The current agitation in the communication field did not simply erupt spontaneously, but instead occurs within a historical frame of revolutionary developments in the social sciences. '' It should come as no surprise that communication researchers are caught up in the contagion of unrest that has spread through the social sciences.Even a casual reader of Ferment in the Field cannot fail to note the recurrence of buzz words and catch phrases which, in one form or another, are germs of ideas that have begun to appear with increasing frequency in all fields. The purpose of this article is to suggest that this development marks not merely a temporary disturbance in the status quo, but instead reflects revolutionary changes subversive to established ideals in the naturalistic vision of the social sciences.We begin by putting this notion in perspective within the context of recent challenges directed against the "mechanistic tradition" that was embraced by social scientists for generations. The human system was idealized to be a push-and-pull machine that stressed action by contact
This article attempts to consolidate various contextualist ideas that have emerged out of the "crisis "that social psychology experienced over the past two decades. It proceeds on the philosophical premise that all sociopsychological knowledge is perennially conceptual and conjectural and no method can conclusively demonstrate the truth. Other assumptions and assertions of this experiential, interpretive orientation that recognizes the plurality, spontaneity, and ecological dependency of social behavior are exploited, with particular emphasis on their implications for a profoundly relativistic and pluralistic shift in sociopsychological thinking.
A multidimensional scaling analysis was performed to examine how adult subjects perceive causality and chance in relation to each other. 12 hypothetical situations, representing different classes or categories of causality and chance were scaled on the basis of pairwise comparisons. The results indicated that subjects' perception of causality and chance is two-dimensional with one dimension representing the more objective, conventional chance-cause distinction and the other the more subjective cause-reason distinction. Thus, it is argued that not only Buss's (1978, 1979) logical categories of cause and reason have found empirical validation, but important theoretical implications for attribution theory can be derived.
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