[lbo-talk] Sternberg article on Academically Adrift

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Tue Feb 8 21:18:48 PST 2011


First, psychologists have developed many "explanatory theories of mind", from Freud to cognitive psychologists like Sternberg to neurocognitive theorists. You may disagree with one or more of these approaches, but psychologists are definitely not lacking in the "theory of mind" department. Miles

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I am aware of multiple theories, so I'll revise what I wrote to say there is no consensus, so that a theory of mind is contested territory. Hence why I said loosely that psychology lacked a theory of mind. The problem is psych has too many theories. And not only that but some theories seem valid and useful in some cases and not others.

For example, I was becoming something like a clinical social psychologist as a student counselor using direct observation. What was going on in my mind was an assessment of both our program's capability and the students being interviewed.

In our staff meetings, we were sharing experience and attempting a kind of probability. But we were using these constructs like probability, measure, assessment in much more informal ways, so that our experience and judgement could enter the evaluation.

In contrast, in a particular sense there is still only one physics with minor variations, as far as I know. The contiuum hypothesis on which newtonian physics applies and the quantum or discrete hypothesis are not competing on the same ground. The problem is different.

All that isn't to say that psychology isn't a science. It is simply a different kind of study than physical science, which also doesn't make it any less interesting and insightful. For example, you can't disagree with a physical law or physical constant. And yet you can disagree with a theory of mind.

Then there is another problem with these comparisons between psych and physics, which is they require different kinds of learning. which seems to me to catch sight of the problem there maybe different kinds of `minds'. Maybe the whole idea of a fixed construction is wrong. Maybe a mind is not a fixed construction of any sort, but a fluid series of states that can form temporarily and then dissovle, in macro-time of a life, and micro-time of thought, so we have to change our conceptual basis.

CG



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