One standard explanation for the "failure to thrive" of sociological and psychological explanations is their intentionality. Here, intentionality takes on a slightly different meaning than it usually does on this list. An utterance is "intentional" in this new sense if it contains a proposition as the object of a verb of mentation. Intentional explanations are of the form, "Jones avoided center al park because he thought there were bears in it." Notice that the truth of the nested proposition has no bearing on the truth of the explanation. Nothing about the state of central park or its wildlife has any bearing (sorry). This feature of intentional explanations blocks a familiar kind of scientific progress in which an explanation is made richer by empirical elaboration. Take for instance, "the London epidemic of 18-- was caused by cholera. We now learn that cholera is a water-born disease. We can now say, given the truth of the cholera assertion, that "the London epidemic was caused by a waterborne disease. This move, called "substitutio salve veritate", (substitution preserving truth), cannot be done with intentional explanations. It does us no good, for instance, to do research on bears and learn that they are large omnivorous mammals. We cannot infer that Jones avoided central park because he thought there were large omnivorous mammals in it because the truth of that assertion depends solely on Jones beliefs, not on the truth of the matter.
The idea is that such intentionality in sociological and psychological explanations forever blocks their linkage to the more fundamental and general explanations of biology, chemistry, and physics. Nick Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([email protected]) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > [Original Message] > From: russell standish <[email protected]> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> > Date: 9/22/2009 2:20:08 PM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ABMs and Psychology > > On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 04:10:20PM -0700, glen e. p. ropella wrote: > > Thus spake russell standish circa 09-09-21 04:02 PM: > > > Bedau's weak emergence. So what you're proposing sounds to me just > > > like a stronger notion, possibly even akin to Bedau's strong > > > emergence. I give an example of a loopy structure in my book (page > > > 162) which I think is an example of strong emergence. > > > > Except I'm not defining "emergence", here. I'm defining "complexity". > > As I've said, "emergence" seems like a useless concept to me. > > > > I would say the two terms in essence mean the same thing. I would say > a "complex system" is one that exhibits "emergence". > > BTW, I technically use the term complexity to refer to a measure - it > is a numerical quantity, usually closely related to information. But I > do recognise that it could be used to describe a quality - ie that which > makes a complex system complex. If the first sentence is true, then > complexity would be the quality of exhibiting emergence :). > > I think the difference between our approaches is you would prefer to > give up emergence to the the obfuscating mysterians, and invent a new > term "complexity" for the concept, or similarly related, whereas I > would prefer to reclaim the term for a perfectly well-defined > technical meaning. Your approach is not wrong, per se. For instance > I've given up attempting to assign a meaning to the term "realism" > (from our other thread :). > > -- > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Mathematics > UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [email protected] > Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
