Mr. WORMSER. I would like to bring into the record then, if Professor Briggs will confirm it, that he resigned entirely voluntarily, and he was made a member of this advisory committee of the fund for the advancement of education and served some years, and resigned with a letter of resignation to Dr. Faust, the president. It is dated March 16, 1954. The CHAIRMAN. Are there any other questions? If not, you are excused, Doctor. Mr. WORMSER. May we take it for granted that subpenas are continued if a witness is not able to appear today, it will carry over to the next day? Mr. HAYS. May I have an understanding that the next witness who comes in without a prepared statement and you undertake to question him and get him out of here, all the same morning, there won't be any meeting. If the minority isn't here, there can't be a meeting, and the minority is not going to be here unless we are going to run this thing on an adequate basis so we have a chance to find out what it is all about. Mr. WORMSER. Do you mean a witness can't testify without a statement? Mr. HAYS. Let him come back when I have had a chance to look at his statement so I can ask him some questions about it. Mr. WORMSER. The next witness will not have a prepared statement. Mr. HAYS. You had better make plans to let us look at his statement and question him later. The CHAIRMAN. He can be made available for questioning later? Mr. WORMSER. Yes. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will meet in this same room tomorrow morning, Wednesday, and Thursday morning we will have to reserve the announcement of the place of the meeting, and we may be able to meet here. If not, we will make the announcement tomorrow. Being a special committee, we are more or less in a difficult situation when it comes to meeting places. We will recess now. (Whereupon, the committee recessed at 12:30 p. m., to reconvene on Wednesday morning.) TAX-EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 1954 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, TAX EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS, The special subcommittee met at 10 a. m., pursuant to recess, in room 429, House Office Building, Hon. Carroll Reece (chairman of the special subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Reece, Hays, Goodwin, and Pfost. Also present: Rene A. Wormser, general counsel; Arnold T. Koch, associate counsel; Norman Dodd, research director; Kathryn Casey, legal analyst; and John Marshall, Jr., chief clerk to the special committee. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will please come to order. Mr. WORMSER. Dr. Hobbs, Mr. Chairman. The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Hobbs, will you please stand and be sworn. Do you solemnly swear the testimony you are about to give in this proceeding shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Dr. HOBBS. I do. Mr. HAYS. Mr. Chairman, just in view of the statement you made on the opening day about all of the witnesses being sworn, I think it would be well that the record show that Dr. Briggs yesterday was not sworn. The CHAIRMAN. Professor Briggs was sworn and I think the record will so show, or at least it should show. Mr. HAYS. On discussing it last night, we thought he had not been. We started to swear him and we got off the track. The CHAIRMAN. I have not looked at the record. Mr. KоCH. Page 251. Mr. HAYS. He was sworn. The CHAIRMAN. Yes; I did swear him in. Thank you very much. Mr. Wormser, do you wish to make a preliminary statement of any kind? Mr. WORMSER. Yes; I want to say that Dr. Hobbs will testify chiefly on the nature of social-science research. I think we may take it for granted, and I think the foundations will agree, that social-science. research in this country now is financed virtually entirely by the foundations and the United States Government. There is very little privately financed social research. Dr. Hobbs will analyze some of this research for methods and type and discuss some of the results of the type of research that is used. STATEMENT OF DR. A. H. HOBBS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA The CHAIRMAN. As I understand it, Professor Hobbs, you do not have a prepared statement. Dr. HOBBS. That is correct. The CHAIRMAN. In view of the fact that you do not have a prepared statement, the committee will be free to propound questions as you go along. Dr. HOBBS. Yes, sir. The CHAIRMAN. When a witness has a prepared statement, we ordinarily then defer questioning until the witness has concluded with his prepared statement. But where that is not the case, we feel it is better procedure to be questioned as you go along. You may proceed. Mr. GOODWIN. Mr. Chairman, might I inquire whether or not the witness is available later in the event that we might feel after we have seen the record that we want to interrogate him concerning the part of his testimony which we had not caught when he gave his testimony? The CHAIRMAN. I assume he could be made available, could he not? Mr. WORMSER. I think Dr. Hobbs is prepared to stay tomorrow if we want him. I am sure he would be glad to come back if necessary. May I ask you first to identify yourself with a short biographical note? Dr. HOBBS. I took undergraduate work at what was then Penn State College. It is now Penn State University. I took graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and received a Ph. D. in 1941. I received a Ph. D. in sociology there. I began teaching sociology and social science in 1936 at the University of Pennsylvania, and except for 3 years in the military service, I taught continuously. Is that sufficient? Mr. WORMSER. What is your position now? Dr. HOBBS. I am an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. WORMSER. Of sociology? Dr. HOBBS. That is correct. Mr. WORMSER. Dr. Hobbs, you have written quite a number of articles and several books. I am interested particularly in your most recent book which is called Social Problems and Scientism. I think you might launch into a discussion of "scientism" giving your explanation of how you use that term. Dr. HOBBS. All right, sir. There is, or at least there seems to be, and I think most people would agree with this who have been involved in the matter in teaching or studying, there is a good deal of confusion about the term "science." There is a tendency to designate as science a number of things which are not science, or at least there is serious question as to whether they are scientific or not. So I attempted to analyze this problem by going to the books dealing with scientific methods to find out in what way it could be analyzed and interpreted. By way of background, I would just like to mention a few things which are usually included in scientific investigation. The method of science is one which has been tremendously successful in solving a variety of types of problems, but, as we all know, it began in fields such as physics and chemistry and astronomy. Mr. HAYS. Are those what you would term, Doctor, the exact sciences? Dr. HOBBS. That term is frequently applied to them, although technically there would be some question if you strained the term "exact" even in those areas. Some of them are not exact. Mr. HAYS. In other words, what you are saying is that there is no such thing as an exact science? Dr. HOBBS. In absolute terms I think most scientists would agree with that. This method involves, for one thing, controlled observation. By that is meant that if I express my opinion on something, my belief on how to raise children, you express your opinion, we can debate these opinions back and forth from now until kingdom come, and in no way that will necessarily reach agreement. That, of course, was the situation in philosophy for many centuries. But with the scientific inethod, they gradually learned to use this technique of controlled observation, a means whereby anybody, no matter what his feelings on the matter, no matter what his beliefs or prejudices, in observing the results, is compelled to agree as to them. In order to use this technique of controlled observation, which is fundamental in scientific procedure, you have to reduce the things that you are studying to quantitative units-units which are quantitative, units which are not only quantitative, but which are homogeneous, and units which are stable. A quantitative unit is a thing in turn which can be measured in terms of weight, distance, velocity. In science as you know, they have gone a step further and developed instruments, ammeters, speedometers, scales, things of that type, by means of which these units can be measured with a sufficient degree of precision to justify the type of experiment which is at that time being done. Congressman Hays, that is the general context of exactness or precision in science for the purpose of experiments. The measurements must be exact. But that does not mean exact in the sense of perfectability. Mr. HAYS. What I am trying to get at is this: Is there any science in which after these experiments the conclusions which are arrived at can be termed "exact"?" Dr. HOBBS. The conclusions can be measured and in terms of the purposes for which the measurements are being made, they can be said to be exact. There will inevitably be some element of error which scientists always attempt to reduce to the least possible terms. Mr. HAYS. I believe you said that you are now teaching sociology and social science? Dr. HOBBS. I am teaching sociology; yes, sir. Mr. HAYS. Is there such a thing as social science? Dr. HOBBS. In the sense in which the term "science" is applied to the physical sciences, I think it is extremely questionable that the great bulk of the work in sociology, history, political science, could be designated as being scientific. In that sense, I would say very little. Mr. HAYS. But that is a term that has become quite common, and is used rather generally to bulk all of the sciences dealing with the sociological aspects of civilization, is it not? Dr. HOBBS. That is correct. The terms "social science" and "political science" and similar terms are very widely used. I think it would |