Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE CHARACTER AND ORGANIZATION OF THE SCIENCES - COMTE

« the different sciences, and their interrelations, we can improve the organization of scientific research.

For newwork, especially that requiring several disciplines, will be suggested by various features of the general scheme andbe fitted into it appropriately.

We shall not, for example, waste energy in grappling with topics such as psychologyfor which there is, and can be, no positive science.

The other ground is that the scheme aids us to renovate oursystem of theoretical education; the student learns the general concepts, procedures and conclusions that belongto the scientific method itself while also learning how they are exemplified in the various sciences.

For until ‘acertain number of general ideas can be acknowledged as a rallying point of social doctrine, the nations will remain ina revolutionary state'.

But once ‘first principles' are agreed upon, ‘appropriate institutions will issue from them...forthe causes of disorder will have been arrested by the mere fact of agreement' and a ‘normal state of society' willensue.

([6.11], 1:16).

The disorder to which Comte refers was that marked both by the July revolution of 1830 inwhich the French king, Charles X, was forced to abdicate in the face of middle-class opposition, and by theproletarian riots during the turbulent years of his successor, Louis Philippe, until he abdicated during the Februaryrevolution of 1848.The sociological significance of Comte's law is that he took each of its three stages to be closely intertwined—forhe could not have said causally connected—with the three phases into which he divided European history, phasescharacterized by the relative strength during each period of the temporal and spiritual (religious or philosophical)authorities.

Society in the first phase, dominated from the fourth to the fifteenth century by Catholicism andfeudalism, was organized, in its economic structure, for war, and in its intellectual structure for the need of apriestly caste, with its theological knowledge, to share power with the nobles of a military court.

The latterdemanded ‘passive obedience' from the common people, and the former required their ‘mental submission'.

In thesecond or metaphysical phase, the Protestant subversion of Papal authority replaced blind faith with a limiteddegree of intellectual freedom and political authority for the educated or the wealthy.

At the same time, free cities,the bourgeoisie and science began their development and interacted with the effects of the Protestant Reformation.In consequence, we are now in the modern phase of industrialism, positive science and political revolutionariesseeking legislative, administrative and social power.

Our technological and scientific advances must be matched,therefore, by new forms of social and political authority.

These new forms are what Comte believes that he, andperhaps he alone, can offer.

He does so in his second major work, the Système de politique positive, after havingdescribed in the Cours the scientific method and knowledge that are to culminate in the positivist society.However, Comte devoted only two introductory chapters (or lessons), and one later chapter, of the entire sixty inthe Cours to basic problems in the philosophy of science.

These include the scientific status of psychology, thenature of scientific explanation and, of course, the character, scope and application of the Law of Three Stages.Comterejected the study of psychology because he took it to rely on unverifiable introspection of the intellectualprocesses and the passions.

To this he objected that ‘there can be nothing like scientific observation of thepassions, except from without, as the stir of the emotions disturbs the observing faculties more or less'.

Nor canthere be an ‘intellectual observation of intellectual processes.

The observing and observed organ are here the same,and its action cannot be pure and natural'.

The reason, for this, he thinks, is that ‘In order to observe, yourintellect must pause from activity; yet it is this very activity that you want to observe'.

Unless your intellect canpause, it cannot observe.

But if it does pause, there is nothing left to observe ([6.11], 1:12).

Of this argument JohnStuart Mill complained, many years after his initial enthusiasm for Comte's views had waned, that it is ‘a fallacyrespecting which the only wonder is that it should impose on anyone'.

For if we can learn about the mental life ofother people only by observing their behaviour, how can we ever interpret it unless we are allowed to use ourknowledge of our own feelings and thoughts? We cannot obtain that knowledge merely by observing our ownbehaviour.

In fact, we obtain self-knowledge both by memory and by our ability to attend to ‘a considerable numberof impressions at once'.

Comte's wish to replace introspection with observation of behaviour, including physiologicalreactions, neglects the impossibility of then correlating that behaviour with what on his own view is our inaccessiblemental life.Mill recognizes that Comte believes that all mental states are produced by—invariably succeed—states of the brain,and hence that the regularities of succession among mental states necessarily depend upon similar regularitiesamong brain states.

Nevertheless, even if this is correct, Mill argues, mental regularities cannot be deduced atpresent from physiological regularities.

We are able to investigate the latter only because we have a betterknowledge of the former ([6.47], 63–4).

Mill could have added what he also knew: that for all Comte's argumentshows, the actual relation between mental states and brain states is the reverse of what Comte believes, and thatthe latter invariably follow on the former.

In any case, the fact that one invariably follows on the other doesnothing to make the later regularity either impossible to observe or in some way fictitious.

The temporal relation, ifany, between the two kinds of regularity is irrelevant to their observability—except that if one of them wereunobservable in principle we should find it difficult to establish the temporal relationship.Comte's dismissal of psychology as a genuine science was not based on the scientific evidence available to him, andthe rejection led him to neglect describing what Mill did describe in Book VI of A System of Logic (1843), the natureof the relationship between psychological and sociological phenomena—between ‘the operations of mental life' andthe genuine, or irreducible, laws of society of which Comte was the tireless herald.

Comte did assert that theexplanation of individual human actions could not be logically derived from supposed ‘laws of individual life', whetherthese laws were psychological or otherwise.

For individual actions are the outcome of combined biological and socialfactors that accumulate over time, and thus create the societies to which all actions of individual people owe theirexistence.

Because such factors underlie and produce the psychological features of every person, it is only thefundamental sociological laws that permit us to explain those features.

The laws do so by explaining the character,origin and changes of particular types of societies and of civilization taken as a whole.

These conclusions, popularthroughout the nineteenth century, were one answer to the. »