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ABSTRACT
The following aphorism is used as the point of departure for the discussion in this article: ‘How do I know what I think till I see what I say?’ Its literal meaning is that it is through the very act of speaking that you get to know what you think; but the aphorism also has a suggestive quality to it. As a consequence, many artists and thinkers have referred to the aphorism and sometimes also elaborated on it. That the message of the aphorism is relevant for social science as well can be exemplified by the important interest that Robert K. Merton has shown for it, primarily to probe the process of creativity in science. Following up on Merton’s ideas, but also taking them in a somewhat different direction, I argue that the aphorism may be of help when you try to theorize in a creative way in social science. Examples of this are provided.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Richard Swedberg is Professor of Sociology at Cornell University since 2002. His work falls mainly in the areas of economic sociology and social theory, with an emphasis on theorizing. See e.g. The Political Economy of Alexis de Tocqueville (2009) and The Art of Social Theory (2014).
Notes
1 I am grateful to Michela Betta, Patrik Aspers, the reviewers of Distinktion and one of its editors for very useful comments. I also would like to thank Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where this article was conceived and written.
2 While this wording of the aphorism is the one that Merton (Citation1978b, 1) used and that can be found in Forster (Citation1927, 152), there also exist a number of variations (such as ‘How can I tell how I think till I see what I say?,’ ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’, and so on).
3 Merton’s definition of serendipity reads as follows: ‘the discovery, by chance or sagacity, of valid results which were not sought for’ (Merton Citation1945, 50).
4 The letters can be found in Box 372, Files 1 and 2 in the Robert K. Merton Papers at Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Besides the letters, the two files also contain various clippings and letters relating to the aphorism. There exists no message from Edelman in response to Merton’s letters, nor any other indication of how he reacted to them. File 1 contains 164 pages of material and File 2, 112 pages.
5 Merton had e.g. found that George Wallas had used the aphorism in a book published in 1926, that is, one year before the publication of Aspects of the Novel by Forster. It can be added Merton did not explore to what extent Forster used the insights of the aphorism in his own work as an author. Nonetheless, in an interview many years after the publication of Aspects of the Novel Forster was asked if he himself thought that ‘all the important steps in the plot must also be present in the original conception [of a novel that the author has]’ (Furbank and Haskell Citation1953). Forster answered, ‘certainly not all the steps. But there must be something, some major object towards which one is to approach [like the event in the cave in A Passage to India].’ He also said, ‘Of course, that wonderful thing, a character running away with you – which happens to everyone – that’s happened to me, I’m afraid.’
6 Merton preferred this terminology to the conventional one of context of discovery and context of justification (Reichenbach, Popper).
7 ‘One heuristic that has been of first importance to my work is missing, however, from the programs I have described in this chapter [entitled ‘The Scientist as Problem Solver’]. To make interesting scientific discoveries, you should acquire as many good friends as possible, who are as energetic, intelligent, and knowledgeable as they can be. Form partnerships with them whenever you can. Then sit back and relax. You will find that all the programs you need are stored in your friends, and will execute productively and creatively as long as you don’t interfere too much. The work I have done with more than eighty collaborators will testify to the power of that heuristic.’ (Simon Citation1991, 387).
8 See note 4.
9 In a passage he later deleted, Peirce adds: ‘ … barring communications in newspapers, the fact is that I have never printed anything about philosophy which was not based on at least half a dozen independent written attempts made at long intervals to analyze the subject far more minutely than I have ever done in print’ (Peirce Citation1997, 277).
10 There is also the famous experiments by Benjamin Libet (Libet et al. Citation1983). These show that before an action is taken, a signal to initiate the action has already been registered in the brain. The example Libet that used was a person moving a finger, something that limits the interests of his work for the argument in this article, which is how a person’s ideas and thoughts emerge from the subconscious. Nonetheless, Libet’s work does show how central the subconscious is to human activities.
11 This picture of how a scientific work comes into being is highly stylized. Many social scientists work, for example, by producing a number of drafts, which are changed a bit each time around. This allows for a gradual improvement of the argument; it also makes the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification less clear. On the negative side, the workstyle of producing several drafts can lock in the original analysis and block a radical change of direction.
12 Following the pioneering work in psychology by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s, the term heuristics also refers to another phenomenon than discovery and creativity, namely decision-making with the help of thumb rules, in situations of uncertainty (see Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky Citation1982).