Posted by Estella on August 31, 2006, at 19:04:30
In reply to Re: Biopsychosocial vs Biological Reductionism, posted by finelinebob on August 30, 2006, at 21:09:23
> To this day, dualism is firmly entrenched in theological thought.
Yeah. Though there is a move to attempting to
understand religion in evolutionary terms. Over extension of the theory of mind module etc etc. Yeah, people do tend to be dualist on religious grounds. Typically substance dualists on religious grounds while property dualism is more associated with... er... theorietical sophistication, I guess. I don't know any philosophers who hold that the mind / soul is an immaterial substance.I would have thought atheism / agnosticism / humanism would have been on the rise... Hence... I would have thought that as science marches on people would be inclined to adopt materialism and give up their dualism (their substance dualism at any rate). I don't really know though. I figure back 100 years ago all members of the class would have been substance dualists.
> Is there any other kind?Well... There is subjective reality, inter-subjective reality, objective reality. I think those distinctions all make sense. Scientists build replication and repeatability and inter-rater reliability etc into their observations so their observations need to be repeatable by others following the same method. That means that they aren't just studying subjective reality because others study the same portion of the world and typically agree (fairly much). So... Inter-subjective. Hard to study objective reality though... I guess we study objective reality in the sense in which the natural world counts as objective (would have existed without people) whereas socially constructed reality might be studying society and culture and money and institutions and stuff like that. Not that there aren't objective facts about institutions and the like, but they are social constructions in the sense that they wouldn't have existed if people hadn't made them up.
Searle is okay. Sometimes he isn't particularly rigerous though so it can be hard to pin down what he is saying...
> My own understanding comes from the psychologist Lev Vygotsky ("Mind in Society" and "Thought and Language") and the semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin (sorry, haven't read any original work, but this is a good one "Dialogism").
Hrm. I haven't heard of either of those.
> Bakhtin poses an interesting question that digs into the notion of a social mind: "When someone speaks, who is doing the talking?" The answer is at least two people: the speaker and the listener. We couch our language, our choice of words or phrases or modes of expression or even level of depth based upon who we perceive our audience to be and how we think we might best communicate to meet our needs (in the least) and their needs (at best). It's Vygotsky, though, that extends that notion to all of mind: that mind exists between people and is defined in terms of cultural and sociological circumstances as much as biological circumstances.Ah. I guess that sounds okay so much as they aren't meaning to commit to anything like the Benjamin Worf hypothesis
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/njp0001.html
A guess... It is a model of communication. I haven't done any sociology. Just looked at some of it in psychology. Need to do some reading...
:-)
poster:Estella
thread:680731
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060825/msgs/681814.html