Hi folks. Thanks Nancy and Gregg. As I read Gregg's comments and in thinking about the ToK & UTUA more generally, I think the argument is precisely that we should extend our analytic assessments of mental behavior to include the full range of animals, common processes and mechanisms, etc. That would be one critical branch, just as biologists do not merely study cellular life (e.g.) among humans, but across organic life generally - obviously depending on the specialists & experts in question. There will always be a division of labor.
As for "human psychology," that's where we'd also highlight all the other stuff (i.e., Culture) that helps shape or influence "mental behavior." I think where we differ, in good faith, is the degree to which we identify the drivers of individual behavior, the levels of influence, and the extent to which some of us focus on Culture (and clearly technology) as shaping behavioral outcomes. Think of Gregg's J-I-I model. The real challenge for those of us who analyze the supra-individual level of reality, in my view, is the extent to which, as with Mind and mental behavior, we are willing to define and explain an emergent reality not reducible to Mind. Brilliant people with vastly different perspectives have long debated this issue. At the very least, I think most folks agree these days that historical context, social location (the relationships into which we are born and the social networks to which we are exposed), and cultural info (both material and non-material) are key determinants of human social behavior, i.e., meaning how we interact with others as individuals and in group settings. As ever, I'm open to thinking seriously then about how we reconcile psychology's mission with that of the social sciences that take into account everything 'above' the level of the Mind.
For example, I'm working on the idea that there are general "social forces" that are supra-individual in nature that directly shape behavioral outcomes at both the individual and group level. One such example is "social distance," where there appears to be an almost inverse-square relationship in terms of "influence" (and all kinds of human behaviors, from calling the police to believing someone's account of something) if we locate those involved in an exchange at measurable "relational" and "cultural" distances in social space. The social distance concept, as I'm using it, involves both relational and cultural dimensions). I maintain that I can make a priori predictions about all kinds of behavior based on my knowledge of these factors alone. In fact, I've done this on many occasions with various experiments, even at the personal level. For example, I used various measures of social distance to predict with 90% accuracy (9 of 10 cases) how many of my best friends from high school would remain married at least ten years and which would divorce. Just a couple of key measures of social distance and without factoring in their personalities, intelligence, etc.
But the idea of "divorce", of course, (a horse is a horse...) is a cultural construction and not simply a Mental behavior. So, how does such a concept, then, get connected to the Mind of the individuals involved? That's an example of where Gregg and I are playing off of each other to try to better integrate the disciplinary boundaries and come up with new ways to talk about human behavior, as distinct from bonobo behavior or the behavior of ants (all valid and important arenas, to be sure!). And the connection occurs, IMO, through the J-I-I dynamics. Oversimplifying, but that's the general point that intrigues me as a social scientist. Always open to new ideas and explanatory frameworks that push us further in the direction of a deeper understanding.
All best regards, -Joe
Dr. Joseph H. Michalski
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King’s University College at Western University
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Nancy,
Interesting point, and one I largely agree with. I did my case study of Maggie in part to demonstrate that the UTUA language game is up to the task of capturing clinical/human phenomena.
For me, your point raises the general issue of the identity of psychology and its proper subject matter. From a ToK System perspective, what you are describing is the central interface between human and professional psychology. That is, how does the science of human psychology frame human experience in a way that allows clinicians to operate in the therapy room in a scientifically informed way? I agree that this is, arguably, the most central, pragmatic question of our field.
However, I would add a point of clarification. I would not characterize it as the center of the basic science of psychology. At least from a ToK metaphysical system perspective, the basic science of psychology is concerned with the mental. Mental is a description that characterizes what makes animal behavior so different from that of inanimate objects and organisms like cells and plants. I am particularly attuned to this because I am right in the middle of working on this in my book. Attached is an excerpt clarifying why I say this.
For me, the basic science of psychology should be defined as the science of mental behavior. Comparative/Basic psychology is concerned with describing and explaining animal behavior (the functional behavior of the animal as a whole, mediated by the nervous system). Human psychology should be an important/major subdiscipline. The human subdiscipline is what connects to and scientifically informs the profession (which ideally feedbacks and informs the science of human psychology). Now I say “should be” because the institution of psychology can be defined anyway that we psychologists want. I am making this pitch on conceptual grounds to align the field with the (abstract) model provided by the ToK (and a coherent language system more generally).
I fully recognized that there is a strong argument against this, which is that this is not how the institution of psychology has evolved, nor does it correspond to how most psychologists currently function. Animal behavior has gone by way of the biologists and comparative psychology is fading fast. As Stam’s article note, something like 90% of psychologists are in applied domains, at least in the US. And of the meager 10% who are scholars, probably 80-90% of those are interested in humans. So, probably less than 5% of psychologists deal with animals these days. Of course, in the heyday of behaviorism in the 1920-40s, most experimental psychologists were animal behavioral researchers, so it has evolved.
The bottom line is that the field faces an identity issue, no matter how you slice it. It is most commonly defined in textbooks as the science of “behavior and mental processes.” If this has any conceptual validity at all, it corresponds to animals in general rather than humans only. And yet, almost all modern psychologists study and help humans. So the field is most definitely off kilter in terms of its alignment. As an institution, if we care about coherence, we need to decide if we are about human or animal mental behavior. Of course, as the Stam article points out, coherence has never been something that the field has achieved and by now, psychologists have habituated to and accepted its absence.
Thanks,
Gregg
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]>
On Behalf Of Nancy Link
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2018 8:01 AM
To:
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Subject: Re: Stam's critique
Hi Gregg,
Thank for this article and the discussion. I agree that the route to the unification of psychology lies in scientific psychology being able able to address at an abstract level the human phenomena observed within clinical psychology.
Nancy
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]>
on behalf of Gregg Henriques <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tuesday, September 25, 2018 at 7:35 AM
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Stam's critique
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://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595780/
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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