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Reductionism

Dr. George L. Engel Reading Reductionism:

“Animal conduct is known to many through the romantic tales of populizers, through the descriptive work of biological observers, or through the attempts of vitalists to show the inadequacy of physical laws for the explanation of life.  Since none of these contributions are based upon quantitative experiments, they have led only to speculations, which are generally of an anthropomorphic or a purely verbalistic character.  It is the aim of this monograph to show that the subject of animal conduct can be treated by the quantitative method of the physicist, and that these methods lead to the forced movement, or tropism, theory… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel Reading Reductionism:

Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

“The unitary concept of causality is radically different from less developed concepts of causality, and this is due to differences between the unitary and preunitary structures of two other concepts, space and time. In unitary thought, time and space are thought of as part of a four-dimensional space-time continuum rather than as existing independently as one temporal dimension and three spatial dimensions as in general system and previous stages.  The division of experience into spatial and temporal dimensions is thought of as an action taken by the knower (like the division of a map into east-west and north-south dimensions) rather… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

FORMAL OPERATIONS: THE CONCEPT OF CAUSALITY: “The general system concept of causality is cyclical…. The cyclical view is less concrete and more abstract than the linear formal operational concept. Formal operational reasoning locates the cause of the difficulties in concrete events; general system reasoning locates the problem not in any single event but rater in a pattern of interaction in which [the involved elements] affect each other….The change to cyclical causal patterns [implies reversibility].” Koplowitz, H.: “A Projection Beyond Piaget’s Formal-Operations Stage: A General Systems Stage and a Unitary Statge,” in Commons, M, Richards, F, and Armon, C. [EDS], BEYOND… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

FORMAL OPERATIONS: THE CONCEPT OF CAUSALITY “The formal operational concept of causality is a linear one.  An event is conceived of as being the result of a previous event…. The previous event itself may be thought of as resulting from the previous event or a string of events…. The linearity of the formal operational concept of causality is revealed in questions commonly asked about events.  ‘Who started it?’  ‘Whose fault is it?’  ‘How did it begin?’  These questions imply a causal chain that has a beginning…while in linear progressive chains of causality it is meaningful to speak about the beginning… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

“The causal principle seems to apply to psychological no less than physical sequences, for the cause-effect relation (going by the mere definition of the concepts seems prima facie only to describe a time sequence and not by itself to involve space…. …The scientific concept of causality is inseparably bound up with spatiality:  in space, entities are isolable; by reference to its coordinates they can be measured and positionally identified; by means of this reference, velocity and acceleration can be determined, and in this way ‘effect’ can be quantitatively correlated with ’cause.”…[but] when the causal scheme is transfered to the ‘inner… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

“The principle of ‘quantitative equivalents’ between cause and effect [required by the causal principle underlying scientific determinism] … in turn requires assignability of quantity to defined items, which in turn requires measurability-and this requires a whole set of further conditions: that the items are severally identifiable, with a separate identity to each through time; which requires that they are isolable and each distinguishable from its contemporaries; which requires that they are external to each other – and this they can only be if distributed in an extended continuum with simultaneous dimensions that provide for discrete location as well for magnitude… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

“This fallacy [of the single cause] is the commonest error of science, making unsound a considerable proportion of its conclusions.  Everywhere there is a search for ‘the cause’ of this or that phenomenon:  the investigator is not content until he has found ‘it.’  Yet natural phenomenon – and most emphatically is this true of biological phenomenon – merely arrives out of a complex situation in which they occur.  Many elements of that situation affect them: and all that experimental science can do is determine what difference is made by altering one or more of these elements:  None is ‘the’ cause… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel’s Causality Quotes:

Dr. George L. Engel Reading Reductionism:

“After about 1630…most physical scientists assumed that the universe was composed of microscopic corpuscles and that all natural phenomena could be explained in terms of corpuscular shape, size, motion, and interaction.  That nest of commitments proved to be both metaphysical and methodological.  As metaphysical, it told scientists what sort of entities the universe did and did not contain:  There was only shaped matter in motion; as methodological, it told them what ultimate laws and fundamental explanations must be like: Laws must specify corpuscular motion in interaction, and explanation must reduce any given natural phenomenon to corpuscular action under these laws.… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel Reading Reductionism:

Dr. George L. Engel Reading Reductionism:

“The behavior of the whole (or system) can best be investigated by analyzing the whole into its basic elements and studying the property of these parts in isolation from the whole.” Kitchener, R. F. Holism and its Organismic Model in Developmental Psychology. Human Development 25: 233-249, 1982. Pp. 235.

Dr. George L. Engel Reading Reductionism:

[The analytic method] “involves 3 steps:  first the analysis of the whole into its basic irreducible ‘atomic’ parts (e.g., planets or molecules); secondly, the determination of the basic properties of these atoms (e.g., mass, velocity, distance) and how they interact with each other; thirdly, the ‘synthesis’ of the original phenomena by means of so-called composition laws. Crucial for the completion of the third step was the existence of a composition law, a principle which indicates how the component parts interact so as to produce the whole.” Kitchener, R. F. Holism and the Organismic Model in Developmental Psychology. Human Development 25:… Read More »Dr. George L. Engel Reading Reductionism: