By Leon James 1976

 

not-out-given                                             Article
AN-EC-DOTE                   <========>      Pre-publication draft
un-published                                              Not for quotation

                   Based on: Leon James, NES , 1975 ©
                       PSYCH. 705R:  Ethnosemantics, UH, Spring 1976

     An EXPERIMENT is a representative anecdote offered as substantiation of a (scientific) hypothesis (the latter is in turn, offered as substantiation for priorly reported anecdotes. )  Thus, the aggregate, accumulated collection of experiments in a defined field of publication (non-an-ec-dotal: see scientific "literature") is a collection of anecdotes that serves to substantiate current scientific theories and views of reality. 
     ANECDOTES function to provide an operational terminology for stating hypotheses and hypotheses about interconnecting hypotheses--or "theorizing".  Therefore, different types of theorizings in a science (called "Schools") are derived from different collections of anecdotes (as a result, specialities use characteristic differentiating experimental methods in their "research". 
     Anecdotes are informative about terminology in so far as they are representative of other anecdotes in a specialty (see STANDARDS within an area in a field used in evaluating research proposals and articles for publication in experimental journals).  However, anecdotes are not necessarily representative of what they topically claim they represent: e. g. many experiments in the literature known as "Developmental Psycholinguistics" informative about the terminology used in talking about the speech of children contributed to by psychologists and psycholinguists; but they are not representative of the speech of children as we ordinarily understand this human experience through our contact with children as a daily-routine setting that spans years of parental exchanges with their offspring.  Thus, a terminology based and maintained upon an experimental literature must necessarily be reductionistic or non-representative of the human experiences they purport to explain or account for.   Strict scientific understanding is thus logically separate from understanding human experience.  The former is contained within the latter by being a human endeavour, an organized institiution, a context based instrumentality, hence a socio-cultural dynamic.
     Scientific understanding of human experience becomes the dialectical anatomy of the understanding of human experience when it is claimed by scientists that science can explain experience; since that claim reverses what contains what:  it asserts boldly (but with what justification?) that scientific understanding will explain what understanding is.  But that is a logical fallacy, since it is plain to our ordinary understanding. 

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