Carrol Cox wrote:
>
I claim that so far, no
> one,
> including Freud et cetera have given a satisfactory answer in the
> case of psychology. What is it the study *of*?
Human behaviour. Psychology is an attempt to explain behaviour, a description of how people act towards themselves, towards other people(in different situations) and I guess towards other animals and even other objects. There are many ways of going about this: there's evolutionary,philosophical,folk,cognitive,game theory, social, abnormal, intentional, and behaviourist psychology amongst others. By no means are these mutually exclusive and they don't all operate on the dame explanatory level.Because each branch yields its own insights,I think the best way of going about it would be a kind of methodological pluralism which draws on each branch in,yes, a grand meta-narrative. One of the best attempts at this is *Unto Others* by Elliot Sober and David Wilson.
While psychology must be based in the physical nature of people and animals it is not reducible to it.Human biology is multiply realizable i.e. consistent with feudalism, capitalism and socialism whereas psychology may change across modes of production. For example, a "knowledge" worker may feel superior to a manual worker in capitalism, but this may not be the case in pre-capitalist forms of commodity production yet the knowledge worker may have the same biological structure in both modes of production.
There are generally only three theories of motivation; hedonism, egoism and pluralism(h+e+altruism).These are not normative theories of how people should act but how they actually act. Beyond that, when asking why do people act, for example, egoistically, evolutionary theory or genetics is usually invoked. People act egoistically to maximize the number of their own offspring or act altruistically to maximize the number of offspring in a given group or species. Yet clearly, evolutionary theory, genetics and psychology in general, cannot be seperated from culture and socio-economic structures in any explanation because beliefs and desires must figure in any psych. explanation, and belief& desires are at least in part conditioned and created by socio-economic structures and history. I think there are parts of psychology like rote or language learning that are amenable to biological explanations but more complex phenomena like aggression or sexuality reflect deep societal beliefs.
Sam Pawlett
BTW,Yoshie, if you are reading this where did you get the Sartre quotes from? Whad'ya think of his CDR?