Journal for the Theory of Social Behauiour 16: I March I 986

0 0 2 1-8308 $2.50

The Ambiguities of Self-understanding

STEPHEN TOULMIN

The problems with which the present symposium is concerned, as arising from
“social psychology’s inadvertent rediscovery of the self ’, exemplify the
teething troubles that still face us in turning psychology into a “modern”
science. If they are viewed on too short a time scale, they will remain
perplexing. But, if we look behind the research programme that Wilhelm
Wundt laid down for “experimental” psychology a century ago, and
discount certain idiosyncracies of the English language, we shall find it
easier not only to see that those puzzles are unavoidable, but also to
understand why that is so.
As we shall see, the most that the noun “self’ can be for psychology is a
shorthand sign, pointing to the whole realm of deliberate conduct and
reflexive experience: even then, it only hints at the full range of conduct and
experience involved. If we take it to denote anything more concrete, it may
mislead us into attempts to locate an elusive entity: “the selfitself ’, so to say.
Either way, “the self’ breaks the normal bounds of scientific method, and
pushes us in the direction of humanistic inquiries. By itself, that does not
make our investigations less “scientific”; but it does help to remind us how
much the scope of scientific inquiry has expanded, and how far its methods
have changed, since natural philosophers laid down the basic ground rules
of “modern science” in the seventeenth century.
The present commentary pursues several of these issues, in turn. I t begins
by recalling the limits that the founders of modern science placed on
scientific inquiry, and shows how these limitations excluded scientific
study of ‘Lagency” or “the self ’. Against this background, it re-examines
two crucial contrasts between the physical and the behavioural sciences.
First, as to (a), the nature and role of experiments in behavioural science:
some assumptions about the “experimental method” which are properly
taken for granted in the physical sciences cannot be carried over into
psychology. Second, as to (b), the nature and scope of psychological
generalizations: any attempt to establish universal laws and theories in
 42 Stephen Toulmin
psychology assumes that their subject matter is more theoretical and
abstract, less practical and concrete, than it in fact is. O n the other hand, if
psychologists aim at phronesis (“practical wisdom”) rather than episteme
(“exact theory”), they may find it easier to acknowledge that - as Wilhelm
Wundt himself knew - the historical and cultural contexts of human
thought and conduct limit the ability of the behavioural sciences to
generalize.
In passing, we may see how the substantival noun “self’ helps to mislead
us into adopting too general an approach to psychology. Taking all these
issues together, the “rediscovery of the self’ may yet open up ways of
overcoming the current divisions between the sub-branches of psychology,
~

and moving toward a more integrated view of the subject. This, however,
depends on our acknowledging that the cultural and social contexts within
which all psychological investigations are conducted cannot be kept out of
their results, and revising our intellectual expectations and methods of
research accordingly.

PART I
MODERN SCIENCE AND THE “INVISIBLE AGENT”

It may at first seem surprising that “reflexive” and “self-directed” activities as

close to daily experience as thinking to yourself, watching your step, and
caring how people think of you, should have waited for so long to become
topics for scientific study. If we recall the original strategy of modern science,
however, this surprise will prove misplaced. From the start, the “mathemat-
ical and experimental philosophy” (as its founders called it) set rational
reflection, thought and conduct outside the science of causal “nature”; and
what held good for rational activities directed at the causal world of nature
held good even more surely of the “self-directed” (i.e. reflexive) aspects of
mental life and experience.
Three elements in the new natural philosophy combined to banish most of
psychology (and, notably, “self-study”) from the scope of modern science.
They are the following:
( I ) the basic axiom of mechanics that all material objects and systems in
the natural world are “inert”, or passive;
( 2 ) the classical ideal of scientific “observation” as that of an outside agent
who studies natural phenomena involving material systems, without
modifying them in the process; and
(3) the consequent requirements about the nature and cogency of valid
“experimental” procedures.
Ifwe take these three features into account, we shall see how “agency”- and,
particularly, “the self’ - became inaccessible, even invisible, to the research
procedures of “modern science”.
 The Ambiguities of Sew- Understanding 43

(I) The inertness of matter

The belief that material objects and systems are “inert”, and so incapable of
initiating actions, or even movements, was an unquestioned starting point of
seventeenth century mechanics, and of the associated natural philosophy. T o
Isaac Newton and his successors, from the 1680s on, as much as to RenC
Descartes fifty years earlier, any argument that one material body can do more
than transmit to another such body motions originating elsewhere (let alone
ex:rcise “agency” over it) was ridiculous. Scientific writings of the time are full
of asides like, “that matter cannot put itself in motion is allowed by all men”;
and Newton took great care to dissociate himself from the idea, e.g., that the
Sun “acted” directly upon the Earth. Either (he argued) “gravitational
attraction” was a secondary effect of mechanical collisions and interactions in
some underlying quasi-material medium (or “aether”), or else it was a direct
manifestation of God’s continuing activity within the operations of Nature.
This axiom had some unhappy consequences. Giovanni Borelli, for
instance, hoped to explain the movements of animals and birds: he could give
an account of the mechanical links between the muscles, skeleton and nerves,
and the respects in which their movements were interdependent; but he could
only hint that the final origin of (say) a bird’s taking flight lay in an
“immaterial agency” acting on its brain. So the very rigour of the new
scientists’ determination to limit physics to mechanical processes drove them
into both psychological mentalism and physiological vitalism. True, in their
eyes, the broader advantages of a mechanistic physics made this price worth
paying; but for “human philosophy”, this -the original research programme
of modern science -imposed severe limitations.
Two revealing tautologies sum up the point. For modern science in its
seventeenth century form, the prototypical objects of research were objects; and
physical objects alone lent themselves to objective study. Scientists dealing with
(e.g.) the structure of rocks, the acceleration of balls on an inclined plane, or
the motion of blood corpuscles through the arteries, could be confident that
these things were not counter-suggestible, and would not behave unusually
just because they were under observation. Nor need they worry (as the
alchemists had done) lest their own states of mind might change their
observations. Using the new research methods, objectivity and reproducibility
were available, just because scientists focussed their attention on the “inert”
systems and “physical” phenomena that best responded to those methods.

(2) The scientist as rational onlooker

Correspondingly, the ideal posture for modern scientists minimized (if
possible, eliminated) the effects of their observational activities on the
phenomena that they were studying. The more perfectly this was done, the
44 Stephen Toulmir,
more “objective” the resulting observations would be. The astronomer
Laplace stated this ideal in its extreme form, by supposing an Omniscient
Calculator who, given the positions and velocities of all the atoms in the
physical universe at the Creation, could use Newton’s laws of motion to
compute the entire subsequent history of that universe. However, in order to
realize this image, Laplace’s “calculator” must be able, both to measure the
current position and velocity of all particles without changing them, and also to
perform the resulting computation from a standpoint outside the material world
to which its results referred.
For some two hundred years, modern science developed fruitfully without
going beyond phenomena for which these assumptions held good. The world
of physics was a comprehensive mechanical clock, and the task of science was
to figure out the workings of its movement. Only recently has it become clear
that not all phenomena are of this kind, even within physics: John Dewey’s
1929 Gifford Lectures (The Quest f o r Certainty) showed that this is the true
lesson of Werner Heisenberg’s “indeterminacy principle”. In scientific fields
like psychiatry and ecology, by contrast, the posture of Laplace’s detached
calculator had never been appropriate. If philosophically minded scientists had
reflected sooner on the special methodological demands of such fields, indeed,
the limits of the earlier deterministic vision might have been recognized
sooner.

(3) The idea of a scientific ‘<experiment’’

What was true of scientific observations was a fortiori true of scientific
<c
experiments”. An astronomer could study the planet Venus transiting the
disc of the eclipsed Sun (say) without any risk ofchanging the phenomenon by
the act of watching it. Designing a proper scientific experiment likewise
involved devising an artificial situation, in which the physical behaviour of
material objects could be recorded, while minimizing the effects of the
experimental procedure on those processes.
So, once again, the validity of the experimental method depended on the
assumption that the effects of an experiment on the phenomena being
studied could always be reduced to an acceptable and measurable extent.
Bitter experience has subsequently shown that this assumption is anything but
universal. Or, to put the point more exactly, bitter experience has now obliged
scientists to recognize that this assumption holds good o n b in a certain limited
range ofcases and situations; and, specifically, that most of the subject matter
of modern psychology lies outside this range.
T o psychologists who know the history of their subject, none of this is news.
Rent Descartes, Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Wundt all had reservations
about the chances of developing a comprehensive “scientific” psychology; and
their doubts were closely connected with our present point. Descartes’ Mind/
 The Ambiguities of Self- Understanding 45
Body distinction was methodological just as much as ontological: so under-
stood, he was insisting that in a purely mechanical Nature phenomena just
“happen”: they are never “right or wrong”, “correct or incorrect”, “fitting or
inappropriate” as human actions typically are. So, if we are to study actions
fruitfully, we must ask notjust what physical “causes” produce mental effects,
but also what personal “reasons” agents have for acting as they do; and, the
moment we do so, we move beyond the scope of seventeenth century natural
philosophy. (No physical object moves as it does “for its own reasons”!)
For Descartes, psychology fell into two halves: one “causal”, the other
“rational”. On the one hand, we can study the uncontrolled feelings that are,
in modern terms, by-products of the secretion of (say) adrenalin. Such feelings
Descartes viewed as mechanical effects of bodily causes on mental processes,
and so as part of the causal world of physical Nature. On the other, we may
study deliberate thought and observation, calculation and judgment. Such
rational activities do not just “happen”: they are “performed” well or badly,
and analysing them in causal or physiological terms alone does not make them
intelligible.
Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Wundt couched their reservations in other
terms, and the larger schemes ofideas with which their doubts were connected
were somewhat different from Descartes’. Still, they too were sure that rational
thought, deliberation and conduct must break the bounds of any natural
philosophy whose explanatory categories were mechanical. For Kant, the
contrast between natural phenomena and rational experience lay in the fact
that the two realms had different kinds of Gesetzlichkeit (“regularity”). For
Wundt, the subject that he called Volkerpsychologie (or “cultural psychology”)
was unlike “experimental” psychology in comprising aspects of thought,
perception and conduct that embody local and changing concepts. In studying
(e.g.) human sensory response to pairs of pricks with different separations, we
can control the experimental conditions, and so count on obtaining reproduc-
ible results. When we study (say) “cognitive activities”, however, we find that
the individual human beings or groups that we study all bring to those
activities expectations and concepts which are derived from the culture or
epoch they themselves grew up in: to that extent, any generalizations to which
our investigations lead apply only to sets of people with similar cultural and
historical backgrounds.
Given the research programme of “modern science”, human agency was
inevitably problematic, and the expansion of science into psychology gave rise
to unavoidable methodological problems. Some statements about the self
could be accommodated within the new science without difficulty - “Since
Summer, I have gained weight”, “After three gins, I get a headache”, and the
like. Such statements again dealt with “phenomena”, i.e. things that
“happen”. Both fat and headache happen to “me”, as a passive victim, not as
an active agent- I do not directly “do” them. Not all self-referring utterances
46 Slephen Toulmin
can, howcvcr, be rcad in this way. Statements about the things that I say or
do as an agenl treat mc not as passive recipient of changing properties, like
weight or a hangover, but as active initiator of change.
In this sccond sense, as Kant put it, the ego was transcendental, and could
not be analyscd in terms of any set of adjectival predicates: rather, for him,
thc ego scrvcd as the bare subject of the verbs “act” and “experience”. So
takcn, the word “I” did not refer to an objecl that was fat or intoxicated: a
“thing” whose nature could be described in physiological or material terms.
Instead, “I” pointed to a subject who had cxpcriences, deliberated, and acted
as his or hcrjudgmcnt dictated: a “person” whose conduct was accounted for
in intentional, rational or perceptual terms. In Kant’s eyes, all attempts to
describe or lheorize aboul the “I” rested on categorial misconceptions: you could
not dcscribe yourself- qua agent -any more than you could see the retina of
thc very same eye that you were also using to look wilh. (Looking at a
rcflection of your retina in an opthalmologist’s mirror is another matter!)
As a result, the active “I” ceased to be an object of causal analysis, and
vanished from the Newtonian physicist’s view. T o psychologists who were
committed to the modes of observation, experiment and explanation char-
acteristic of “modern” (i.e. seventeenth century) physical science, human
beings qua agents became scientifically invisible; and “rational agency” has
won its place in late twentieth century psychology, only at a price. It has
been necessary, in practice, to recognize that the traditional methods of
cxpcrimcnt and observation are inappropriate to such studies, and must be
replaced by others, which are better adapted to the fresh classes of
problems and issues that are involved in the study of human activities and
experiences.

PART 11
SELF-AWARENESS AND SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT

For those who study rejexive thought and action - i.e. “the self’ - all these
problems about agency are compounded. Their task is not merely to extend
mechanical categories to embrace rational activities as well as causal
processes, but to rethink the methods of science in such a way that, instead of
focusing exclusively on the (“external”) world of nature, they can also be
applied reflexively, to explain our (“inward”) self-perception and self-
understanding. The initial dichotomy between causal processes and rational
activities made it impossible to give an account of agency that fully conforms
to the demands and methods of “modern” science, even for actions directed
outwards toward the world of material objects; but, when the actions in
question are self-directed, so that the subject and the object of action are one
and the same, the traditional methods of physical science finally lose their
grip.
 The Ambiguities of Sev- Understanding
47
Our present historical analysis thus has methodological lessons for
psychologists who take “self-awareness” and “reflexiveness” seriously. These
lessons have to do, firstly, with the particular conditions on which the
behavioural sciences can claim to be “experimental”; secondly, with the kind
of “generality” at which psychologists can hope to arrive.

( I ) The cogency of the experimental method in physics depended on the “inertness”

of the physical systems which are its objects of investigation: the fact that they are
unaware of being studied, and presumably behave in the same ways, whether or not
they are being observed. In all the behavioural sciences (including ornithology!) the
research problems are different. I t is not easy to devise situations in which we can study
people, animals or birds without their knowing it; and some people even regard it as
unethical to put human subjects into such deceptive situations.

In all studies of “meaningful” or “significant” conduct, indeed, the

effectiveness of our procedures depends on the prior self-awareness and
experience that individual research subjects bring to the investigation.
Attempts to limit the study of human behaviour to “objective” experiments, in
the physical scientist’s sense of the word, have proved self-frustrating: the few
behavioural scientists who put research subjects into expcrimental situations
from which all cultural or linguistic cues are eliminated have obtained
impoverished results. Some years ago, for example, two radical behaviourists
studied the literature on “conditioning” human verbal behaviour: they could
find only three sets of experiments that were fully “objective”, in that sense.
What were those experiments? They were, respectively, concerned with the
learning of nonsense syllables, with the enunciation of sibillants, and the
speech of psychotics in a mental ward! This result is no accident. The
elimination of all recognized linguistic and cultural cues also destroyed the
familiar, culturally determined meanings that could be “read into” the
experimental situation, so the only kind of behaviour which there was left to
study was vocal, rather than verbal behaviour.
Eleanor Rosch makes a similar point in her work on the recognition of
“prototypes” and “family resemblances”. There she reminds us that, in the
absence of other cues, research subjects always bring their own prior
understandings to bear on the interpretation of experimental situations. This
is not something to be deplored or circumvented. It is, as she sees, “in the
nature of the case”: it represents a constitutive element in the definition of
psychological issues, as such. (An historian might further add that this point,
too, is close to the considerations that Wilhelm Wundt had in mind, in arguing
that all “cognitive” activity embodies a cultural element, which demands
historico-anthropological methods of study.)
The relation between behavioural scientists and their autonomous research
subjects today, thus, differs radically from the relation between seventeenth
century physicists and their inert, unwitting objects of study, which defined
48 Stephen Toulmin
the “experimental method” employed in modern science. Not for nothing,
those who participate in psychological experiments are called “subjects”, not
“objects”. In these experiments, they are coequal agents alongside the
scientists themselves, and their cooperation is the outcome of a social bargain.
Nor can we correctly interpret their roles in those experiments, unless we are
prepared to ask how the terms of that “social bargain” affect their positions
vis-i-vis the experimenter.
In speaking here of “the relation between behavioural scientists and their
research subjects”, I do not imply that this relation has the same form in all
circumstances, or that research subjects automatically bring a unique and
standard set ofexpectations with them, when they enter the laboratory. Quite
the contrary: in line with Susan Hales’s claim that this relation is a social one, I
believe that psychologists and their subjects may relate to one another in any
of a dozen ways, depending on the circumstances of different experiments. At
just this point, indeed, an intriguing set of research topics opens up for social
psychology. How far do subjects with different cultural or social backgrounds
bring significantly different expectations to the laboratory? Do Latino subjects
approach psychological experiments with the same attitudes as Anglo ones?
Do Mormon students (say) behave in exactly the same ways as Jewish ones?
Or are subjects of different nationality, social or economic status, liable to be
more or less passive or inquisitive, cooperative or counter-suggestible, in
experimental situations? Wundt’s insistence on the anthropological and
historical (or Volker$sychologisch) aspect of “higher mental functions” surely
begins, at this point, to take on some real substance for research psychologists
today.

(2) The other implication of our historical analysis may be more radical. When
seventeenth century natural philosophers devised the “experimental method”, they
did so with the purposes of physics in mind, and they assumed that it was a legitimate
goal to bring to light, and provide evidence about, the “Laws of God’s Creation”: i.e.
universal generalizations about natural phenomena and mechanical processes in-
volving bodies and forces, matter and motion.
Alongside twentieth century psychologists’ assumptions about the virtue of experi-
ments, correspondingly, they have tended to assume that their own proper intellectual
goal is to bring to light a similar body of “laws ofpsychology”: i.e. universalgencrali~ations
designed to explain human thought and conduct. That is precisely what now most
needs to be called in question.

In fundamental physics, questions are typically posed in abstract terms, e.g.

“inertia”, “field” or “lepton”; and the experimental situations physicists
choose to study are selected, and even deliberately fashioned, to provide real
instances of situations to which those abstract notions apply. The questions
asked, and the answers obtained, in a physical experiment are thus relevant to
any particular, concrete state of affairs that we may study “on the ground”
 The Ambiguities of SelJ-Underslanding 49
only to the extent that this state ofaffairs succeeds in exemplifying the relevant
theoretical concepts and problems. If it fails to do so, physicists arc entitled to
ignore the resulting observations, as being “beside the point”. This feature of
physics brings it, in the classical Greek sense, under the heading ofepisteme, as
being a theoretical science concerned the properties of idealized or abstract
entities; and it is this feature alone that also allows physicists to prcsent their
discoveries in the form of truly “universal” generalizations.
When we are concerned with human conduct in real-life situations, by
contrast, thesituation is not thesame. Theconditions that hold good in physics
are suspended, and the goal of“universa1ity” is no longer relevant to the nature
ofthe case. As Aristotle puts it, human conduct falls, not in the realm ofepisierne,
but in that ofphronesis (“practical” understanding): it must be described and
explained in terms of “concrete particulars”, not “abstract universals”. We
may usefully look for “universals” only in those limited branches of the subject
(e.g. physiological psychology) that overlap into the physical sciences:
elsewhere, the psychologists’ tasks are more concrete and particular, and
resemble thoseof (say)law and medicine more than they do thoseofthe physical
sciences.
Accordingly, psychologists are not compelled to concern themselves with
unqualified generalizations and I OO’/O correlations alone. The pursuit ofperfect
correlations is, in fact, an unhappy effect of their preoccupation with the
example of theoretical physics, with its timeless and idealized concepts. To that
extent, psychologists can look for more helpful models elsewhere. In sociology,
for example, it has recently become apparent that any fully universal “group
theory” is too abstract, general and sweeping to throw real light on actual social
situations, and that sociologists need to take the varied histories of theparticular
groups they study into account more seriously. And it may be helpful if
psychologists likewise recognize that their subject matter is intrinsically
particular and concrete, in a way the subject matter of the physical sciences
rarely is, and so give up their fruitless and misleading pursuit of universal
generalizations.
It is not enough, therefore, to acknowledge the social character of experimen-
tation in psychology, but to continue posing our psychological questions, and
looking for answers, in the universal, abstract terms proper to physics. Ifhuman
conduct lends itself, at best, to description in terms of statements that tell us
what is “generally, typically or normally”, rather than “universally and
invariably” thecase, so be it. It may well turnout that Aristotle was right, when
he insisted that, given the richness and complexity of human behaviour, it is
unreasonable to demand of ethics or psychology the kinds of “necessity” and
“universality” one can reasonably call for in geometry or theoretical physics.
This point is well understood by those practitioners who deal with human
conduct in real life situations, for examplejudges. In the practice oflaw, nobody
seriously expects all human beings from a known class or background to behave
50 Stephen Toulmin
in one and the same predictable manner: faced with circumstances p, q and r
(say), we do not assume that people of the same background will respond to
those circumstances in the same invariable and universal way. Instead, lawyers
and judges -and all of us in our more practical moments -are happy to find
that (exceptional situations apart) people respond to any given circumstances
in familiar ways “normally” or “generally”, so that any given individual will
presumably so respond, in the absence of other considerations. But they also
understand very clearly that, when one is dealing, not with an abstract entity
(say, “the positron”), but with concrete, individual human beings, there is no
way to rule out the occasional “exceptions” that rebut that presumption in
particular cases.

PART111
CONCLUSION

To sum up: the programme of seventeenth century science set out to reveal
neutral “facts”, which supposedly lay around the world of Nature waiting to
be observed and recorded by impartial, rational spectators. From the start,
then, “scientific method” was unsuitable as a way offinding out what goes on
when (say) second-year graduate students agree to enter the laboratory, and
obey the instructions of professors whose goodwill affects their academic
standing. To allow for the novel features of such an event, it is not enough to
invoke one single extra factor as making the students’ responses more complex:
e.g. their self-esteem. Instead, we must analyse the entire social interaction
involved in the experimental situation, and so bring into the open all of the
factors and considerations which - explicitly or implicitly - can affect the
research subjects’ perception of their roles, and so influence their actual
performance.
This symposium is, therefore, a first step in a larger inquiry. At this point,
several new lines of inquiry are worth exploring. Recently, anthropologists
have developed a sub-specialty known as “ethnography of science”, which has
tended to focus hitherto on the activities ofphysical scientists in large, complex
laboratories, e.g. linear accelerator centres; and the ways that proton beams
react to being observed do not of course raise anthropological questions. But
the same methods can be applied also in studying psychological experiments,
where the interaction of scientists with their research subjects is crucial. The
methods of the “cross-cultural psychology” developed by Eleanor Rosch and
others may also throw light on these experimental situations. Not least, they
may help us to separate the culturally variable understandings that research
subjects bring with them from those other responses that may yet prove
invariant between cultures. No doubt, “self-esteem” is again relevant; but the
 The Ambiguities of Sev- Understanding 51
factors that reinforce or undermine the self-esteem of research subjects are also
cultural variables, and it is again necessary to keep comparative, “cross-
cultural” elements in the forefront of the inquiry.
If these parallel investigations are brought to bear on the study of
“experiments”, as instances of self-aware human activity, this symposium will
have further virtues. It is a model of the way in which different fields of
behavioural sciences, which were for so long pursued in isolation, can be
“cross-fertilized” to yield, together, results of a kind that none of them can
achieve singly. Specifically, one weakness in the research programme of
individual psychology, particularly in the United States, springs from the
assumption that human beings can be “abstracted from” their situations with
the same ease as (say) electric currents or lead spheres: this belief reinforces
the mistaken idea that truly significant “psychological laws” apply to all
human beings whatever, whatever epoch they lived in, whatever culture and
society they came from. As the argument of this symposium indicates, rather,
we shall properly understand the behaviour of a human individual, not by
focussing exclusively on “stimuli” present here and now, but only by seeing this
as the behaviour of an individual who brings a social, cultural and educational
background to the situation. All the problems of individual psychology thus
become, a t one and the same time, problems about the culture and society
from which they come, the historical epoch in which they live, etc, etc., etc. The
publication of this symposium may, then, be an indication that the fragmenta-
tion of psychology, which fifteen years ago seemed irreversible, is about to
remedy itself.
The final question, nevertheless remains: “What light will all these studies
throw on the general nature and constitution of the selj?”; and the answer to
that more general question is not clear. It is not even clear that the question can
be answered. The “rediscovery of the self’ by the social psychologists has
largely consisted in recognizing that research subjects are “conscious agents”,
quite as experimental psychologists themselves, and that the subjects enter
psychological experiments knowingly, with their own understanding of the
“bargain” involved in accepting that role. How they actually perceive the
balance of advantage in this “bargain” is a topic for research by social
psychologists and cultural anthropologists, as well as by “ethnographers of the
behavioural sciences”. What is not so clear is what light such inquiries can
throw on general, theoretical issues about the “self’, at least so long as those
issues remain as ambiguous as they have been hitherto.
The very abstraction, “self’, has a power to mislead us. T h e word “self’
comes from the prefix and suffix, “self-” “-self ’: the Oxford English Dictionary
has forty columns of compound words that embody these two modifiers, many
of which date back to Middle and Old English. For the freestanding noun,
“self ’, by contrast, it lists fewer citations; and these typically paraphrase
compound uses (e.g. “his very self’), or else personify specific traits such as
52 Stephen Toulmin
selfishness (“Self, the great Enemy”). There remain only a few uses of the
freestanding noun originating in speculative theory: none of these dates from
before the late seventeenth century, and they come specifically from writers
likeJohn Locke and Sir Thomas Browne.
How do those speculative uses relate to the older compound forms? They are
presumably reached by abstraction from more familiar compound uses; but,
we must ask, is there one and only one way to abstract a “self’, for purposes of
theory, from all the varied practical compounds - “myself’ and “selfish”,
“selfsame” and “self-conscious”? O r are not all our different “selves”
abstracted from the compound forms in different ways, depending on the
context and purpose of the particular inquiry? In psychoanalysis, for instance,
such phrases as “fragile selj” and “cohesive self’ have understood clinical uses.
These, however, use the word in a different sense from that used in
philosophical debates on personal continuity and identity; and the contrast
between “self’ and “other” in developmental psychology is different yet again.
That being so, different contexts and purposes apparently create occasions for
using the abstract noun “self” in quite distinct ways.
Must we assume that all these “selves” are one and the same? That
assumption is hard to justify: a unitary “self’ has philosophical charms, but
can hardly embrace all the modes of reflexive thought and conduct that we
refer to by “self-” and “-self’ terms. All that such compound terms have in
common is reflexivity: instead of having someone or something else as a target,
the thoughts and actions in question, in some way or other, turn back on the
agent. The specific target of this “turning back” is not the same in all cases: it
may be directed at any feature of an agent’s habits or feelings, personality,
body or skills. (The terms “self-esteem”, “self-awareness” and “self-abuse”
point to quite different features of the individual concerned!) Rather than
assuming that the target of reflexive conduct is, in all cases, a unitary and
singular “self’, then, we do better to tackle the taxonomic task of identifying
and classifying the various kinds of deliberate thought and reflexive action,
and recognizing the crucial differences among them.
How far (e.g.) are self-processes, self-concept traits, self-esteem, self-
monitoring, self-image management and self-protection - all of which are
discussed in the course of this symposium- species ofa single common genus?
O r are the differences between these varied modes of human thought and
conduct, activity and experience, so deep that they must be studied and
analysed in correspondingly different ways? For the time being, it seems, the
study of the “self’ is scarcely ready for its Newton: it will make more progress if
it can only find its taxonomically perceptive Linnaeus.
This conclusion is not intended to be discouraging. A taxonomy of all the
independent issues that arise for psychology out of the varied modes of
reflexive thought and conduct classifies, and clarifies, a subject matter more
complex than psychologists usually acknowledge. We can already draw some
 The Ambiguities of Self- Understanding 53
first broad distinctions, e.g., between:
( I ) the “socially constituted” selfof Mead’s social theory,
( 2 ) the “cohesive” or “fragmented” self of Heinz Kohut’s ideas in clinical
theory,
(3) the epistemological self of arguments about personal identity or
continuity, and
(4) the selfof moral and psychological discussions about “selfishness” and
“self-interest”.
Each of these types of self may be broken down further, into narrower sub-
species; and the full spectrum of self- and -selfidioms no doubt includes other
general notions as well. Much laborious analysis is needed in order to
complete this taxonomic work, but the present symposium is a helpful start in
opening up the investigation.
By itself, the insight that in psychology and similar sciences, research
subjects enter the laboratory with a self-awareness that is not shared by
“objects of study” in physical sciences, confronts experimental psychologists
with a threefold challenge:
( I ) to make a respectful bow toward the central points of Wundt’s
Volkerpsychologie;
(2) to reconsider the kinds of “objectivity” that they can legitimately aim at
in their experiments; and
(3) to make allowances for the concepts, perceptions and prior understand-
ings that their research subject collaborators bring with them to the
joint work.
As steps toward a reappraisal of experimentation in the behavioural
sciences, we need two things. Firstly, we need an analysis of scientific
experimentation, by psychologists, ethnographers and others, which treats
“doing experiments” as just one more human social activity. This involves setting
aside the nostalgia for the “objectivity” of classical physics, and viewing the
interactions of experimenters with their research subjects as two-way affairs, in
which the classical “objectivity” presupposed in the 18th and 19th century
physical sciences is unattainablein principle.
Secondly, we must avoid taking as our templates in experimental psychol-
ogy simple bodily movements by human subjects, and assuming that the
deliberate, conscious, self-attentive moving of (say) a n arm differs from an
unthinking movement of the same limb, only by the addition of an “inner
unspoken thought”. As Susan Hales sees so clearly, “movement” and “action”
are objects for psychological study of wholly different kinds, and the relation
between them is, if anything, reversed. Inadvertent movement of my arm (if,
e.g., I knock a wineglass off the dining table with my elbow) mimics the
“action” for which the uninformed observer might mistake it; and is better
thought about in quite other terms. Likewise, in other cases ofself-conduct, the
“reflexitivity” of actions lies not in a “consciousness” added to paradigmatic
54 Stephen Toulmin
unthinking behaviour: instead, “unthinking behaviour” comprises bodily
movements which -at first blush, and from a distance- can be mistaken for
“deliberate actions”, though they fit differently into the situation, and have
quite distinct kinds ofplasticity or stereotypy.
That being the case, deliberate conduct (or “action”) must be studied quite
aparl f r o m unthinking, inadvertent behaviour (or “bodily movement”). This
contrast rests, not on philosophical or semantic quibbles, but on the
observable differences between the two things: above all, on the contrast
between bodily movement as a physical phenomenon, and deliberate actions
as social interactions. Unless we take these differences seriously enough, we
shall fail to recognize what kinds of restrictive conditions are needed, before
experiments in the behavioural sciences can ever have a validity comparable
to that which we associate with experiments in physics and physiology; and,
until we recognize these limitations and make proper allowance for them, we
shall continue to lack all protection against the great mass of so-called
“empirical” research in psychology which proves, on inspection, to be
theoretically pointless.

Stephen Toulmin
Universio of Chicago

NOTES
For a more detailed discussion of the roots of modern science in seventeenth century natural
philosophy, as treated in Part I of this paper, refer to my essay entitled “The emergence of post-
modern science,” in Thegreat ideas today, X@J (Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica Press, 1981),pp.
68-1 14,as well as to my book, Thc rchcrn to cosmology (Los Angeles, University of California Press,
1983),pp. 117-54.About the role of the “inertness” of matter in distancing psychology from
physics, with further bibliographical references, see “Neuroscience and Human Understanding”,
in G . Quarton, F. Schmitt et al., Thcncuroscicnccs:ashrdyprogram (New York, Rockefeller University
Press, 1969).For the ways in which a mechanistic physics generates physiological vitalism as a
byproduct, see the opening ofciovanni Borelli’s Dernotu animalium (Rome, 1680-I), Vol. I, pp. 3-
4.As to the reservations of Descartes, Kant and Wundt about the very possibility of a scientific
psychology, these are well expounded in Theodore Mischel’s introduction to the book, Human
action (New York, Academic Press, 1969),pp. 1-40,On Wilhem Wundt, see also Sigmund Koch
and David Leary (eds.), A century ofpychology us n science (New York, McGraw Hill, 1983).
The survey of work on linguistic conditioning referred to in Part I1 (I)may be found in the
paper, W. C. Holz and N. H. Azrin, “Conditioning human verbal behavior”, in W. K. Honig
(ed.), Operant behavior (New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966).Eleanor Rosch has discussed
the effects of prior expectations on research subjects’ ways of responding to the experimental
situation in “Principles of categorization”, E. Rosch and B. B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and
catcgorization, (Hillsdale, NJ., 1978).
The issues about the scope of psychologicalgeneralizations raised later in Part I1 (I)have been
rarely discussed by recent philosophers. The classical exposition of these issues is to be found in
Books VI & VII of the Nicomachcan Ethics: there, Aristotle contrasts epistme and phroncsis, and
argues that human conduct is both too concrete, and also not regular enough, to admit of
explanation in terms of universal and invariable terms. In just the last few years, the topic of
 The Ambiguities of Sev- Understanding 55
“practical reasoning” has begun to attract fresh attention among philosophers: Alasdair
MacIntyre has a book on the subject in preparation.
For “cross-cultural” psychology, as a hybrid between experimental psychology and cultural
anthropology, see especially the papers ofEleanor Rosch. In addition to the paper cited above, one
may add her other papers, “Cognitive reference points,” Cognitivefisycholou, 7 , pp. 532-47 ( I 975),
“Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories”, Cognitiuepsychology,7, pp.
573-605 ( 1976),“Basic objects in natural categories”, Cognitiuepsycholou, 8, pp. 382-439, pp. 1-49
(1986), and “Categorization of natural objects”, The annual reuzew of psycholou, 32, pp. 89-1 15
(1981).For a more detailed discussion of the etymology and linguistic complexities of the terms,
“self’, “self-” and ‘‘-self’, see my paper, “Self-knowledge and knowledge of ‘the self,” in
Theodore Mischel (ed.), The self: psychological andphilosophical issues,Oxford, Eng., 1978.