EMPIRICISM IS A HOAX:

Some of Cowles's most interesting discussions, in Chapters Two and Three, concern the way in which evolutionary theory became a way of thinking about mental development. Mill had seen the need for a science of the mind, an empirical psychology, to underpin his own account of science, and evolutionary theory, initially dismissed by Darwin's critics as being unscientific, was taken on board as a scientific resource. Darwin's followers would attempt to turn scientific thinking into an instinct, using the theory of natural selection to explain how the capacity for science had first emerged.

Cowles sums up his major thesis when he writes that in "the decades between Darwin's translation of an experimental idiom into an evolutionary theory and Dewey's use of that theory to buttress new approaches to experimentalism, we find a kind of chaotic coherence, a patterned assembly of reference and self-reflection". This takes us to the development of psychology, for more than any other discipline, it was psychology that fostered a scientific image by promoting its exclusively empirical "scientific method". [...]

As Cowles remarks, commenting on Charles Eliot's reforms at Harvard in the 1870s, science and its benefits were now central to the understanding of liberal education and its relation to progress, and a new generation of psychologists was crucial to enacting this vision. But what the discipline actually delivered was classification, and it is in this (rather than in the kinds of academic developments that Cowles focuses on), that one finds the explanation for empirical psychology's towering status in the early decades of the twentieth century. The influence that psychology came to wield was less the result of genuine theoretical developments among serious researchers, than of the pragmatic benefits the discipline seemed to bring. A classic example of its supposed practical uses comes in the form of the "mental test", a term coined by James Cattell, which was used to measure the apparent cognitive skills of its subjects. Cattell sold this appearance of "science" to the American public, but receives only passing mention in Cowles's account.

No one now could count Cattell's project of anthropometric mental testing as anything other than a shallow, confused exercise, and a complete waste of time as far as the development of psychology was concerned. Yet its significance was immense. Its importance derived from the fact that, in the first decade of the twentieth century, America was faced with millions of new immigrants with completely different cultural backgrounds and educational achievements. Rapid industrialization and the rise of new professions meant that some formalized criteria were required to judge applicants for jobs: they needed to be ordered and, through education, Americanized. Cattell's testing programme met an immediate need, trumping more cautious and thoughtful forms of psychological research in its ability to promote itself as a crucial resource for assessing the abilities of newly arrived immigrants.

Psychology, as the bastion of empirical testing, has always remained highly problematic. In 2015, an international team of 270 university researchers set out to repeat 100 psychology experiments published in top psychology journals, publishing their results in Science. They found that they were unable to reproduce 64 per cent of the findings: 75 per cent of social psychology experiments failed the test, as did half the cognitive psychology experiments. This is not just a problem for psychology, but more generally for the idea of a scientific method that is taken to guarantee objective results. The kind of exploration that Henry Cowles offers, which traces the connections between scientific method and psychology, is accordingly especially welcome.

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