Tolstoi and Qualiltative Psychology

[Nick Thompson]

Duncan,

Interesting

For a statement to be law like, in my world, it has to extend beyond or between or before the cases it actually arises from.  So, you see me holding a class of wine to my lips, tipping the glass, and swallowing.  The only strictly qualitative statement you can make on the basis of that observation is that "Thompson has drunk some wine".  Such a statement is not Law Like, so far as I can see.  But the statement, "Thompson drinks wine"  is law like because it projects beyond the particular observation.  Notice that what we take to be law like depends on our frame of reference.  Consider the statement, "Thompson is drinking wine."   Because of the tense "is drinking" it, too projects beyond the instant observation to subsume all the components, holding the glass to my mouth, tipping the glass, swallowing,  and therefore does have a law-like quality, but at a much reduced temporal scale.  

So, returning to your example.  Does your law-like, "the right place at the right time" extend beyond the particuilar instances from which one has derived it and therefore does it constitute a general observation about the correlation between the characteristics of the leader and the characteristics of the social and political context that makes such a leader effective, or is the observation only to be made, case by case, after the fact.  

Thanks for your response,

Nick

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


----- Original Message -----
From: Duncan MacLean Earle
To: Nicholas Thompson
Sent: 10/11/2005 1:02:05 PM
Subject: RE: Tolstoi and Qualiltative Psychology


Nick,
Seems to me the idea of being the "right person in the right place at the right time" is a place to start, as this commonsensical saying suggests the interface between personality and law-like structures of society; a great case is Marcos and Zapatismo; he was the right person to begin a "thick translation" of the Maya culture as both leader and spokesman, and just at a time in the evolution of the crisis of governance in southern Mexico to give his appearance a kind of "we were just waiting for someone like you" sort of miraculous quality.  And rest assured there are law-like generalizations out there about collectivities of people, including US.
Best
Duncan
-----Original Message-----
From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2005 12:41 PM
To: Kitchen
Cc: Kitchen
Subject: RE: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.
> >

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