[8.1.1]

Ethnosemantics and Social Psychology. The etymological composition of psychology shows that in its original conception by the Greeks, and as recaptured in the spirit of the Renaissance in Europe, it refers to the systematic study of the psyche or mind. This is no doubt the reason that psychological writings in the Classicist Western traditions of knowledge have been authored chiefly by men who were philosophers and men of letters by profession: Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Goethe, Emmerson, Coleridge, William James, John Dewey, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard. In contrast to these investigators of the human mind stands a list of the founders of the investigation of human behavior: Wandt, Helmholz, Pavlov, Thorndike, Freud, Watson, Skinner, Hebb, Harlow, Milgram. Since common sense requires that we acknowledge both sides of the issue, and propriety obligates the scientist to respect community common sense, we submit that therefore there is a need for two psychologies.

The first psychology started the second psychology going: it is the study of the mind that created the study of behavior. For various historical reasons (which we won't attempt to specify here), the psychology today view in the profession and outside is that the first psychology was replaced by the second, this representing the onward progression of modern ideas, especially scientific. Thus, in the current conception, of the mind, which is being presented by professionals to the schools and to the literate public, the psychologist may represent the study of the mind as unreal, subjective, vague, hypothetical, anachronistic, non-scientific, etc., and to represent the study of behavior in contrastive terms using words like scientific, objective, real, precise, proven, modern, etc.

This onesidedness is surely not in the best interests of the community given the ubiquitous role psychologists now occupy in schools, business, community planning, therapy, education, mental health, socialization practices, verbal habits, etc. Common sense dictates that a psychology that represents itself as behavioral only cannot be 'given away to the people,’ I cannot, in other words, be meaningful to the majority of the people. The fact is that the parameters of the mind have their own existence in the socio-cultural environment: the behavioral methodology has no access to data in experience because "experience" is redefined there as "behavior." Having been redefined, the phenomena of experience are now beyond the critical knowledge of scientific study. These psychologists thus needlessly deny themselves a critical area of investigation, and as well, the community does not benefit from its full resources and potential.

It is necessary therefore to show what the phenomena of experience are and how they are being excluded by the behavioral redefinition. Let us explore the following areas of possible concern and investigation:

1. Choosing, making choices as in: postponing an action, selecting a phonograph record, withholding a fact, accepting, rejecting;

2. Feeling familiar as in: waking up in the morning, examining one's memories, recognizing changes in the environment, performing routine tasks;

3. Sudden memory or the "flow of consciousness" as in: not being aware of all that affects our reactivity, not remembering the details in most sequences of action, thought, involvement, noticings.

The experimental literature one can find on choice behavior is so extensive and diverse that no unified nor common sensical explanations have been proposed or are known in the mainstream of thought in American Cognitive Psychology, which is the largest field topically since it includes most of Social Psychology and the lion's share of Human Experimental. Choice Behavior is listed in the APA Index Terms (1974) along with Decision Making and Cognitive Processes. Decision Making is listed along with Management Training and Planning. Cognitive Processes is listed along with Human Information Processes, Cognitive Development, Reasoning, and Thinking. Choice behavior is thus a major issue in psychology today and is being vigorously pursued by the experimental methodology. As mentioned however, this demonstration of plenitude and excellence has neither given the community a viable engineering of choice behavior nor satisfied the man of judgment and respect in the community who is a man of letters, a student of the mind. Indeed, our poets, philosophers, artists, religious leaders, great men of history, and our wise old grandparents have constantly waged a protective battle of counter -propaganda to the second psychology. They continually reaffirm the wisdom of legend, the reality of myth, the synchrony of a universe already complete and perfect. The study of choice behavior from the exclusively behavioral methodology --the second psychology- -accounts for only half of the variance. The other half of the variance is needed to restore psychology to the relevance and support of the major community forces of intellect and understanding listed above.

Choice behavior may be studied through the methodology of the first psychology, as developed over a long and well established line of descent. This methodology was already complete when the practice of publishing text evolved in society, probably around the Chou Dynasty in China, ca. 1111 B. C. The oldest unit of publication known is the popular and widely read modern translations of the I CHING or BOOK OF CHANGES. According to modern scholars, the I CHING was already complete in structure and format by the time Confucius edited and rewrote much of the text, ca. 555 B. C. The I CHING is a unified theory of social settings and employs an empirical methodology known as the hexagrammatic morphology. A hexagram is a formal paradigm invariably consisting of two trigrams: the upper trigram and the lower trigram correspond to the separate phases of evolution of choice behavior. Starting with a duality of atomic elements called "firm and broken lines, It and a complementary pair of trigrams (upper and lower), the total number of permutations yield 64 distinct hexagrams. Each hexagram bears a title that is descriptive of the content of the hexagram., e.g., Youthful Folly, Peace, Standstill, Enthusiasm, The Corners of the Mouth or Providing Nourishment, Influence, Inner Truth, The Family, etc. Each hexagram thus covers a zone of social life as seen from the point of view of the individual's daily round of existence in community.

The formal structure of the I CHING is mathematically exact as it is for all methodologies of the first psychology. As mentioned earlier, the first psychologists were philosophers and Philosophy was the highest level attained by human reason. The philosophers of Greece and before the Christian Era and the philosophers of the architects of Modern Science were mathematicians or natural scientists. Webster's New World Dictionary gives for "natural philosophy" the entry "earlier name for natural science, specif., physics)." In fact, it was not until well into the development of the second psychology that statistical methodology became available for the study of behavior, ca. 1900. Even so, statistical techniques were not used on a routine basis in journal articles until after the Second World War. Thus, before the advent of statistics, and before the advent of the exclusive behavioral methodology, there were developed and well established formal techniques of analyses and syntheses. Anyone who reads Aristotle (despite the translation issue) cannot but be struck by the fact that a carefully edited version of it could pass for a college text of the 1970s. In it, the student will find the major categories of logic, classification, taxonomy, hierarchy, symbolic notation system, as well as the major attitudes or principles of natural science data on the behavior of the individual organism and the nature of social structures.

Virtually every great western scientist in the History of Science has been a mathematician and has concerned himself with the nature of mind. Rather than behavior occupying their exclusive focus, the phenomena of mind always occupied a primary focus. The methodologies they evolved were paradigms whose formal purity were fit to match and represent the purity and perfection of the human mind. Therefore the scientific study of the mind, i.e.,, the first psychology, sees statistics as a less powerful and less suitable methodology. Instead all the methodologies of the first psychology are exact, formal,. categorical, unified, stipulative, definitively correct or incorrect, explicit with no excess meaning; in contrast, the methodologies of the second psychology are statistical, experimental, hypothetical, rarely definitively correct or incorrect, deductive rather than stipulative, fragmentary, fluid and scalar rather than categorical, theoretically over-productive and rich in excess meaning.

The two psychologies may complement each other in a cooperative drive towards unifying psychology and returning it to, community relevance and acceptability. By way of illustration, let us present side by side, two studies on choice behavior; one comes from the current tradition of the second psychology and is exclusively behavioral; the other represents the methodology of the first psychology, is exclusively formal, and comes from our work in Ethnosemantics.

The relationship between personal mind and the socio-cultural environment cannot be investigated adequately in an exclusively behavioral methodology without redefining, and therefore altering, experiential data in terms of behavioral data. Each person has access to his or her personal mind data through awareness and through consciousness (the difference between these two will be discussed below). This accessibility is direct, unfragmented and apperceived instantaneously by the person. The activity or methodology of introspectionism on the other hand, is not direct and instantaneous; it is analyzable into components which are then reconstructed as a hypothesis about their actual connections. Therefore, introspectionism as a behavioral methodology is unreliable and of unknown validity.

The appropriate methodology for the functional analysis of the mind parameters is neither behavioral objectivity nor systematic introspectionism. A behavioral methodology investigating verbal reports people give, would isolate reports given as descriptions of events for which the investigator possesses specific information; the reports may then be matched as against the independently available information and a judgment of validity or accuracy can be rendered or scored. As well, scores may be contrasted across selected situations. The following diagram represents an illustrative paradigm for a behavioral methodology of verbal reports. Note that the A-B contrast is the paradigm used when wishing to compare the relative accuracy of reporting between two people or two groups. In the example given, John and Mary are asked to make reports about a meeting they attended: validity of single assertions as

well as number of assertions made, may both count towards accuracy. In the A-C contrast, John's reporting is investigated as a function of situation: here, situation A requires him to describe what he has noticed in an event, while situation C requires him to report, not what he has noticed, but whether he has performed a particular act. Since these represent two different contingency matrices, accuracy of reporting may be studied as a function of separately identifiable parameters (e. g., easily verifiable or not, important or unimportant issue, etc.).

Note that both introspectionism and behaviorism use methodologies that require control data. In the case of introspectionism, data are obtained only in routinized situations where practice and a restricted focus of observation insure reliability; unfortunately, independent (outside) control data on inner events are obtainable in only few situations, as in monitoring physiological activity. In the case of behaviorism, data are obtained only under control conditions, i.e., where independent sources of information are available, independently of the participant subjects or initiators of the dependent parameter values.

The requirement of control data is an inherent, albeit voluntary, act of separation from the study of mind parameters. Its advantage as a research strategy is maximal with behavioral parameters, since only these are replicable by independently working investigators. The requirement for replicability is essential to scientific explanations, though it is not required for interpretations. Thus, investigative methodologies used in chemistry, histology, genetics, mechanical engineering, and others, do not make use of "control data,, but rather rely on methods of observation under known conditions; hence, experimental evidence in these cases depend on the demonstrated functional relationship between the observed interactions (dependent values) and the situational or environmental factors whose values for the experimental condition are known or calculable. For example, the interaction between compound structures X, Y, and Z are recorded (dependent measures) as a function of environmental factors such as temperature, pressure, purity, presence of catalysts, etc., all of which have either known or calculable values for the given experiment.

In social situations, the environmental parameters are not calculable in the same way as are physical parameters in chemical interactions. This has been the chief rationale for adopting the behavioral methodology of control data as comparison to the experimental data: the independent parameters whose values are not calculable can at least be neutralized or deemed random rather than systematic; hence the oft repeated or implied caveat in psychological research, namely "all other things beingequal" and the more cynical reply, namely "but they seldom are."For one, the methodology thus used is weakened by, such an attitude which insists on a rigorousness at one point of the procedure which Is neutralized by lack of rigorousness at another place. For instance, it has become somewhat of a professional joke that scientific psychology today is applicable to the behavior of college students only, and that is further qualified by the real consideration that these data hold only within the restricted environment of laboratory experiments and pre-printed forms. As a result, what rigorousness has been achieved in the measurement and treatment of restricted behavioral measures is vitiated by the lack of rigorousness involved in the interpretation of the data and their extrapolation to more natural social situations.

There is clearly a need for a methodology that retains rigorousness both in the measurement of dependent parameters as well as in the identification of independent parameters in natural social settings. Only when both these efforts are reasonably successful can we prosecute a rigorous science of social settings as functional determiners of individual behavior. Ethnosemantics is a branch of psychology that concerns itself with the development of methods for the rigorous an analysis of social settings as functional frames for observed behavior. This methodology will be briefly presented here. It should be' said that we are presenting the initial phases of our work in ethnosemantics and we invite our colleagues and students to join in the task. Though incomplete in many respects, our proposal does claim to have solved the major methodological problems that has, kept behaviorism thus far from successful naturalistic studies of the community. But on this, the reader is to be the final judge.

The history of Psychology is marked by the same duality that highlights the History of Ideas In East and West; that is the double focus mind/matter. In the history of modern psychology, i.e., the psychology that was created during the past centenary, two definitions of the field co-exist side by side, but not necessarily acknowledging each other. Psychology, The Study of Behavior and Psychology, The Study of the Mind (e.g. Hebb 1966) are two familiar epithets for titles of textbooks and for definitions of the field.

While the scientific study of behavior has flourished and mushroomed into many active sub-fields and applications, the scientific study of the mind has advanced in only one modality, namely the neurophysiological. Though this approach has proven fruitful in some areas, as in psychopharmacology, clinical neurology, genetics, it has obviously failed to penetrate the same order of generality that has been achieved with the study of behavior. This is now understandable in retrospect, since defining the mind in terms of the physiology of neuronal action has evolved from a methodology that gathers data on abnormal or special behavior and then extrapolates to normal behavior. No other possibility exists since direct experimentation on the physiology of the brain is objectionable. Hence, the scientific study of the mind is restricted to theoretical extrapolations; its empiricism has not come of age.

On the other hand, the behavioral study of the mind, which is being actively pursued in several sub-fields of the scientific study of behavior, as in psychophysics, mental measurement, ESP, transpersonal psychology, cognitive psychology, hypnosis, altered states of consciousness, are all committed to mind-as-matter rather than to mind-as-mind. Only the latter represents a genuine scientific study of the mind; the former is a behavioral reinterpretation. This is not to say that a behavioral interpretation is inappropriate for its purposes, for obviously if mind is anything, it has connection and relevance to behavior. Nevertheless, the behavioral re-interpretation of the mind cannot substitute for the scientific study of the mind.

That mind is to be acknowledged as an independent component of any sociocultural environment is a proposition that has not fared well in the recent history of psychology. Instead, the counter-proposition has been traditionalized in modern textbooks which says that mind is either an epi-phenomenon (i. e., beyond science) or a subjective phenomenon (i. e., beyond general relevance). For instance, a common view holds that super-conscious may be real but since it cannot be measured or investigated, It is beyond scientific study or organized knowledge. Similarly, subjective experience is reinterpreted behaviorally in terms of verbal reports or psycho-motor reactions, as when behaviorists investigate such phenomena as consciousness, interpretation, imagination, awareness, morality, commitment, dedication, conflictual ideas, etc. The data generated by these investigations may serve their purposes whenever the connection between mind and behavior is at stake; but they are not substitutable for data needed on the structure and function of mind, independently of behavior.

Because the counter-proposition is currently so dominant in psychology and the study of the mind so restricted in generality or scope, it is necessary for those like us who see the scientific study of the mind as a pragmatic, and independently viable field, to show that mind does indeed have an independent existence in community life. In our judgment, the most fruitful procedure would, be for us, to demonstrate that an empirical methodology exists which generates facts about the mind; that these facts cannot be obtained through the behavioral approach; and that these facts are functionally related to the socio-cultural environment.

In the behavioral modality, we recognize that long-term memory is selective in content and in accessibility. As well, short-term memory is affected by attention span, intelligence, and mood. But we also recognize a feature of memory that is not behaviorally obtainable: let us call it sudden memory to mark its non-temporal feature, hence unobtainable through a methodology that pre-supposes temporal operations. Sudden memory is a parameter of the mind, and like all mind parameters, are accessible only to record keeping procedures that are independent of their temporal parameters; the latter are also there, but since they are temporal they are obtainable only in behavior parameters (see CHART T/20 in Chapter 10).

Non-temporal mind parameters independent of behavioral data?

We dare say yes --and like many such obvious solutions in the past, we can wonder, along with our students, why or how it dawns but reluctantly. One might speculate that perhaps that is the case because it requires an inductive, synthetic reconstruction and our civilized habits constrain us to analytic, deductive operations. Be that as it may, the impartial reader or student may investigate the reasonableness and value of a synthetic methodology that has remained inaccessible to a deductive behavioral methodology of temporal operations. Such is the study we have set for ourselves, and we begin at once by specifying the methodology we propose for the scientific study of the mind-as-mind.