On Wed, 22 Dec 1999 23:18:52 -0600 "Nate Schmolze"
<schmolze@students.wisc.edu> writes:(cut)
>This becomes a real struggle for me because similarity is assumed as the
null >hypothesis (universal species) and if there is diversity it is
assumed biological if not in >words in practice. So even when we value
diversity within a cultural frame it tends to be >reified as biological
as in talk of miltiple intelligences and learning styles. You can even
>take tests online now to determine what learning style your child is.
(cut)
One of the things which sometimes got me in hot water in my old psych
department is my assertion that there is no such thing as a "generic
human being." You can't have a human person without a culture and a
history, and that culture and history date back to birth and - if the
"fetal programming" people turn out to be right - back to conception if
not earlier. I'm currently reading Lewontin and Levin's "Dialectical
Biologist," having read "Humanity and Nature" by Levins and Haila and
Lewontin's "Biology as Ideology." (An epidemiologist in my new
department suggested them when I asked for something to refute the
sociobiologist/evolutionary psych people.) The first two books are
allegedly about ecology, but they actually deal with epistemology and the
whole peculiar habit we have of trying to sort out what is organism and
what is environment. According to them, and it makes sense to me, what
they're saying is that they "construct" each other, i.e. there isn't a
clear way of stating cause-and-effect in our customary way.
This seems like a productive way to think about our "nature-nurture"
controversy. In other words, there's no controversy possible because the
question itself doesn't make sense. (Anyway, with living systems, where
do you find a point in time to label as the "beginning," since all life
(people, cultures) arise from other life/people/cultures as far back as
we are able to determine. Any other opinion is just that - opinion which
is unverifiable.) It's like asking, "Is the mind in the brain or the
brain in the mind?"
I'm not an "interactionist" either - because using the term implies that
there are real, separate entities to be observed interacting.
Unfortunately, the distinction is so ingrained in current discourse that
we're more or less forced to use it, so I guess I would describe myself
as an interactionist when speaking to most people, especially when
fighting with Jensenists. :-)
> is it necessarily beneficial they all "catch up" in child rearing
practices.
I wasn't thinking in terms of "catching up" - that implies a race in
which someone else is already winning. What I was getting at is that
changing class is somewhat like emigrating to a different country. The
first generation, and to some extent the second, preserve many of the old
ways at home, including, for example, intangible ways of relating to the
child, encouraging it to speak up in front of adults, giving it puzzle
books or not, etc. By the time there are third-generation
upper-middle-class African-Americans the differences will most likely
wash out. A possible method might be to measure performance not of
inner-city families who make it out to the suburbs, but the performance
of the children of the old Southern black professional/middle class,
where there is a tradition of education and ambition reaching back at
least a century. The problem with using summary statistics, as our
current science seems to be addicted to, is that a tremendous amount of
information gets lost, and unless you are very, very careful in choosing
your sample, you end up with misleading information, or no information at
all, and yet a beautiful-looking p value. After all, if you have e.g. a
very strong bimodal distribution, how much is the mean going to tell you
about any specific case if you weren't told about the distribution being
bimodal in the first place?
If only life were simpler....
Rachel
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 11 2000 - 14:04:09 PST