> At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought.
> From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is
> relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumental reason
> (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards acceptance of
> himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be
> satisfied. Although his entire history , from the time his mother was
> shot and he was captured, through his voyage in a cage to imprisonment
> on this island prison camp and the sadistic games that are played
> around food here, leads him to ask questions about the justice of the
> universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted
> psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics
> towards the humbler reaches of practical reason. And somehow, as he
> inches through this labyrinth of constraint, manipulation and
> duplicity, he must realize that on no account dare he give up, for on
> his shoulders rests the responsibility of representing apedom. The
> fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he
> performs."
Sultan's is also the insight of Foucault. This form of "science" to some degree (Foucault himself exaggerates it) hides a sadistic will to power. What Foucault fails to notice, though, is that the methods themselves are inadequate for understanding their object because they canalize the same instinct as the sadistic will to power. The methods deny that the object is "alive." Moreover, in the case of apes and even, in a sense, more obviously in the case of humans, they ignore the role of "mind" in the determination of what occurs. In the human case, where the degree to which instinct dominates mind varies greatly depending, among other things, on the relations within which individuals develop and live, the methods also ignore the fact that the way mind enters into behaviour varies significantly with variation in these relations. The exclusive reliance on "experimental" methods ignores this by implicilty assuming that the behaving entity remains unchanged with changes in its relations. So too do mathematical and statistical methods.
These are Whitehead's ontologically based criticisms of the methods of this form of "science." See for instance, Modes of Thought (particularly the summary in Lectures VII and VIII). They are repeated by Keynes in his criticisms of Jan Tinbergen's early work in "econometrics." The latter, Keynes claims, mistakenly imports into social science the "habit of mind" of the natural sciences in their orthodox "materialist" form.
"My point against Tinbergen is a different one. In chemistry and physics and other natural sciences the object of experiment is to fill in the actual values of the various quantities and factors appearing in an equation or formula; and the work when done is once and for all. In economics this is not the case, and to convert a model into a quantitative formula is to destroy its usefulness as an instrument of thought. ... "The point needs emphasising because the art of thinking in terms of models is a difficult - largely because it is an unaccustomed - practice. The pseudo-analogy with the physical sciences leads directly counter to the habit of mind which is most important for an economist proper to acquire. "I also want to emphasise strongly the point about economics being a moral science. I mentioned before that it deals with introspection and with values. I might have added that it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One has to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogeneous. It is as though the fall of the apple to the ground depended on the apple's motives, on whether it is worth while falling to the ground, and whether the ground wanted the apple to fall, and on mistaken calculations on the part of the apple as to how far it was from the centre of the earth." (Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. XIV, pp. 299-300)
As Whitehead and Keynes point out,. these ontological questions are relevant to the problem of induction.
“There is a curious misconception that somehow the mathematical mysteries of Statistics help Positivism to evade its proper limitation to the observed past. But statistics tell you nothing about the future unless you make the assumption of the permanence of statistical form. For example, in order to use statistics for prediction, assumptions are wanted as to the stability of the mean, the mode, the probable error, and the symmetry or skewness of the statistical expression of functional correlation. Mathematics can tell you the consequences of your beliefs. For example, if your apple is composed of a finite number of atoms, mathematics will tell you that the number is odd or even. But you must not ask mathematics to provide you with the apple, the atoms, and the finiteness of their number. There is no valid inference from mere possibility to matter of fact, or, in other words, from mere mathematics to concrete nature.” Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 126
"the more complicated and technical the preliminary statistical investigations become, the more prone inquirers are to mistake the statistical description for an inductive generalisation." (Keynes, Treatise on Probability, Collected Writings, vol. VII, p. 361) He quotes Whitehead in support of this: "There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the applications of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain." Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics, p. 27
Ted