Re: [xmca] Since some people asked

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Joe
Thanks for tracing this historical development.
I looked up your article "Werner's Relevence for Contemporary Developmental
Psychology" written in 1992. I was intrigued by the section
titled "Development as Heuristic, Not as Phenomenon" on page 560. This
section seems to tie in with the notion of *analysis into units* in your
comment:

My understanding of the Galileoan mode is that the issue is not placing
things in conceptual categories but is in a complexly structured analysis
of conditions, influences, causes, involved in any event, etc.. The
analysis didn't look for "types" - it looked for conditions. In this sense
the "unit" of analysis, if there is such, is the result of this analytic
enterprise and not its beginning.

Hence, "analysis into units."

Exploring the idea of *types* or *units* as the process of *entification*.
Thus, as you wrote in your article, "rather than being able to start with
language, cognition, logic, or whatever, Werner started with the notion of
an organism"

Joe, in your article you further elaborated the complexity of Werner's
approach by stating that Werner,

"... doubles the enquiry  so that one must not only account for the laws of
the entity as they are proposed within theories, but one must also account
for the processes of "entification" that form  the entities into the things
that are then studied.
This fact alone makes Werner easily fated for extinction, because this way
of theorizing, while perhaps suitable for philosophical and LITERARY
journals, is at variance with the normal practices of developmental
practices. In normal practice, researchers address themselves to a
literature by following some topic and then aligning various theories and
research findings with respect to that topic.  Theoretical ideas must be
ideas of sufficient concreteness that they can themselves be treated as the
KIND of higher order topics that can allow a literature to be organized
around them"

Joe, I was fascinated with this aspect of your article and read
[understood]this section as perceiving KINDS of topics as particular
"genres" around which a literature "develops".
Thanks for sharing your personal history

Larry




On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 2:11 PM, JAG <jglick@gc.cuny.edu> wrote:

> My understanding of the Lewinian contrast between Aristotelian and
> Galileoan modes is that the Aristotelian mode hinges on placing things in
> conceptual categories - almost as if the placing of something in a
> conceptual category explains it. My understanding of "unit of analysis" is
> that it bears a strong (but not identical relation to finding the
> conceptual home for some piece of behavior).
>
>
> My understanding of the Galileoan mode is that the issue is not placing
> things in conceptual categories but is in a complexly structured analysis
> of conditions, influences, causes, involved in any event, etc.. The
> analysis didn't look for "types" - it looked for conditions. In this sense
> the "unit" of analysis, if there is such, is the result of this analytic
> enterprise and not its beginning.
>
> Hence, "analysis into units."
>
>
> For me this all bears on where I started, Werner's enterprise. Werner was
> not Galileo, nor was he Aristotle.
>
> The object of Wernerian analysis was to describe, in somewhat structural
> terms, what would count as "development" and not as "mere" change. For
> Werner Development had to mean something other than change over time.
> Although that sounds a bit like Aristotelian thinking (the "concept"
> "development") - BUT the practice was Galileoan. Any piece of behavior, as
> candidate for development was examined from a number of points of view,
> including the material conditions, the patterns of behavior, both in terms
> of correctness kinds of errors, or in terms of directionality of behavior
> or lack thereof, or the degree to which behavioral units were organized
> with respect to one another  (if you don't like the implicit reference to
> testing).
>
>
> NB: The referent of developmental analysis was not people it was the level
> of organization of behavior and how it was organized in given situations
> (this was later developed by Kaplan using the Kenneth Burke's rhetoric and
> grammar of motives tetrology as a means of developmental analysis), To the
> extent that there was overlap or not between material cultural conditions
> and level of organization of behaviors the distinction between behaviors
> and people was not easy to understand (or maintain). [blame it on Cassirer]
>
>
> Interestingly the Wernerian use of microgenesis helps to save this
> particular day, Depending on temporal conditions that same individual could
> show either an "advanced" or a "primitive" level of response (unfortunate
> choice of words, but they were the words used). One study in this mode
> involved the display of a typed word at different exposure times - at
> shorter exposures reports of word meaning resembled "aphasic" speech. These
> kinds of studies clearly demonstrated the referent of a Wernerian notion of
> developmental analysis. This issue wasn't about fading or timing, it was
> about level of organization of response.
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