Russ,
A fascinating question! My knee jerk reaction would be to say that I
was trained as a comparative psychologist in the same sense that
someone could be trained as a police officer - insofar as a
comparative psychologists is a person with a certain skill set who
does a job (research). However, that feels a bit too knee-jerk.
My colleagues who study Narrative are all about 'positioning'. In that
sense, I think I said "I was trained" in order 'to position' both
myself and the ideas: First, the phrase implies that I do not
necessarily do comparative psych and ethology now, but I WAS taught
how to do it, i.e., that I have some authority regardless of my
currently degenerate state as a 'developmental psychologist'. Second,
the phrase implies that the views presented did not originate in me,
and are not unique to me, i.e., that other people agree with what I say.
Of course, that is just my guess, I WAS NOT trained as a narrative
psychologist ;- )
Eric
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 06:14 PM, *Russ Abbott <[email protected]>*
wrote:
Both Eric and Nick use the phrase "I was trained". I would like
to know more about the intention here. Normally one talks about
training an animal, e.g., to sit or roll over, etc. One also talks
about training people to do relatively formalizable jobs or to
obey fairly well understood rules, e.g., train someone to run a
piece of machinery or to be a police officer. It strikes me as
strange to say that someone was trained to be a scientist. Would
you be willing to elaborate on that.
-- Russ Abbott
______________________________________
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles
cell: 310-621-3805
blog: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/
vita: http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
______________________________________
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 10:05 AM, Nicholas Thompson
<[email protected] <#>> wrote:
Eric, Steve,
I am trying to reconcile my agreement with the spirit of your
correspondence with my largely failed attempts to work toward
a common language in our conversations about complexity on
this list and on Friday mornings. I, too, was trained in many
traditions.... comparative psychology, ethology, zoology, some
physical anthropology, quite a lot of english literature, and
even a little meteorology. And some of my best friends are
mathematicians. But perhaps unlike Eric (?) (who was my last
[postdoctoral] student, by the way, and my great intellectual
benefactor) I am convinced that the effort to communicate
amongst perspectives is valuable. And I cannot see how
communication is possible without some attention to and
adjustments of the use of specialized languages. It bothers
me still, for instance, that two members of our community can
use words like "system" or "information" in entirely
contradictory ways and yet fancy that they are communicating
with one another.
I think this is where an analogy to the paradox of mathematics
that Byers highlights might be useful. The struggle over
language is worthwhile but only because it fails. No man
struggles in order to fail, but still, failure is the wet
edge of science.
What do you think?
Nick
PS, to Eric: /"The wonderful feature of the New Realism’s
metaphor is that it honors our separate points of view without
giving up on finding a point of view that integrates them. Two
blind New Realists groping an elephant: “OK, I’ll follow the
snake toward the sound of your voice and you follow the tree
toward the sound of my voice and we’ll see what we feel along
the way.” PAUSE. Together; /
/ “My God, it’s an ELEPHANT!”" / / /
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected] <#>)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
----- Original Message -----
*From:* ERIC P. CHARLES <#>
*To: *Steve Smith <#>
*Cc: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <#>
*Sent:* 3/23/2010 6:20:41 AM
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] multiple tool kits [was (advice
needed!)]
Steve,
As a partial endorsement of your argument, I was trained
as a comparative psychologist (comparing between species)
and an ethologist (the European branch of animal behavior
that showed we could treat behaviors as evolved phenomenon
in the same way we treat anatomy). I was specifically
trained in these as two separate, but related traditions.
When I arrived at at U.C. Davis, which has (or at least
had) the premier graduate training program in Animal
Behavior in the country, and as I started attending more
of the Animal Behavior Society national conferences, I
noticed a disturbing trend:
There was a conscious attempt to create a generic study of
animal behavior in which everyone did basically the same
thing from the same perspective (though with variation in
species studied and behavior focused on). I kept trying to
explain to people, most forcibly to the grad students, as
I thought I had a chance with them, that this was bad.
They were trading in several hard-won and
highly-specialized tool kits (those of comparative psych,
ethology, behavioral ecology, biological anthropology,
etc.) for a 101 piece toolkit from Walmart.
If they were trying to encourage collaboration, I would
have been all for it, but instead they were trying to
create a shared language by destroying the uniqueness of
the distinct approaches. Yuck!
Anyway, just an endorsement of your project from a very
different context,
Eric
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 08:26 PM, *Steve Smith
<[email protected] <#>>* wrote:
siddharth wrote:
>
> you're right about the language issue - even a basic word in the
> complexity debate- eg. 'modeling'- is interpreted/understood slightly
> differently in architecture..its easier when they mean things totally
> different, like your example- its really tricky when they mean things
> almost the same, yet not - these micro-shifts in meaning make things,
> well, complex-er!
> thanks!
For what it is worth, I've been working with Dr. Deana Pennington of UNM
on this very topic... a joint UNM/Santa Fe Complex proposal to the NSF
was just declined, but had it been funded, we would have been extending
work done on a related NSF grant just ending this month on the topic of
"the Science of Collaboration". Central to this work is the notion
that each discipline (and subdiscipline and individual) has a
distinct
but complementary set of concept and terms that they use to understand
and share their work. One of the tools to be developed is a
collaborative tool for eliciting and resolving the terms and concepts
across cross-disciplinary teams and projects.
We are still seeking funding and opportunities to continue this work and
it is an obvious project to carry forth at the Santa Fe Complex (in
collaboration with UNM, etc.) if possible.
We (Santa Fe Complex) just hosted a workshop for this team on Agent
Based and Cellular Automata Modeling. It did not address the problem
of language directly but indirectly did by providing a variety of
practitioners with a common working vocabulary (to whit, NetLogo) for
expressing and exploring simulations. Of course, within the context
of this course, we immediately encountered terminology conflicts (when
is a "patch" a "cell"? etc.)
Seconding the spirit of Nick's point, it is this very ambiguity that
provides the expressiveness and the leverage. If you constrained
everyone to a controlled vocabulary, you would have nothing more useful
than an efficient bureaucracy within a fascist government. Things
would generally be unambiguous, but rarely useful!
- Steve
============================================================
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
Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================
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
Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
------------------------------------------------------------------------
============================================================
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
