(TOKer’s I am cross posting this from Alexander’s list—he asked me to explain how the ToK approaches psychology in contrast to the modern approach)

 

Great question about psychology and the ToK formulation, Alexander. Let me focus here on the first part of your query, spelling out the ToK System (which BTW, is embedded in a larger UTUA Framework) vision relative to mainstream academic (American) psychology.

 

Modern academic psychology, at least as it is taught here in psych 101 courses, is defined by its commitment to empiricism (i.e., it emphasizes systematic data gathering and testing hypotheses). At the conceptual level, it consists of a bunch of overlapping but also competing and inconsistent paradigms. Some of the major ones are: social cognitive functionalism (e.g., Albert Bandura, Beck), radical behaviorism (Skinner), psychodynamic (neo-Freudian), humanistic, evolutionary, and cultural (or social structural…feminist, postmodern), along with many other minor ones. From a ToK perspective the multiplicity of fragmented paradigms fail to produce consensual knowledge (in contrast to Periodic Table of the Elements, for example). And thus modern psychologists are largely going through the motions of the scientific method, but they are not generating consensual scientific knowledge in the same way as physicists, chemists and biologists do.

 

The ToK starts with the one thing that psychologists have consensus about, which is that there is no consensus about how to define the field. Theoretical psychologists call this “the crisis” and has been readily recognized since the turn of the 20^th Century. I have labeled the crisis “the problem of psychology”. It refers to the fact that unlike physics and biology (defined respectively as the sciences of Energy/Matter and Life) there is NO shared general subject matter that unifies the field. That is, it is sometimes defined as the science of the mind, sometimes consciousness, sometimes behavior, sometimes it corresponds to only people, sometimes it corresponds to animals. It can’t even agree on whether it is primarily a basic science discipline (like biology), or if it is more of an applied health service discipline (like medicine or social work).

 

Why is there no agreed upon subject matter? The reason for this was well-diagnosed by the philosopher Larry Cahoone in his 2014 Orders Of Nature. In it he builds a systematic metaphysics almost identical to my ToK System vision that includes Matter, Life, Mind and Culture as separable orders of nature. He argues strongly that such a view is needed in contrast to the either/or Matter/Physicalism versus Mind/Idealism versus Dualism that has been the operating as the fundamental metaphysical “choice” for modern, Western intellectual thought.  He writes:

 

“[The picture of naturalism adopted here] rejects the dominant bipolar disorder of modern philosophy, the belief that reality is constituted by at most two kinds of entities or properties, the physical and the mental, a disorder shared by idealism, dualism, and physicalism or materialism, reductive or nonreductive. That disorder encouraged us to think physics is the only metaphysically interesting natural science, that human mentality is the only part of nature that creates problems for a (physically oriented) metaphysics, that knowledge and mind are solely human possessions, that all the other natural sciences—chemistry, the Earth sciences, biology, engineering—are metaphysically unimportant. This dualism has been repeatedly and recursively applied, multiplying sub-schools (for example, between “scientific” naturalists and “humanistic” naturalists), but always with the same tendencies. It arguably has something to do with the congealing of twentieth-century Western philosophy into two opposed hermetic traditions, analytic and continental philosophy, one (in its metaphysics) tending to focus on highly specialized problems in the interpretation of physics and the possible reduction of mentality, the other rejecting natural science as inhospitable to whatever matters to the human prospect (there being some exceptions on both sides who, as is said, prove the rule). In a broader context, both are manifestations of the conflict of C. P. Snow’s the “two cultures” (Snow and Collini, 1993). In contrast the current naturalism bases itself in multiple sciences, not just physics. It accepts emergence, the presence of irreducible properties at levels of complexity, or what is the same thing, the reality and causal relevance of hierarchically arranged complex systems and processes. The idea is not new. It is a re-fashioning of a genre of post-Darwinian naturalistic metaphysics active from 1870– 1930, and epitomized by the British Emergentists of the 1920s. Such thinkers—who pre-dated the division of philosophy into analytic and continental schools—accepted the metaphysical relevance of multiple sciences and saw nature as complex and evolving. Largely cast aside by philosophy, their conceptions remained alive in the work of some revisionist theologians and interdisciplinary scientists concerned with emergence and hierarchical systems theory, recently resurrected by scientific work on complex systems.”

 

The ToK System is a picture of Cahoone’s emergent naturalism. Both systems show very clearly that there is a “Mental Order” of nature that resides between the Life/biological and Culture/Social dimensions. Why is this crucial? Because it provides a clear systematic metaphysical grounding for understanding what exactly is meant by “the mental,” which becomes the foundational way of characterizing psychology’s subject matter. That is, (basic) psychology is/should be the science that is concerned with the mental order of nature. For example, I have explicitly articulated why this understanding allows us to go from the current split between cognitivism versus behaviorism to a coherent “mental behaviorism” (can share papers if interested).

 

So, that is one answer…the ToK resolves the metaphysical problem of modern scientific psychology. I will say it actually does more than this, as the full UTUA language system I built also comes with Justification Systems Theory, Behavioral Investment Theory, and the Influence Matrix (and a whole system for psychotherapy). These allow for the “metatheoretical” integration of all the paradigms to create theoretical harmony, anchored to a shared language system. My book, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, explains how this works.

 

Let me stop there and see if this makes sense. The next part of the answer gets into morality and digital and the future. I will also say here that I agree with Mark that modern psychology was disconnected from the moral in a deep and problematic way that it needs to contend with and offer a vision about. I can also articulate why I am so enthralled with your “Empire” vision and why I think there are such strong parallels with how I see things. I will simply summarize the linkages as follows: I believe that the Enlightenment did a great job of helping us understand the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of nature. However, it breaks down at the level of psychology, for the reasons noted. I think I built a system that can solve the problem of psychology, and that can then be linked to the social sciences on the one hand and morality/ethical living on the other. I think the world is horribly confused about these domains and chaos is reigning. I think both of us are interested in fostering greater understanding of the connections between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the arts/humanities/theologies and how to build a post postmodern grand meta-narrative that brings clarity to these issues, and affords us a way to transition into the digital age in with greater wisdom than is currently being exhibited by our leaders and institutions.

Best,

Gregg

 

 

 

 

 

From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Alexander Bard
Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2019 7:15 AM
To: Intellectual Deep Web <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: BIT and Four Inner Senses

 

 

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