This might just be the stupidest thought that crossed my mind or one of the more interesting ones. I don't know if its a product of one of those moments of clarity or a naive notion arrived at, solely due to a lack of knowledge or because I'm missing something obvious that's right there in front of my face. It's nothing groundbreaking, I assure you. Just an idea..
I'm calling it a fundamental fallacy in methodology.
In any science, advancement is made by proposing new theories and then either proving or disproving them by collection and analysis of empirical data. This applies to the relatively young field of psychology as well.
How do you collect empirical data about the mind? Yeah, I'm aware of experimental methods, tests, questionnaires, surveys etc. But the problem, I feel with this is, you get very, very limited information and the information is very vague because the nature and scope of the questions, usually are. This is not a problem with the intelligence behind the questions, the reasons have more to do with practicality and context.
I thought, how can anyone ever completely understand me? What I can or do communicate is merely a fraction of my entire thought and the reasons behind the nature and form of my thinking are more often than not unclear even to me. This means that my parents or even my closest friends can never completely know me (I'm not entirely sure as to how to feel about this), the best they can do is form an educated opinion and image of my mind based on the collective pool of my actions (including communication) in life - the ones they know of. Generally, this suffices, in terms of decisions, emotions and problem solving in life.
But, surely, this educated guesswork can't be adequate for scientific analysis and theorizing. I mean, if those closest to me, who have known me my entire life, have pretty much a 'good guess' as to how my mind works, exactly how much can an academic, a stranger no less, glean from me with a few pointed questions or a specific experiment? Also bear in mind that the questions or the experiments are almost always designed specifically to suit the needs of the scientist, which means that, given the malleable and highly dynamic nature of the human mind, the information extracted may be distorted or contaminated by many, many factors -regardless of the precautions and safeguards taken by the scientist (which are, again, constrained within the boundaries of practicality).
So the question then becomes how valid are the conclusions arrived at and theories proved or disproved based on this unreliable data. How often, despite attempted objectivity, does the evidence kind of fit the theory instead of the other way around?
More importantly, what does this mean to the larger human campaign to analyse and understand the mind? Would we have to wait for technology and medical science to catch up, to explain everything biologically? If any or all of these things are even remotely true, then it would be the cruelest irony that the mind that quantifies and attempts to objectively analyze everything in creation that its aware of, is incapable of doing it to the one thing that is fundamental to the rest - itself.
I'm calling it a fundamental fallacy in methodology.
In any science, advancement is made by proposing new theories and then either proving or disproving them by collection and analysis of empirical data. This applies to the relatively young field of psychology as well.
How do you collect empirical data about the mind? Yeah, I'm aware of experimental methods, tests, questionnaires, surveys etc. But the problem, I feel with this is, you get very, very limited information and the information is very vague because the nature and scope of the questions, usually are. This is not a problem with the intelligence behind the questions, the reasons have more to do with practicality and context.
I thought, how can anyone ever completely understand me? What I can or do communicate is merely a fraction of my entire thought and the reasons behind the nature and form of my thinking are more often than not unclear even to me. This means that my parents or even my closest friends can never completely know me (I'm not entirely sure as to how to feel about this), the best they can do is form an educated opinion and image of my mind based on the collective pool of my actions (including communication) in life - the ones they know of. Generally, this suffices, in terms of decisions, emotions and problem solving in life.
But, surely, this educated guesswork can't be adequate for scientific analysis and theorizing. I mean, if those closest to me, who have known me my entire life, have pretty much a 'good guess' as to how my mind works, exactly how much can an academic, a stranger no less, glean from me with a few pointed questions or a specific experiment? Also bear in mind that the questions or the experiments are almost always designed specifically to suit the needs of the scientist, which means that, given the malleable and highly dynamic nature of the human mind, the information extracted may be distorted or contaminated by many, many factors -regardless of the precautions and safeguards taken by the scientist (which are, again, constrained within the boundaries of practicality).
So the question then becomes how valid are the conclusions arrived at and theories proved or disproved based on this unreliable data. How often, despite attempted objectivity, does the evidence kind of fit the theory instead of the other way around?
More importantly, what does this mean to the larger human campaign to analyse and understand the mind? Would we have to wait for technology and medical science to catch up, to explain everything biologically? If any or all of these things are even remotely true, then it would be the cruelest irony that the mind that quantifies and attempts to objectively analyze everything in creation that its aware of, is incapable of doing it to the one thing that is fundamental to the rest - itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment