Dear Eric and Nikita n all, You join Robert in the desperate, altruistic attempt to save me from the clear meaning of my own words. There are two reasons to stop doing lame social psychology studies and take up writing novels: (1) is the reason you give, and which I endorsed in the sec group: social psychology dissertations are piss-poor politics. (2) is the one I am now am pressing and which I used to raise, from time to time in the kitchen group, after listening to microgenetic accounts of humans doing this or that. The narrative description of the behavior of a person doing this or that, thought to be of psychological significance, is so close to fiction that I would expect that any argument strong enough to justify it would be strong enough to justify fiction.. I may be wrong, but I want to hear that discussion. So far, the only reactions I have gotten are horror and apathy. I guess your last response is in the horror category.
The one thing I cannot live with is the notion that there are varieties of truth ... artistic truth, emotional truth, scientific truth, etc. Obscurantist hogwash. My VALUES tell me that there is but one Truth and different ways of getting at it. Changing a man's values is devilishly hard. You can point out to him that he plainly does not believe things that those values entail, and see if he changes his beliefs or changes the values (in which case, they probably weren't values in the first place.) Or, you can demonstrate that a proposition that he claims as a value conflicts logically with other propositions for which he has made similar claims, (in which case he must give up on some values, or give up on logic. The Tea Party movement provides wonderful examples of the latter defense) Please do one of these two things and stop telling me I don't believe what I say I believe, without providing evidence. All I am saying here is, If literature has a pair of binoculars through which it can see things that science cannot see, science better get a grant from NSF to buy the damned binoculars. All of this seems to me perfectly standard New Realism, although you know that stuff better than I do. Intuitively, prior to much reflection, I share the view sponsored by so many on this list that there are truths in fiction not (yet) found in psychology, partly because our professional ethics wont let us do the experiments that novelists every time they sit down to write. After all, most interesting statements about humans are dispositional ... "A person will do X if you do Y to him." This is exactly the sort of situation that novels are made to explore. Be careful here: this started out as a quixotic little thought. The more you yell at me, the more I am inclined to believe it. All the best, Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/nthompson http://www.cusf.org -----Original Message----- From: Nikita A. Kharlamov [mailto:nkharla...@clarku.edu] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 7:29 PM To: ERIC P. CHARLES Cc: Nicholas Thompson; kitc...@lists.clarku.edu; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re[2]: [FRIAM] Art is a Lie Eric! I think you are being too harsh. To an extent - fiction WAS and STILL IS a method of psychological knowledge for a potentially unlimited audience. I for my part read Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' well before stuff like 'Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.)'. A lot of people learn something about human hearts/souls/minds/consciousnesses/behaviors/etc (strike out / append as desired) from great and not-so-great works of fiction rather than from great papers in Scientific Psychology and great Scientific Psychologists and Great Counseling Psychologists. In fact, before some debatable point somewhere in XIX century, lots and lots of texts written in the manner of interrogating what we today call the subject matter of the Reverend Scientific Psychology had no option of being thus labeled. At best those were labeled Philosophy. And contained a great deal of fiction. Thus, if you allow creating fiction to have something to do with whatever you think is the thing in reality that Most Eminent Scientific Psychology studies - fiction really is just one of the ways of making sense of this weird stuff. And could at times have roughly the same effect as qualitative psychology in terms of providing the first grounds for Its Majesty Scientific Psychology. (I wonder how many great works in Scientific Psychology were inspired at least in part by fiction?) Of course, if Scientific Psychology is supposed to perennially suffer from psychotic denial of its own roots in the basic tendency of humans to wonder what the hell is going on in other people's heads - then indeed, fiction should get out of the way of hypotheses apparently dropping down from those mountains hanging in thin air (I think those come from Japanese drawings, may be mistaken) that inspired Cameron to create the world of Avatar. (Oops. Fiction again. Strike Cameron out, leave only thin air - is it a scientific fact though that the air is thin?) n Monday, October 18, 2010, 9:54:54 AM, you wrote: > Nick, > This is bizarre! "Fiction is a potential method in scientific > psychology." I cannot, for the life of me parse it. Is it equivalent > to saying: "Fiction is a potential method in scientific physics."? > Granted that science fiction has broadly anticipated many things that > are now part of scientific physics, but it also anticipated many > things that were not, and I hope you are not arguing that cutting edge > sci-fi writers should get endowed chairs in physics on the basis of > their scientific accomplishments! > When I recall you making criticisms along these lines, it was mostly > to frustrate doe-eyed grad students who wanted to save the world. You > argued, at those times, that if they wanted to help survivors of > genocide, they would be better off writing a gripping novel that > helped increase international attention to their plight; if they > wanted to help survivors get along better with genocide bystanders, > you would write a heart wrenching novel with a message of > reconciliation; etc. The last thing you should think in either of > these situations, you argued, is that everything is failing for the > lack of one more scientific study in social/personality psychology. > This arguement I completely agreed with. It does seem to argue for > some sort of deep relationship between fictional literature and "truth." > However, I have no idea what you are getting at now. Certainly one > could study fiction as an empirical psychologist, but that wouldn't > make fiction a "method". Are you trying to say that a valid way to do > scientific psychology is to make stuff up? No chance you are doing > that. What are you trying to get at?!? > Eric > On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 12:42 AM, "Nicholas Thompson" > <nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote: > I would like, if only as a matter of principle, to rise to the defense > of all those techno-barbarians on the list who cannot find voice to > defend themselves, but I can only say that … IF there is something > valuable in fiction, if it indeed fosters or transmits knowledge, Then > fiction is a potential method in scientific psychology. > To twist Stephen J. Gould’s words a bit: They are Overlapping Magisteria. > There is no knowledge that is not potentially scientific knowledge. > Nick -- Nikita A. Kharlamov Department of Psychology Clark University 950 Main Street Worcester, MA 01610 USA nkharlamov at clarku dot edu http://www.cfs.hse.ru/eng/content/view/24/42/ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
