There are so many things that might…

There are so many things that might be incorporated in to “fear of strangers”, or “attachment”, or “intelligence” and that to propose that it is somehow “multi-determined” misses the point. “Determined” is the wrong word.
The elements of behavioural repertoires are resources actively mustered by self-directing organisms.
An over-ambitious social physics, albeit statistically sophisticated, would give an oddly flat theory of social relationships precisely because unique, yet meaningful, patterns would be smoothed out under general statistical laws.
We may not be very interested in tracing the history of collisions a given atom has with other atoms, as one atom is very much like another.
But the knotted tensions between people and groups of people give us plenty to think about.
And though we often generalise, calling one person more or less intelligent or fearful, we know that our appreciation of these qualities is rooted in our knowledge of the context in which the intelligent action or fearful response was made, and also in the history of its development.
The treatment of social beings as colliding billiard balls must ignore important idiosyncrasies.
Individuals do not move through a smooth physical vacuum; they negotiate structured social contexts in company with other individuals. Can you measure a social relationship?
Of course, anything that can have a name put to it can be measured more or less usefully. But by the same token, it can be understood more or less differently.
The examples of splitting and lumping therefore, are not alternative ways of doing the same thing.
Although they use the same subject matter and the stories they tell about it may not match.
Measurements are “objective” inasmuch as scientists agree on the thumb to be used as the ruler.
Primatologist Emil Megel at the State University, New York, at Stoney Brook, concluded a conference on methods in the analysis of social interaction by asking workers to “develop and refine methods which explicitly recognise and exploit and rather than attempt to eliminate and the observer’s prescientific, intuitive and global forms of judgement…
The key issue is not how to reduce the observer’s role to zero (or even to an absolute minimum) but simply how to render it at least as explicit, as clear, and as quantitatively specifiable as any other aspect of the system under study and so that other observers will know how to look at the same phenomena from the same perspective and should they care to do so.” Can we save the Chesapeake Bay?
Christopher Joyce

Admin5 Nj brieföffner

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