ABSTRACT
Interobservation is designed to overcome the idea that partial experiences of the world may be irreconcilable or at least hard to collate, as the parable of the blind men and the elephant suggests. In contrast, there is Paolo Bozzi’s approach, the method of interobservation. The experimenter assigns a task to a group of observers who try to produce a consensual description. This chapter argues that Bozzi implies that psychology is poor in well-founded, systematic, consensually agreed-upon description. Biology emerged from ambitious efforts to create natural histories, systematised collections of observational data, culminating in the 1930s with development of ethology by Niko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and von Frisch. With few exceptions, psychology seems to have pushed observation into the non-public context of discovery, by staying within the chain of evidence offered by previous non-observational studies, as the example of Spears shows.
