Following the tradition of modernist philosophers, there seem to be two rules for any modern science to succeed.
(1) The method of that science must be sought in its subject-matter.
(2) Every determination must be deduced from a previous state in which that determination is not yet explicitly realized as such.
These are criteria by which good sciences proceed, and which lesser sciences, or sciences still in a state of confusion, ought to obey. The grossest confusion may be found in what used be called "behavioral psychology" and the traces it left in contemporary psychology and sociology. The idea prevalent here is that human behavior can be subjected to "experiments," and "hypotheses" can be "tested" against these experiments, just like the case in physics. Now, in so far as the human being is considered as a body with many physiological and biological properties, the inquiry is harmless. However, when this method is extended to the study of the human mind, as well as the relation between what the person thinks and what the person does, then things begin to go awry.
There is a famous experiment in sociology, which may be called the Elevator Experiment. Five people populate an elevator, all hired by the experimenter. A hidden camera is placed behind the ceiling. An ordinary citizen enters the elevator. While the elevator is moving, all of the five hired people turn leftward, 90 degrees. The poor man, who feels uncomfortable that he is the only one standing straight facing the direction of the elevator door, also shifts around and eventually turns leftward, 90 degrees. The experiment is repeated for other people who enter the elevator, and the same results obtain: every newcomer turns leftward in response to the behavior of the five hired people.
Now what the experiment aims to establish is the fact that some of our behaviors are socially determined. However, beyond this point the more precise consequences are less clear. Consider, for example, the fact that the experiment was set within an elevator, where indeed people have nothing better to do than to stay put in a relatively stupified state. In this environment, the most trivial change in the behavior of others would have stimulated the newcomer much more than, say, in a different situation such as a meeting room or in the mountains, where many things are on each person's mind, including ideas on what one ought to do next. While in each of these situations it is undoubtedly true that certain behaviors - often very trivial ones - are due to habits nurtured in society, often times the real issues that matter to the person in the non-trivial situation are not wholly determined by the behavior of others.
For instance, in the case of the meeting room, questions such as "how one ought to conduct oneself in a discussion?" "what ideas one ought to express?" "in what sort of context is it appropriate to express such ideas?" and so on immediately affect the thinkers involved. When the underlying purpose of the thinker is to "blend in" to the gathering and to follow what is normal, then the answers to these questions will most likely be determined through social norms and habits, as well as how others speak and behave on that particular occasion. But if the thinker has a degree of independence, and wishes to base his ideas and conduct on more than mere convention, then the way in which he chooses to present himself to others will be determined by something other than the observable behaviors of others in the same room. In this latter case, no amount of experimenting can give us insight into why this person has decided to express these ideas in just these manners. The sufficient answer must come from a method suited to the process of thinking which was that thinker's.
Now the sociologist who believes that all behaviors of any sort can be explained by appeal to social norms, might say that what appears to be the original thoughts belonging to the thinker's spontaneous reflections are really conditioned through and through by what others have deemed "normal" and "acceptable" under similar circumstances. The thinker, then, is merely re-combining the elements of these previously acquired norms.
The above line of thought rests upon two fallacies, which are both violations of rules (1) and (2) respectively. The first fallacy comes from the fact that the sociologist takes a phenomenon that is not social to be a social phenomenon. The reflection of the thinker is not a reflection guided by the purpose of conformity and social harmony. It rather rests upon very different principles, and moreover the thinker is more or less aware that this is the case. By distorting the subject-matter so that it will conform to his sociological method, the sociologist in essence fails to take into account this self-reflective aspect of what the thinker is doing. The second fallacy is that the sociologist presupposes what in fact only arouse afterwards. What I mean is that the norms to which the thinker allegedly conforms do not exist prior to the thoughts and conduct on the part of the thinker. If the thinker is successful in his conduct, he will most likely establish a new norm, to which future thinkers will aspire. While it may be just to explain the behaviors of these subsequent followers by appealing to the norm established by the first thinker, the same cannot be the method by which to explain how the thinker himself came to think and act in this particular way.
This kind of distortion and illegitimate presupposing is more commonplace in the dubious sciences than is desirable. This is one more good reason for studying logic from a properly philosophical point of view, that is, in abstraction from its application to particular branches of thought.
