ABSTRACT
There were few more penetrating commentators on professional life in America than the late Everett Cherrington Hughes. In a series of articles, capped by one in the American Psychologist nearly sixty years ago, in 1952, he discussed the relationship between science and profession and their impact on psychology. Hughes was not launching a broadside against professional life so much as noting that its imperatives and directives depart substantially from the norms of scientific method. In his time, he fought mightily to expand the responsibility of professions to public opinion. The lacuna in Hughes' analysis was his failure to see that the struggle over the nature of science in society takes place largely within professional life. In political science the gulf between normative theorizing and empirical description could hardly be wider. In psychology the key rift, indeed rupture, is between clinical uncovery and experimental discovery as methods for determining evidence.
