Jochen,
As an indirect answer to your question: One reason why physics,
chemistry, and biology seem to be largely complete and self-contained fields is
through the progressive banishment of the magical explanations for their
phenomenon. There are many traditions in psychology which have, to a greater or
lesser extent, been successful in banishing magical explanations, however the
currently dominant approach - cognitive psychology - is all about magic. The
entire basis of Chomsky's critique of Skinner, for example, was an unflinching
faith that magic was needed to account for verbal behavior, and hence that any
approach not based in magic must be wrong.
One reason that psychology
is stuck with this burden, I suspect, is that the hard sciences have
pretended that dualism is not a problem for them due to their heavy reliance on
instruments, and they have convinced others to join them in this myth by trying
to foist all the problems of dualism onto psychology.
There seems to me little hope that the borders between psychology and other
sciences (e.g. neuroscience) will be solved until these more fundamental issues
are dealt with. (For example, there is much magic invoked in
www.extremetech.com/extreme/123485-mit-discovers-the-location-of-memories-individual-neurons.)
Oddly, quite similar problems stand between genetic and organismal biology.
People have become so infatuated with DNA, that several magical properties are
attributed to it (e.g., that it 'stores a plan' for the organism, or 'codes'
for a specific, macroscopic, body trait).
Eric
On
Sun, May 13, 2012 12:20 PM, Jochen Fromm j...@cas-group.net
wrote:
The classical sciences like physics, chemistry, biology and psychology
are similar, they seem to be largely completed and self-contained
fields. The major phenomena and subfields are well known, and the
available research methods are applied to all common phenomena.
The unsolved problems seem to lie between and beyond the disciplines,
when things start to get very complex, for example between psychology
and neuroscience, or between biology and molecular genetics.
We can not really say how genes generate a living organism
or how neurons interact to produce a mind in detail. And
there is still a large gap between mental processes, abstract
thoughts or subjective feelings on the one hand,
and concrete brain circuits, neural correlates or
molecular processes on the other hand.
Do you think it is possible to bridge the gap between psychology
and neuroscience using some kind of sociological/ecological
approach by an society or ecology of mind, as proposed by
Marvin Minsky and Gregory Bateson, respectively?
Eric has written about ecologcial psychology in his blog
Fixing Psychology a couple of times (without mentioning Bateson
or FRIAM, though). What do you think, is this a promising approach?
-J.
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
