'Chaos in the brickyard' revisited: what if Forscher were a butcher?

摘要

When I began my doctoral program at The Pennsylvania State University in 1979, one of the papers we discussed at our first motor behavior lab seminar was Bernard Forscher's (1963) "Chaos in the Brickyard." This thoughtful little letter to the editor of Science drew an analogy between scientific research and construction work. The goal of scientific research was to discover explanations or laws, but the people engaged in this work were actually builders who constructed wonderful edifices. Edifices were constructed by assembling bricks; scientific explanations and laws were constructed by assembling facts, or data. Early in the history of construction, bricks were carefully made and, because brick making was painstaking, only those required for the edifice at hand were produced. But over time, things changed. The builders realized that delays hampered their efforts in obtaining bricks. Brick making became an end in itself, and, probably due to technological advances, it became easy to make bricks. Eventually, the land was flooded with bricks, many of them random and useless; it was difficult for builders to find the proper bricks for a task, because they had to search through so many. There was, indeed, chaos in the brickyard. Forscher concluded with, "And, saddest of all, sometimes no effort was made even to maintain the distinction between a pile of bricks and a true edifice" (p. 339).