http://www.writerq.com/mobile/Decon_WBB/ Latest updates from Don A. Campbell http://www.writerq.com/mobile/library/730/definitions-in-the-social-sciences/ The social sciences are the scientific study of the full range of contemporary human personal and social behaviors and the uses to which individuals put innate, learned, and cognitive behaviors in the creation, development, and maintenance of societies.
History as a social science is the scientific study of all past human personal and social behaviors, and the uses to which individuals have put innate, learned, and cognitive behaviors in their creation, development and maintenance of societies. Thus history is the scientifically ideographic study of the causality involved in the development of civilizations. As a subject, history embraces the totality of past human sociocultural and cognitive experience.

To function as scientific disciplines, the social sciences must be able to define the behavioral commonalties of their subjects. That is, what are the common elements of societies? What are the common elements of human behavior? This leads us to the fundamental causality of history and the social sciences, the causality of human behavior. That behavior is predicated on two major elements: natural biological instincts and socially learned behaviors predicated on the existence of those instincts.

The primary innate elements of human behavior rest upon but are emergent from the biological nature of man. Foremost to understanding man is his existence as a thinking being with open instincts. We are a thinking species; by our own definition we are Homo Sapiens Sapiens. When we do not learn or think due to injury, disease, or genetic defect, we are classified as abnormal. However, what we learn is open to environmental and social influences. That we must learn is innate. What we learn is open and is constrained only by the innate ability of the brain to perceive and abstract an impression of the world. It is also innate that we are a social species and . We organize ourselves into social groups. If we do not socialize into a group, if we do not accept the behavioral norms of that group, if we are socially dysfunctional, if we are sociopathic, our behavior is treated as abnormal. As a social species, it is innate that we must behave within a social context. That we must learn via socialization is innate. But as with learning and thinking, the socialization pattern we learn is open. We learn the values of the group and learn to aspire to them. Our socialization can follow any one of many patterns that have been created in response to environmental, social, or cognitive causalities. The mean behaviors of humans are learning, living as social beings within a group and thinking. But there are abnormalities and extremes to human behavior. A rule in science is that one cannot determine the true mean from the extremes.

There is another innate behavior shared by all humans which is not obvious. Because of our thinking and socialization, because of the vast variety of things that we can learn and think about, because of the vast number of social systems that thinking and environmental pressures can produce, we are functionally an open-innate behavioral species. We have no innate instinctive behavior which causes us to behave in limited and specific ways; our innate drives are open. We have a set of open-ended behavioral incitements which force us to learn to behave within the range of norms which define what it is to be human. It is this range of norms that we must understand. This capability of open-innate behavior repudiates as a dead end, the linear logic of either or thinking about nature versus nurture.

The socialization pattern we learn is the one which created and maintains our social group. One of the chief conditioners of the creation of the socialization pattern is the existence in all social groups of status hierarchies. Status hierarchies are known by several names. They are called, class structures, or dominance hierarchies. Social groups are maintained by status hierarchies. They are innate to social systems. For every social group, some such status structure exists. Without it the group would degenerate into a mass of contending strangers. Within a social group, individuals strive for a psychologically comfortable level of status. They do this via the innate mechanism I label status questing. One of the key elements which allows status hierarchies to exist is the fact that normal individuals seek status and grant deference to other members of their social group. In the majority of societies, the process of status questing is initiated and controlled by puberty rites.

The central idea of status grows from a group's judgment of its survival needs. The individuals with skills that promote that survival are granted status by the group. And there is an element of deference granted to the status holders. This deference provides the emotional glue that binds the group together. It enhances the status holder's place within the group and gains him privileges and responsibilities which encourage his behavior. So there is a reciprocal relationship between status and deference granted and duties toward the survival of the group. Failure to maintain those duties loses the individual status. Status deference extends beyond the deference granted to individuals. The group itself has status and is granted deference. This is the root cause of altruistic behavior. The whole of the group is greater than the sum of the individual parts and individuals grant deference to the institutional whole.

The most fundamental status is that attained by personal merit. The idea of merit and attainment is a function of the group's value system. This merit can be based on many criteria including experience, intelligence, personal charisma, leadership experience, or physical prowess. However, that prowess is not a function of intragroup aggression. Aggression does not hold social groups together. Aggression produces stress, and stress cause groups to fragment into defensive subgroups. The key concept for the maintenance of social groups is deference. Deference provides a willing cooperation and acceptance of the leadership of those judged to be superior.

The only functional definition of aggression is intraspecies predation. Every society has sanctions in place to protect itself from aggressive individuals because it recognizes that aggression is abnormal. Remember, there is a political myth that man is innately aggressive. There are about 6 billion peaceful people in the world. A simple test question: are you personally aggressive? Do you think and behave like a Klingon? Only a small minority of people are aggressive and predatory. They are the extreme. You can not judge the mean by the extreme. As a basic rule, no social species can exist as social when it is predatory on itself.
We distinguish between aggression and competition. Competition is a complex aspect of play. Play is cooperative. Competition teaches the group the capabilities of the members and is the first step in the ranking process. It teaches the group what the skills, temperament, and capabilities of each member are. Physical prowess is a valid status marker only as a means of affording the group protection from outside dangers, not as a means of forcing the group to grant status. Prowess is not aggression it is a display of defensive capability.

However, as part of a learning species which is socialized into belief and behavior patterns, most individuals can be taught some level of aggressive behavior. The existence of post-traumatic stress syndrome belies the myth of innate aggression as normal. Far too many soldiers suffer psychological damage from exposure to combat for it to be a normal pattern of behavior. Individuals must be trained to see the enemy as non-human, not of the group. Most warfare is long range against impersonal objects, to help protect the psychological stability of the soldier. We can not assume society exists to block innate aggressive impulses, rather some aspects of complex social groupings create aggressive behavior and teach it as a norm.]]> http://www.writerq.com/mobile/library/730/definitions-in-the-social-sciences/ Tue, 07 Oct 2014 12:37:01 +0000 Don A. Campbell http://www.writerq.com/mobile/library/728/the-fundamentals-of-science/
Science allows no claim to stand without evidence.

There are three fundamental kinds of evidence in science.

The First, and arguably the oldest kind science grows naturally from non experimental observations of the natural world. We observe, experience and make judgements about the way things are, and the way they work from our experience of them. What science does is take the events we experience and analyzes their components backward to the event that produced them. The technical label for this type of science is Idiographic science. Ideographic science attempts to reason from the effect to the cause. This is largely a descriptive process which attempts to understand complex processes in nature. Any event which is produced by many causes, i.e. has many diverse components interacting, is called a system. Idiographic science is the science of systems.

Astronomers can not directly experience the stars or planets so they reason backward down the chain of causality from the evidence they can observe to discover the phenomena which produce that which is observed. Geologist can not create volcanos to experiment on, so they observe and reason from the observations of volcanos to an understanding of the processes involved. Biologist observe the diversity of life, and its changes over time, and reason from those changes back to the origin of life.

For example, assume that you have never seen a water glass before. If you discover a broken glass, you observe the results of a unique event. You can gather the pieces and reassemble them and gain an understanding of what the glass was before it shattered. You can then examine the whole glass and begin to understand what it’s function was before it shattered, and you can even reason farther back to what might have created the glass, and what effects the glass might have had while it existed. With enough evidence you come to understand that the effects of the glass can be greater then the sum of the parts. A glass can have social effects, utilitarian effects, its use can have many causalities which transcend the glass as a thing shaped out of silicon. From this, type of analysis Idiographic scientists conclude that a thing can have effects, can produce causalities, greater than the sum of its parts. And in fact complex events can themselves be so imbued with internal causalities that their behavior, and effects can not be completely predicted. In technical jargon, these systems are said to be non linear in their behavior.

All rigorous Idiographic science depends heavily on the second type of science which is technically labeled Nomothetic science. This is the science of experimentation and manipulation.
Nomothetic science is based on the repeatability of experiments. If the same thing can be made to occur under the same circumstances its existence is granted and the explanation for the phenomena is accepted if no case which falsifies the explanation can be found. In Nomothetic science things are taken apart to understand all the components down to the most elemental then reassembled to understand the function of the whole. In Nomothetic science a fundamental assumption exists, that the whole is equal to the sum of the parts. A thing is what it is and nothing else. The assumption is that there is a stability and fixity to the nature of things which can be specifically understood once the fundamental causalities involved are understood. Thus pure Nomothetic science believes there are absolute answers to be gleaned from nature and attempts to discover those fundamental causes and to reason from those causes to the effects they produce.

When Idiographic science finds those understood Nomothetic causalities within the unique or not reproducible events it studies, it uses Nomothetic science’s understanding of the causality behind those components to understand that which can not be directly observed or to understand what produced the effect that can be observed.

Idiographic science can be thought of as a system not of absolute proofs, but of a system of statistical probabilities. In the system of nonlinear thinking called Chaos theory, it is understood that not only do things have a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, they have an ongoing sensitivity to changing conditions. So while one could conceivably know all the individual components of an event, and how they interact, one can never make absolute statements about all the behavior of the system because to do so one would have to include every possible effect the universe might impinge on it which would effect its behavior. Thus while there is an in the ball park level of understanding about events and the likelihood of outcomes and behaviors, there is a fundamental uncertainly to all events which defy absolute knowledge. This uncertainly becomes more and more crucial as events increase in complexity.

There is a third type of evidence used in science. To many minds this is the most unassailable form of evidence. It is the evidence produced from logical reasoning within the strict boundaries created by the special language called mathematics. This language is created by taking the fundamental discoveries of Nomothetic science, such as those called constants, and assigning them a specific symbolic place - a value - in mathematical language. The symbolic language thus created allows logically deductive reasoning from the known to the unknown. When a system of values and constants are properly defined and their individual causality is understood the manipulation of the symbols that represent them can be predictive. And those predictions can be tested against observation and experimentation. Functionally Mathematics is a branch of Nomothetic science and maintains Nomothetic science’s belief that the whole is equal to the sum of the parts, which is to say there is a perfect linear causality and connectivity involved in the nature of things.]]> http://www.writerq.com/mobile/library/728/the-fundamentals-of-science/ Tue, 07 Oct 2014 11:53:58 +0000 Don A. Campbell http://www.writerq.com/mobile/library/720/understanding-the-roots-of-human-behavior-notes-on-the-causality-of-social-/ If we seek to understand humans in a global perspective, we must understand the universal elements of human behavior. This requires defining the causality of that behavior. For some this is the most difficult of all scientific problems. The basic question is, What is the nature of human nature? Are we genetically programmed or free, or is it a case of being a bit of both? It is basic in the social sciences that each human, each culture, and each society is unique. It is a staple in the classical physical sciences that it is the role of science to study universal causalities and describe them as laws. One school of classical science, assumed that since both societies and humans are unique they could not be studied and described as obeying universal natural laws. Thus, the social sciences could not be true sciences. The other school tried to find universal elements of human behavior in genomic control of human behavior. This became the nature side of the nature/nurture controversy. The posit is, genetically encoded instincts force all animal behavior into specific responses to stimuli. But analysis of specific individual responses to specific stimuli reveals such a range of responses to any specific stimuli that no specific underlying law could be formulated.
Understanding human behavior in the social sciences requires a synthesis of biosociological (nature) and sociobiological (nurture) thinking. Human behavior is the universal causality in social systems. That causality like human behavior is chaotic, emergent, and nonlinear. There are five primary areas of innate behavioral causalities which tie human societies together. First we are a learning species. When we do not learn due to injury, disease, or genetic defect, we are classified as abnormal.
Second, we are a social species, and when “normal” we innately socialize into and identify with group behaviors. If we do not socialize into social roles, we are treated as abnormal.
Third, the order in our social groups is maintained by status hierarchies which are innate to social systems. In hierarchies individuals strive for a level of status they find psychologically comfortable. Learning through socialization and achieving a comfortable position status are innate behaviors driven by the learned values of a given socialization pattern. And the values act as super-normal sign stimuli for status questers who are blocked in their quest for satisfactory social status.
The Third innate behavior is that we are a thinking species. And in that thinking we engage meta cognitive thinking about what we have learned, and about what we have thought about what we have learned.
The open-innate interaction of learning, thinking, socialization, and status questing drives all primary forms of social causality. The open-innate drives are conditioned by a need for social conduct, where there is no innately fixed order of conduct to be learned. So societies form of the need to adapt an survive in the given environment in which a group finds itself. Primary status is derived from achieving the most beneficial behavior within and for the society.

Hence both classical approaches to science revealed a misunderstanding of what science is and what unique means as well as a misunderstanding of the nature of natural laws as fixed rather than as part of an adaptive system. The deterministic philosophy of science still bedevil our understanding of science is.

Chaos, Complexity and Emergent Systems
Chaos theory recognizes that all systems, both physical and social, are unique within the boundaries of their definitions as systems. However, once a system is defined as a unique stable set of dynamic relationships, the fact of that definition places the system into a taxonomic class of phenomena which have common attributes. Those common attributes are not unique. Thus they can constitute a description of the universal principles behind that taxonomic class of system's general behavior.
Since the behavior is nonlinear, however, one can only observe what the behavior will likely be, but never predict it exactly. This has been called sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
But this description is itself flawed. In chaotic systems there is an ongoing sensitivity to changing conditions. So to be a system it must be self adaptive and self organizing.
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Since the time of the ancient Greeks it has been recognized the change is part of all of nature. That was expressed then as “You can never step into the same river twice.” The flow of river itself was changed by the fact of your stepping into it. And as the river flows the river bed changes, be it by one grain of sand at a time. At each instant of flow it is different. But while the system of the river remains it a state of constant flux it is describable as a system. It can flood, or shrink during droughts or seem to remain steady for years. But at any one instant there can be hundreds of changes happening. A beaver building a dam, the water eroding the bank causing it or a tree on the bank to topple into the river each event changes the river and its history.
The a river, every system is subject to multiple ongoing influences from events outside the system. But the system’s self organization tends to maintain the system. The river floods and cuts a new channel. It is still a river, but it is changed. A river can completely abandon its channel and direction of flow and so become a river with a different mouth and even a different source. So the science of system has to itself be dynamic enough to account for all the variations that a system can display but still find the fundamentals which constitutes the causality under which the variations maintain themselves as a system.

Science's understanding of systems is complicated by several factors. First is the phenomenon of chaos itself. The theory holds that complex systems can emerge from chaos without the event of an outside causality. The growth of complexity itself creates new causalities. That is new levels of causality form within complexity which lead to new levels of organization that were not inherent in the individual particles of the system.
Up quarks and down quarks have the inherent ability to create neutrons and protons. But is the complexity of neutrons and protons not that of the quarks that create simple atoms like hydrogen and helium. Simple atoms themselves to not have the inherent ability to create more complex atoms. That causality comes from the effects of temperature and pressure in stars. So each level of complexity has the possibility of creating a new level of causality for the next level of self organization.
For reactions to be Nonlinear means even with an absolutely full set of data on the system at any given point, it is not possible to say with absolution precision what the next behavior of the system will be, because the next level might create a new level of complexity. The next behavior can be chaotic as a new form of system because the increased complexity of chaotic systems creates nonlinear causalities within themselves that are not predicable until the causalities appear.
But the new system itself will fall within a set of behavioral dynamics which when understood will identify the system.]]> http://www.writerq.com/mobile/library/720/understanding-the-roots-of-human-behavior-notes-on-the-causality-of-social-/ Thu, 02 Oct 2014 16:20:01 +0000 Don A. Campbell http://www.writerq.com/mobile/Decon_WBB/ http://www.writerq.com/mobile/Decon_WBB/ Sun, 28 Sep 2014 13:18:38 +0000 Don A. Campbell