The Observation of Human Systems

Lessons from the History of Anti-reductionistic Empirical Psychology

Jose Magone, Joshua W. Clegg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138516526
• eBook ISBN: 9781351478236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"Contemporary mainstream psychology has moved toward methodological specificity bounded by instrumental experimentalism. However, this institutional reduction of sanctioned methods has not been fully embraced by all social scientists, nor even by all experimental psychologists. The social sciences are rife with examples of practicing empirical scientists disaffected with the reductionism and atomism of traditional experimentalism.The empirical theory and practice of four of these disaffected social scientists--Lev Vygotsky, James Baldwin, James Gibson, and Kurt Lewin--is explored in this volume. Each of the scientists considered here argued for a rigorously empirical method while still maintaining a clear anti-reductionist stance. They justified their disaffection with the dominant psychological paradigms of their respective eras in terms of a fidelity to their phenomena of study, a fidelity they believed would be compromised by radical reductionism and ontological atomism.The authors in this collection explore the theory and practice of these eminent researchers and from it find inspiration for contemporary social science. The primary argument running through these analyses is that the social sciences should take seriously the notion of holistic empirical investigation. This means, among other things, re-establishing the indissoluble ties between theory, method and procedure and resisting the manualization of research procedures. It also means developing theories of relations and not simply of elemental properties. Such theories would concern particular units, fields, or systems of relations and not be reduced to, or interpreted in the terms of, other systems. Finally, a holistic social science requires integration of the active agent into theory, method, and procedure, an integration that points toward both participatory and emancipatory methods."

1

The Problems of Reductionism in the Social Sciences

Joshua W. Clegg

Introduction

I imagine many of us of had the experience of conceiving some interesting idea or research question and then thoroughly murdering it with methodology. We start with curiosity, or perhaps insight, and then try to reproduce that insight in terms of the dominant methodological requirements of our discipline. Unfortunately, this experience may often leave us feeling something like guests of the fabled Procrustes. In the Greek myth, Procrustes was a robber who compelled all of his guests to spend the night in a special iron bed. According to Procrustes, the bed’s most wondrous property was that it fit any who lay in it. Unfortunately for Procrustes’ guests, the means by which this wonder was accomplished included either severing whatever appendages remained outside the confines of his bed or stretching the guest’s body to match its length. The more dogmatic method-talk of contemporary institutional psychology feels much like Procrustes’ bed—we are all welcome to lodge under the broad roof of professional psychology, so long as we are willing to dissect our ideas, interests, and insights such that we discard those aspects that don’t fit instrumental experimentalism. Of course, this requirement means that we often kill those ideas and replace them with an inanimate and, worse, uninteresting conglomeration of severed limbs.

I suspect that this experience is not particularly rare among contemporary psychological researchers. As Martin and Dawda argue:

because many psychological phenomena are complex, multi-dimensional, and context dependent, the attempted reduction of these phenomena to a known set of constitutive elements for research purposes seldom is accomplished without injury or alteration to the phenomena in question (Martin and Dawda, 2002, p. 39).

Similar sentiments have been expressed by many important figures in the history of psychology, including those who will be discussed in this book.

This experience is common, at least in part, because a general trend in the history of psychology has been a move towards greater specificity (or narrowness) in the domains, means, processes, and locations of scientific inquiry, a “shrinking in the range of topics for psychological investigation” (Toulmin & Leary, 1985, p. 601). There have, of course, always been particular practitioners or whole traditions that have resisted this move toward method and domain specificity, but the bulk of mainstream psychology has embraced it. Because of this trend, the appropriate domain of scientific psychology has been reduced from subjectivity to a particular kind of sensory subjectivity; the means of conducting and disseminating inquiry have been reduced from language in general to mostly frequentist numerical language; and the processes by which inquiry is carried out have been reduced from observation of all kinds to mostly numeral assignment.

In general, these moves toward specificity have been the result of attempts to fit psychology within the methodological limits of an instrumentalist conception of experimentalism (Danziger 2000); but this institutional reduction of sanctioned methods has not been fully embraced by all psychologists, nor even by all experimental psychologists. Many psychologists have found this trend not only restrictive, but also inherently perilous for the phenomena they studied. This fact is made strikingly clear in the writings of four psychologists whose work is considered in this volume: Lev Vygotsky, Kurt Lewin, James Baldwin, and James Gibson. The authors in this volume have outlined the anti-reductionistic programs of these psychologists in the hope that contemporary psychology can learn from their struggles, and perhaps even develop an approach to observational and experimental methods that is not inherently reductionistic.

The Special Problems of Reductionism in Empirical Psychology

Before outlining the structure of this volume, a word on the problems of reductionism. These problems have been persistent in all sciences at least in part because the will to reduce seems to be an inextinguishable human longing. Indeed, reduction lives in the very heart of the human community. Language is a reduction, as are all the systems of meaning that bind us together. Science, then, could hardly be without reduction; science requires that we reduce the complexities of our environment in analytic and explanatory terms. This is why it is important to note at the outset that the problem being addressed in this volume is not “reduction” but “reductionism.” Reduction is a necessary analytic and abstractive practice. Reductionism is the notion that any given phenomenon can be reduced to its constituent elements without any loss of meaning. This philosophy is the antithesis of holism—or the notion that there is something about the organization, or relation, of elements that transcends, and cannot be fundamentally reduced to, the elements themselves.

The classic problem with reductionism in psychology is the reductio ad absurdum, which flows from reducing human experience to its products—namely, the postulates of science and mathematics. In psychology, this kind of reductionism is manifested primarily in reductions of human experience to “neurophysiological, behavioral, psychometric, or computational terms” (Martin and Dawda, 2002, p. 38). The difficulty with such reductions is that the means of reduction—systems of social meaning like science or philosophy—is also their object.

In philosophy, this is a well-worn issue, perhaps best exemplified by Husserl’s devastating critique of psychologism. According to Husserl, psychologism is the notion that “the essential theoretical foundations of logic lie in psychology” (Husserl, 1999/1900, p. 5). What Husserl meant by this formulation was that the processes of consciousness, including logic, mathematics, and science, were considered reducible to and explainable by the principles of scientific psychology. Though this conclusion is the inevitable result of a reductionistic psychology, it is inherently problematic:

Since science is only a science in virtue of its harmony with logical rules, it presupposes the validity of these rules. It would therefore be circular to try to give logic a first foundation in psychology. (Husserl, 1999/1900, p. 8).

The essential philosophical problem here is not so much the dubious capacity for consciousness to perceive itself, but the absurdity of a reductive fiction that claims that products of consciousness can somehow be more fundamental than, and thus somehow independent of, consciousness itself.

Scientists have also long recognized the limits of pure reductionism—“we know that nineteenth century mechanistic materialism, built so confidently on the foundation of Newton, is inadequate for physics itself, let alone for biological, psychological, and social phenomena” (Sloane, 1945, p. 223)—yet in psychology, material and other forms of reductionism seem to grow rather than diminish in influence (see Orange, 2003 for a review of reductionist philosophy in the social sciences).

The problems with reductionism as an ontological stance seem insurmountable, a fact which has led Barendregt and van Rappard (2004) to argue that “reductionism should be considered distinct from the metaphysical mind-body problem” and considered instead as “a methodology for bridging different theories at different levels” (p. 469). In some ways, this suggestion seems to fit what many contemporary social scientists actually do. Mind-brain reduction seems to be “in the air” for most social scientists but it is rarely explicit and certainly beyond the current state of empirical validation. In contrast, however, the institutionally sanctioned canons of method, particularly experimental method, are overwhelmingly reductionistic.

The practical limits enjoined by this sort of entrenched institutional reductionism are very real, as Wendell Garner illustrated in his description of an attempt to conduct research using a “phenomenological methodology”:

These experiments were very successful in elucidating phenomena not obtainable from reaction times and errors. As a result, I wanted to continue using these methods. However, in the late 1960s I reverted to using a tachistoscope, reaction times, and errors. Why did I do that, if the newer methods were so successful? The reason is that students trained in these techniques could not get jobs when they finished their graduate training (Garner, 1999, p. 21).

For sometimes very pragmatic and political reasons, then, reductionism seems to be most enduring not in its ontological form, but in its methodological one (Martin and Dawda, 2002).

For the purposes of this volume, it is at this methodological level that reductionism is considered. We are concerned not so much with the theoretical implications of particular ontological reductions (though these issues are important and certainly unresolved) as with the methodological implications. Concomitantly, we are also considering the possibility of empirical and experimental methods that are not fundamentally reductionistic.

Non-Reductionistic Experimentation?

At the outset, any attempt to develop theories and methods for nonreductionistic experimentation may seem strange. After all, the most common textbook definition of an experiment is some unwieldy reductionist phrase like “an experiment is the manipulation of one or more independent variables and the measurement of one or more dependent variables, while holding all other variables constant.” While admirably specific, this definition encompasses an extremely narrow range of psychological experimentation (what, for example, was the “dependent variable” in the Stanford Prison Study?). Because of the narrowness of such definitions, for the purposes of this volume, experimentation will be defined as “observation with intervention,” a definition specific enough to capture the essence of experimentation while still broad enough to include the majority of self-labeled experiments.

Under this broader definition, the notion of non-reductionistic experimentation is at least feasible and the authors in this volume do an admirable job of delineating much of the theoretical and methodological core of that notion. In chapter 2, Alexander Kozulin argues that in their sociocultural approach to development, Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria explicitly eschew the reifications of material reductionism and, perhaps more importantly, develop an account of the developing human that demonstrates qualitative, unique, and non-reducible changes both across time and between different levels of organization. Kozulin outlines Vygotsky’s arguments that psychological phenomena are not only dependent upon materially irreducible social and cultural frames but also on the constructive qualities of individual consciousness. According to Kozulin, developmental processes that seem easily reducible to maturation can be shown to be dependent on the available socio-cultural tools. He uses Vygotsky’s notion of the “zone of proximal development” (ZPD) as a paradigmatic example demonstrating that both development and learning are not meaningfully understood as static capacities, but must be understood in their sociocultural unit.

René van der Veer also discusses Vygotsky’s empirical theory in detail. He argues (in chapter 3) that Vygotsky’s experimental theory requires an experimenter who transforms, or deforms, what is being investigated, an experimental situation that allows participants to be active, creative participants in their own change, and a methodology that allows experimenters to observe developing processes in vivo. He demonstrates the importance of these principles with a discussion of how ZPD experiments employing the method of double stimulation provided better prediction of academic performance precisely because these examined the process by which a child’s cognitive ability can be transformed (i.e., the learning situation) and not static categories such as “intelligence.”

In chapter 4, Jaan Valsiner outlines James Baldwin’s genetic logic as an instance of anti-reductionism in empirical theory. Baldwin’s genetic theory claims that phenomena occur at different levels of organization that are not reducible to one another, and that the unique systems governing different levels cannot be generalized by analogy to other phenomena. According to Valsiner, some implications of Baldwin’s genetic view include a focus on “unfolding novel processes, rather than their prediction, or retrospective explanation” (Valsiner, this volume, p. 54). Under this system, all psychic processes are continuous, progressive (developmental), composed in qualitatively distinct events, and can be understood only within their own context and their own mode. Baldwin’s genetic theory also implies that the progression of future events is fundamentally indeterminate and genetic logic thus undermines frequentist probability as a foundation for psychological knowledge. Valsiner shows how this system of genetic logic does not permit the static and reductive methodologies of Baldwin’s (and our) time and ultimately argues that Baldwin’s attempt to formalize psychological concepts in terms other than real numbers is the right direction for the future of psychology.

Next, Eric Charles recounts how J.J. Gibson’s work in perception eventually led him (Gibson) to an anti-reductionist empirical program. Charles shows how Gibson’s roots in New Realism as well as the practical necessities of perception research led him to reject a reductionistic view of perception in favor of a relational account—i.e., an account of perception in terms of irreducible real relations between percipient and perceived. On Charles’ account of Gibson, perception always entails an irreducible unit of active percipient and meaning-laden environment. Thus, the perception researcher, Charles argues, must conceptualize and investigate a percipient whose whole organism is actively employed in exploring an inherently meaningful environment. Such an investigation is only possible in holistic research contexts and not in the highly reduced research paradigms of contemporary perceptual research.

In chapter 6, Aaro Toomela takes up a discussion of Kurt Lewin’s anti-reductionist program. Toomela argues strongly that mainstream contemporary psychology’s move away from the holistic, idiographic, and theory-driven emphases of pre-WWII Austro-German psychology has produced a less sophisticated approach to theory and method than that of Kurt Lewin. Toomela emphasizes Lewin’s commitment to experimentation as a necessary element of empirical psychology and suggests a Lewinian revision of empirical investigation (including experimentation). This revision includes a psychology that is theoretically, rather than methodologically driven, that focuses on whole, integrated systems of relations, rather than isolated phenomena, and whose theories and methods delineate not only empirical relations among constructs but also theoretical relations within constructs. Methodologically, according to Toomela (and Lewin), this means that aggregate data are useless for building psychological theory and should be replaced with formal mathematical models, and that purely phenotypic, or behavioral analyses are misleading and incomplete because they exclude the psychological field of the participant.

Lee Rudolph (in chapter 7) also considers the work of Kurt Lewin, taking up the difficult task of developing a feasible mathematical model for a holistic approach to empirical and experimental psychology, a model that eschews an a priori reduction of mathematical modeling in psychology to “number” and “measurement.” He follows Kurt Lewin’s intuition that qualitative mathematics, and in particular, topology could serve as the basis for such a model and so develops a topological model describing Lewinian life spaces as finite topological spaces. From this effort, Rudolph concludes that the mechanics of topology can be meaningfully and rigorously applied to a Lewinian life space and can, in fact, serve as a basis for rigorous mathematical deductions.

In the penultimate chapter, Jeff Reber and Zachary Beckstead add to this historical account a discussion of more contemporary non-reductionistic empirical methods. They outline contemporary work in two different traditions: systems theory and Lewinian field theory. According to Reber and Beckstead, systems theorists assume that all phenomena are constituted in their relations and so must be investigated within their own complex systems. Reber and Beckstead consider a study in family systems theory as an exemplar of systemic thinking in the social sciences. They discuss the systems-inspired elements of this research, including a theoretical and methodological focus on systems larger than the individual, but they also discuss the limitations of this research—namely, that it employs non-systemic measurement techniques such as the individually completed questionnaire.

Reber and Beckstead also consider some contemporary research in the tradition of Lewinian field theory. They outline the basic tenets of Lewin’s field theory, including the assumptions that all of the facts of psychological experience are composed in relations and not static entities and that all the elements in the field of psychological experience, whether represented by an individual or a group, are fundamentally interdependent. They consider one of many possible examples from social psychology that have been influenced by Lewin’s holism and conclude that, as in family...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. The Problems of Reductionism in the Social Sciences
• 2. Sociocultural Paradigm
• 3. Creating the Future: Vygotsky as an Experimenter
• 4. Baldwin’s Quest: A Universal Logic of Development
• 5. Ecological Psychology’s Struggle to Study Perception at the Appropriate Level of Analysis: Examining the Past, Guessing the Future
• 6. Kurt Lewin’s Contribution to the Methodology of Psychology: From Past to Future Skipping the Present
• 7. A Unified Topological Approach to Umwelts and Life Spaces Part II: Constructing Life Spaces from an Umwelt
• 8. Anti-Reductionistic Empiricism in Contemporary Psychological Research
• 9. Considering the Foundations for a Holistic Empirical Psychology
• List of Contributors
• Index