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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