ABSTRACT
During the past century psychologists have participated in what might be considered one of humankind’s greatest intellectual adventures. They have, in J. L. Austin’s (1962) terms, joined in the “pursuit of the incorrigible,” or the “always true,” a pursuit that has challenged thinkers from Heraclitus to the present. Perhaps the major stimulus for recent pursuits can be traced to philosophers of science who came to believe that it is possible to discern within the variegated activities of the natural sciences a common pattern of acquiring knowledge. As maintained, when those rules of knowledge acquisition were properly distilled, the resulting elixir would transform the character of human life. Natural scientists might employ such rules to determine what forms of inquiry were productive and thus accelerate manifold the impressive advances of the centuries preceding. And, within other spheres of inquiry, including the sociobehavioral sciences, the adoption of such rules would insure progress no less significant than the harnessing of electrical energy, the discovery of genetic transmission, or the smashing of the atom. In Bertrand Russell’s (1956) terms, it was hoped that one day there would be a “mathematics of human behavior as precise as the mathematics of machines.” I am speaking here, of course, of the positivist–empiricist movement toward a unified science, a movement generally committed to the belief that when properly employed theoretical language can act as a representation of the contours of nature and can be constrained through rigorous assessment of such contours. With steady increments in the objective certainty of theoretical language, humans might become the arbiters of their own destiny.
