The Role of Science in Behavioral Disorders.

* Special education as a concept and as a field of study is often misunderstood and misrepresented by those who propose radical reform or restructuring (Hockenbury, Kauffman, & Hallahan, in press). Special education for students with emotional or behavioral disorders is at particularly high risk of being misunderstood and poorly implemented, in part because many individuals today neglect or undermine its scientific foundations (Walker et al., 1998). Hence, we need to address directly the crucial role of science in providing more effective education for the students we serve. I am a special educator, not a philosopher, and I was not trained in the natural sciences. Therefore, I write as a layperson about abstract philosophical and scientific issues, but also as a professional educator concerned about the implications of these issues for special education. Science, in this article, refers to the methodologies of testing disconfirmable hypotheses and proofs through publicly verifiable data to which scientists and philosophers of science such as Diamond (1997), Gould (1997), Gross (1998), Kuhn (1996), and Wilson (1998) refer. The importance of the topic is underscored by the burgeoning antiscience sentiment among the public and among special educators, which has been discussed elsewhere (e.g., Kauffman, 1999a, 1999b; Walker, in press; Walker et al., 1998). Rules and Mules: Contrasting Worlds of Rule-Making The basic issue at hand is how we will choose to live in a rule-governed world. That is, what rules should we choose to govern our behavior, particularly our professional behavior? Humans make rules for living, and these rules may be constructed or reconstructed to form various belief systems and to govern personal behavior and interpersonal interaction. Such rules may lead people to cling stubbornly to a belief or pattern of behavior simply because a religious authority figure told them to or because it fits their preferences or construction of reality, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Prejudice, blind loyalty, and corrupted logic are neither exclusive to religion nor excluded from the lives of those who claim to work outside the realm of religious faith. Either religious or secular rules may demand or justify the killing of other human beings who disagree with a rule, which is perhaps the ultimate in the rule-corrupted conduct that we call "mulish." During my reflection on the topic of this article, a verse by Ogden Nash that accompanies Camille Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals came to mind: "In the world of mules, there are no rules." An anthropomorphic view might lead us to conclude that language means nothing other than what the mule constructs from it; reality is determined by how the mule sees things, not by anything external to the mule. A mule lives blissfully ad hoc-is idiosyncratically deconstructive, coercive, unpredictable, and oppositional. Nash's verse suggests an alternative to the world of mules-a different, rule-governed world that, presumably, humans may choose or decline to inhabit at particular times. Five Assumptions Regarding Rules Actually, in the world of mules, there is one rule: "The world is as I see (or construct or invent) it or believe it to be." Humans might best choose an alternative rule-governed world in which they assume that (a) we need different rules for different purposes, since no single set of rules is a fully satisfactory guide to all aspects of living; (b) all rules are grounded in values, and we must specify the values of our rules; (c) the origins and appropriate application of particular rules are often misunderstood; (d) personal experience and the popularity of ideas are often unreliable guides to rule making; and (e) all truths are tentative, but some truths are more tentative than others, and science provides a set of rules for revising what is accepted as truth. Each of these points applies to the value of science in behavioral disorders. …