I'd like to drop a small caution (and perhaps a large brick) into the
discussion of links between physics and social science. Historically,
social science tends to suffer from a wholly uncalled-for inferiority
complex as regards the so-called "hard" sciences: social scientists grab
whatever theory has reached the popular press, and claim it as
representing some issue in social science, in order to prove that social
science has not simply been blowing smoke. Common theories of the mind
tend to reflect current technology: Freud and hydraulics, the
behaviorists and early calculating machines, and early cognitive science
and the PC. But the use of analogies indicates a lack of genuine
understanding--we know that it is "similar to this," not what it is by
itself. Sometimes this leads to embarrassing missteps on the part of
social scientists (I recall one who built a psychological theory around a
fundamental misunderstanding of one piece of relativity theory and it got
published!) and physical scientists (e.g., Marvin Minsky discovered
Bowlby's work on attachment theory twenty years after the fact and thought
it was brilliant--which it was, twenty years previously--and lectured on
it, ignoring anything since).
In fact, I will argue that, contrary to popular belief, recent trends in
physical sciences have benefited from the social sciences. As physics
moves from the easily measurable to the uncertain, there has become a
greater reliance on tools like statistics, and modern statistical
methodology was primarily developed by and for social scientists, who
struggle with a far more uncertain set of data than any physicist. To put
it brutally, social sciences appear "softer" than physics because the data
are more complex and uncertain even on the most elemental level.
Tolerance of ambiguity is essential in social science, and shunned in
classical physics. Hence, my assertion that social scientists need not
suffer from feelings of inferiority--we have tens of thousands of
researchers struggling to obtain a set of data we can all agree on and
replicate, whereas Galileo could drop a couple of cannonballs off a tower,
and any sixth-grader could duplicate his results.
So I have two points here as regards this discussion: first, I am wary of
A=B reasoning; I think chaos theory has some implications for psycholgy
directly, in terms of looking at neuronal activity (which is physics,
after all), not necessarily at the level of expressed thought, and it is
not necessary to conclude that we must assume mathematical physics should
be the source for determining social science validity. Second, it is
worth restating the basic flaw in all social science study, including
learning, which is the philosophical and mathematical limitation that you
cannot fully understand yourself, since you cannot get outside yourself.
All we can study is the pieces that pass within view.
Steve Kelner, Ph.D
Director, Educational and Advising Services
Center for Quality of Management
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