I remember something about Joseph Priestley and Ben Franklin trading mouse and mint plant experiments as a first demonstration of what would eventually become the carbon cycle.
To this day, if you ask college students where the weight gain in a growing plant comes from, most of them will say the soil, or the water. Almost none of them imagine the air.
Are you by any chance familiar with Gaston Bachelard’s “the birth of the scientific mind”? He argues that (what we would now call) new paradigms emerge when specific obstacles to understanding are overcome. For instance overcoming substantialism - the tendency to explain the behavior of a complex system in terms of the properties of a putative substance - leads to the ditching of phlogiston theory (my example here, not his). What may be some widespread tacit assumptions in psychology that make progress impossible?
The day before Archimedes sat in that bath, he had no idea that he was about to make an Eureka discovery. Thus it is not helpful to talk about Holy Grails in psychology. What psychologists have are the "Here Be Monsters" maps of the ancient cartographers: problems they would like to explore and solve.
I follow psychology blogs because most Ph.D. psychology bloggers list philosophy as their second credential. Speaking as an outsider I say with great diffidence that in none of these blogs have I ever seen the statement, "Psychology is mainly concerned with the irrational."
That may be a difficult thing to acknowledge. However I think that it might help to shift the focus away from statistics and empiricism. Many studies seem to be about collecting and subjecting data to the usual numerical methods, in the hope that something publishable will pop out.
For a science to reach "paradigm" stage, it needs clear maps that actually work: entities, relationships and contexts that can be held as guidance for navigating the territory. We extract these map elements from patterns we discern over many observations. For us to generate maps that operate well at the same level at which we navigate, we need observation tools that enable us to see enough detail *at that level* for those patterns to be identified.
Currently, in psychology, we have been operating without observation tools that provide this level of detail for the actual territory of subjective experience. It's crude at best. So we are unable to discern pattern at a sufficient level of sophistication to meet us in the realm of actual experience, where we are trying to get better maps for navigating, both individually and collectively.
Yes, we can observe neurological activity, for example, but that operates at a much different level than the one we actually inhabit as conscious, agentic beings. So the maps we get from neural correlates are essentially useless to a person struggling with inner distress. Similarly for observation of statistical patterns in populations. They don't assist with navigation in any way that improves agency.
I remember something about Joseph Priestley and Ben Franklin trading mouse and mint plant experiments as a first demonstration of what would eventually become the carbon cycle.
To this day, if you ask college students where the weight gain in a growing plant comes from, most of them will say the soil, or the water. Almost none of them imagine the air.
https://www.aaas.org/news/new-curriculum-outperforms-traditional-biology-materials
During medical school, I frequently compared psychology to witchcraft, but I think this is a more apt comparison!
Are you by any chance familiar with Gaston Bachelard’s “the birth of the scientific mind”? He argues that (what we would now call) new paradigms emerge when specific obstacles to understanding are overcome. For instance overcoming substantialism - the tendency to explain the behavior of a complex system in terms of the properties of a putative substance - leads to the ditching of phlogiston theory (my example here, not his). What may be some widespread tacit assumptions in psychology that make progress impossible?
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/new-paradigm-for-psychology-just
Very interesting, thanks!
The day before Archimedes sat in that bath, he had no idea that he was about to make an Eureka discovery. Thus it is not helpful to talk about Holy Grails in psychology. What psychologists have are the "Here Be Monsters" maps of the ancient cartographers: problems they would like to explore and solve.
I follow psychology blogs because most Ph.D. psychology bloggers list philosophy as their second credential. Speaking as an outsider I say with great diffidence that in none of these blogs have I ever seen the statement, "Psychology is mainly concerned with the irrational."
That may be a difficult thing to acknowledge. However I think that it might help to shift the focus away from statistics and empiricism. Many studies seem to be about collecting and subjecting data to the usual numerical methods, in the hope that something publishable will pop out.
Right on!
For a science to reach "paradigm" stage, it needs clear maps that actually work: entities, relationships and contexts that can be held as guidance for navigating the territory. We extract these map elements from patterns we discern over many observations. For us to generate maps that operate well at the same level at which we navigate, we need observation tools that enable us to see enough detail *at that level* for those patterns to be identified.
Currently, in psychology, we have been operating without observation tools that provide this level of detail for the actual territory of subjective experience. It's crude at best. So we are unable to discern pattern at a sufficient level of sophistication to meet us in the realm of actual experience, where we are trying to get better maps for navigating, both individually and collectively.
Yes, we can observe neurological activity, for example, but that operates at a much different level than the one we actually inhabit as conscious, agentic beings. So the maps we get from neural correlates are essentially useless to a person struggling with inner distress. Similarly for observation of statistical patterns in populations. They don't assist with navigation in any way that improves agency.