"Digging Deeper" Essays and Questions for PSY 202

NOTE THAT THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT WAYS TO COMPLETE THE EXAM ALTERNATIVE OPTION:

1.  Complete any 3 of the "digging deeper" questions below.

2.  Do a more creative project option as explained below.

As noted on the course syllabus, this material is NOT a requirement for the course in general.  It offers a way for students who don't "test well" to earn a portion of your grade in a different, yet still academically rigorous, manner, by writing comprehensive answers to any three (3) of the 13 questions below. 

Each section below -- one for each lecture unit of the course, plus one slightly different option -- begins with an essay in which a key topic from that lecture unit is expounded in more detail.  It then continues with a question or set of questions you are to answer in essay format.

You might want to begin by briefly skimming all 13 sections.  Some are easier reading than others, so don't get scared off by those that are a bit more "highbrow" -- I'm trying to appeal to a diverse student population (including representatives of all four Keirsey temperaments, see Unit 5).  (Sections 1-3 are particularly heavy sledding for those whose idea of purgatory is a philosophy class, so if that's you, skip down to later sections.)  That might help you to earmark sections that you think you want to tackle.  Then, if you're trying to be proactive and work on material we haven't yet covered in lecture, skip ahead to the relevant portion of the main lecture notes and make sure you've got the basics down before you try to "dig deeper"... you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you achieve tenure, or so I'm told.

Note that various hyperlinks are sprinkled throughout the material below to elucidate ambiguous points or to provide additional resources.  Most of those hyperlinks point to material outside of this Web site (will take you away from material I have written personally), so be aware that there will be no returning links to bring you back to where you are now.  Use the "Back" arrow of your Web browser to do that.  Naturally, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of materials outside of my own Web site;  nor can I claim (even assuming that such a thing is possible?) that these sites are "objective" or "unbiased".  (They are, at least, intellectually respectable and serious sites, except for those that obviously are linked to provide some much-needed humor, such as the link that ends this paragraph.)  At best, I can try to make sure that the links work;  I'll check them every so often, which means in between watching reruns of MacGyver.

These questions are intended to be challenging, as befits their use in this course.  I don't expect graduate-school level answers from you, but I do expect you to "dig deep" and use your answers to demonstrate a comprehensive and well-thought-out understanding of course concepts that goes beyond rote memorization into integration, application, and synthetic thought.  Impress me!

Want to do something still more "outside the box"?  I might consider it... but you'll have to make a formal sales pitch.  If you're interested in that, keep reading... if not, jump down to the "digging deeper" questions below.

What might that option be?  It could be almost anything that I have preapproved.  In past semesters, students have earned the equivalent of one unit exam grade by such means as:

Here are the 13 preapproved qustions, bookmarked for easy reference (for Internet newbies, that means that you can click on the links below and jump right to the section you want... although this feature doesn't seem to work with all Web browsers).  

Unit 1:  Why is psychology nonparadigmatic? 

Unit 2:  Chapman's ways of knowing and the limits of science 

Unit 3:  Philosophy of mind  

Unit 4:  Phoneme recognition experiments 

Unit 5:  More about the Keirsey temperaments 

Unit 6:  Applying the Six Hat model 

Unit 7:  Jerry Lucas and "The Memory Book" 

Unit 8:  Words Fo People Dat No Speak Pidgin 

Unit 9:  Lifespan development and the Strauss-Howe cycle 

Unit 10:  The continuity hypothesis 

Unit 11:  The perils of eclecticism

Unit 12:  Pathological obedience and Abu Ghraib

Alternative option:  Identifying psychological concepts in fiction

Unit 1:  Why is psychology nonparadigmatic?

In lecture, we briefly discussed Kuhn's notion of paradigms and how this idea relates to psychology as a science. We addressed the distinction between paradigmatic and nonparadigmatic science and explored implications of the fact that psychology lacks an overarching paradigm.  But we didn't ask, or attempt to answer, the important question, "Why does psychology lack a paradigm?"

Kuhn -- and to help you with this question, should you choose it, I've placed a copy of Kuhn's seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on four-hour reserve at the UWMC library (see especially pp. 10-22) -- seems to suggest that paradigmatic sciences are somehow "superior" to nonparadigmatic sciences:  "Acquisition of a paradigm and of the more esoteric type of research it permits is a sign of maturity in the development of any given scientific field" (p. 11, italics mine).  This clearly hints (or worse) at the notion that nonparadigmatic sciences are "immature", in their infancy, still awaiting the arrival of a paradigm that will make them "real" sciences.  While some of my colleagues in the natural science faculty may agree with this notion, clearly I do not.  I think that psychology will never have a single governing paradigm -- and that we are probably much better off without one.  But why doesn't psychology have a paradigm?  Why (if I'm right about this) can we never expect that psychology will have one?  And what implications does this have for the future of the field?

Clearly there is something going on here that has to do more with a philosophical dispute than a scientific one (if we define "scientific" as "based on empirical observations";  see Section 2 below for more about that).  As science writer Nancy Pearcey puts it,

"Philosopher John Searle says there are two pictures of the universe that are really at war with one another.  Science [by this he means reductionistic science] gives a picture of the universe as a vast machine, regular and law-like in its behavior.  But everyday experience gives a picture of humans as agents capable of consciousness, rational decision making."  

Since both can't be correct, and since empirical observation as such gives us no basis by which the dispute can be resolved (which means that it is a metaphysical, not a genuinely scientific dispute), it is difficult to imagine how the social sciences can develop a paradigm.  Note that this problem runs through many aspects of our society.  For instance, our legal system is founded on the premise that human beings are free agents (since only thus can we morally hold people responsible for their choices and actions).  Yet many within psychiatry hold to a reductionistic view that says that people are nothing but a bundle of complexes or a set of neurons firing or a group of conditioned behaviors -- entirely determined by impersonal forces outside of their control.  Both can't be correct, so when attorneys bring in psychiatrists to offer expert testimony in cases of "not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect", it's really a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.

This has implications for the academic enterprise in general as well.  Again, as Pearcey summarizes the problem:

"[T]he concept of truth itself has been [unhealthily] divided – a process… [that can be illustrated] with the imagery of a two-story building.  In the lower story are science and reason, which are considered public truth, binding on everyone.  Over against it is an upper story of noncognitive experience, which is the locus of personal meaning.  This is the realm of private truth, where we hear people say, “That may be true for you but it’s not true for me….”   Today we might say that in the lower story is modernism, which still claims to have universal, objective truth – while in the upper story is postmodernism…  The two-story grid functions as a gatekeeper that defines what it is to be taken seriously as genuine knowledge, and what can be dismissed as mere wish fulfillment."

The social sciences lie right on the fault line of this issue.  Hence the problem.

Question for discussion:

Discuss whether or not you believe that psychology can develop a paradigm;  whether (if you think this is possible) it should;  and the implications, both positive and negative, that you see for the field based on your answer.  Your grade will not depend in any way on whether or not you agree with my position as outlined above.  Show in your answer that you understand clearly what a paradigm is. 

Unit 2:  Chapman's ways of knowing and the limits of science

The following essay offers some of my thoughts and ruminations about the nature and limits of the scientific enterprise.  They represent my private views (meaning that not all of my faculty colleagues agree with me).   Thus you are free to disagree with me as well... feel free to be as wrong as you want to be.  (That's a joke, son.)

Despite the general success of the scientific "metanarrative" in our culture over the past 600 years or so (though it appears that technological advances generally outstrip our capacity to develop consensual ethical standards for moderating their uses), science cannot answer all possible questions.  To say that only those questions that science can address are "real" questions (that is, that science is the only form of "objective" knowledge) is to stack the deck unfairly and also to make some presumptions about the human capacity for objectivity that, since Kant, are generally regarded by philosophers as overweening and unwarranted.  (If you like Kant and would like an alternative spin on the same kinds of issues Kant addresses, try Herman Dooyeweerd.)

In Chapman's terminology, science as a methodology represents a specific and formalized way of utilizing induction and deduction (or, as they are often called when used in a cyclical fashion as part of the formal scientific method of reasoning, "retroduction") in the pursuit of knowledge.  Scientists as human beings, of course, make regular use of the other four ways of knowing as well, since they are an inescapable part of the human condition (and may represent "hard-wired" aspects of how the brain processes information?);  but when operating formally, within their role, they are not supposed to justify their conclusions on the basis of these other epistemological methodologies.  In itself, this fact does not necessarily imply that retroductive knowing is "superior to" other ways of knowing or that it provides knowledge that is more "objective";  words like "superior" and "objective" are strongly value-laden terms that require, for their justification, the use of philosophical assumptions that (here's the main point) cannot be derived from the application of the scientific method itself.  Thus, science as a methodology cannot be regarded as self-contained or wholly recursive.  Belief in its validity relies upon a wider worldview framework that, to a greater or lesser extent, is presuppositional or philosophical.  Historically, both theism and materialism have been more or less equally successful in providing a metaphysical justification for the belief that scientific reasoning is valid, though for some complex technical reasons that would take us too far afield here, I not surprisingly believe that the theistic argument for the validity of science is more philosophically watertight.  

Science cannot answer all questions because it deals with matters of repeatable observation.  It can only treat data that is empirical and replicable.  For this reason, science cannot address ethical questions (since science is about what is -- hence, at least in part, actually or theoretically observable -- while ethics deal with what should be).  Similarly, historical questions are technically outside the province of science since historical events are, by definition, unique and unrepeatable.  This does not necessarily imply that ethics and history are "subjective" fields in contrast to the supposed "objectivity" of the pure scientist, as Mortimer Adler (to take one example) notes in detail.

Of course, in practice scientists often engage in "leaps of logic" that extrapolate rather far beyond the extant data, and to note this is not necessarily to be critical.  Theories involving mechanisms of macroevolutionary speciation (if they exist, which is, of course, debatable) represent one obvious example;  absent a time machine, no human observer can directly prove the existence (or absence) of such mechanisms.  The question of how far such "quantum leaps" in reasoning can rationally go before one is justified in accusing a given theorist of engaging in wish fulfillment is a difficult and technical one, although wherever the bar is placed, it should be applied in a philosophically neutral way (if an atheist is allowed to speculate about the existence of unobservable sister universes for which there can never be any direct evidence, I should not be barred from speculating about the existence of God with equal justification).

The above argument is in rather sharp contrast to the prevailing view in our culture that matters of "fact" (which presumably can be derived only by means of science) and matters of "value" (which derive, it is argued, from the use of other ways of knowing that are inherently "subjective") occupy wholly different, incommensurable and nonoverlapping, realms.  My contrasting contention is that, to the extent that human beings can be approximately objective (or at least balanced and able to correct substantially for their own biases), science provides one means, but by no means the only means, of gaining objective knowledge.  In other words, not all truth is scientific truth.

As suggested above, science represents a methodology, not (as such) a worldview.  Many philosophical notions that are conventionally (though rather muddle-headedly in my view) associated with science in our culture, such as the notion that all events in the universe can be explained in terms of wholly impersonal and deterministic (and/or purposeless stochastic) chains of cause and effect, are not part of science proper.  These beliefs cannot be derived logically from the methodology of science as such.  Science as a methodology requires nothing more than a de minimus philosophical justification for expecting the universe to be structured and generally predictable (and for presuming that sensory data and the application of logical thinking can yield valid conclusions about reality).  As noted above, both theism and materialism offer sufficient justifications of this sort.  There may be other worldviews that can do so as well, although some (such as animism and pantheism) generally do not.  Science seems to require the belief that the physical world is real, not a mere illusion.  But it most certainly does not require the belief that the physical world is all there is.

Of course, some branches of science, more than others, appear to have become hotbeds of, and/or lightning rods for, metaphysical conflicts of this nature.  The much-vaunted (and, I think, badly named) "creation-evolution debate" is the most obvious, or at least culturally salient, example of this.  This issue is a complex one, involving as it does a typical conflation of empirical (evidentiary) and metaphysical (presuppositional) elements.  When an argument takes place on two different levels of discourse at the same time without clear boundaries being delineated, strange things indeed can happen.  An explication of this specific issue is not the purpose of this essay, but I offer as a starting point the following interesting question:  "Do mature forms of creationism and naturalistic forms of neo-Darwinism lead to different empirical hypotheses (about what can, or could given requisite technologies such as a time machine, be observed in the world of sensory observation)?"  The question is more complex than it may seem at first.  Those who answer "no" tend to characterize themselves as (if not inherently wedded to metaphysical naturalism) as "theistic evolutionists";  those who answer "yes", as "intelligent design theorists".

Note that is very easy to return an overly simplistic answer to questions of this nature.  For instance, one common (but too easy) answer, one that contains a valuable half-truth but not a whole one, is to say that science gives us the "what" and the "how" (addresses empirical matters only), while theology (or, more generally, philosophy) gives us the "who" and the "why" (addresses metaphysical issues only).  A major problem with this idea is that all forms of theism (treating deism for this purpose as a de facto form of agnosticism) presume, if they do not explicitly require, that at least some phenomena in the universe be regarded as inexplicable in terms of purely naturalistic causation.  Thus, differing empirical claims must be made by the naturalist (who believes that, given sufficient knowledge, one would be able to derive a "theory of everything" from within a closed model of the universe) and the theist (who believes that this is intrinsically impossible even given unlimited time and resources, intellectual and otherwise).  While this does not mean that the theist believes in a "God of the gaps" (classical theism attributes all phenomena, whether or not definable secondary causes are involved, to the divine purpose), it does mean that the theist will assert that there will be gaps that cannot be bridged, while the naturalist will hold to the faith that the gaps can be closed.

However, since science does not require the presumption that all phenomena can be explicated by means of retroductive analysis, but only that suitable (empirical and replicable) phenomena generally can be made to yield to this approach, I conclude that science does not require naturalism as a worldview.  They are often confounded to yield the amalgam sometimes styled as "scientism".  But this is a historical accident (or, as the Reformers would have it, a noetic phenomenon), not a logical necessity.

As suggested above, my view is that both science and religion, though employing different epistemological methodologies (as well as different terminologies), have -- at least in theory, some of the time, when rightly applied -- the potential to provide us with "objective" truth (subject to the aforementioned limitations on human objectivity to which all human beings, individually and collectively, are subject).  (Again, this is in contrast to the prevailing view in our culture that religious truth is purely subjective or existential only -- "true for me" but not true in any universal, objective, or transcendent sense.)  I do not regard them as wholly separate domains, again for reasons outlined earlier:  science makes at least minimalist philosophic claims (that the universe can reasonably be regarded as structured and capable of being understood), and religion makes at least minimalist empirical claims (for instance, that some subset of empirical phenomena, perhaps including but not limited to the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of consciousness, will inevitably defy attempts to explain them in purely naturalistic terms).  Most extant religions make more significant empirical claims than that, but for our purposes it is enough to show that the two domains do overlap.  There are connections between them that defy any attempt to construct an unbreachable firewall between the two.  Science rests on a foundation of philosophy (religious or secular in nature as the case may be), and religion must, to be regarded as valid, describe a universe that is consistent with the "common sense realism" engendered by everyday phenomenal experience.

The social psychology of human experience being what it is, scientists and religionists as members of "professional communities" (or, worse, "power structures") can and do collide, war over turf and influence.  But to blame this either on science or religion is to miss the point.  The causative element is neither science nor religion as such, but human nature.

Words are slippery things, an insight for which we largely have the postmodernists (and Wittgenstein, who may nor may not qualify as a postmodernist) to thank.  Postmodernism itself is a term that has come to mean more or less whatever a particular user of the term may wish it to mean, a fact with which a true philosophical postmodernist might not be at all displeased.  

However, for our purposes we may briefly think of postmodernism as, in part, a reaction against the intellectual hegemony of Enlightenment-based scientism.  Unlike classical theism, which provided (or, as I would say as a contented anachronism, provides) both truth and meaning as corollaries of itself, naturalistic scientism provides truth but not meaning.  That is the desperate legacy of reductionism or, as Os Guinness memorably terms it, "the striptease of humanism".  Once human experience itself is subjected to this kind of analysis, all that makes us human dissolves under the influence of the "universal acid" (while I disagree sharply with Daniel Dennett, the originator of this phrase, it's very important to understand his ideas) that is reductionistic materialism.  If particles are all, then we all are nothing but particles -- inherently devoid of meaning and purpose, which are treated (necessarily) as questions that science cannot address.  The resulting world-picture is a bleak one for those who treat its implications seriously;  claims that a scientific "theory of everything" can be developed one day is, as Chesterton puts it, like telling a prisoner to rejoice in the fact that the prison now encompasses the entire cosmos.  One can excuse the prisoner if he feels more like despairing than rejoicing.

Postmodernism is modern culture's dominant answer to this dilemma, of the problem of trying to have one's cake (nontheism and the presumedly valuable autonomy that, rather opaquely to my way of thinking, is said to derive from that -- though how a purely deterministic being, made up of particles that cannot help but do what they do, can be expected to enjoy its illusory autonomy is, frankly, beyond me, having as I do a mere three-digit IQ) and eat it too (to find meaning in a supposedly meaningless universe).  The idea is that one can construct one's own purely subjective meanings and bootstrap oneself into a meaningful existence by so doing, the price being that all meanings must be regarded as equal (the only remaining sin in a postmodernist culture is the dreaded charge of "intolerance", meaning the belief that some things are actually true).  

Postmodernism has its virtues.  It reminds us that all metanarratives run the risk, at a minimum, of carrying within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.  (This is all that "deconstruction" seems to mean, though the concept is usually spun out over several hundred pages, presumably because writers are paid by the word.)  Religious worldviews are no exception;  religion has its dark side (the Inquisition comes to mind), a fact well known to militant antitheists, who seem to forget that such items as the Reign of Terror or the Soviet gulags balance that particular set of scales rather neatly.  Postmodernism, if nothing else, has the potential to remind us of the virtues of humility and of listening to those whose stories differ from our own -- both of which, it might be noted, have always been regarded as virtues by balanced representatives of classical theism and (it is to be hoped) materialism.  

Postmodernism also has its vices, notable among them meaning that the price of admission is the death of rational discourse.  This can lead to a sort of historical blindness (many of my students do seem to believe that human history began with the birth of Britney Spears).  It can also easily lead to rampant forms of cultural polarization (see "A Social Psychologist's Search for Purple America" for some thoughts about that).  Whether its vices outweigh its virtues remain to be seen.   Conveniently, writing at age 50, I may not live to see the denouement of that particular play, which might be titled Son of the Fall of the Roman Empire.  This is only one of the many advantages of late middle age, but that's another topic for another essay.

Question for discussion:

Identify as many of Chapman's "ways of knowing" as you can in my essay above.  Discuss how my use of these "ways" might color or shape my opinions and conclusions about the nature of science.  Show in your answer that you understand Chapman's model.

Unit 3:  Philosophy of mind

In lecture, we discussed the difference between epiphenomenalism and dualism as two opposing philosophies of the mind-brain or mind-body relationship.  This essay will explore that issue in more depth.

Some students have been curious about why I am a dualist, not an epiphenomenalist.  As noted in the main lecture notes, I don't care which view you personally adopt;  I encourage students to think critically for themselves.  But as a matter of intellectual honesty and as "food for thought", I offer the following rather lengthy and technical essay.  It represents the state of my thinking at this time, which is, of course, subject to change and further refinement without notice.

(Note to fans of F.F. Centore:  I am using the term "dualism" to refer to what Centore would properly call "psychosomaticism", though it may also encompass what he would call "vitalism".  In contrast, "epiphenomenalism" in this paper means what Centore calls "materialism", whether reductionistic or not.  This comment can safely be ignored by readers who have no clue what I am saying here.)

Preliminary considerations

Even the most extreme epiphenomenalist will concede that the brain is not a computer.  Not only is it many orders of magnitude more complex than the most sophisticated computer in existence today, but (thinking purely of the infrastructure or "hardware") it operates in a fashion very different from that of a computer.  However, for the purposes of this essay, it will often be convenient to think of neural connections and firings as if they were analogous to the "memory" and "operating system" of a silicon-based computer.  This is only an analogy for purposes of argument and should not be taken literally, as it is completely inaccurate in many important details.  However, the arguments presented in this essay will not depend on the assumption of any substantive similarity between how computers work and how the biology of the brain works.

Why is the question of dualism vs. epiphenomenalism a philosophical, not a scientific, one in my view, unresolvable by means of observation or experiment?  (At least, that is my view, though for the record, some epiphenomenalists disagree vociferiously -- without, however, it seems to be, any empirically well grounded basis for so doing.)  One major reason is the belief, now shared by many in both psychology and philosophy, that it is inherently and logically impossible for any finite conscious entity ever to fully understand itself or the basis of its own self-awareness.  This is not due to any existing limit in scientific knowledge;  a tenfold, hundredfold, or millionfold increase in scientific knowledge would not resolve the problem.  Let's take a look at the rather convoluted argument.

Imagine (here's the computer analogy) that any idea, concept, or experience (element of consciousness) can be represented by some combination of neural connections and/or firing patterns (that's the assumption of psychophysical parallelism, which -- it is important to keep in mind -- both epiphenomenalists and dualists share).   To keep things manageable, let's develop some symbols.  Let small letters represent an idea, concept, or element of conscious experience;  for instance:

    x = "2 + 2 = 4"

Let capital letters represent the neurological representation of that idea, concept, or element in terms of some pattern of neural connections and firings, which will be depicted here (by analogy) as a pattern of zeros and ones, though this is of course a vast oversimplification.   For instance, we might find (by experiment) that

    X = 0101110

Now let the term e(x) mean "an explanation of why x is represented neurologically by X".  (That is, an answer to the question, "Why is "2 + 2 = 4" represented psychophysically as 0101110?")  Whatever the explanation (which is likely to be incredibly complex) might be, it is itself an idea or concept that (by the assumption of psychophysical parallelism) must be able to be represented by some neural pattern E(X).  By definition, E(X) must include X:

   E(X) = 100100101011100010101

Since E(X) contains but is larger than X by definition, it must be true that just X is a subset of E(X), so E(X) is a subset of E(E(X)), and E(E(X)) is a subset of E(E(E(X))), and so on.  In other words, we have an infinite regress.  For any neural pattern (which must, in general, correspond to an element of cognition or conscious experience), we can ask, "why is that experience represented physiologically by that neural pattern," and so on.  There is no upper limit to this process.

Yet, the human brain, as a physical system, is finite.  Even though no living human being has ever "exhausted the capacity" (speaking analogically, for again, the brain is not a computer) of the brain, in theory there must be a finite limit to the number of neural patterns that could ever possibly be generated, for there is a less than infinite number of neurons in the brain, the brain is limited by the size of the skull, and so on.  Thus, at some point in the infinite chain X, E(X), E(E(X)), E(E(E(X)))... the brain must be unable to make a further step.  At that point, it is logically impossible to avoid the conclusion that the brain is having an experience it cannot explain (because it lacks the capacity to contain the explanation).  In one way, this idea can be seen as a logical extension of Godel's Theorem in mathematics.

An infinite being could understand human cognition fully, of course.  In fact, even a sufficiently great but finite superhuman being could do so.  All that is required is, in essence, a data table containing three columns and a huge (but finite) number of rows.  In each row, column 1 would list a specific pattern of neural firings (with all possible patterns listed in the table);  column 2 would list the corresponding conscious experience or idea (some cells would be blank, for instance, when a part of the brain not associated with conscious awareness was implicated);  column 3 would list a comprehensive theoretical explanation of the connection between the two.  Since the number of possible neural patterns is finite, the data table is finite (though it far exceeds the capacity of the human brain, as argued above, and hence could never be encompassed in its entirety by a human thinker).

As humans, therefore, we presumably are incapable even in theory of understanding the exact links between neural patterning and conscious experience.  At present, as noted below, we have literally not even a clue of how this connection might work.  At best, we have (a) a good understanding of the physical workings of the brain and (b) the rudiments, at a very gross anatomical level, of the parallelism between neural patterning and variations in conscious experience.  To call this a working model of consciousness is like saying that a Neanderthal who knew that a dropped rock would fall understood Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Note that the argument above, and in fact all the arguments in this essay, do not depend upon a "spiritual" or "religious" view of the universe.  Although historically and statistically most dualists have believed in God (as I do), and many if not most epiphenomenalists have not, it is possible to regard this as more of a historical accident than a logical necessity.  (See my comments in the Unit 1 essay above regarding the question of that "historical accident".)  Dualism requires the belief that materialistic explanations of consciousness are insufficient;  it does not require any specific assumptions about what that might mean or why that might be possible.  Conversely, theistic faith does not rest on a foundation of dualism as such, though it is more easily reconciled with dualism than epiphenomenalism.  (Some staunch theists have been epiphenomenalists, though they are currently in the minority.)

Now to the arguments themselves.

Argument #1:  Epiphenomenalism inherently undermines the validity of thought

This argument was framed most briefly and cogently by C. S. Lewis, as follows:  "If naturalism is true, we can know no truths."  (By "naturalism", Lewis meant, or for our purposes can be interpreted as having meant, epiphenomenalism.)  Other important proponents of that idea have included G. K. Chesterton and Alvin Plantinga.

Let's see what this means.  To regard our thoughts as valid and defensible is to argue that we have freely applied rules of abstract logic to them.  The word "freely" is important and an essential part of what rational thought means.  But the epiphenomenalist must, by defintion, regard freedom as an illusion pure and simple.  To him or her, we do not "choose" our thoughts;  they are inevitable products of our brain states, which are deterministic products of external causes outside our control.  Why, then, should we assign any importance or validity to them, or presume to think that they correspond in any sense to objective truth?

We can only have confidence in our thoughts (or in some rationally evaluated subset of our thoughts) if our thoughts are free, which means dualism.  While deterministic systems (like computers) can be rule-governed, we can only have confidence in the meaningfulness or validity (as opposed to the mere consistency) of those rules if they are put there by a logic-governed being (the human programmer).  Unless we believe that human beings are deterministic systems governed by rules that are meaningful because they were put there by a free and logical Creator (a conclusion repellent to many epiphenomenalists), we can only regard humans as logical if we view them as free (hence dualism).

Modern epiphenomenalists attempt to avoid the force of this argument in two major ways, both of which, I believe ultimately fail of their purpose.

Counterargument #1:  The Darwinian explanation

This argument suggests that we can presume a general (though not complete) correspondence between our conclusions and external reality because survival is enhanced by the ability to analyze and solve problems logically.  There is some force to this argument, but as outlined below, I think that it is insufficient.

While evolutionary mechanisms doubtless exist in some sense and to some extent (I have no interest in engaging the origins debate here), natural selection can by definition only "care" about reproductive fitness or survival-to-reproduce.  Thus, only traits that contribute to the individual's ability to pass on genetic material to future generations (or that, by virtue of how the genetic code works, are directly correlated with traits that do this) can be selected.

Does the ability to reason abstractly about purely philosophical or theoretical matters qualify?  It's hard to see how.  (To argue that this "must" be so because we now have that ability is purely solipsistic, arguing in a circle.)  There is certainly no evidence that mate selection is driven by a desire for an abstractly logical partner (versus, say, a physically attractive one).  Nor is abstract logic necessarily at all correlated with the kind of concrete, pragmatic problem solving ability that might contribute to ongoing physical survival.  (In fact, research indicates that "absent-minded professor" personality types are anywhere between two and five times more likely than others to experience serious accidents that might diminish survival-to-reproduce.)

Counterargument #2:  Quantum mechanics

A second argument (which tends to be more vague and unfocused but nonetheless worthy of consideration) is that we no longer view the world as a rigidly deterministic system.  As Newtonian mechanics has given way to a post-Einsteinian universe, we now know that (at least at a micro level) physical entities behave stochastically:  the behavior of, say, a particular quark can never be specified exactly, but only in terms of probabilities.  The concept of randomness may, these thinkers say, provide a way that a purely material system could be regarded as "free".

However, there are two major problems with this idea.  First, quantum behaviors only occur at the micro level.  Something as large as a neuron (let alone an entire brain region) is not subject to these kinds of stochastic processes.  (Or, more technically, the probabilities cancel each other out at the micro level, leading to the same outcomes that an old-style deterministic model would have generated.)  Second, randomness is not the same as freedom.  Freedom implies purposive or intentional activity, which neither a purely random nor a purely determined system can be said to have.

Argument #2:  Epiphenomenalism provides no explanation for the subjective qualities of conscious experience

A word about the term "mechanism" as it will be appearing from time to time, like currants in a bun, throughout this essay.

The assumption of metaphysical naturalism (the notion that all events in the universe can be explained solely and sufficiently through chains of impersonal cause and effect) absolutely requires that a scientific mechanism be found to account for any empirical phenomenon.  Hence, an epiphenomenalist is duty-bound to assert that consciousness can be explained mechanistically.  A dualist is (no pun intended) free to assert either that mechanisms of this sort are involved or not (see the section on counterarguments to dualism below, however).

Of course, it is perfectly legitimate for the epiphenomenalist to state (as s/he must do, if s/he is being honest about things, given the current state of scientific knowledge and progress) that we do not yet have such a mechanism, but that s/he believes that one will eventually be found.  Nothing illogical about that:  but note that the second part of this statement is nothing more or less than an article of faith.  It is no different from stating, "No evidence of twelve-foot-tall green-skinned space beings with six eyes and a remarkable ability to play the saxophone has yet been found, but I believe that eventually it will."  The second half of both statements is outside the universe of discourse of science in that they are not falsifiable.  If the necessary data is found, the belief is confirmed;  but in the absence of such data, one can always claim that further investigation "is believed likely to turn it up".  While the statement may be entirely correct, it is not a scientifically grounded statement as such, merely a wish or hope.  (It may be defensible on nonscientific grounds, of course.)

At the present time, there is not even a ghost of a hope of a hint of how any material system, no matter how complex, might come to "exude" consciousness.  The notion that consciousness is a "necessary emergent" of certain kinds of physical systems is nothing more or less than a pipe dream at this time.  No relevant mechanisms have been identified.  Note that the existence of psychophysical parallelism, which no one disputes, is not such a mechanism but is merely a correlation.  (The fact that, when the temperature drops, people feel cold does not mean that a drop in temperature is the same as the subjective experience of being cold.  The same can be said of the link between brain states and conscious experience.)

Again, this argument is of a different nature than argument #1 above.  My contention in section #1 is that belief in the truth of epiphenomenalism is logically inconsistent, whereas here in section #2 I am simply arguing that there is no concrete evidence to justify that belief at the present time.  Further research could disprove my second argument (though, again, there are no specific grounds to believe that this would ever happen;  it is just a hope on the part of those who wish to view consciousness in emergent terms);  no amount of empirical evidence could vitiate the first argument as such.

Argument #3:  Epiphenomenalism requires acceptance of deterministic assumptions about human nature and behavior

The argument here is still weaker in that it does not represent either an inherently logical flaw in epiphenomenalism (as does argument #1) nor an evidentiary flaw (like argument #2), but simply a necessary consequence of accepting epiphenomenalism as true -- a consequence that happens to run absolutely contrary to the foundational concepts of Western civilization and, particularly, our legal and ethical systems.  This fact does not disprove epiphenomenalism;  but it shows that a logically consistent epiphenomenalist would have to argue (as does B.F. Skinner) that we must scrap the current foundations of our culture and rebuild it on a completely new basis.  This most people are unwilling to countenance;  hence, it can be argued, belief in epiphenomenalism is an existential impossibility.  It can be imagined, but not lived out in practice.  A worldview that cannot be lived out in the real world is unlikely, all things being equal, to be correct;  though it is not inherently impossible that it is correct.

If epiphenomenalism is correct, we are all "puppets on a string" (our behaviors are strictly and solely determined by forces outside our control).  If this is true, it makes no sense to think of holding others morally accountable for their actions.  Social and legal sanctions lose the only ethical or philosophical justification that they might have, namely, that people are being subjected to outcomes that could have been anticipated and avoided had they chosen differently (i.e., more responsibly).  We can no longer speak of justice (just as, based on argument #1, we can no longer speak of truth) if epiphenomenalism is correct, but only of brute force, of "might makes right", of the lex talionis disguised (through a sort of social deception or sleight of hand) as true moral justice.

If this is true, I'm going to have to stop watching reruns of Law and Order,  for while the universe (on these assumptions) does contain a deterministic order, it doesn't contain any ethical laws.  But, wait, if it's true, I can't help but watch;  my behaviors are determined.  That's a relief;  I like the show.  Lennie Briscoe is something of a role model.  He's dead now, but I'm working on that, so we may soon be far more alike than he or I might once have thought.

Counterarguments against dualism

It's only fair-minded for me to mention some of the major counterarguments that epiphenomenalists have historically made against dualism as I close out this essay.  Obviously, the good arguments are not all on one side or the other;  were this the case, no controversy would remain, as people would have long ago resolved the question.  No philosophical worldview is watertight;  all contain seeming paradoxes, all are challenged by anomalous data.  (See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for more on that.)   The goal of critical thought is to weigh the arguments and make a rational, though necessarily tentative (for the jury can never fully be in, at least not in this life) choice among competing alternatives, as I have tried to do in this essay.  Weigh my arguments above against the best counterarguments from the epiphenomenalist side, which I will attempt to present fairly;  then make up your own mind.

Counterargument 1:  The absence of a mechanism/means by which the material and immaterial worlds could influence one another

The word "mechanism" may not be precisely the right one here.  But if (as dualism must in some way postulate) consciousness is a nonmaterial entity by definition (however we might speculate about what that might mean -- and note that, as indicated earlier, this does not necessarily imply a Cartesian concept of the immaterial soul as such, though it does not exclude that possibility), we have to ask, "How can these two 'realms' or 'worlds' or 'types of reality' influence one another?"

After all, even the dualist must admit that there are strict limits to the ways in which these two realms can interact or intersect.  I cannot directly alter the physical world merely by thinking about it (if I could, I would add some recently materialized dollars to my bank account).  As the old joke goes, "all who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand".  My soul or spirit or mind or self or whatever we might call the conscious part of me can only control my own body;  it can only do so by means of the mediation of physical brain processes;  it can only do so as long as the physical mechanisms of brain and body remain alive and intact, and so forth.

Thus, the dualist must postulate some sort of special connection or "psychosomatic unity" between mind and brain, but it is impossible to elucidate precisely why this is so or how it might work.  While this is perhaps a "wash" (since the epiphenomenalist cannot specify how pure matter no matter how constitute might become conscious or exude consciousness:  in fact neither side has any "mechanism" about which to speak), it does seem a weak link in the dualist position.

Note, however, that some of the red herring arguments commonly advanced against traditional Cartesian dualism are sheer nonsense.  We need not in any sense specify a "part of the brain" or "region of the brain" that serves as the "mind-brain link".  We don't know enough about what consciousness is to draw any such conclusions.  All we need say is, with some humility and reverent agnosticism, that we don't know how this works, and that (if my argument under "preliminary considerations" is correct) we can never know.  If the dualist has a hard time explaining why my mind is linked to just one body in just one limited way, the epiphenomenalist has an equally challenging puzzle on her/his side of the divide.  

Counterargument 2:  The presumed unscientific nature of dualism

Those who define science in a certain way tend to argue that dualism is "prescientific" or "unscientific", in that it introduces concepts that are inherently unobservable and untestable (the existence of an immaterial self, soul, mind, or spirit).  The fact that these are concepts that have been important within the religious history of the West adds fuel to the fire for those who see science and religion as inherently opposed or oppositional (a view I strenuously dispute;  the motto of the University of Denver, where I obtained my undergraduate degree under the expert tutelage of psychology professor Bernie Spilka, is pro scientia et religione, and I see no reason not to support both enterprises wholeheartedly).

In my view, however, this rests on a philosophically biased view of what science is.  It is true that dualism is not reductionistic  But to define science as necessarily reductionistic or materialistic is to stack the deck unfairly against dualism.  It is not a logical requirement of science to make that assumption.  Science is about observables, but it is not necessary to conclude that only observables are real.  A scientist is free to be a materialist, but cannot correctly claim that science has proven that view.  At most, materialism is an operationally convenient viewpoint for scientists to take;  convenience is a weak test of truth at best!  The fact that naturalistic science can explain many empirical phenomena well does not prove that it can explain all of them, just as the fact that many drinks contain alcohol does not prove that all drinks are alcoholic by definition.

Some individuals like to cite Occam's razor (it was once said by a nameless wit that Occam bled to death when he cut himself with his own razor) as evidence that epiphenomenalism is "more parsimonious" than dualism.  I think this doubtful (we could be sure of this only if a coherent mechanism to explain consciousness in material terms were known;  as noted above, we do not have this essential point of comparison), but even so, Occam's razor correctly states that the simplest sufficient (that is, complete or coherent) model is the one that is presumed correct, and we do not know if epiphenomenalism qualifies as a sufficient model.  In my view, for reasons outlined above, it does not.  (And, in any event, the principle of parsimony remains only an assumption.  It does not constitute a logically coherent proof of the notion that simpler models are actually more likely to be true.)

See my Unit 2 essay above for more about the nature of science and its philosophical underpinnings.

Counterargument #3:  Is dualism vitalistic?

This may or may not be an offshoot of the first argument.  Some see dualism as opening the door to belief in the ability of nonmaterial agents to influence physical reality in a host of other ways that dualism itself does not postulate.  If we believe that the spirit (or spirits) can change physical events in even one way, what prevents us from "regressing" (so the argument would run) to a "prescientific" belief in a host of other such events, such as the notion that the spirits of my ancestors can visit my home in the middle of the night and rearrange the order of cans on the pantry shelf, or the notion that my soul can leave my body and temporarily inhabit the body of a stray cat?

Clearly, phenomena of that nature, if they can be postulated to exist at all, are completely outside the universe of discourse of science.  (I can observe that the cans on the pantry shelf have a different arrangement than formerly, but can draw no scientific conclusions about the causes involved, since they are inherently unobservable and outside the scope of my own introspective awareness.)  Consciousness is not like that;  all of us know from direct experience that we are conscious and self-aware;  that phenomenon is not in doubt (except by radical behaviorists like Skinner, who appear to use a mind they do not have to doubt the existence of mind in the abstract, a paradox if ever there was one).  

It is true that dualism (probably) requires the belief that the material cosmos (or, at least, the three-dimensionally-bounded spacetime continuum we physically inhabit) is not all there is.  (That could be debated, but on a very high philosophical level that will likely transcend this course.)  But our choice among ways to conceptualize that reality must be bounded by the empirical phenomena we observe.  Most phenomena that do not involve consciousness seem well explained by the kinds of scientific models that view the universe as a closed system.  This does not mean that all of them are;  it means that, in doing normal science, we can operate under the presumption that this is generally (not necessarily universally) true.  This is one reason why science and religion are not inherently at loggerheads;  they usually operate at different levels of explanation.  ("The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is wholly from the LORD";  both parts of this proposition can be objectively true and valid even though the scientist can only draw empirical conclusions about the first part.  The scientist, speaking as a scientist, cannot tell us whether the second part is true or false, though as a human being s/he is likely to have drawn conclusions one way or the other since the existential demands of existence practically require all thinking adults to adopt some kind of philosophical worldview.)  In other words, dualism need not lead to the wholescale abandonment of empirical science, which (contrary to popular opinion) is historically and philosophically dependent on theism, not atheism, as the logical ground of its emergence.  (See Alfred North Whitehead for one exposition of this idea.)  Nor does dualism require the uncritical acceptance of any and all religious ideas;  those in direct conflict with clear empirical evidence must be viewed with extreme caution at a minimum, if we are to regard religious truth as propositional or objective in any sense.   Again, see my Unit 1 and 2 essays for more about those issues.

Question for discussion:

Identify yourself as either an epiphenomenalist or a dualist.  (Your grade will not in any way depend on which position you adopt.)  Showing me in your answer that you understand the distinction between these two points of view, explain why you hold the view you do.  React, in your essay, to some of the arguments outlined in the essay above.  Identify one problem or challenge in your chosen viewpoint and discuss how you might address that.  Be specific and complete.  

Unit 4:  Phoneme recognition experiments

Back in the 1970's, when Bill Gates was still a twentysomething pre-entrepreneur and Power Point was just a thumbtack, I took a graduate course in language perception with the esteemed Dominic W. Massaro -- on whom be peace.  Much of what I learned in that course has stuck with me over the years.  One portion of the course dealt with a group of experiments about the perception of speech sounds by prelinguistic infants.  I'll briefly, and somewhat nontechnically, summarize this research below. 

To understand this research, we must first define what is meant by the phenomenon of habituation.  In this simplest type of learning, the strength or intensity of a reflex is modified by how frequently the eliciting stimulus is encountered.  The learning is represented by the fact that a stimulus which originally generates (for instance) interest or fear will come to elicit a less and less intense response over time as the individual learns that the stimulus is harmless or boring.   Note that this simplest form of learning does not involve the generation of any new responses, but simply a change in the intensity of an existing response. 

Although, by definition, prelinguistic infants cannot provide us with any verbal self-reports, behavioral and/or physiological responses such as habituation can provide a substitute or proxy for self-report.  In a typical habituation study of this sort, an infant subject is repeatedly exposed to a stimulus (call it stimulus A), and with each stimulus presentation, some response such as heart rate is measured.  Decreases in heart rate with repeated exposure to the stimulus indicates habituation (the child is getting increasingly familiar with, and eventually bored with, the stimulus).  When the heart rate has reached a pre-stimulus or baseline level, the infant is then presented with a new stimulus, B.  If the infant can distinguish perceptually between A and B, there should be a spike in the heart rate because the infant has not been habituated to this new stimulus.  If this does not occur, it can be presumed that the infant cannot tell the difference between the two stimuli.  In fact, the magnitude of the spike in heart rate can be taken as a fairly accurate measure of how different the two stimuli seem to the infant.  In this way, psychophysical questions such as (in this case) ones related to stimulus discrimination, as defined in lecture, can be addressed with nonlinguistic subjects such as infants (and nonhuman animals).

In the studies on speech perception, the question under consideration was, "Are human infants hard-wired to perceive differences between similar speech sounds (the technical term for such sounds is phonemes)?"  Particularly, the question is whether there is something special about phonemes:  whether infants are better able to discriminate between similar phonemes than between other kinds of auditory stimuli such as, for instance, musical tones.  In the experiments, then, musical tones represent a "control condition" against which perception of speech-related stimuli can be contrasted.  

Using habituation as a methodology, we first habituate the infants to a particular sound (such as a particular musical tone, such as middle C). We then present a randomized array of other sounds (other tones on the musical scale) and measure the infant's degree of response.  Based on the argument above, it would be expected that the further the new tone is musically from the original habituated tone, the larger the spike in the infant's heart rate.  We would expect -- and we obtain -- a straight-line or linear relationship between the degree of physical difference between the two stimuli (the independent variable) and the degree of infant response as measured by heart rate (the dependent variable):

(The X axis represents the degree of physical change from stimulus A, the Y axis represents the degree of increase in heart rate over the habituation baseline.)  Nothing controversial here;  all is as one would expect.

When, instead of using musical tones, we use speech sounds, however, something surprising happens.  If we habituate the infant to a particular phoneme, like \b\, and then present a range of phonemes that are intermediate between this phoneme and a similar one like \p\ (a speech synthesizer is required to produce these intermediate sounds), we obtain the unexpected result of a nonlinear, S-shaped response curve:

What does this mean?  It means that, with language sounds but not with musical tones, we get a sharp response boundary, as if the child is hard-wired to maximize the difference between similar sounds.  Any \b\-like sound gets processed by the brain as if it were \b\;  the infant can't "hear" the difference between the sounds.  Without this ability, no child would ever learn language... the task would simply be too daunting, too complex.

This research raises the interesting question, how did this property get wired into the first place?  (It would have no adaptive significance in a nonlinguistic environment, of course, and thus poses an interesting chicken-and-egg problem to those who are resistant to the notion of teleology in biology... though there are numerous solutions to that problem that would be too complex to pursue here.)

Question for discussion:

Discuss the results above in light of the nativist-empiricist controversy as outlined in class.  To what extent do these results lead to a different conclusion than that suggested by perceptual experiments discussed in lecture?  Why or why not?

Unit 5:  More about the Keirsey temperaments

In lecture, we talked at some length about the four Keirsey temperaments.  Here's a quick review in case you were asleep at the switch:

This section has to do with practical applications of this model.  For instance, here's more about how the four types tend to learn.  

This suggests some different learning strategies for each temperament, as follows.

If you are a Commander...

1.  Watch your tendency to get mired in the details.  Remember that some things matter more than others.  Particularly, when taking notes, don't copy everything down, but learn how to differentiate between what matters and what only seems to matter.

2.  Learn how to pace yourself so that you don't run out of time when the clock is ticking (such as during exams).  Don't think you have to read every exam question three or four times... some Commanders have doubled or tripled their exam scores simply by trusting their first impressions more.

3.  Don't just memorize information in a verbatim way.  Many college courses emphasize theory, not mere facts.  Practice rephrasing key concepts in your own words (not just memorizing formal definitions).  Try generating original examples (not just memorizing examples offered in lecture).

If you are an Adventurer...

1.  Find ways to keep yourself engaged in boring classes, since courses with a heavy emphasis on theory and a "talking heads" approach may easily put you to sleep.  Ask for opportunities to earn a grade through real-world application of theories and concepts, like internships or field observation.

2.  Hold yourself accountable since it's easy for you to procrastinate around activities that aren't much fun.  Use the "Premack principle" -- reward yourself for doing something you dislike by following it with something you do enjoy.

3.  Take the time you need to double-check your answers during exams... don't be in too much of a hurry to rush out of the exam room.  Beware your tendency to be overly impulsive.  Make sure you haven't missed important information on the exam.

If you are a Systematizer...

1.  Don't be confrontational in classroom interactions (especially not with your instructor, who may expect deference or at least common courtesy).  Learn how to disagree without alienating others.

2.  Don't neglect the facts... in some courses more than others, it's important to get the foundational facts right, even to be nitpickingly precise. 

3.  Be sure to affirm, not just question... a balanced analysis spends as much time on what's right with something as on what's wrong with it.  Learn when (and how) to personalize, to develop and express a subjective opinion.

If you are a Harmonizer...

1.  Don't confuse enthusiasm with understanding.  Being excited about an idea is one thing;  being able to articulate your comprehension of the underlying ideas is something else. 

2.  Watch your tendency to nonlinearity, to chasing the rabbit where it runs, particularly in writing essays.  Don't ramble unnecessarily, which drives more linear types up the wall.  Work hard at maintaining a logical, linear focus with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

3.  Learn how to logically defend a point of view.  It's not enough to be passionate about something;  you have to be able to make a rational case for it, which means looking objectively at both pros and cons, both strengths and weaknesses, both assets and liabilities.

The fact that, by definition, instructors are people too (contrary to what some students think) means that all teachers have a temperament as well, and this influences their approach to the academic enterprise.

Commander instructors (about 25% of college teachers):

Adventurer instructors (a vanishingly small trace element among college teachers -- can you figure out why?):

Systematizer instructors (about 40% of college teachers):

Harmonizer instructors (about 35% of college teachers):

Similarly, the four temperaments have different ways of approaching, and attempting to solve, problems... and different career preferences, as well as different ways of approaching career self-management... and so forth.  But I'm not going to elaborate on that, because this leads directly to your assignment for this section. 

Question for discussion:

Identify one area of life other than education/academia (other than being a student or teacher).  For instance, you might choose "selecting and managing a career" or "solving life problems" or "handling money" or "managing and maintaining relationships"... or anything at all that interests you, from sex to religion to politics to entertainment to dieting.  Discuss how you think people of each of Keirsey's four types might deal with the issue you have chosen.  Show me in your answer that you understand Keirsey's model.  If you would like to pull in some outside resources (not a specific requirement), a great place to start is with the Type Reporter (I've contributed numerous articles to this newsletter over the years).  This newsletter utilizes the language of the "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" or "MBTI", but you don't have to understand that model to make use of this resource;  just know that in MBTI language, SJ = Commander, SP = Adventurer, NT = Systematizer, and NF = Harmonizer. 

Unit 6:  Applying the Six Hat model

This essay has to do with a practical application of Edward de Bono's "Six Hat" model as discussed in lecture.  To make optimal use of the information below, think of a problem you are facing in your life right now.  It helps to think of a chronic problem that you've had difficulty solving or resolving in the past, a nagging issue in your life.  As you learn the steps below, try applying them, step by step, to your own real-life situation.

Step One:  Vent your feelings (Red Hat)

With emotionally charged problem situations, it's helpful to begin by being honest about your feelings.  Powerful feelings like shame, rage, panic, despair, guilt, sorrow, confusion can block any attempt at rational problem-solving.  So start by getting those feelings out of your head and onto a piece of paper.  Use journaling to write out your feelings in detail.  Remember that, when wearing the Red Hat, you don't have to be logical, consistent, or coherent.  You don't have to have reasons for the way you feel.  Your feelings don't have to make sense to yourself or others.  Others don't have the right to sit in judgment on you while you are, as De Bono says, "under the protection of the Red Hat".  So start by "telling it like it is" about your emotional reactions to the situation you face.

If you are weak at Red Hat thinking, you may be tempted to skip this step on the ground that feelings are irrational or unimportant.  Or you may draw the conclusion that you "have no particular feelings" about the situation you are facing.  This could be true, or it could mean that you're out of practice in identifying and articulating your feelings.  Before assuming that your feelings are nonexistent or insignificant, make sure you're in touch with the way things really are underneath the surface.  As my counselor friends say, denial isn't just a river in Egypt.

On the other hand, you don't want to stay mired in your feelings either.  The goal is to get them out so you can look at your situation in a fresh, and hopefully more rational way, unencumbered with strong feelings that can keep you stuck or create mental blind spots for you.

Example:  I'm failing my psychology class and it makes me really mad.  I wish Dr. Embree would just drop dead.  Underneath I'm mad at myself too.  I'm scared that if I don't pass the class, I won't be able to graduate and I'll end up with a minimum-wage, dead-end job.  I'm frustrated with myself because, no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to do any better.  I feel stupid.  I feel like a failure.  I feel like giving up on life and becoming a Wal-Mart greeter.

Step Two:  List the facts and reality constraints (White Hat)

Now that you've dealt with your emotions, you're ready to list the facts as they relate to your situation.  Unless you've done your Red Hat work first, it can be very hard to do this:  emotions can be distorting lenses that magnify some facts (or, in extreme cases, create imaginary "facts" that don't really exist), minimize others (or, in extreme cases, make you completely blind to their existence).

In the spirit of the White Hat, don't analyze the facts or try to figure out what to do about them.  Just list them.  De Bono suggests a P-M-I approach:

Example: 

Plus:  I have successfully completed 30 college credits with a GPA of 3.2.  I show up for class every day.  I am young (21) and motivated.  My tuition is paid.  Dr. Embree lets students drop one exam.

Minus:  I am bored with the psychology class.  I don't seem to understand much of what Dr. Embree is saying.  Dr. Embree is the only person on campus right now who teaches this particular class.  The class is held at a bad time of day for me (8 a.m.)  I got a D on my first exam and an F on the second.

Interesting:  The class has 40 students.  I sit on the left hand side of the classroom near the front.  

Step Three:  Brainstorm creative solutions (Green Hat)

Green Hat thinking means creative, "lateral" thinking.  The goal is to dream up as many possible creative solutions as you can, without worrying about whether or not any of them is realistic or rational.  Low-probability, bizarre, deliberately flawed solutions are desirable, as they may break limiting mental mindsets and widen your solution set.  Humor is a desirable trigger for creativity.

Aim for a minimum of 25 different solutions (50 or more would be even better).  Use random-word association if you need help in achieving this target.  Don't stop generating solutions until you have a strong sense that you have "scraped the bottom of the barrel" or come up against the "law of diminishing returns".  If you have not included some stupid, crazy, absurd ideas, you haven't done your job!

Example:

  1. Bribe Dr. Embree to give me a passing grade.  (Rumor has it that small bills, with no consecutive serial numbers, work best.)

  2. Hack into the UW Colleges computers and change my grade to an A.

  3. Hire a tutor.

  4. Cheat.  For instance, hire a really smart student to submit to plastic surgery that will make her/him look just like me, so s/he can take my exams for me without being detected.

  5. Define "success" as any grade of F or higher, thus guaranteeing success (unless I happen to get a final grade of G or H).

  6. Use telepathy to read Dr. Embree's mind before the exam and find out what the right answers are.

  7. Incite Osama bin Laden to destroy the state of Wisconsin.  Because this would mean the end of the UW System, my grade would not matter since no student would have a transcript.

  8. Meet with Dr. Embree and ask him for help.

  9. (random word:  "raisin")  Raisins are wrinkled.  Can I figure out a new "wrinkle" to approaching the class, such as a new and different study technique?

  10. (random word:  "cable")  A cable is a connecting fiber or wire.  Is there some way I can build a better "connection" between the information in this class and things I care about, such as my present or future career?

  11. (random word:  "beer")  Can I find a way to get Dr. Embree drunk while he is grading so that he will be more generous in setting grade cutoffs?

Step Four:  Categorize, strengthen, combine possible solutions (Yellow Hat)

The goal is to find and retain what is useful about each solution on your Green Hat list.  Even the stupidest, craziest solutions contain, in all probability, the germ of a good idea.  Your job is to find it.

Substep 1:  Cluster or categorize your solutions

Write your Green Hat solutions on index cards, one solution to each card.  Then sort the cards into piles of similar solutions (solutions that have something important in common). 

Example:  Some solutions involve faking or cheating my way into a good grade.  Some solutions involve lowering my standards or deciding in some way that the grade does not matter.  Some solutions involve changing my skill set or strategies/approaches to the class.  Some solutions involve changing my attitudes or motives.  Some solutions involve changing Dr. Embree's attitudes or perceptions about me.  Some solutions involve asking for help in some way.

Substep 2:  Identify what is helpful or useful about each idea

Find what is "worth salvaging" about each idea, even the craziest of them.

Example:  I don't really think that having Osama bin Laden destroy the state of Wisconsin is a good idea.  It would mean the end of the Packers, for instance.  But the idea does suggest to me that my grade doesn't exist in a vacuum.  It only has meaning relative to the grades of other students.  It only has meaning within a social system (the university).  Maybe I can find a way to "stack the deck" in favor of myself relative to others.  Maybe I can find a different social system (such as a career path or an employer) where grades don't really matter.

Substep 3:  Look for solutions that can be combined

Sometimes, two half solutions can be combined to yield one full solution.  If two solutions have opposite flaws, the two may cancel each other out if they are implemented in tandem.  Look for such combinations.

Example:  Bribery (solution 1) is illegal, but it does address what I think the real problem is, the fact that Dr. Embree is biased against me.  Hiring a tutor (solution 3) is legal, but it doesn't address this bias factor.  Combining the solutions, could I hire someone to be, not my tutor, but my "advocate" or my "marketing specialist" to talk with Dr. Embree on my behalf and convince him to give me a second chance?

When you are done, you should be able to roughly rank-order your solutions from the best overall to the worst overall.  Try to select a "short list" of the five or six best solutions overall before moving on to Step Five.

Step Five:  Play devil's advocate in troubleshooting your solutions (Black Hat)

Now take off your rose-colored classes and take the most skeptical, hard-headedly objective look as possible at your "short list" solutions.  Try to identify all the possible flaws and problems associated with them.  Assume the worst case scenario.  What might prevent each solution from working?  Is there a fatal flaw or "doomsday scenario" lurking behind some of the solutions?

If you find this difficult, ask a friend to play this role for you.  But don't get mad when s/he trashes your best ideas.  That's her/his job.

The goal isn't to be negative for the sake of negativity.  The goal is to identify serious flaws and problems in advance, so they can be corrected before the fact rather than waiting (as many of us so often do in real life) until after the fact.

Example:  Meeting with Dr. Embree (solution 8) makes sense, but there are some problems.  He's busy, so maybe he won't have time to meet with me.  I haven't been very respectful to him in the past, so maybe he won't be willing to help.  Maybe our schedules won't overlap enough to make a meeting possible.

Now try to think of a workable strategy or sub-solution to each obstacle you have identified.

Example:  I need to mend some fences, perhaps even apologizing to him for the time I called him a no-good dirty expletive deleted, before asking politely for help.  I need to be flexible about scheduling, even taking some time off from work as needed, to find a time that fits within his work week.

If, after you have done your best at this step, one or more of your "short list" solutions have "survived the gauntlet" and seem realistic and workable, move to a trial implementation.  Try the best of them (or your choice of the "best of the best") out for a defined period of time, then assess whether or not it's working.  If it is, keep going!  If not, determine what's wrong and either decide to modify that solution or to move to a different solution.

If no solutions make the cut, you will need to go back one, two, three, or even four steps and backtrack in a way that will lead to additional solutions:

With practice, you become more and more adept at identifying which step in this process is the weak link or the bottleneck:

Working on strengthening a weak cognitive mode ("Thinking Hat") may help you to overcome this problem.  Or, you can partner with someone who is strong where you are weak (though sometimes this is emotionally threatening;  choose your partner wisely).

That's only five Hats.  What about the sixth?

The Blue Hat (representing mental strategizing, overseeing your own problem-solving process, or "metacognition") is implicit in the entire process.  This entire essay is a venture in Blue Hat thinking:  it is helping you to find a structure with which you can tackle most life problems.  Effective problem solvers know how to move back and forth between cognition (thinking about, and acting on, the problem itself) and metacognition (thinking about thinking, or monitoring the effectiveness of the process of solving the problem);  between action and reflection;  between (to use Stephen Covey's terms) "production" and "production capacity".  There's a time to use your saw to cut down trees;  there's a time to sharpen your saw so you can continue to cut trees down in the future.

Problems are an inherent part of life and are also the source of all job security (since, as Tom Jackson notes, a job is nothing more than a formal invitation to solve a particular class of problems for someone -- an employer or customer -- who wants them solved).   Becoming a fluent, flexible problem solver is one of the most important skills you can develop in your lifetime!

Question for discussion:

Identify a specific problem you face in your personal or professional life and use the model above to attempt an analysis of that problem.  Show in your answer that you understand the distinctions among the six cognitive modes.

Unit 7:  Jerry Lucas and "The Memory Book"

Jerry Lucas hardly qualifies as a scientist or a psychologist.  He is a self-described "NBA legend" with "a very active mind".  But his book on how to utilize human memory effectively -- rather obviously titled The Memory Book -- is a useful resource for students who struggle with the memory burden inherent in the college life.  (According to someone who is very much a real scientist, Mel Levine, the memory burden of the college years far outstrips the combined memory burden of the average person's entire working life, even though most people spend about 10 times as many of their adult years working as they do learning.)  Lucas' system makes sense in terms of the Atkinson-Shiffrin model discussed in class.

Even wrapped in the cloak of the Fair Use Doctrine, I probably can't outline the details of Lucas' system on this Web site;  I look very bad in stripes, and I hear that prison food is terrible.  So (as a sort of Plan B), I've placed a copy of Lucas' book on four-hour reserve in the UWMC library.  The question below refers to the ideas he outlines in that book.  (Even if you aren't "digging deeper", you might find Lucas' suggestions of practical help to you as a student, particularly in fact-driven as opposed to theory-driven courses.  In case you're fuzzy about that important distinction, here's how one source describes the difference:  in fact-based courses, "an encyclopaedic knowledge will be required", but in theory-based courses, "the skills needed are those of reasoning, of being able to make inferences based on one or two core models, and of being able to see patterns and family resemblances in apparently diverse materials".)

Question for discussion:

Outline, in detail, links between Lucas' memory system and the Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory as discussed in lecture.  Show in your answer that you understand the Atkinson-Shiffrin model.  In particular, discuss the following concepts from Lucas' work:  (1) original association, (2) substitute words, (3) peg words, (4) the memory graph.

Unit 8:  Words Fo People Dat No Speak Pidgin

In lecture, we discussed the Whorfian hypothesis.  This exercise involves an application of that concept.

Read the following excerpt from Da Jesus Book:  Hawaiian Pidgin New Testament.  

“God, you our Fadda.
You stay inside da sky.
We like all da peopo know fo shua how you stay,
An dat you stay good an spesho,
An we like dem give you plenny respeck.
We like you come King fo everybody now.
We like everybody make jalike you like,
Ova hea inside da world,
Jalike da angel guys up inside da sky make jalike you like.
Give us da food we need fo today an every day.
Hemmo our shame, an let us go
Fo all da kine bad stuff we do to you,
Jalike us guys let da odda guys go awready,
And we no stay huhu wit dem
Fo all da kine bad stuff dey do to us.
No let us get chance fo do bad kine stuff,
But take us outa dea, so da Bad Guy no can hurt us.
Cuz you our King.
You get da real power,
An you stay awesome foeva.
Dass it!”

Copyright (c) 2003 -- Wycliffe Bible Translators

It’s not too hard to make sense of this excerpt based on your linguistic knowledge as a native English speaker, once you realize that Hawaiian Pidgin (which technically, despite the name, is not a “pidgin” at all, but a “creole”;  see note below) follows the “phonological rules” of Hawaiian, not of English.  Speech sounds and letter combinations that do not exist in Hawaiian are not used.  Thus, “people” becomes “peopo”, “the” becomes “da”, “kind” (meaning “type” or “sort”) becomes “kine”, and so on.  In addition, linking words like “of” which are required in standard English are frequently not used.  Examples:

·         Da peopo = The people

·         Fo shua = For sure

·         An spesho = And special

·         Plenny respeck = Plenty (of) respect

·         Ova hea = Over here

·         Outa dea = Out of there

·         Da kine bad stuff = The kind(s) (of) bad stuff;  The bad things

·         Dass it = That’s it;  That’s all

·         Jalike = Just like

A small number of words are drawn directly from Hawaiian and require explanation for a person who does not know that language:

·         Hemmo = Take away

·         Huhu = Angry, enraged

In linguistic theory, a “pidgin” language is a simplified language made up of the merged vocabularies of two or more separate languages, with a very basic grammatical structure, used by members of two separate language communities for the purpose of basic communication, such as for trade or business purposes.  (The word “pidgin” is said by some to be a corruption of the English word “business”.)   Children of these individuals often develop a more grammatically sophisticated blend of the two languages, which they learn to speak as their own native (birth) language;  such languages are “creole” languages.  Linguists would say that the passage in the handout is written in Hawaii Creole English, but most native speakers of that language call it Pidgin (which technically it is not).

Question for discussion:

To what extent do you see this passage as either supporting or refuting the Whorfian hypothesis?  If language is a “window on the culture” of those who speak and think in that language, what conclusions might you draw about the culture and worldview of native Pidgin speakers, and how do these differ from the culture and worldview of speakers of standard American English?  Note that the distinctions may be found more in the “connotations” of language (the mental pictures we get, and the associations of related ideas, when we hear a word or phrase) and less in the literal dictionary meanings.  For instance, how does your mental picture of “da Bad Guy” (Pidgin) differ from your mental picture of “the evil one” (standard English)?  In the words of a native Pidgin speaker who was part of the translation team, “Da Pidgin… talk strait to da heart fo plenny people.  Fo dem, da English talk mo to da head.”  Do you see evidence to support this idea in the passage (as compared to the standard English versions of the Lord’s Prayer with which – I hope! – I can safely assume you are familiar)?  How might this relate to the Whorfian concept as discussed in lecture? 

Unit 9:  Lifespan development and the Strauss-Howe cycle

In their fascinating books Generations:  The History of America’s Future and The Fourth Turning:  An American Prophecy, William Strauss and Neil Howe outline a fascinating theory of generational cycles in history that has numerous implications for many subfields in psychology.  Here is a brief summary of their model and its implications.

 
The saeculum

Strauss and Howe begin with the observation that a wide range of sociological, psychological, and economic variables -- from crime rates to attitudes about gender to vocational patterns -- are well correlated and track in tandem, in a generally predictable, cyclic fashion (see the figure below, where X = time, Y = some empirical variable of interest):

They note that the length of a cycle (e.g., from trough to trough or peak to peak) is roughly fixed over the centuries, and corresponds roughly to the length of a long human life (80 to 100 years).  They call such a cycle a saeculum (the same root word from which we get our more familiar term "secular", meaning transient, changing, and referring to the world of empirical, everyday experience, as opposed to the eternal, constant, transcendent, and metaphysical or sacred).  A human being born at the start of one saeculum might, if he or she did not die prematurely, expect to die in old age at the start of the next one.

The correspondence between the length of a human life and the length of a cultural saeculum is, they say, no accident.  The saecular turnings occur because of specific generational influences as outlined below.

Seasons and cohort generations

They note that just as a human life traditionally has four "seasons" each lasting about 20-22 years -- the "spring" of childhood, the "summer" of young adulthood, the "autumn" of midlife, and the "winter" of elderhood -- so, too, can the cultural saeculum be divided in this way.  The parallel is that just as humans are born, live, and die, so eras or epochs in history (the saecula) have a natural life span:  they are bounded by (begin with, and end with) a time of crisis, chaos, external threat (such as a major war), or ekpyrosis.  At the end of each saeculum, the culture must, in a sense, die and be reborn -- or fail to be reborn, as when an entire civilization ceases to exist.  The transformation in a society engendered by moving from one saeculum to another is so dramatic, so radical, so much of a "quantum leap" change that one might say that the society is born into a "new world".  (Hence, Americans still use the phrase "postwar" to refer to the contemporary era or saeculum, even though World War II took place nearly sixty years ago.)  As a nation, America has experienced three such ekpyroses or saecular crises:  the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and World War II.  If Strauss and Howe are right, we are due for yet another one -- the end of the current saeculum -- somewhere around the year 2025. 

As Strauss and Howe use the term, a cohort generation is a group of persons born within the same general time period (usually about 20 years), who share the same set of defining experiences.  Because of the length of a cohort generation relative to the actuarial human lifespan, there are between 4 and 6 cohort generations alive in America at any given time.  As noted below, there are four basic types of cohort generations that recur, in Strauss and Howe’s theory of history, in a predictable, cyclic fashion.  

 

Social moments

 

A social moment is a key, defining time and series of events that shapes the entire culture and, in a significant sense, ushers in a new phase in history.  There are two contrasting kinds of social moments which, Strauss and Howe assert, occur in an alternating sequence:    

Note that the lapse of time between like social moments is about 80 years, or four cohort generations, in length.  This is no accident, as we’ll see below.  It also suggests that we’ll be due for another secular crisis somewhere between 2010 and 2025.  Hence we’ll soon find out how valid Strauss and Howe’s model is… stay tuned.  

 

Four generational types

 

Based on the above concepts, we can define the four generational types as follows.    

Because of the influence of social moments as mediated by the age (phase or stage of life) during which they are experienced by the different cohort generations, the four generational types tend to take on different personalities or values.  Of course, these are generalizations that apply only to the “group persona”, not universally to every member within a given cohort generation:   

What fuels the generational cycle?

Why does the saecular cycle occur?  According to Strauss and Howe, it has to do with the fact that each generation instinctively corrects for the excesses of the previous generation, and in so doing raises its own children in such a fashion that the cycle will continue to turn.  Let's take a look at how this works.

During a Crisis (ekpyrosis or saecular Winter), when the culture is faced with a catastrophic external threat of such proportions that the culture itself may not survive (e.g., World War II), those who are children during this era are understandably raised to be obedient, to be silent, to conform, to basically get out of the way and not impede their elders (young adults) as they tackle the job of saving civilization.  Assuming that the challenge is successfully met (the culture does not die, but is reborn into a new era or saeculum), the young adults who are seen as responsible for this epic victory take on a heroic persona (Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation").  But something quite different happens to their children.

Rising to adulthood in a post-crisis High or cultural Spring, this generation -- the so-called Adaptive or Artistic generation, the most recent example of which is the so-called Silent generation (born between 1927 and 1943) -- faces an intriguing paradox.  On the one hand, outwardly they experience a time of tremendous optimism about the social order:  likely a time of economic prosperity, social cooperation, and tremendous technological progress.  On the other hand, they often feel as if they were "born too late" to emulate the "great deeds" of their next-elders, and feel relegated to an "also-ran" role in which they can, at best, be maintainers of a social system they did not build.  In addition, as time goes by, the dark side of the saecular High begins to show itself, in the excessive conformism of the times, the stifling of autonomy and dissent (e.g., the McCarthy era), and in what increasingly begins to be seen as a spiritual or cultural sterility -- a society that is outwardly (technologically) sound but inwardly devoid of values and meaning.

In reaction to this, Adaptive/Artist parents raise their children (the generation that comes of age during the High or Spring of the culture) to be inward-looking, value-driven.  The children are usually overindulged, at a time when economic prosperity is such that concerns about survival seem remote and rising expectations for each succeeding generation a given.  Coming of age, these individuals then respond dramatically, even violently, to the perceived value sterility and mindless conformity of the culture (they never experienced the cultural Winter that made these traits once a necessity and a virtue, and now only see their outmoded excesses).  The result:  a sudden values transformation, often explosive, pervades the youth culture in a time of Awakening or Summer (the Consciousness Revolution, the Summer of Love -- in a word, the 60's).  This is an Idealist or Prophetic generation (most recently, the Boomer generation, born between 1943 and 1960):  intensely inner-directed, value-driven, autonomous, idealistic, otherworldly, and generally contemptuous of "the Establishment" erected half a saeculum ago by their grandparents and so assiduously tended by their parents.

Committed to the values of individualism and inner-directedness, Idealist/Prophetic parents raise their children even more autonomously and permissively than they were raised, often to the point of neglect ("latchkey children"), partly because they are so preoccupied with the inner search for values and for social transformation of the value landscape of society that they can fail to be good parents, and because (raised in a time of economic prosperity when thrift and planning for the future begin to seem redundant and needless) they tend to focus on the now and/or the eternal, neglectful of the intermediate future of the next generation.  The result:  a time of increasing neglect of, if not outright hostility to, children (it is no accident that abortion became legal around this time), and as a result, a dramatic rise in social pathologies.  This generation of "neglected" or "abandoned" children, a Reactive or Nomadic generation (most recently, Gen X, born between 1961 and 1981), too young to remember the cultural sterility to which their parents were reacting, grow up in a world that seems to them an unsafe, amoral jungle in which only the strong and the pragmatic survive.  Certainly they feel that they receive little or no help, financial or otherwise, and have to learn to make it on their own.  Seeing the excesses of idealism, they often become tough, cynical, hard-bitten pragmatists and adventurers.

Naturally, having experienced a childhood of neglect, these individuals become determined to raise their children very differently, protectively and nurturantly -- at a time when their next-elders reinforce this trend because of alarmist concerns about the breakdown of society, as society's external structures appear to be splintering or falling apart (an Unraveling or Autumn, e.g., the "culture wars" of the late 80's and the 90's).  As the trends started in the Awakening begin to "go too far" and begin to be perceived as rampant individualism, hedonism, and amoralism, society clamps down and begins to look for ways to protect children and to foster collectivism, cooperation, volunteerism and the like.  The result:  a generation of valued children (a Civic or Heroic generation) that grows up believing in the value of order, structure, teamwork, and responsibility in the face of a society that radically needs fixing.  Currently, the Millennial generation (born after 1981) is the current Civic generation, the first wave of whom are just beginning to reach young adulthood.  The last such generation was the generation (born between 1901 and 1927) who, as young adults, fought and won World War II:  Strauss and Howe note many similarities between the young people of the Great Depression and today's Millennials.

Why does the cycle keep turning?  Why another Crisis, Winter, or ekpyrosis?  In part because aging Idealists or Prophets -- intensely value-driven as ever, with the natural inflexibility of idealism, and prone to see the world in black/white uncompromising terms -- are likely to respond to the social Unraveling by means of one last-ditch effort to respond to external threats in terms of a catalysmic, even apocalyptic, moral struggle:  the North versus the South (the Civil War), the free world versus the totalitarian menace (World War II), or... just maybe... America versus the terrorist axis of evil (the pending Crisis of 2025, or if you are a terminal pessimist, World War III)?  At some point, these trends take on a life of their own, reach a point of no return, and society has little choice but to mobilize in the face of another impending crisis that threatens to engulf the entire culture.  We aren't there yet;  current events, sad and sobering as they are, are a mere harbinger of the Winter to come, if Strauss and Howe's model is correct.  It is late Autumn, not Winter.  But Autumn is a time to prepare, for Winter may soon be here.

If the Heroic generation of that era can rise to the challenge, the cycle will turn yet again and another saeculum will be born.  If not (as has happened, of course, repeatedly throughout history), that particular culture will die.  Cultures almost always fall to ruin, Strauss and Howe argue, during a badly managed Winter or time of Crisis -- the ekpyrosis point of a saecular turning.  Again, stay tuned for the year 2025 (give or take a decade).

Note that once every four generations, the seasons of human life (one generation's youth or Spring, young adulthood or Summer, midlife or Autumn, and elderhood or Winter) match the seasons of the saeculum or wider culture (High or Spring, Awakening or Summer, Unraveling or Autumn, and Crisis/ekpyrosis or Winter).  For this generation -- always an Idealist or Prophetic generation -- old age coincides with the (potential) death and (hopeful) subsequent rebirth of the culture.  Is this poised to happen again within the lifetime of most who are reading these notes?  Time will tell.

Resulting generational archetypes

 

Thus, each generation finds its core values defined by the unique experiences of its own youth:

Question for discussion:

How might Erikson's stage theory of lifespan development require modification in light of the Strauss-Howe model?  For instance, it's likely that Erikson's concepts were shaped by his own generation-specific experiences (he was a member of the Civic generation of the World War II era, that is to say, the previous saeculum).  As a result, his model might best describe the likely lifespan experiences of Civics, but might not fit as well the life experiences of other generations such as the diametrically opposite Idealists.  What changes or adjustments might have to be made, would you suggest, to integrate these two models?  (For instance, Civics have to "grow up early" -- particularly, transition from adolescence into adulthood -- in light of the pending or current Crisis;  but Idealists tend to "grow up late".)  Be specific in your answer, showing that you understand both models and can do some creative thinking about how they might meaningfully be integrated.

Unit 10:  The continuity hypothesis

In Unit 8, we discussed the role of language in shaping thought.  One issue we did not have time to discuss in detail in that unit is the fact that language is inherently dichotomous.  The terms with which we speak (and think) are usually either/or category terms (tall vs. short, rich vs. poor, friendly vs. unfriendly)... as if there were, in fact, two distinct, discrete groups of persons with no overlap between them.  This is inherent in the nature of language itself:  it tends to sharpen or exaggerate category differences.

But in fact the external reality about which we are using language to communicate is usually a continuous one -- a broad range of possible values (of height, net worth, sociability, and so on) with, again, most people falling in the moderate range (of what usually, though not always, is what statisticians call a normally distributed variable).  

In other words, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the issue at hand, the dichotomies implied by our language system are usually apparent, not real.  They do not really exist, but are a sort of linguistic metaphor.  As a result, it can be dangerous and distorting to treat the dichotomies as if they were really there (in technical terms, to reify them), because they do not really exist in the underlying phenomena or data.  Only in rare cases (e.g., gender -- male vs. female) are there true dichotomies -- two distinct, easily identifiable populations -- in the external world as such.  (And even that seemingly obvious instance is no longer considered a "politically correct" one;  the trend within postmodern academia is to think of gender as a purely social construction, so that each of us is whatever gender we define ourselves as being.  That's why official UW surveys, when asking about gender, now often offer, not two check-box alternatives, but four or more, the last always being -- presumably as a court of last resort to avoid offending or excluding anyone -- "Other".)

For instance, there is no objective, clear-cut dividing line between rich and poor (what dollar figure would you suggest?) or between tall and short (what height cutoff should be used?)  For individuals in the middle of the distribution (a middle-class person of average height), it is difficult to know which set of opposing terms best applies.  Such a person might be "rich" compared to an unemployed homeless person, but "poor" compared to Bill Gates;  "tall" compared to a professional jockey, "short" compared to an NBA star.   The criterion implicitly dividing the two verbal categories is a shifting and a subjective one;  this is the point behind Garrison Keillor's famous joke that in his home town, "all the children are above average".

When the linguistic category does not carry much social baggage, perhaps none of this is a huge problem.  But when dealing with labels that clearly involve a "good" versus a "bad" pole -- like "sane" versus "insane", or "normal" versus "abnormal" -- the distorting impact of language as a system for categorizing reality can be devastating.

Psychological abnormality is, in general, a false or illusory dichotomy:  there are not two groups (the normal and the abnormal, the well and the sick, the sane and the insane) but only one -- humanity, most of us being, of course, moderately neurotic.  This fundamental reality -- that "abnormal behavior" is not categorically different from "normal behavior", that it differs only in degree and not in kind, only quantitatively and not qualitatively -- is known as the continuity hypothesis.  

One point of the Big Five model discussed in lecture is to emphasize the fact that there are many different ways to be "normal".  But another point of that model is to provide a basis for discussing the continuity hypothesis.  If that hypothesis is true, any form of mental illness, no matter how extreme, can be linked to a less extreme, more adaptive and functional, non-clinical or sub-clinical personality variant (some particular Big Five profile).  For instance, schizophrenia might be seen as a very extreme form of a normal E- O+ A- N- profile.  To have that profile does not mean mental illness, but it does mean (compared to the population average) social withdrawal, a way of thinking about reality that is highly creative at best and quirky at worst, and a tendency to "think too much, feel too little" -- all traits that, if exaggerated by a factor of 10 or 20 or 50, might begin to look very much like true clinical schizophrenia.

An important research program for the 21st century is to try to draw links of this sort between normal personality variants and abnormal personality conditions (the psychodiagnostic categories or the mental illnesses).  The point of this exercise is to see if you can generate testable hypotheses of this type.

Question for discussion:

Select at least two (2) of the diagnostic categories (mental illnesses) discussed in lecture.  Doing for each of these what I have done with the example of schizophrenia above (but in more detail), outline how the symptoms of each of these clinical conditions might be mirrored, in a much less extreme and more functional way, in a particular combination of Big Five traits within the "normal" (nonclinical) portion of the population.  Be specific and complete, showing me that you understand both the clinical syndromes you choose to discuss and the Big Five model.  Note that it may not always be the case that all five of the Big Five dimensions are relevant to a particular situation.  In my example of schizophrenia above, I said nothing about the dimension of Convergence because it does not seem significant to that particular syndrome.

Unit 11:  The perils of eclecticism

An advantage of eclecticism, as discussed in lecture, is that it allows a counselor to pick and choose approaches to match the needs of particular clients.  In part, this suggests the notion of matching counseling strategies to counselor personality traits.  Here is what Myers et al. (1998) have to say about counseling and personality:

Doing this effectively, however, means translating these concepts into the different schools of thought discussed in lecture.

Question for discussion:

Select two (2) of the schools of thought discussed in lecture.  For each, using Big Five language and taking advantage of the suggestions above, discuss in specific terms what kinds of clients would be most likely to profit from or respond well to the therapeutic approaches presented by that school of thought, and why.  Be specific and complete.

Unit 12:  Pathological obedience and Abu Ghraib

Review the facts associated with the Abu Ghraib atrocities here.  (Postings of news and op-ed pieces on the Web come and go, so I'll have to check this hyperlink from time to time to make sure it's still current.)

Question for discussion:

Discuss how the Abu Ghraib atrocities might be explained in terms of the concepts discussed in lecture related to conformity and pathological obedience, particularly as exemplified in the Asch and Milgram experiments.  Be specific and complete, showing me that you understand these concepts fully and can apply them to a specific real-world situation.

Alternative option:  Identifying psychological concepts in fiction

Read the short story "Kendra's Window" (hyperlinked). Then identify at least three (3) psychological concepts from lecture and discuss, in detail, how these concepts are exemplified in the story.  Be thorough and complete.

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