Hi List,

  I am sharing some slides from a presentation I made at the conference I was at. It was organized by fellow list member Gary Brill. He brought myself and another scholar who works from a “Descriptive Psychology” frame together to talk about the concept of behavior. Although it was not well attended, I felt the exchange was productive.

 

  One of the points I tried to make clearly is that previous attempts to define behavior in the field of psychology and behavioral biology have attempted to strongly distinguish between behavior and non-behavior. One of the central points the ToK makes is that we need to “start from the bottom or beginning” and define behavior in general and then realize that folks in biology or psychology or the human-person sciences are attempting to get at specific kinds of behavior, namely the behavior of organisms, animals and people.

 

  The other cool thing from my perspective was that there is a very close line up with how Descriptive Psychology defines the behavior of persons and how the ToK does. Both essentially define the essence of persons behaving as persons as being characterized by a Deliberative actor self-consciously justifying their actions on a social stage. The Descriptive psychologists emphasized how this led to a parametric analysis of behavior that has been valuable. I found myself more fascinated by the conceptual correspondence.

 

  To me, it has solidified one of the key conceptual insights about the nature of human nature. Namely, human beings are both primates and persons, and that these two dimensions of human beingness can be conceptually separated (even though enormously intertwined).

 

Best,
Gregg