Hi On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Charlotte Manly wrote: > My own opinion: I do not think you can teach theory-building.
Probably depends on one's definition of "teach." Perhaps not all teaching needs to be explicit. I think your own example from graduate school (i.e., exposure to theory-making in different areas) would constitute teaching. > I consider myself part theorist, and I teach statistics (with > a little research design thrown in) to graduate students, but > I simply cannot imagine how you would teach > theory-development. For one thing, what counts as a good > theory depends partly on the subfield. But are there not some common characteristics that cut across areas? An important quality of a good theory for me, being a reductionist at heart, is that it must be mechanistic. That is given a description of the underlying mechanisms and the inputs to the system, one can "see" how the to-be-explained behaviour emerges. In the past I have used the analogy of a factory to describe this requirement. That is, psychologists are trying to describe the internal workings of the psychological "factory" that produces human behaviour and experience. For me, too many theories in psychology lack this mechanistic quality, but I expect that will change in the coming decades. Piaget, for example, never (to my knowledge) explains how such theoretical "mechanisms" as reversability actually are implemented by the human mind/brain (see more below). This is one reason why it can be difficult to determine whether different theories are truly different, or simply alternative ways to verbalize some pre-mechanistic theoretical ideas. Once one has a true mechanism to explain psychological phenomena, then it is possible to consider other characteristics of good theories (e.g., how general is it in terms of the number of phenomena that can be explained). And I think talking > about what makes a good theory or how they were developed has > to be grounded with specific examples. I agree entirely here. But teaching by examples is still teaching. > Developmental psychology actually does have some interesting > new theorists (Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Jeffrey Elman come > to mind in the area of cognitive development), but the link > between theory and data is still sometimes tenuous. The model that I like best here (and in a number of other areas as well) is based on the idea that inhibitory processes are relatively weak in early childhood and gradually strengthen as we develop. This model has the advantage both of explaining diverse phenomena (e.g., decline in seizures with age, increasing precision of motor movements, capacity to inhibit impulsive acts as in "simon says," improved ability to ignore distractors in selective attention tasks, ...), and perhaps of providing a mechanistic explanation for past non-mechanistic theories (e.g., a Piagetian reversability mechanism would plausibly entail inhibition of current perceptions/thoughts, ego development could entail the inhibition of more primitive impulses, ...). So I do think that some principles of good theories/theorizing can be identified, although as Charlotte said, it is probably difficult to communicate these ideas without discussing specific examples. Best wishes Jim ============================================================================ James M. Clark (204) 786-9757 Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax University of Winnipeg 4L05D Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED] CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark ============================================================================ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
