“…we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from
scientific psychology.” (Noam Chomsky). To what extent would you agree?
When I first read this argument, I disagreed with Noam Chomsky mainly because he makes this issue seem categorical and unquestionable – that “we will always learn more about human life…from novels than from scientific psychology.” In fact, he seems to be unduly confident in his argument that it seems like his argument has risen not from rational analysis and serious contemplation but from his whimsical desire to believe that human life and personality are too intricate and complex to be understood by using science alone.
But after doing some more research about his argument, I found that he might actually be making a valid TOK argument. Chomsky says, “most of what we know about things that matter comes from [novels] surely not from considered rational inquiry.” He then claims that this “considered rational inquiry” “reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope.” Here he seems to be saying that because scientific psychology resorts to only one way of knowing: “rational inquiry” or reasoning, it has a rather “narrow scope” in terms of understanding the “full human person.” In other words, one way of knowing, reasoning isn’t comprehensive enough to fully understand the different aspects of human beings.
And I think that even though scientific psychology encompasses the other three ways of knowing, perception, language and emotion, it does in a very superficial level compared to the novels. First of all, novels, at least the better ones, make use of intricate and profound language in order to create and communicate knowledge. And the even better ones purposefully use ambiguous language and arguments to allow readers to choose their own interpretation of the text. Novels involve a much-sophisticated use of language than scientific psychology, which merely aims for factual clarity in its use of language.
Unlike scientific psychology that strives for emotional detachment, novels make use of emotion as another way of knowing. By using language that appeals to emotion of the readers, novelists try to recount a vivid story that would allow readers to not only understand but also relive the experience by empathizing and imagining. In fact, Joseph Conrad, the author of Heart of Darkness, claims that, “My task, which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is before all, to make you see. That-and no more, and it is everything”. When was the last time you heard a research psychologists talk about the “power of language” in her research papers or that her paper would make you “hear…feel… and see.” Conrad says he tries to write so that the words (language) can make readers hear and see (vicarious perception), and make them feel (emotion).
Contrary to the mainstream belief that scientific psychology appeals to reason as a way of knowing much more than do novels, I think that reading novels involve much more reasoning processes. I think it is our biased conception that the essence of science is reason while arts tend to be less dependent or associated with reason as a way of knowing. Novels require reason if not more reason as when reading a book, we not only have to literally understand but also make connections, comparisons, and decode ambiguous language, trying to grasp the message that the author has created through an entire piece of art. In fact, try to remember when you have read your last novel and a psychology article/paper. Which one activated more reasoning processes in your mind – reading a science paper or reading an esoteric and arcane novel like Heart of Darkness? While reading something on science, we use logic to get a literal understanding of the concepts, when we are reading novels, in order to understand the author’s choices and his intended effects, we as readers have to engage in a much more interactive and complex reasoning processes.
And after having read Heart of Darkness in my IB English class, I feel like I have learned more about human personality than what I have learned in my IB Psychology class. The depth and profundity of the knowledge acquired in IB English is much more revealing than the knowledge I’ve acquired in IB Psychology. While it’s true that we may have covered a wider range of topics and theories in our IB Psychology class, I have to say Conrad, with his “power of language” really made me hear Kurtz’s last words, “The Horror, The Horror,” feel the fascination of abomination, and see the ghastly reality which made Kurtz ventriloquize those last words. I find that Conrad’s portrayal of the dark areas in us, which are momentarily suppressed by the society and its laws, cannot be as delicately and intricately illustrated through scientific psychology. Novels appeal to our language and emotional capacities when psychology superficially does so. Thus if Conrad’s ideas about human personality were to be translated into scientific psychology, the impact would greatly differ and much less desirable.
Likewise, what I’ve learned about stereotypes in Psychology class seems insignificant and rather trivial compared to the great realization I had in my IB English class concerning stereotypes on the African people, while reading Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. The novel suggests the human’s wired tendency to form stereotypes, either positive or negative. Salih suggests that true equality cannot exist in a society in which people live in the extremes: the white people can either look down upon the African people who are different from them as people to be conquered or look upon them for the same set of dissimilarities, considering those qualities to be exotic – that there is no middle ground or that one group of people can’t believe in the virtual equality of them and others. I have to say that I’ve learned much from this book – the fact that virtual equality is hindered by our tendency to stereotype – is much more insightful and significant than what I’ve learned from my IB Psychology class of how this tendency may be caused by our schemas.
However I do realize that the reason why I’ve learned more in my IB English class than IB Psychology could be that I haven’t yet been exposed to the more complex and advanced types of concepts and knowledge, which isn’t taught at the high school level course. Thus my personal evidences are based on my limited exposure and experience with these two subjects.
Moreover, I realize that I’ve taken on this argument from the “receiver’s” perspective – I’ve argued that novels have a greater impact on the readers than scientific papers have on their readers. More or less, I’ve defined the “we” in Noam Chomsky’s argument as the people in the society who are exposed to the works of scientists and novelists rather than those who create those works themselves. If we were to define this “we” as everyone in the society including the scientists and novelists, the argument could possibly go in a different path.
Novels’ validity as a source of knowledge is often criticized as well. Novels are in fact invented using knowledge based on experience and “folk” psychology, which is also known as the “received wisdom and commonsense assumptions about human behavior and motivation.” And thus “there is no empirical reality against which we can check the truth of [the novelist’s] account of [characters’] consciousness,” claims David Lodge. However novels are in fact lies that reveal truth. These lies ironically “give us a convincing sense of what the consciousness of people other than ourselves is like.”
The “objective” nature of scientific psychology is what I believe is one aspect which science is superior to novels. Scientific psychology allows objective approach to our assumptions and generalizations: the aforementioned “folk psychology” novelists use to write novels. Scientific psychology, through analytical and objective research, tries to uncover our assumptions and disprove our beliefs as being false many of the times. However, although science may be more objective than novels, scientific psychology cannot be absolutely impersonal and objective either. The “discovery in quantum physics disproves “that an event is ultimately inseparable from its observation, undermining the assumption that science is absolutely objective and impersonal.” In fact I’ve learned in my IB Psych class that objectivity in the results can be skewed by factors such as demand characteristics, experimenter biases and participant expectancy.
In conclusion, I agree with Noam Chomsky we, the “receivers” of knowledge will learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology, but I can’t say “always” due to my limitations as a knower as my ideas are confined by the limits of my experiences. I’m not an omnipresent and omniscient being that Noam Chomsky claims himself to be.
EduContents 