed under the concept of 'reification' as outlined above: the same process is involved in 'the methodological denial of any historical dimension to social facts'..."
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"...it does not explain why some ideas of natural science were accepted and others fairly strenuously rejected; and it does not even begin to ask in what frame of mind thing-sciences were applied to man in the first place."
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"We should recognize that the infiltration of value judgements into 'objective' terminology is not just loose talk, a psychological weakness of scientists; to classify actions which are seen as a threat to society as malignant process is a means of repression more final and devastating in its effects than any overt condemnation."
Subtitles that may inspire you to really take the time to read this essay in full:
The politics of psychiatry
The uses of an ideological critique
(includes a long list of notes for the independent-minded researcher-types (like me!))
A good article but does it go far enough?
On ideology in the sciences, it doesn't only affect the human sciences. One of the recognitions of modern philosophy of science is that firstly "facts" are always theory-laden, without the theory to interpret experimental results, the "facts" are just noise. As well, theory is culturally dependent. It's not true, as some anti-realists maintain, that this discounts all scientific theory, reducing it to "useful opinion", but it does point out that the theories that are posited, and then experimentally verified, are chosen in the first place due to ideology, not due to any scientific necessity.
While ancient and medieval science suffered from the situation where a plausible explanation happens to be the wrong one, and therefore experimental verification is a positive step, without the acute observation and deduction from observation prior to positing a theory, the theories experimented on become more arbitrary and more at the whims of dominant ideologies. When you combine this with the fact that most modern researchers receive no training in critical thinking, implausible theories are given funding for a "research program" quite often while far more plausible theories are ignored because they don't immediately imply a fundable research program, or because they go against the dominant ideology.
A further problem in psychology and psychiatry particularly is that after these disciplines were removed from their original foundation in theology, they no longer had a working definition of the psyche itself, and so no common basis with which to compare different theories. New psychological "theories" end up really being attempts to re-found the entire science, without making that transparent enough for the theorist to begin by defining the psyche. It's issues like this that led Rutherford to state "Physics is science, the rest is stamp collecting.". The attempts to apply the techniques of the natural sciences to psychology simply end up in inappropriate reductions, where by the time the analysis even begins the theorist has lost sight of the psyche and starts discussing neurons.
The "success" of modern science is fundamentally an illusion created by new things coming about as part of technology's mode of revealing, which is then accounted-for by modern science. In fact it's not difficult to make the case that since Descartes the archetype of the sciences is accounting, as a measurement of the abstract. The emphasis on explanation, especially explanation from origin, while ignoring comprehension of what something actually is, is an expression of this accounting in terms of an accounting-for.