Hi all,
I'd like to say something about Carl's paper. I have read it carefully and
enjoyed it thoroughly. Indeed, if one believes in Vygotsky and activity
theory, G.H. Mead and symbolic interactionism, and Habermas and his theory of
communicative action, one cannot but embrace Carl's "expose." Carl's
impressive scholarship brings in his paper, implicitely or explicitely, the
theses defended by some revolutionary and profoundly insightful
psychologists, such as Vygotsky and Mead, social theory and culture, which
mainstream psychology continues to ignore, unfortunately. This, probably
because, even though mainstream psychology claims it has ridded itself of
behaviorism by re-introducing "subjectivity" during the "cognitive
revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, it nonetheless continues to hold on to
the positivistic logic and the mechanistic worldview that are at the heart of
behaviorism.
Personally, I believe that as long as mainstream psychology continues to
ignore culture, it will go on promoting the reductionistic, distorted image
of the human being it is asking us to take for granted--a caricature which is
the very reason why almost all psychological interventions fail when applied
to the real world. Of course, to capture culture and study the individual in
context, psychology needs a different methodology, one that can grasp
phenomena holistically without breaking them down into discrete variables and
without constraining them by operational definitions. And I am afraid that
the longer psychology departments of our universities keep their doors tight
shut when it comes to teaching qualitative methods, the longer many will
continue to look at them as "unscientific," the longer we will continue to
misinterpret our research subjects and accumulate tons of mostly irrelevant
knowledge on what it means to be human.
Incidently, just a few weeks ago, I submitted an article on the topic of
"subjectivity" that I believe lends empirical support to some of Carl's
theoretical points. Thank you Carl for your outstanding piece!
Doris.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 01 2001 - 14:24:54 PST