> I'd welcome reactions to this approach, negative as well as positive.
> Perhaps there's something crucial I'm losing or missing by taking this tack.
Martin:
The problem with your approach is its either/or nature, dismissing
what is different without understanding it -- alas, the human way, almost.
To me the beauty of cultural psychology is that it is trying to span the
gaps -- between quantitative and qualitative research, between theory and
practice, between individual and global.
What you miss is that you can tell a story with numbers, not the
whole story but aspects of the story that are impossible to understand
without them. Quantification can contribute to the description of the
larger social and historical context. In fact it is especially useful for
uncovering what the agent-eye-view misses. You say that the "juxtaposition
of the limited viewpoint of the agent and the larger forces that cannot be
seen clearly at the time is the power of narrative." Actually, such
juxtaposition is one of the prime outcomes of agent-based programming
(probably also dismissed, by you, as just another form of quantification).
With agent-based programming various types of individual agents are given
particular properties within a system of resource "patches." With
interactions that change qualities of agents depending on the surrounding
agents and patches, a whole system of changes can unfold that is radically
different from what is happening to the individuals. Everybody I know who
has worked with these systems is surprised by the difficulty of predicting
what will happen combined with the similarity to real world "stories."
My point is not to denigrate story telling. Master storytellers
(like Kathy Brown here in the lab, Eva Ekablad, who is working on xmca,
and many contributors to xmca, perhaps including yourself, but certainly
including the best "theorists" I have known, like Jim Moffett, Kurt
Danziger, and Mike Cole) are research treasures. When I read *Current
Directions* or *Psychological Science* these days I am often disappointed
by the lack of culture and the lack of narrative behind the thinking in
the articles. But narrative without quantification also suffers.
For example, people look at what is going on and want to increase
the use of a particular practice (say statistics in psychological
research). So they get power and demand that others use their favorite
practice (notice they have done this without any quantification of the
historical use of various methodologies). What they fail to realize is
that fast growth can be as dangerous to a practice as no growth.
Ecologists have known this for most of the century. Cultural psychologists
are just beginning to understand how this process works in cultural
settings and quantification is necessary for this understanding.
Understanding needs quantification, but quantification lacks
significance if there is no narrative underlying it. My favorite practice
is to try to put them together in meaningful ways, give the results to
people, and let them choose how to use them in their own individual and
cultural settings.
David