931207 Hal to Bill P. and Oded 931206

931207 Hal to 931207 Bill P. and Oded

I think Bill is right about criterion validation. Humanist
sociologists I know are fond of citing the paradox of criterion
validation as an extension of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

I faced this issue in my 1972 dissertation on how police patrol
officers decided whether to report offenses. I concluded then, and I
continue to believe, that while criterion validation is unattainable,
construct validation is testable. You don't measure the thing itself;
you measure its product, and check the result against that predicted
by your theory. You cannot measure a quark, but you can detect its
anticipated traces.

I now believe we have programmed into our intentionality templates
against which we measure experience--one of anxiety producing
mechanical control, the other of security producing tetrahedronal
control. I cannot show you the motives moving either in a straight
line or orbiting around one another; I can project their material
manifestations and observe whether anxiety or security follow (from
such indices as, between to persons face-to-face, eye contact). I can
tell you I believe that I actually feel the movement of motives in
myself and others now that I am aware of the phenomenon, but that is a
spiritual experience, not a material one.

I don't believe we need to reduce ourselves to behaviorism in order to
build testable theory. l&p hal