At 02:50 PM 10/17/1999 -0400, you wrote:
> I am not referring to the natural laws or physical laws only to
> Psychology.
So, you are not arguing against the scientific method per se, only the
application of the scientific method as a way of knowing within psychology?
And, therefore that the principles which operate within psychology are not
subject to these natural laws. Still trying to make sure I understand where
you are coming from on this.
> There is a tendency in Western scientific tradition to
> hold all other variables constant while isolating the assumed
> critical variable.
{snip}
> in the compounded and complex stimulus configuration from which it was
> extracted.
This is a good point and one that I make sure to address with my students.
That although we strive for the control of all possible confounds to
establish a cause-effect relationship, this does not always represent the
"real world". However, there are statistical methods that allow for more
than one variable to be manipulated at a time and I encourage my students
to consider these in their own research. Also, recent advances in areas
such as structural equation modelling and hierarchical linear models are
striving to address these issues. It is not an issue of the design
methodology but the statistic procedures available for analysis, a
situation where the tools are guiding the project rather than the projects
guiding the development of new tools. In fact, I see a trend to include
more than one variable at a time as a fairly common practice these days. It
is all part of trend to help ensure the external validity (and/or
generalizability) of our findings, something that I do feel many
researchers tend to overlook. This actually makes it sound like what you
are really arguing for is more attention being paid to coping with the
threats to external validity, especially when results are applied across
cultures.
> Maybe,it tells us more about the methodologies than the populatio.
See Paul's question on this... what does it tell us about the methodologies
being used?
> Btw,one guideline for critical thinking is to tolerate uncertainty.
Yes, it is true that we must be able to tolerate uncertainty. However,
isn't our goal to try and reduce this uncertainty? The approach you seem to
be advocating seems to have uncertainty as the goal, or at least take a
hands off approach to dealing with it. Perhaps this is another of your
points which I'm unclear on.
To tie all of this to teaching...or at least attempt to...
One of the things I try my best to do is to present a variety of different
ways of knowing to my students. Then, I go through them to point out the
strengths and weaknesses of each approach. This is how I was taught about
these methods in both my philosophy and science (including psychology)
courses, so it is a model I've been repeating. I would love to hear if
others do this different and how you go about presenting this material to
students.
- Marc
G. Marc Turner, MEd
Lecturer & Head of Computer Operations
Department of Psychology
Southwest Texas State University
San Marcos, TX 78666
phone: (512)245-2526
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] or ...
