Those who want to study what is in front of their eyes

Wise words from Colin Mills:

“I’m seldom interested in the data in front of me for its own sake and normally want to regard it as evidence about some larger population (or process) from which it has been sampled. In saying this I am not saying that quantification is all there is to sociology. That would be absurd. Before you can count anything you have to know what you are looking for, which implies that you have to have spent some time thinking out the concepts that will organize reality and tell you what is important.”

“… the institutionalized and therefore little questioned distinction between qualitative and quantitative empirical research is, to say the least, unhelpful and should be abolished. There is a much bigger intellectual gulf between those who just want to study what is in front of their eyes and those who view what is in front of their eyes as an instantiation of something bigger. Qualitative or quantitative if your business is generalization you have to have some theory of inference and if you don’t then your intellectual project is, in my view, incoherent.”

Everyone is a genius at something

 

 

Spearman, C. (1925). Some Issues in the Theory of`”g”‘(including the Law of Diminishing Returns). Nature, 116, 436-439.

The role of measurement in science

“The road from scientific law to scientific measurement can rarely be traveled in the reverse direction. To discover quantitative regularity one must normally know what regularity one is seeking and one’s instruments must be designed accordingly; even then nature may not yield consistent or generalizable results without a struggle. [...] I venture the following paradox: The full and intimate quantification of any science is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Nevertheless, it is not a consummation that can effectively be sought by measuring. As in individual development, so in the scientific group, maturity comes most surely to those who know how to wait.” (Kuhn, 1961, pp. 189-190)

Kuhn, T. S. (1961). The function of measurement in modern physical science. Isis, 52(2), 161-193.

An attempt to explain what statistics is about

Statistics is about trying to infer a pure, imaginary, nonexistent, often massively multidimensional structure which relates different quantities to each other, together with estimates of how uncertain the estimates are of the shape of this structure. This inference is based on the statistician’s expression of their best guess of the qualitative nature of this structure (based on substantive theory, experience wandering around the world…), combined with data which is used to constrain this best guess and estimate quantitative parameters describing the shape.

George Box said “All models are wrong…” (if they’re models then they’re imaginary and they’re intended to simplify reality)  “… some are useful…” (they help us understand some phenomena, or to make predictions, when combined with, say, psychosocial theory; they relate in some way to the – or at least a – reality out there…).

Greenwood function

Just found the Greenwood function, “that describes the relationship between the frequency of a pure tone and the position of the hair cells measured as the fraction of the total length of the cochlear spiral in which it resides” – pretty cool.

R code to make the picture below:

curve(165.4*(10^(0.06*x)-1), 0.3, 35, log = "y", xlab = "mm", ylab = "Frequency", main = "Greenwood function")

 

Social organisation without authority

From Colin Ward (1966), Anarchism as a Theory of Organization.

“[...] “anarchy” means the absence of government, the absence of authority. Can there be social organisation without authority, without government? The anarchists claim that there can be, and they also claim that it is desirable that there should be.

“Anyone can see that there are at least two kinds of organisation. There is the kind which is forced on you, the kind which is run from above, and there is the kind which is run from below, which can’t force you to do anything, and which you are free to join or free to leave alone. We could say that the anarchists are people who want to transform all kinds of human organisation into the kind of purely voluntary association where people can pull out and start one of their own if they don’t like it. I once, in reviewing that frivolous but useful little book Parkinson’s Law, attempted to enunciate four principles behind an anarchist theory of organisation: that they should be
(1) voluntary, (2) functional, (3) temporary, and (4) small.
They should be voluntary for obvious reasons. There is no point in our advocating individual freedom and responsibility if we are going to advocate organisations for which membership is mandatory.
They should be functional and temporary precisely because permanence is one of those factors which harden the arteries of an organisation, giving it a vested interest in its own survival, in serving the interests of office-holders rather than its function.
They should be small precisely because in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organisations have least opportunity to develop.”

“I abandoned psychoanalysis. But I am a psychoanalyst”

“I am in a certain way a psychoanalyst – I am still a psychoanalyst from a certain point of view. From another point of view, I am not a psychoanalyst, because I refuse in my work with the family to use the psychoanalytic model. The psychoanalytic model was developed by Freud in the last century and Freud could not know the systemic way of thinking. Also, in my opinion, it is not true that the psychoanalytic model is only intrapsychic. A certain part of psychoanalysis is intrapsychic. For example, what Freud calls the parts of the psyche-the ego, superego, and id-are intrapsychic because they describe the way in which the psyche, the mind of a person, functions. But in therapy, the psychoanalytic model is not intrapsychic; rather, it is dyadic when it is correct, because it is in analysis that the relationship between the therapist and the patient, the transference, is analyzed. So Freud‘s ego, superego and id and so on are intrapsychic. Freud’s transference is dyadic.

“[...] Dyadic thinking is not enough, because the family is at least a triad. It is necessary to remember that a system is not the sum of dyads or the sum of individuals-mother and father, son and mother, father and son, son and daughter, daughter and mother. It is necessary to observe all systems functioning at the same moment. So psychoanalysis continues in the Aristotelian way of thinking and has no way of looking at other concepts, such as coalition of two people against a third person and so on; it remains an intrapsychic or dyadic model. It is necessary to go beyond even the triad.”

“[…] according to the model, I abandoned psychoanalysis. But I am a psychoanalyst according to the rigorous study of continuity which my psychoanalytic mentors taught me.”

References

Barrows, S. E. (1982). Interview with Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Giuliana Prata. American Journal of Family Therapy, 10(3), 60-69.