From discrete actors to goal-directed actions: toward a process-based methodology for psychology

Abstract

Studying social phenomena is often assumed to be inherently different from studying natural science phenomena. In psychology, this assumption has led to a division of the field into social and experimental domains. The same kind of division has carried over into ecological psychology, despite the fact that Gibson clearly intended his theory for both social and natural phenomena. In this paper, we argue that the social/natural science dichotomy can be derived from a distinction between hermeneutics and science that is deeply rooted in the atomistic, structuralist ontological tradition. We show that, from a process-based perspective, the central questions of hermeneutics (action of an individual within a context of possible actions), ecological psychology (behavior of an organism in an ecological niche) and physics (motion of a particle in a field) share a similar structure. Building on these ideas, we propose a common, process-based methodology for psychology that integrates field theory with insights from quantum mechanics to accommodate traditionally problematic concepts in natural science such as teleology and values. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, empirical findings on the paradigmatic problem of prospective control (such as gaze control in automobile driving in relation to perceptual tuning) are presented.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Ed Reed and Pamela Reed for their encouraging comments on an early version of this manuscript. We also thank Alan Costall and Scott Jordan for their many useful suggestions that helped us focus the paper more clearly.

Notes

 It is worth highlighting that in Heidegger's approach understanding is fundamentally different from the enigmatic duality of the notion of understanding based on the distinction between “knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’. In a radical process ontology, achievements and things (knowing or understanding something) are just by-products of a more fundamental understanding (i.e., knowing or understanding of how to achieve something).

 Nevertheless, we are fully aware of the difficulties in using proper language adequate for the type of process-ontology we propose in this paper. The structure of everyday language usually implies the use of a dualist ontology. In a predicate nouns are typically used to denote things and verbs are to express processes (changes, activity, etc.).

 For example, see Iberall (1992, 1995, 1997) on physicalist homeokinetics, radical relational biology by Rashevsky (1954) and his follower Rosen (1978, 1992), and Newtson and colleagues’ (1973, 1987) technique to analyze the structure of behavior.