The new genetics in the Soviet Union / by P.S. Hudson and R.H. Richens.

  • Hudson, P. S.
Date:
[1946]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The new genetics in the Soviet Union / by P.S. Hudson and R.H. Richens. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    III. PSYCHOLOGY To those accustomed to the convention of impersonahty generally observed by western scientific writers, any discussion of psychological questions relating to the mental attitudes of research scientists may seem irrelevant. Such a convention, however, is not observed in the Soviet Union, and scientific discussions there often tum about the motives of the protagonists of rival theories, rather than around questions of intrinsic reasonableness. It is indeed possible to analyse the various genetical theories put forward in Russia, setting aside such questions of psychology, and this procedure will be followed in the remaining chapters. But it is not possible to understand how these theories came to be put forward, or why they are so ardently championed, unless the underlying psychological motives are ascertained. Furthermore, the types of scientific discourse followed in Russian journals are frequently alogicaP in form, that is, do not concern themselves so much with stringent argumentation from factual data, but analyse instead the psychological issues involved in accepting or rejecting the scientific concepts under consideration. For this reason, attention must be paid to this type of procedure if a com¬ prehensible account is to be rendered of the Russian genetical theories. In Western Europe, the convention of impersonality derives from the logicians of the Middle Ages from whom it was inherited by the seventeenth century scientists. It was commonly believed that the concepts derived by legitimate inference from scientific observation were unconditionally true, granted that the observations were accurate and the inference valid. So convinced were scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the absolute nature of their conclusions that Kant used this confidence as a prime consideration in his Critique of Pure Reason. Marx, in the nineteenth century, attacked this complacency. By insisting on the primacy of matter and the secondary importance of mind, he reinterpreted the history of ideas as a reñexion of the concurrent history of material conditions, rather than as an independent pro¬ gressive illumination of the human intellect. In his writings, and in those of Engels,®' the procedure is often adopted of analysing ideas, not in respect of their intrinsic reasonableness, but by regarding them as inevitable consequences of material conditions, the latter interpreted along Marxian principles. This shift of emphasis from logical to historical analysis results in a psychological treatment in which the motives of scientists, conditioned by their material environ¬ ment, are treated in preference to a detailed examination of the content of their ideas. This type of procedure appears to have found a congenial soil in Russia. Pre-occupation with motivation is characteristic of the greater Russian novelists such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; it also characterizes the early Russian Marxist Plehanov and, to an extraordinary degree, his successor Lenin. Throughout the whole length of his classical work Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin inveighs against the philosophical views of many late nineteenth century thinkers, not by the traditional method of logical refutation, but by a form of associative discourse, in which he shows that the views that he is denouncing either disagree with those of Marx or Engels, or conform to some extent with those of Berkeley, Hume or Kant. The correctness of the views of Marx and Engels are largely assumed, also the falsity of the idealist and sceptical trends in philosophy. It must not be supposed that Russian geneticists are antipathetic to logical reasoning, for both Lysenko and Prezent have written many long passages of stringently argued discourse, weU- nigh impeccable from a logical standpoint. What is characteristic is not an absence of logic, but an intermixture of logical and alogical methods of procedure. It frequently happens that two or three pages of carefuL argumentation are followed abruptly by a sudden dart into speculation of an extraordinary type, or into a minute analysis of the motives of their critics, or into quotations from some approved authority. Such sudden metamorphoses in the style of discourse will not be unfamiliar to those conversant with Russian literature. It is also im¬ portant to bear in mind that alogical discourse is not necessarily iUogical. It is quite possible to derive valid conclusions by invalid argumentation, but it is not possible to demonstrate that the conclusions so reached are in fact true. In arguing by authority, for instance, it is only ^ The term alogical is used in this bulletin for methods of discourse other than logical. The term illogical usually implies a defective logical sequence, while alogical sequences are devoid of any sort of logical texture altogether. Conclusions reached by alogical discourse may be true or false, and ii true are not demonstrably so without reference to subsidiary verification. 23
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