“Psychology is the child of two quarreling parents,” says Jerome Kagan, distinguished investigator into children’s development, and author of a cross between memoir and history, An Argument for Mind (p. 8). The quarreling parents are philosophy and biology. These days we could also add computer science, but Kagan expresses no interest in computational representations of mental processes. Since any inquiry into speech origins can claim those same quarreling parents (along with linguistics) I had some good hopes for this book, and it does provide an excellent sense of method and caution in making claims.
The books’s first chapter is something of a tour de force in the way it combines Kagan’s intellectual autobiography (pretty much nothing on his personal or emotional life) with a history of psychology in the 1950s. If he could have kept it up, he would have produced a classic kind of intellectual memoir, but, not surprisingly, he couldn’t keep it up. Partly this seems to be a lack of narrative technique, and partly a lack of discipline.
Discipline in writing means crossing things out, especially the things you love. If you plan to present ideas rather than the wife and kids in your memoir, you had better cross out everything that can be summed up with Seinfeld’s yadda yadda. On page 98 I scrawled the word “riffing” in the book’s margin because he was taking us through a random series of subjects—creationism, pornography and local values, the movie Casablanca, the League of Nations, ethnic cleansing, gay marriage, and on and on—without ever saying anything surprising. I doubt that he ever even looked up anything to include in these riffs. Writing two and a half pages off the top of the head is the luxury of an author who is sure of his publisher.
The contradiction here is that the book is excellent on the argument that we should not just offer ideas from the top of one's head and then try to prove them. Kagan’s hero is Roger Brown, a long-time psychologist at Harvard whose book A First Language was based on the study and observation of what children say as they develop speech. Kagan became a great child psychologist because he collected mountains of data and then looked for their meaning; he did not first figure out how the world must work and then collect data to prove his point. He writes, for example:
It took more than a year of poring over all the evidence to appreciate that the appearance of words that referred to self—words like “I,” “my,” “mine”—and to the child’s feelings was the best predictor of the month when dramatic improvements in performance on our cognitive tests appeared. The emergence of an awareness of self could initiate and suppresses actions, be evaluated by others, and experience feelings functioned as an organizer. (p. 121)
Now there is an observation to be appreciated!
Over the decadesI have read mountains of paragraphs about the emergence of self that are heavy on philosophy and vague on facts. I mistrust almost all of them because the notion of the self’s centrality is such a peculiar feature of the modern west with its economic view of “rational self-interest” and political emphasis on the “individual.” Such a culturally distinct notion cannot really be the distinguishing feature of humanity. But Kagan says something else, and he bases it on facts observed: We use self-awareness as an “organizer.”
Because it is technical rather than philosophical, Kagan’s observation has a better chance of being correct across many cultures. Outside the west, values tend to be more community-oriented and people frequently understand themselves as parts of a group; however, a person can be very community-oriented and yet still use self-awareness as a way to organize thoughts and expressions about community membership.
Relationships like the one between self-awareness and mental organization, based on observation, are Kagan’s strongest point and make clear Kagan’s distinction between proof-based theories and discovery-based theories.
Proof-based theories make an assertion and prove it by finding supporting data. Much of the behaviorist theory that dominated psychology at mid-century was based on the assertion that animals only acted in return for a reward. They were able to show examples of reward-based learning while ignoring the many counterexamples. Their experiments demonstrated their assertion rather than tested it.
Discovery based theories amass data and see what can be said about it. The temptation here is to find something abstract to say so that one’s theory is as general as possible, but an explorer who can stay with specifics returns to civilization with new facts to build with.
Psychologists tend to suffer from deep envy of physics and its ability to make very accurate, very general statements. “Many psychologists would love to write equations with the power of Isaac Newton’s terse statement that force is the product of mass and acceleration.” (p. 11) But they forget that Newton could see so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants who had amassed a pile of discovery-based statements. Those statements were very specific. Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are about the orbits of planets. Galileo’s studies of motion are about falling objects. Once these specific laws existed, Newton could synthesize them into a general law of gravity. If psychology ever assembles enough specifics, it too may produce a Newton able to provide a more general law. Synthesis rather than abstraction is the way to obtain powerful scientific generalizations, a point Kagan almost makes but never quite spells out.
There is much food for thought in this memoir; too bad it’s sandwiched between so much yadda yadda.
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