Metaphyschology: The smallest assumption needed...

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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I’ve always been curious about this. Now, before I start, I’m aware that the answer is ‘it’s complicated’. I’m gonna pretend, at least for a little while, that this isn’t the case and a simplistic solution is possible, just to motivate the question being in a certain form.

So, what is the subject matter of psychology? This might seem straight forward (it’s people, stupid) but I’ve never been sure. So, someone engaged in research describes a discrete, relatively isolated psychological mechanism, is what they’re describing an

1). aspect of observation, so makes no strong claims about the psyche itself. You fit together little, modal elements of behaviour, bound by a descriptive term, and then look for cross-cultural patterns based on this first weak assumption.

2). aspect of our psychological construction that is, at least, relatively necessary. So, you analyse behaviour of agents X, Y and Z (x1000) and, when they all display the same behaviour (accounting for variables and situational conditions) you’re left with an element of the self-structure that is part of what it means to be an agent. This further implies that we are necessarily NOT tabula rasa: the river may take a different course each time, but that landscape that forms it has definite contours and certain aspects of its route are determined simply by it following the rules of being a river.

3). True psychological claims can only be justified by appealing to aspects of construction, true, but structure only occurs at the neurological, biological level. There are no facts of mind, only facts of brain. Only these can be tested with scientific rigor and therefore form a justified claim about reality.

There are two problems with this… spiel. First that, if anything, it probably involves all three, where you have observations of repeated phenomena, you test them to see if they represent anything underlying (or beyond conscious thought) and then, if this becomes particularly well established, you start looking for connections across the descriptive layers we apply. Fine.

Secondly, how does one avoid the second position, roughly where I think psychology wants to be, collapsing into either one or three. How does one justify the existence of discreet psychological structures, with a definite nature and that can be empirically tested?

Long introduction to a short question really…

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Unlike the body… the mind cannot be wholly defined, as the psyche appears to be a non-stable entity with continuously evolving thoughts - if that was not the case, then manipulation would be rife and humanity set to self-destruct.

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Pshchology became an issue in philosophy during the enlightenment. Locke and Hume wrote essays about human understanding. in the late 19th century C.E., psychology came into its own through the works of James and Freud. So, what is psychology now? It has moved beyond how we understand anything to why we understand anything, hence it cannot be divorced from epistemology. Science has helped move psychology into considerations of how brains produce thought, leaving the why open to question. Psychology at present is a mix of information from such disciplines as neuroscience, behaviorism, etiology, genetics, etc., etc., etc. That being said, I still describe psychology as descriptions of how we think and act and why. “Meta” leaves me cold as the prefix is understood mostly to mean some disconnected (from natural processes) abstraction.

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I am of the opinion that a parked car, a car tavelling down a road, and a car crashing into a tree, are all still cars.

Nor do I believe that because a car can be parked, or that it can travel down the road, has anything what so ever to do with being defined as a car.

As Plato pointed out, if you do not know the definition of a thing, you do not know a thing, and that, quite frankly is a physical fact.

Now I am amazed at those who insist that ignorance of self is the preservation of mankind. A posture that is direcctly opposed to what we are, in fact, well we will leave religious metaphor alone at this time.

The human mind is an environmental acquisition system with the same job to do as any other environmental acquisition system of any other living organism. The particulars of our job, nor the fact of our ineptness at it, does not negate this simple observation.

Now if you desire to see just how far back in time my definition runs, in the pdf to Langauge and Experience is a section called The Number of His Name. The purpose of the demonstration is that man does not yet know himself. That men call the good evil and the evil good, which means, on an Aristotelian or Platonic level, that they assert when they should deny and deny when they assert, or again they do not know the difference between form and matter, which means, well quite frankly, as mind they are dysfunctional.

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The fundamental problem psychology has is that it is deeply rooted in common, every day language to describe the phenomena with which it works, yet it must use this surface level, folk apparatus to talk about the empirical evidence coming from both its own experiments and those coming from, say, neuroscience. It doesn’t so much bridge the gap, yet, but painfully straddle it.

Compare psychology to physics, the technical language of the former is nothing like that of the latter, when do you ever hear academics from physics talk about surface level phenomena, such as hardness, in their research, rather than the underlying properties that generate this conscious experience, when engaging at a relatively high level? In some sense, that surface experience is necessarily the subject matter of psychology and this muddies their waters.

Which in turn generates the problem, about what are you speaking, or, when you speak (publish articles) what exactly are you proving?

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Your mind may be basic and easily assimilated and read, but mine ain’t - fact!

We are not all the same / our minds are not all of the same ilk… sorry - you cannot tell me what I feel about my own psyche/my own mind.

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A quick thought after a quick skim - I apologize up front if it’s irrelevant…

The practice of pyschology is the discipline of improving one’s quality of life through means other than manipulating one’s environment. I’d say “whatever works”, but some things seem to work in the short term but prove deficient in the longer term.

I’d like to think there’s a lot packed in those two sentences, but maybe I’m deluding myself.