From Causality to Catalysis in the Social Sciences

Valsiner, Jaan

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-33099-6_8

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Moscovici, 1988) to investigate how the media coverage and ideological dilemmas of living environmentally childfree are not just reflections of people's attitudes and views, but also constitute social representations that contribute to constructing new meaning and thus might have an impact on individuals' own thoughts and decisions. Similarly, cultural psychology's emphasis on dynamic meaning-making through the use of sign systems at various levels, such as personal, societal or political (Valsiner, 2019), could be valuable in exploring how debates and conversations on the topic of living environmentally childfree might have an impact at the personal level.…”

Section: Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideological Dilemmas Actualised by the Idea of Living Environmentally Childfree

Nakkerud

2021

Hu Arenas

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Over the past decade, the choice of living childfree has increasingly been viewed as a pro-environmental behaviour. Recent research has investigated statistical relations between environmental concern and reproductive attitudes, as well as exploring the processes around actually deciding to live environmentally childfree. Based on increased public attention about the phenomenon, this article employs Michael Billig’s notion of ideological dilemmas to analyse the media coverage of choosing to live environmentally childfree, attempting to answer how these dilemmas influence whether living childfree is perceived as a relevant pro-environmental behaviour. Thirty-one news items were analysed using a synthesis of critical discursive psychology and thematic analysis. The analysis identified five ideological concepts: liberalism, sustainable development, globalism, biologism and humanism. Each of these concepts contains positions supporting and opposing the idea of living environmentally childfree in Norway. These ideological dilemmas seem to weaken the perceived relevance of living environmentally childfree, as the topic is easily dismissed or framed as irrelevant. I therefore conclude that the discourse of living environmentally childfree is analogous to how society generally relates to solutions to the environmental crises.

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Section: Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideological Dilemmas Actualised by the Idea of Living Environmentally Childfree

Nakkerud

2021

Hu Arenas

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“…Social sciences are centered on the sharing of experience about the social world in which perspectives of people differ from one another. Valsiner stated that social sciences are crucial in our understanding of the increasingly globalizing ways of living in the twenty-first century, which is characterized by the conflict of rapid technological advancements and the resistance of the traditional social orders to them (Valsiner, 2019).…”

Section: Gamma-knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

The epsilon-knowledge: an emerging complement of Machlup's types of disciplinary knowledge

Horváth

2022

AIEDAM

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Machlup used the words alpha, beta, and gamma to identify humanities, science, and social science as three distinct fields of academic learning and knowing, in addition to general knowledge. Gilles and Paquet identified a fourth type of disciplinary knowledge and labeled it as delta. This includes the knowledge of creative disciplines such as design, law, and economy. Since the time of these road-paving works, a lot has changed. In the last two decades, various concepts and manifestations of intellectualized engineered systems have appeared. A paradigmatic feature of these systems, exemplified by smart cyber-physical systems, is that they collect, infer, or extract massive amount of synthetic system knowledge (M-SSK) based on some pre-programmed human knowledge. The amount of this type of knowledge grows continuously. It can be aggregated on system level and on system of systems level. This paper argues that this aggregated M-SSK is not covered by the abovementioned four genres of knowledge. In fact, it represents a new genre. The conducted literature study underpins this claim. Therefore, the paper suggests dealing with it as a new genre, called epsilon-knowledge. Artificial intelligence, system engineering, cyber-physical systems, and knowledge engineering are the disciplines dealing with epsilon-knowledge. The paper refers to sympérasmology as the proper conceptual framework of studying this genre of knowledge.

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“…Applications of quantitative methods in psychology in themselves are increasingly questioned, such as regarding their underlying epistemologies and measurement theories (Barrett, 2018; Buntins et al., 2016; Michell, 1999; Tafreshi et al., 2016; Trendler, 2009, 2013; Uher, 2021c, 2022b; Westerman, 2014) or regarding the inadequacy of sample‐level statistics for individual‐level explorations (Lamiell, 2019; Molenaar & Campbell, 2009; Richters, 2021). Finally, psychology's neglected and insufficiently developed philosophical and theoretical foundations are identified as the root cause of its persistent crises (Danziger, 1985; Haig & Borsboom, 2008; Smedslund, 2016; Szollosi et al., 2020; Teo, 2018; Toomela, 2018; Uher, 2021b; Valsiner, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's wrong with rating scales? Psychology's replication and confidence crisis cannot be solved without transparency in data generation

Uher

2023

Social & Personality Psych

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Quantitative explorations of behaviour, psyche and society are common in psychology. This requires methods that justify the attribution of results to the measurands (the entities to be measured, e.g., in individuals) and that make the results' quantitative meaning publicly interpretable (e.g., for decision making). Do rating scales-psychology's primary methods to generate numerical data-meet these criteria? This article summarises selected epistemological and methodological problems of rating scales that arise, amongst others, from the intricacies of language-based methods and from psychologists' challenges to distinguish their study phenomena from their means of exploring these phenomena. Failure to make this logical distinction entails that disparate scientific activities are conflated, thereby distorting scientific concepts and procedures. Rating scales promote such conflations because they serve both as description of the empirical study system (e.g., behaviours) and as symbolic study system (e.g., data variables), leaving the interpretation of each system and the mapping relations between them to raters' intuitive decisions. Verbal scales, however, have broad semantic fields of meanings, which are context-sensitive and therefore interpreted differently, and which cannot logically match the quantitative meaning commonly ascribed to the numerical scores derived from them. The ease of using

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From Causality to Catalysis in the Social Sciences

Cited by 15 publications

References 20 publications

Ideological Dilemmas Actualised by the Idea of Living Environmentally Childfree

Ideological Dilemmas Actualised by the Idea of Living Environmentally Childfree

The epsilon-knowledge: an emerging complement of Machlup's types of disciplinary knowledge

What's wrong with rating scales? Psychology's replication and confidence crisis cannot be solved without transparency in data generation

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