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pose of confirmation or it may be evidence lying in our past experience. The professional experience of social workers makes them recognize a recurring relation between the number of rooms occupied and the health and decency of the occupants; between a man's trade union record and his record as a worker; between the size of a family and the minimum amount of food they can live on; or between a family's income and their having extra rooms unrented, etc. Although none of these relations are fixed for all time, the richer the experience of the worker in supplying him with such fairly constant rules, the greater is the variety of hypotheses to which such experience can give rise, and therefore the more likely is he to light upon the hypothesis which will prove correct.

What workers sometimes complacently term their intuitions are often merely rapid inferences based on experience. A case in point is the following:

A medical-social worker was explaining that she had learned to trust her intuitions. When asked for instances of what she meant by intuitions she replied, “A man was referred to me not long ago whom I classified as a jailbird at once, and sure enough I found that he had a long record at our county prison." Further questioning revealed this process of reasoning: "The man was an Irishman and had been in this country twenty-two years, but had never been naturalized, which struck me as shiftless for a man of his nationality. That made me sure that he had some reason for not wanting to vote or that he was prevented from doing so by a criminal history."

The intuition was an inference, a hypothesis which the worker's experience suggested and which served to lead her to a search for confirming evidence in the public records. It is of course possible that the man's appearance played an unrecognized part in the forming of this hypothesis.

Occasionally, because of gaps in evidence, confirmation of a hypothesis has to be sought through experiment. Such evidence is, for the purposes of social case work, far from satisfactory, because in dealing with human material experiment is controlled with difficulty. If we send to the charity woodyard an Italian whose work references are inaccessible and he leaves the work after a short stay, is he lazy, or is he incapable of adapting himself quickly to the changed conditions of work with a foreman who does not understand Italians, and with fellow workmen who do not speak his language, etc.? "The one great difficulty," says Alfred

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Sidgwick, "is that of making sure that when we introduce A [laziness] into a given set of circumstances nothing else comes in along with it, or directly after it, or is already there unknown to us. For if another detail, Z, [the difficulty of getting on with an American foreman, among other things] has crept in thus insidiously, the experiment fails to show that it is A rather than Z to which the effect is due."

There is a satisfaction beyond the establishing of a certain number of required facts for those who have or acquire the insight to make such tentative inference. These inferences are a means of leading us from the comparatively few known facts about any client to some of the many unknown ones which a personal social problem always contains, as well as a means of guiding our investigation into fruitful channels. Evidence gathered to corroborate or disprove a theory, to combine new facts with those previously known, thus becomes a creative thing; whereas facts collected mechanically item by item to fill out a schedule or meet a minimum requirement of some sort lack the interrelation that would give them significance. They give but a sketchy outline of a client's needs. When evidence is meager, ingenuity in the making of one working hypothesis and then another and patience in trying them out by experiment may be the only way of arriving at the truth. As we proceed with our inquiry and get, from the accumulating facts and from the use of these in testing our successive hypotheses and inferences, the evidential material for accurate diagnosis, reasoned knowledge gradually takes the place of hypothesis.

In making an advance in knowledge, whether in law, science, or social work, certain risks are involved. Those contained in erroneous testimony have been discussed in the preceding chapter. Assuming then that our testimony is reliable, there are still risks that arise (1) from the process of thinking, or (2) from the thinker's state of mind.

III. THE RISKS INVOLVED IN THINKING

The risks in the process of thinking may occur in four ways; we may have a mistaken general rule, a mistaken particular case, a mistaken analogy, or a mistaken causal relation.

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1. Mistaken General Rule. Suppose that in the case cited on p. 86 we infer that the Italian in question is lazy. We thereby imply that as a general rule needy men who refuse to work at the charity woodyard are lazy. There are, however, frequent exceptions to this rule, other explanations of a man's refusing such work. Therefore the general rule is open to question, and the inference in the particular case is, as a consequence, of doubtful validity.

Again take the case of James Smith, who withholds the name of his present employer. May we say "as a general rule, the man who puts obstacles in the way of consulting his employer is a man with a poor work record" and draw the inference that James Smith wants to conceal his inefficiency? Hardly. Here too there are so many possible reasons besides the one given for such an unwillingness on the part of employes that we must apply this general rule only with great caution.

Couples who are married have neither embarrassment nor hesitancy in giving this information [i. e., date and place of marriage] unless they are purposely withholding facts of early life.1

"It is quite conceivable," writes a critic of this statement, "that the question might have been asked as if it were an accusation that the couple interviewed were not married, or that it might have been so taken by a hypersensitive person. Such an apparent attitude of suspicion does not always bring, in return, the proof wanted and producible; it sometimes brings instead a stubborn refusal, or else the information is given with real embarrassment. Also (2) clients may honestly not remember the date and the year, or (3) they may consider it unimportant and not germane to their present situation." 2

Therefore this general rule is untrustworthy and reasoning which depended upon it would be invalid. In the case of the Browns, who hesitated when asked for the information, you could not infer such concealment with any certainty.

1 The Charity Visitor, p. 21. Some excellent examples of sound inference have already been given from Miss Sears' pamphlet. In the attempt, however, to formulate generalized statements applicable to given combinations of case work circumstance, there is always the danger-a danger which the present volume illustrates too, probably of assuming that in no case can the outer fringe of circumstance not specifically included in the combination make another conclusion necessary. The inference quoted above and a few others that follow, taken from The Charity Visitor, illustrate this risk.

2 For some of the comments quoted in this part of the chapter, the author is indebted to a group of former students, especially to Miss Marion Bosworth and Miss Ruth Cutler.

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A definite statement of the floor and the part of the house in which the family lives... indicates . . economic status, the probable sanitary condition of the home, and, taken in comparison with the part of the house at a previous address, the advancement or deterioration of the family fortunes.1

Has it been the common experience of social workers that knowledge of the floor and the part of the house in which a family lives indicates these three distinct conditions?

A case worker suggests the following exceptions: A family may have risen economically above its rooms or neighborhood but be held there by some tie of kinship, nationality, sentiment, or by accustomedness and inertia. Or a family's idea of thrift may lead them to deprive themselves and their children of what we consider necessities in order to keep a bank account intact. Or again, inconvenient rooms may be in an exceptionally favorable location, near the work of some member of the family, near a church, a settlement, a day nursery, etc. As regards the relation suggested between "floor” and “sanitary conditions" experience does not bear it out. The comparison suggested with a “previous address" might mean nothing, but on the other hand comparison with a series of such addresses would probably have significance.

In short, this rule is subject to so many exceptions or qualifications that we can but regard it as mistaken. When, then, we find a family living in a third floor back on Y Street we cannot from that infer their income and the sanitation of their home.

The following rule is evidently of doubtful validity, since it holds good only with certain exceptions:

Information concerning the school opportunities of any illiterate person should be most carefully gathered and, unless the history shows a gross exploitation of the individual that more than accounts for his illiteracy, it is advisable to have the mental ability of the illiterate person tested.2

As regards those who come from states where there is or has been no compulsory education law and as regards foreigners this rule should be more tentatively stated. Lack of opportunity and lack of compulsion have made illiteracy common among some of them -among the Galician farmers, for instance.

The mere statement of the age and the grade of the child is of value in showing whether or not he is a retarded child. If he is below his grade, a special effort must be made to ascertain whether he is backward merely as a result of bad environment, neglect, physical condition, or irregularity of attendance, or whether he is a mental defective.

1 The Charity Visitor, p. 23.
2 The Charity Visitor, pp. 34–35.

3 The Charity Visitor, p. 32.

Here the various possibilities are indicated, thus safeguarding the statement adequately.

The social worker must bear in mind that the "general rules" that enter into reasoning in the field of human conduct can never be of universal application; that is, they will all be liable to many exceptions. This, however, does not disqualify them from serving to advance knowledge about particular cases. For instance, if 75 per cent of the couples who hesitate to give information about their marriage do so with the motive of concealing discreditable facts, the worker cannot, it is true, from such a rule deduce with any assurance the conclusion that a given reticent couple has a scandal to conceal. But he can make such an approximately general rule the basis of a tentative inference, a hypothesis, which will serve as a guide to his inquiry into the past life of a given couple. The hypothesis may be disproved by further evidence, the couple in question turning out to have an honorable reason for reticence. Nevertheless, it is the worker's merely tentative inference, based on a rule of only partial application, which will have been the first step in bringing the truth to light.

2. Mistaken Particular Case. Since an inference is drawn not from a general rule standing by itself, but from such a rule as it is applied to a particular case, it follows that, however unimpeachable the rule, the particular case may not come under it. The rule that "the constantly shifting family is certainly in need of some kind of assistance" may be accepted by all social workers. If, however, the breadwinner is an exhibitor of trained dogs who takes his wife and children on business tours, this is not a shifting family in the sense intended in the rule. The term shifting family at once becomes ambiguous for this particular case.

Take again the case cited on p. 82 of the patient who was inferred to have been able to pay his hospital bill because he had recently received an accident insurance. The rule back of the inference was that people who have money enough on hand can pay their debts-a sound enough dictum. The first assumption was that this particular patient's case came under the rule. But how did it turn out? The man on being questioned produced a receipt for the board of his children which had just been paid. The sum 1 The Charity Visitor, p. 26.

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