Keith;
First, my understanding of phenomenalism is from Charles W. Tolman's article
Watson's Positivism: Materialist or Phenomenalist? in the book he also
edited, Positivism in Psychology (1991, Springer-Verlag). I was looking at
it in the context of understanding the differences between Social Cultural
and Behaviorism. (and its relevance to special education practice). Tolman
states:
"The crucial distinction between materialism and phenomenalism lies in their
presumed objects of perception and knowledge. Phenomenalism takes its object
to be some aspect of individual experience: sense impressions in its
traditional form, meanings in its 20th-century linguistic form. Materialism,
by contrast, asserts that its object is the thing in itself-indirectly, in
its representationalist form; directly, in its presentationalist form. . .
Phenomenalist, following Hume, think of cause solely in terms of constant
conjunction of sense experiences. For materialism, there remains a
distinction between appearance and essence, which necessarily collapses for
phenomenalism. Methodologically, this is important because it decides
whether the scientist adopts a strategy of seeking underlying (nonapparent)
processes or one of simply describing regularities among observed
phenomena." (p. 85)
Tolman convinces me that the spirit of behavioral methodology is
phenomenalist positivism, notes that phenomenalism today is not overt, but is
expressed through methodology, and that behaviorist cannot be materialist in
this sense. Behaviorism can look to reinforcement as a nonapparent cause,
but the operationalism in its method does bring it back to a consistent
reduction to observable. In this, the biggest problem for me is in the
context of theory dependent observation. I believe that theory is necessary
to translate observed phenomena into data and most of the theory behind
behavioral data remains implicit, that is reinforcement theory is too weak to
make this translation.
For Comte, I know him mostly for his positive method and social physics,
which I see as similar to behaviorism, that's why it confused me to see him
as emergentist.
I come very close to reductionism in my thinking many times usually in
reducing complexity to simplicity like in reducing human action to object
oriented mediation. Would this be reduction to you - and - is a level of
complexity necessary for emergence or for such a version of social cultural
theory?
Thanks for your comments.
Howard
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