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Essentially, the principle of complementarity, as I have described it here, is a rule for the use of language. Bohr had asserted that in certain fundamental physical matters there are two truths rather than one—two views which, taken together, offer a fuller understanding of the atomic world than either was able to provide separately (Moore, 1966). Complementarity, as envisioned by Bohr, incorporated into scientific method an essential statement of the limits of scientific inquiry. Among other things, it took into account the relation of the observer to the object. It brought the subject (and the
subject's dependence upon language) back into the scientific world-picture, thus restoring a relation that had been tacitly set aside during the period of expanding scientific objectification (roughly, from Copernicus to Einstein). Through recognizing a fundamental dichotomy of descriptive modes (corresponding to an experiential dichotomy)7 Bohr pointed the way to a new integration of concepts in physics. An analogous synthesis can be achieved in psychology through a consistent application of complementarity to statements about the mind and statements about the brain—for these two classes of statements also correspond to an experiential dichotomy. This means that for the relationship between psychological description and neurophysiological description, the ultimate state of our knowledge is irrelevant, it will never be possible for one mode of description to be exchanged for the other. A great deal will be gained, I think, if we assume as a matter of principle that both descriptive modes will continue to be necessary, that the expectation that either mode will one day be translatable into the terms of the other is misleading and that any procedure based on such an expectation is methodologically unsound.