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PARTISAN REVIEW
. generalizations about human thinking. . are emerging from the
experimental evidence . They are simple things, just as our hypothesis led
us to expect. Moreover , though the picture will continue to be enlarged
and clarified , we should not expect it
to
become essentially more com–
plex. Only human pride argues that the apparent intricacies of our path
stem from a quite different source than the intricacy of the ant 's path.
The hypothesis to be tested is, in part, that the inner environment of the
whole man is irrelevant to his behavior. One might suppose that in order to
test it , evidence that had the potential of falsifying it would be sought. One
might , for example, study man's behavior in the face of grief or of a profound
religious experience. But these examples do not easily lend themselves to the
methods for the study of human subjects developed in psychologicallabora–
tories. Nor are they likely to lead to the simple things an experimenter's
hypotheses lead him to expect. They lie in the darkness in which the theorist,
in fact , has lost his keys; but the light is so much better under the lamppost
he himself has erected.
There is thus no chance whatever that Simon's hypothesis will be falsified
in his or his colleagues' minds . The circle oflight that determines and delimits
his range of vision simply does not illuminate any areas in which questions of,
say, values or of subjectivity can possibly arise. Questions of that kind, being,
as they must be , entirely outside his universe of discourse, can therefore not
serve to lead him out of the conceptual framework which , like all other magi–
cal explanatory systems, has a ready reserve of possible hypotheses available to
explain any conceivable event.
Almost the entire enterprise that is modern science and technology is
afflicted with the drunkard 's search syndrome, and with the myopic vision
which is its direct result. But, as Huxley , too, pointed out, this myopia cannot
sustain itself without being nourished by experiences of success . Science and
technology are sustained by their translations into power and control. To the
extent that computers and computation may be counted as part of science and
technology , they feed at the same table. The extreme phenomenon of the
compulsive programmer teaches us that computers have the power
to
sustain
megalomaniac fantasies. But that power of the computer is merely an extreme
instance of that same power inherent in all other self-validating systems of
thought . Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems,
the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the
constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world , may fail
catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest . We must also learn
that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally
detached from authentic human experience-particularly in those sciences
that insist they can capture
the whole man
in their abstract skeletal
frameworks.
