buylotrogold

Ed, I've managed to loose the article and I don't feel like wading back through to find it...  too little time, to much bradness... But I'm aware of the power of 'black box' analysis. However in those situations where the BB concept is useful the inputs and outputs are 'well specified' and usually there is a 'theory' as to the equivalent contents of the BB is. In the case of electronics the contents are usually modeled as 'simple' electronic circuits, while in fact the actual contents may be quite different. To further the analogy, and to indicate why I never was successful in the test tech area, in order to fix a black box one of two things needed to be done, 1) replace it, 2) open it up. I usually did the latter, and spent many hours 'understanding' the contents to effect a fix. My test tech peers were content to just replace the box and get out the zillion widgets a day as was expected of a test tech. Fortunately in my 'understanding' I was able to move in the engineering lab, and then with studies and my degree move into software engineering. The point of this little biographical note is that without the theory, without furthering understanding of the detailed contents of 'the box', I would have been condemned to forever 'fix by replacement', or 'just accept the failure'. Also to look at the analogy from a different view, in some cases the system was the 'fault', ie the black box functioned exactly to input/output specificaiton, but the 'system' required something else, or in some cases gave inputs which damaged the black box... In other cases especially in the midwest where lighting strikes everywhere the system provided inadequate protection of the black box from 'non-system' inputs that it was not designed to accept... I don't know if you wish to extrapolate from this my thoughts on psychology as seen from an 'engineering' point of view, but I'll give you a clue that far more time should be spent on system, I/O and black box design specifications all with some idea of 'theory of operation'. In the case of the DSM, I see that document purely in light of an 'output specification' of defective operation.  I see the use of that specification to label and then effect change worse than almost doing nothing, as one has no idea what the 'input' was, nor whether the black box was designed for that input, and just because some number of black boxes seem to function 'correctly', is no indication that they are being properly used. And as a parting note, I think the epistomolgy of psychological 'knowledge' is very important, it has to do with 'was the black box designed to accept these inputs' at the very least, and also has to do with how the 'data', the raw precieved behavior in the case of psychology, is interpreted. In the case of Boyle and the physical world, he interpreted the absense of 'gases' to be the 'absence of everything'. Hobbes was claiming that Boyle was viewing the experiemnt from a 'system' and was either lieing or dupt when Boyle claimed to only report what he saw, which is the claim of science that the knowledge derived is soly from the data. I don't know if this analogy 'works' but dump an image file to the screen as a 'text' file and your screen will be filled with garbage. use a image viewing tool and the image is represented as a 'picture' which you easily recognize as such. The data has not 'changed'(an assumption of course) but your system of viewing the data has... one's garbage, the other thing of beauty perhaps...

To further the analogy, and to indicate why I never was successful in the test tech area, in order to fix a black box one of two things needed to be done, 1) replace it, 2) open it up. I usually did the latter, and spent many hours 'understanding' the contents to effect a fix. My test tech peers were content to just replace the box and get out the zillion widgets a day as was expected of a test tech. In computer electronics, repair people tend to argue whether a complex problem is a hardware problem or a software problem. Psychology has this same debate. Sometimes it is clearly one or the other and sometimes it is both. Many problems are not repairable, but you can find alternative ways of restoring functioning. That is part of what psychologists do

[....] And for Ed's sake so that his reading of Frankl is not in vain, which black box contains the 'free will' option. [...] Oh, don't drag me into this.  But for what it's worth, free will does not appear in this dimension, just as it does not appear in the dimension of biological analysis.  To use an analogy of the man you just mentioned, the human being is like a three-dimensional cylinder. On a vertical surface and a horizontal surface, it casts two different two-dimensional images.  These are the worlds of biological and (most) psychological analysis.  Free will exists in the three-dimensional space but disappears in the two-dimensional projections.  This is not to say anything negative about either biological or psychological analysis, especially not that they are inferior to the more inclusive dimension, but only that specifically human qualities such as free will do not, of necessity, show up here.   Ed

anything negative about either biological or psychological analysis, especially not that they are inferior to the more inclusive dimension, but only that specifically human qualities such as free will do not, of necessity, show up here.   Well, how do you know that say chimps don't have more free will, and monotonous amounts of it, (for Z.'s sake...) since as you've point out above, such a dimension is unobservable from behavior/biological/psychological dimensions.