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Tolstoi and Qualiltative Psychology

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Nick Thompson

Tolstoi and Qualiltative Psychology

All,

the reason this quote blew my mind (see below) was because it was an
argument from calculus for what is called qualitative psychology, which to
me, is the psychology that flows from believing that all thruth comes from
the study of individuals. Not being Platonists, qualitative psychologists
are very short on justifications for generalizations from the study of
indivuals to the class of which individuals are part -- in fact, many are
besotted with the notion that no such generalizations could ever be
possible in principle ... hence our wonder at what exactly they are doing.
But the calculus metaphor at least offers a way to begin a conversation on
such a subject, one which so far as I know ... and I have no reason to know
.... is not frequently had.

Take care, all,

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/
nthompson at clarku.edu

>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 20:31:49 -0600
> From: Robert Holmes <rholmes62 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The laws of history
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <Friam at redfish.com>
> Message-ID:
> <857770150510071931k5250b9eem3a4b65ab573efcb9 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Actually John Lewis Gaddis (a Yale history professor) writes at length on
> this in "The Landscape of History". He devotes a couple of chapters to
> drawing parallels betweeen various historical processes and
> self-organisation, sensitivity to initial conditions and the other usual
> suspects. He spoke at SFI on these parallels about a year ago.
>
> Robert
>
> On 10/7/05, Jochen Fromm <fromm at vs.uni-kassel.de> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Stuart Kauffman writes in his book "At Home in the Universe" on page

299:

> > "We lack a theory of how the elements of our public lives
> > link into webs of elements that act on one another and
> > transform one another. We call these transformations
> > 'history'. Hence with all the accidents of history,
> > one must engage in a renewed debate: Is there a place for
> > law in the historical sciences? Can we find lawlike patterns,
> > cultural, economic, and otherwise?"
> >
> > This question is quite similar to the question of Leo Nikolayevich
> > Tolstoy in his epic novel "War and Peace":
> > "Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation
> > (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies
> > of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is,
> > finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive
> > at the laws of history.", War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, Book 11, Chapter 1
> > http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/war_and_peace/
> > http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2600
> >
> > Both Kauffman and Tolstoy are great story tellers, and
> > history is teld in stories, too. Is history just a collection
> > of stories or more? What do you think, can we establish universal
> > "laws of history", as they say? It is clear that the most
> > basic law which governs history is evolution and coevolution.
> > Besides evolution, what else can we say if we concentrate
> > on agent based models? Are phenomena like the "Butterfly Effect",
> > "Path Dependence" or "Frozen Accidents" equivalent to laws? Is the
> > micro or the macro level more important for the "laws of history"?
> >
> > -J.
> >

Frank Wimberly

Tolstoi and Qualiltative Psychology

Reminds me of Freud's fascination with the physical sciences and his
resulting use of their concepts in explaining drives etc. The metaphors are
useful, I think, but when you actually try to "integrate" something you get
stuck on problems like acquiring the data, quantification, etc. When I was
a first year graduate student in psychology I had to read a book by
Atkinson, et al. call "Mathematical Psychology". There were a number of
models of learning which seemed to fit one or another dataset well but
applying them to prediction didn't work out too well, as I recall.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz Santa Fe, NM 87505
(505) 995-8715 or (505) 670-9918 (cell)
wimberly3 at earthlink.net or wimberly at andrew.cmu.edu or
wimberly at cal.berkeley.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Nicholas Thompson
Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2005 12:41 PM
To: Friam at redfish.com
Cc: Kitchen
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Tolstoi and Qualiltative Psychology

All,

the reason this quote blew my mind (see below) was because it was an
argument from calculus for what is called qualitative psychology, which to
me, is the psychology that flows from believing that all thruth comes from
the study of individuals. Not being Platonists, qualitative psychologists
are very short on justifications for generalizations from the study of
indivuals to the class of which individuals are part -- in fact, many are
besotted with the notion that no such generalizations could ever be
possible in principle ... hence our wonder at what exactly they are doing.
But the calculus metaphor at least offers a way to begin a conversation on
such a subject, one which so far as I know ... and I have no reason to know
.... is not frequently had.

Take care, all,

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/
nthompson at clarku.edu

299:

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