To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>
From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:54:30 -0800
Subject: Re: [s-acc] Re: cognitive error
Abc:
I'm not an "oracle" (that's the Golden State Warriors basketball arena) but I do have notions regarding some of your thoughts here. Kindness of various individuals here has been important to me.
You wrote:
I am wondering if a science of mind is not an essential piece of the 'argumentation' mentioned above. It is not hard to pick apart the fallacies involved and the abuses, though it is always overridden by blunt force common sense and hiding behind the inertia of past practices, substandard education, tolerated discriminations, and bureaucratic inflexibility.
Yes, you've got to HAVE the science in order to FULLY UNDERSTAND how it comes to be. Each psychologist or critical thinker who works in that way has
some insight and applies it as best she/he can.I like Vico in part because he starts from "sensus communis" (common sense) in his effort to ground an approach to social science that stands Descartes on end. He then attempts to engage "the inertia of past practices, substandard education, tolerated discriminations, and bureaucratic inflexibility." Since he was living under the Inquisition he had to be .. quite .. careful in his approach. One time I was given "free access" to the
Vico Institute (nobody was there that day to monitor, but .. they trusted me) and looked around for records indicating his relationship to the Inquisition.My most basic instinct would be, in addition to efforts on the ethical front for those already practicing, to get at candidates as early in the educational process as possible, and to have the perspective of those victimised there to make any experiential and
theoretical perspectives valid to those whose current primary picture of the science of mind works backwards from textbooks like 'Abnormal Psychology', and the sensational events caused by those with mental health issues looking for their 15 minutes of fame [infamy].
Psychologists I know who are trying to be "part of the solution" may do that. But typically they "know something" because of some other part of their lives, and they use that insight as an "intellectual lever."
And of course, there's the prospect of their starting to "know us." It's actually a "leveraging opportunity" for them, if it works right. That's why I'm attempting to design a PsySR project on "new social roles" where we can develop a kind of "new networking" in a productive fashion.
Andrew