Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (65 page)

One might say that it is an imposition upon a mathematician and philosopher to require him to resolve all the problems himself and to put forth all improvements. Indeed, it is an imposition that he be required to develop any technique of application at all, for there should be in any society an apportionment of labor.

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When the basic axioms and computations were finished, it was impossible to release them for there were none to whom such research could be released for application. Thus the work had to be carried out to its furthest extent of not only experimentation but the development and proof of the techniques of application.

One might here use an analogy of bridge engineering. Let us suppose that two plateaus exist, one higher than the other, with a canyon between them. An engineer sees that if the canyon could be crossed by traffic, the hitherto unused higher plateau, being much more fertile and pleasant, would become the scene of a new culture. He sets himself the task of building a bridge. It has been supposed that no bridge could be built across the canyon and indeed, since those on the lower plateau could not see the higher level, the existence of the higher plateau itself was denied. The engineer, by evolving new principles of bridge building and discovering new significance in his materials, manages to throw a bridge across the canyon. He himself crosses and he inspects the plateau carefully; others cross over his bridge and examine the new terrain with delight. Still more and more cross the bridge. The bridge is solid and, if not wide, can yet safely be negotiated. It has not been built for heavy fast traffic. But it contains the basic principles and axioms by which the canyon can be spanned again and again. Many people begin to approach the canyon and look up.

What sort of an opinion would you have of the society on the lower plateau if they but moaned and wept and argued and gave no hand at all in the matter of widening the bridge or making new bridges?

In this handbook we have the basic axioms and a therapy which works.

For God’s sake, get busy and build a better bridge!

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APPENDIX I

The Philosophic Method

Science seems always to advance, while philosophy seems always to lose ground. Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science -- problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement. Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown, ... or of the inexactly known ... it is the front trench in the siege of truth.

Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect and marvelous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and the unexplored.

Shall we be more technical? Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Turgenev’s poem: he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom -- desire coordinated in the light of all experience -- can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Will Durant

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APPENDIX II

The Scientific Method

The Scientific Method is based solidly on definite rules, but is none the less, like the American Way of Life, something that must be lived to be fully understood. The United States has a Constitution, but the American Way of Life is far more than that; so the Scientific Method is, while based on certain readily cited rules, far more than those rules.

For one thing, the Scientific Method implies zestfully, gleefully attacking, with every available weapon of logic, every possible logical loophole in -- your own structure of logic and theory. It requires that a man tear into his carefully built theory with the vim, vigor and spite of his worst enemy. It implies that a scientist’s best friend will review his work starting with the premise that it’s all wrong and do his best to prove it’s wrong.

For the intellectual triumph, the warm glow of victory in science, comes not from producing a new theory -- but from producing a new theory that stands up, and is useful, even when the most knowing make deliberate attempts to find a flaw.

The Scientific Method is behind the testing of Navy armor plate. The production of a perfect piece of 16-inch armor plate is routine and gives no special satisfaction. But the production of a slab of 16-inch armor plate with a 16-inch armor-piercing projectile with its nose buried in that armor, a plate bulged, distorted, but unpierced and unbroken -- that is triumph and satisfaction. We don’t test the 16-inch plate with machine-gun fire, or with 6-inch projectiles. Test it with the heaviest, deadliest weapons you’ve got; then, and only then, do you have something to be proud of.

So with a theory.

There are rules for argument that lead to the building of a theory; they can be condensed to three key, critical points, the sense of which is clear. The problem in application is the subtlety with which violations of those rules can creep in. The critical rules are: 1.

Argument by appeal to authority is of no value whatever.

2.

The observation, not the observer’s report, are the important data.

3.

No theory, however well-established or long-held, can stand in the face of one relevant, contradictory fact.

The first of those rules is the one that is most often violated, usually quite unintentionally and without realizing it. Everybody knows that appeal to authority is no sound way to argue a case, even if the authority happens to be right. Yet so subtle can appeal to authority be that, it is exceedingly easy to miss noticing its insertion; the preceding sentence, for instance, deliberately exemplifies one type of very easily missed “appeal to authority,”

actually the most common of all such appeals. “Everybody knows,” “of course,” “naturally”

and similar phrases are the slipperiest customers in that respect. “Everybody knew” the world was flat for a long, long time, and “of course” the Sun went around the Earth, as any fool could plainly see. And common clay and the precious ruby have nothing in common --

nothing, that is, except the same elements in somewhat different proportions.

But even the less subtle appeal-to-authority that is stamped with the Great Name is a source of immense amounts of trouble. It was not Aristotle’s fault that, for nearly a thousand years, science was stopped still by consistent appeal to Aristotle; he didn’t claim he knew all the answers -- the scholastic arguers did. Even today, in an age which has some understanding of the scientific method, Great Name arguments show up -- except, of course, that the Great Name himself has become a Great Name by most carefully refraining from using that method!

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The sentence, “Einstein says that nothing is faster than the speed of light; it is theoretically impossible,” contains two arguments by appeal to authority, and sounds so learnedly scientific that anyone might be taken in by it. Saying a thing is “theoretically impossible” is, actually, appeal to the authority of present theories. But a theory is not a fact -- it’s an intelligent set of opinions, and no more, as any scientist realizes. So far as the Great Name argument goes, those are easy to spot, and their value comes into focus very quickly if you simply substitute the arbitrary name “Joe Doakes” for the Great Name. The corrected, scientific-method sentence above -- so far as argumentative value goes -- would read, “Joe Doakes says nothing is faster than the speed of light; in his informed opinion it appears impossible.”

Scientifically, there is no difference whatever between the two statements, so far as evidential value goes. The evidence-statement on the subject would read, “Einstein suggested, and physical experiment appears to prove, that nothing is faster than the speed of light; current physical theory, which seems to fit most of the observed data, indictates it is impossible.”

That is, admittedly, a much less solidly satisfying sort of statement. It sounds weak, uncertain of itself or anything else. And it is the sort of statement -- the sort of thinking -- that went from the first small scientific evidence of the atomic theory in 1800 to atomic fission in less than a century and a half. It is the scientist -- who operates on the principle that he doesn’t already know all the answers -- who is out looking for new and better answers. A man who thinks in terms of “This is the answer. I know this is true. That is impossible, because it disagrees with what I know,” does not have to do research. He already knows the answers. He is in no danger of making new and disturbing discoveries that might upset his certainty of mind. The scientist, on the other hand, operates with the certain knowledge that he is uncertain; he is never disappointed, for new data is constantly being found -- he’s looking for it -- that shows that he was, indeed, a bit mistaken.

The non-scientist, who likes to work with Truths and Certainties and think in Absolutes, the method of uncertainties and probabilities seems stifling, an impossible method of operation. It is so impossible that it produces, in a single century, electric light and power, radio, television, atomics, the entire science of organic chemistry ranging from dyes to synthetic drugs, automobiles, airplanes -- practically an entirely new civilization.

By realizing that no theory is final, complete, or perfect, a new concept is admitted: a theory is good so long as it is useful. It is, naturally, a very pleasant thing if the theory also happens to be true, but that (shocking though the thought may be to the layman) is not at all necessary. The really important question is not, “Is it true?” but “Does it work?” If it works, we can use it and pretend it’s true; if it is true, that’s an added bonus.

This reasoning, which seems to some specious and downright dishonest, is the only method so far found that produces results. Look about you: every product that has been touched by machines in its production is a demonstration of the observed fact that, by provisionally assuming a theory is true, concrete, useful results can be obtained. And that by maintaining a willingness to discard or modify that theory at the first sign of failure, progress is made.

For if a theory is good only when it works, then the first time it fails to work -- the first fact it encounters which does not fit -- the theory must be discarded, and a new and better one found. Only someone who insists that a theory is Truth would hesitate to discard a theory that didn’t work. And a scientist never insists that a theory is Truth; only that it is useful.

When an apparent contradiction appears, however, the most careful checking must be instituted. First: check the interpretation of the theory. The basic concepts of the theory might be right, and the application of those concepts wrong. The reinterpretation of the theory may explain the new fact. Second, and actually simultaneously, remember that the observation, not the observer’s report, is the datum, and repeat the observations. The observer may have been wrong. Men can’t see beyond the violet or below the red; quinine makes a man’s ears ring, so he hears sounds that aren’t there, and no man can hear sounds above 20,000 cycles when they 256

are there. Under ultraviolet light, the human eyeball glows slightly, so that one sees a mist of light that isn’t there, but since we can’t see ultraviolet light itself, an observer will not see the source of ultraviolet that is there. Always check the observations; the observer may be wrong.

But actual observations, tacts, are never wrong.

One source of a lot of misunderstanding is the difference between theoretical impossibility and factual impossibility. That is best illustrated, perhaps, by the old story of the man who telephoned his lawyer, explained a legal contretemps, and was told, “Don’t worry about it; they can’t put you in jail for that!” The client replied, “I’m calling from the jail.”

A slight change on that might demonstrate reverse aspect. Make the troubled caller a circus owner; this time we’ll say the lawyer replies, “That’s serious. I’m afraid they can put your elephant in jail for that.”

In each case, theory is in conflict with physical fact; in each case, as it invariably must by the very nature of things, theory, not fact, breaks down.

But all of this is, in essence, a discussion of the scientific method of argument, of thought. There is, at the root of it all, the scientific technique, the final test and proving ground of all scientific thinking. Ideally, the scientific method follows seven steps: 1.