13/11/2011

Psychology & Complexity Science Website

I recently came across this website via one of the Santa Fe listserves to which I belong. It is called: Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists A brave attempt to think out loud about theories of psychology until we get some

Here is how Andrew Wilson, one of the team of psychologists running this blog, explains their focus:

He studies "the perceptual control of action, with a special interest in learning. I had the good fortune to be turned onto the work of James Gibson, the dynamical systems approach and embodied cognition during my PhD at Indiana University. This non-representational, non-computational, radical embodied cognitive science is at odds with the dominant cognitive neuroscience approach, but provides an over-arching theoretical framework that I believe psychology is otherwise missing. My plan for my activity here is to review the theoretical and empirical basis for this approach, to organise my thoughts as I develop my research programme."

---------------------------
I just think this website is great! While my doctorate is in medical sociology, my masters is in clinical psychology, and my early research was in addiction. I love this website because it is pushing hard to move psychology in the direction of systems and complexity. For example, the idea that cognition is restricted to the brain (along with basic notions of a computational or representational mind) or that our embodied mind (which also has emotions, don't forget those things as well, along with intuitions, meaning making, immune system intelligence, etc) is not an emergent phenomenon, developmentally and bio-psychologically progressed through our symbolic interactions with our sociological and ecological systems, is (pun intended) mind-numbing. Just a little plug for symbolic interaction (going all the way back to Mead, Blumer, etc, etc) and neo-pragmatism (a good example is Rorty): these scholars, while not getting it always entirely right, have been pushing these ideas since the turn of the previous century and, in mass, for the past several decades!

anyway, check out the website.

No comments:

Post a Comment