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September 2018

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From:
Mark Stahlman <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 25 Sep 2018 06:07:55 -0600
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Gregg:

Fascinating -- thanks . . . !!

I've done a lot of work on the topic of "order" and "disorder" --  
cross-culturally in China and the West -- and that does seem to be at  
the heart of the matter in both civilizations.  But which kind of  
"order" are you going to choose: Athens (Plato) or Jerusalem  
(Aristotle)?

Or, to put this in historic "philosophical" (not "psychological")  
terms, attempting to use "physics" (i.e. energy/information) as the  
basis of a chain-of-being points towards Plato and his "mentor"  
Pythagoras, not in the direction of Genesis (which takes God as its  
origin.)

This approach is indeed "abstract" and requires "theories" and  
"hypotheses" -- which will appeal to those interested in tackling a  
"unification" in the social sciences, like the "complexity" types  
(thus your idiosyncratic use of their language.)  But will it appeal  
to clinical psychologists . . . ??

The what-problem-does-this-solve? issue is indeed a crucial one.  We  
have been living under TELEVISION conditions, which produced a world  
that is deliberately "disordered."  We live with "deconstruction" and  
"post-structuralism" for a reason.  These attitudes were generated by  
the previous paradigm and most people who were "formed" under those  
conditions have come to accept it.

Your urge for "order" is a reaction against all that -- as was the  
election of Trump &c (which might be why you keep coming back to him.)  
  But what is needed isn't a "reaction" but rather a completely new  
approach which is consonant with the *new* DIGITAL paradigm.  What  
*effects* does this technology generate and what psychology is  
appropriate to the problems caused by this shift?

My guess is that this has been the elephant-in-the-room throughout  
this discussion on your list.  Do we "go back" to a physics-type  
approach -- as was dominant in the early 20th-century RADIO era, for  
instance -- or do we "go forward" into a more *medieval* approach (as  
we are doing at the Center)?

Plato or Aristotle (take your pick) . . . ??

Mark

Quoting "Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx" <[log in to unmask]>:

> Hi List,
>
>   In case anyone is in the mood for some philosophical psychology  
> early on a Tuesday morning, here is a 2015 article I came across  
> yesterday by Hank Stam, who offered a critique of the unified theory  
> back in 2004. This is a similar viewpoint. He is not a fan of  
> attempting to unified the field, ToK style, although he does respect  
> the effort (he was editor of Theory and Psychology and invited me to  
> do a special issue on it in 2008).
>
> Here is the article:
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov_pmc_articles_PMC4595780_&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=PdJxjohah6XRXnFyczNBBETL3UxqncC2R6Rh2wVzK5Q&s=eWqLINyga-h_Sn63fNeXkkJ03kqRJOOJD4FD4GiD7GY&e=
>
> Here is the most relevant part, at least in relation to a critique  
> of the UTUA approach. I think it is worth being aware of:
>
> "But it has meant that from time to time there have been attempts to  
> "unify" psychology under some banner or other so that, at the very  
> least, the stories told to the public by both academics and  
> practitioners would match. The claim is that psychology is not  
> unified and this hurts both its practitioners and its status as a  
> science (Staats, 1991; Henriques, 2008)3. A quick and simplistic  
> comparison is then drawn with the natural sciences wherein physics  
> is taken to be exemplary but even biology will do as a standard.  
> This is then contrasted to psychology's squabbles and the lack of a  
> consensus on the status of just what is scientific and what counts  
> as pseudo-science and, goes the argument, it is high time to clean  
> up the mess. Some one or another scheme is then proffered for  
> replacing many small but recalcitrant theories in the discipline and  
> this over-riding scheme is usually packaged as superior because of  
> its ability to unite, provide a foundation, or otherwise cohere the  
> many strands that make up the contemporary discipline.
>
> Although not numerous, such schemes usually include a list of  
> reasons why this is a problem or why psychology is a "disunified  
> science" in Staats's (1991) words. After some broad generalizations,  
> lumping all areas of psychology together, a wide variety of  
> propositions or arguments have been put forth to unify the  
> discipline. In Staats's (1994) case, this was a "unified positivism"  
> or a "psychological behaviorism" depending on what phase of Staats's  
> career one is reading. Ultimately it was an attempt to fuse multiple  
> areas and features of psychology into a single "unified science."  
> Others of more recent vintage have attempted to keep these projects  
> alive, or at least to put their personal stamp on such a project for  
> every unification project seems to require that its proponent think  
> through the problem anew. In recent years, Sternberg and Grigorenko  
> (2001), Goertzen (2008) and Henriques (2008) among many others have  
> continued to write on these questions, providing variations on the  
> problem (is there a "crisis" of unification?) and offering numerous  
> solutions (e.g., the "tree of knowledge,"-Henriques, a "unified  
> psychology approach"-Sternberg), and so on (see Stam, 2004 for one  
> critique).
>
> The problems with these projects are (i) they are not responses to  
> genuine problems in psychology but an attempt to impose order on  
> disorder from an abstract vantage point, (ii) their relationship to  
> empirical research is thin, and (iii) they rarely amount to more  
> than a singular project or a personal vision of some abstract  
> structures and/or institutional and political processes that might  
> solve the so-called "crisis of disunification" (Green, 2015). But  
> all of these, it is important to note, have also been proposed at a  
> high level of abstraction without solving any particular, single,  
> concrete problem in the discipline. Indeed what characterizes such  
> projects is their considerable remove from the world of minute,  
> everyday psychological phenomena."
>
> Best,
> Gregg
>
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