[From Francisco Arocha, 94/09/27; ]
I would like to comment on the spirit of the series of posts titled
What are our goals? and Help! Is CSG going through a midde-life
crisis? ; -) The issues raised by Ed Ford and Greg Williams I think
are important and may be signs of needed change in CSG-L. Sometimes it
seems that all of us CSGnetters are asked to be basic PCT researchers
when not all of us are in the position to be so. That does not mean
that we cannot contribute, but that our participation may be different
depending on our strenghs and skills. Perhaps if we start proposing
and discussing a specific projects on the net, we can do something
more productive than debating whether Lord has produced good data or
not. Not that these types of discussions are necessarily bad, but most
of the time they end up in nothing we gain from (We knew the answer
beforehand).
I remember two proposals, which as far as I know, were never finished
(or even started). The first one is the PCT paper written by the
collective CSG members. I saw two versions of it, the last one several
months ago. What happened to it? The second, much older than that was
a proposal by Gary Cziko to find a way to get Stella (the post by P.
George just remainded me of this one) at a reasonable price to model
higher levels of the PCT hierarchy. I never knew what happened to the
proposal either. Maybe it is time for proposing specific projects to
work on in which we can contribute in one way or another.
One of the problems that we have to deal with is of course that we are
attracted to PCT for different reasons and have different skills. I am
willing to work in a PCT project, but my training in modeling is as
close to zero as it gets. Nonetheless, I guess I still can learn. I
can help in, for instance, designing a study and collecting data, but
this as long as the study addresses "high-level" variables. Since I
work in a research center associated with faculty of medicine, the
project would have to be related to medical training of some sort;
though this relationship can be very indirect. I had a proposal some
time ago, but it did not come through. I could try again. Of course,
this applies to doing PCT research in my field using the facilities of
the university. Any other research I would have to do it in my spare
time aside from work.
I am basically unsure about how to do PCT research at, for instance,
the program and the principle levels (perhaps the levels I'd be
interested in). Some people have expressed interest in doing research
at these levels, rather than the first three or four levels. People in
fields such as educational psychology (sort-of-my-field) typically do
research that not only is important to me as a researcher but also to
practitioners in education. The problem is to find the way to do the
research. I know very few papers addressing these issues (the one by
Roberson and Glines comes to mind).
ยทยทยท
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Bill P.-The reference to the book I mentioned in a previous post is
the following:
Uztariz, O., Arocha, JF, & Caballereo, F. (I think 1984). Del hallazgo
a la elaboracion: La construccion del objeto en la psicologia
scientificista. Caracas: Central University Press.
written in impecable "castillian" and not translated to any language
(although its title can be translated, very freely, as "From finding
to elaboration: the construction of the object in 'scientistic'
psychology" and it's about behaviourist psychology, human evolution,
social sciences, and epistemology.
That's it for now,
Francisco