Philosophy of Psychology Books - Page 10

Being and Becoming: A Field Approach to Psychology

Arthur W. Combs

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Editorial Review:

Dr. Combs updates his groundbreaking Field Theory of personality. This model grows out of Carl Rogers' ideas on client-centered therapy and has long been a major influence on theories of psychotherapy and personality that are in the humanistic and phenomenological traditions. Here Dr. Combs ties field psychology to the paradigm shifts in biophysical sciences, and so provides a unifying frame of reference for all branches of psychology. His concise approach to the topic makes this book of practical interest to students, clinical psychologists and counselors, as well as academics teaching upper-level or graduate causes in personality and on therapeutic techniques.

Mind, Meaning, and Mental Disorder: the Nature of Causal Explanation in Psychology and Psychiatry

Derek Bolton, Jonathan Hill

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Philosophical ideas about the mind, brain, and behavior can seem theoretical and unimportant when placed alongside the urgent questions of mental distress and disorder. However, there is a need to give direction to attempts to answer these questions. On the one hand, a substantial research effort is going into the investigation of brain processes and the development of drug treatments for psychiatric disorders, and on the other, a wide range of psychotherapies is becoming available to adults and children with mental health problems. These two strands reflect traditional distinctions between mind and body, and causal as opposed to meaningful explanations of behavior. In this book, which has been written for psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, and others in related fields, the authors propose a radical re-interpretation of these traditional distinctions. Throughout the discussions philosophical theories are brought to bear on the particular questions of the explanation of behaviors, the nature of mental causation, and eventually the origins of major disorders including depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, and personality disorder.

Philosophy of Psychology (Critical Assessments of Contemporary Psychology)

Daniel N. Robinson

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Dynamical Cognitive Science (Bradford Books)

Lawrence M. Ward

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Dynamical Cognitive Science makes available to the cognitive science community the analytical tools and techniques of dynamical systems science, adding the variables of change and time to the study of human cognition. The unifying theme is that human behavior is an "unfolding in time" whose study should be augmented by the application of time-sensitive tools from disciplines such as physics, mathematics, and economics, where change over time is of central importance.

The book provides a fast-paced, comprehensive introduction to the application of dynamical systems science to the cognitive sciences. Topics include linear and nonlinear time series analysis, chaos theory, complexity theory, relaxation oscillators, and metatheoretical issues of modeling and theory building. Tools and techniques are discussed in the context of their application to basic cognitive science problems, including perception, memory, psychophysics, judgment and decision making, and consciousness. The final chapter summarizes the contemporary study of consciousness and suggests how dynamical approaches to cognitive science can help to advance our understanding of this central concept.

Explanation and Cognition (Bradford Books)

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Explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. As Frank Keil and Robert Wilson write, "When a cognitive activity is so ubiquitous that it is expressed both in a preschooler's idle questions and in work that is the culmination of decades of scholarly effort, one has to ask whether we really have one and the same phenomenon or merely different cognitively based phenomena that are loosely, or even metaphorically, related." This book is unusual in its interdisciplinary approach to that ubiquitous activity. The essays address five basic questions about explanation: How do explanatory capacities develop? Are there kinds of explanation? Do explanations correspond to domains of knowledge? Why do we seek explanations, and what do they accomplish? How central are causes to explanation? The essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual change in adults, and reasoning in human and artificial systems. They also introduce emerging perspectives on explanation from computer science, linguistics, and anthropology. Contributors: Woo-kyoung Ahn, William F. Brewer, Patricia W. Cheng, Clark A. Chinn, Andy Clark, Robert Cummins, Clark Glymour, Alison Gopnik, Christine Johnson, Charles W. Kalish, Frank C. Keil, Robert N. McCauley, Gregory L. Murphy, Ala Samarapungavan, Herbert A. Simon, Paul Thagard, Robert A. Wilson.

Social Constructionist Psychology: A Critical Analysis of Theory and Practice

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Making Social Constructionism a "Thing" 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book is actually a five-star read for persons inquiring into social constructionist psychology. One of Rom Harre's contributions addresses and dispells the myth that social constructionism MUST deny (or perpetually challenge the concept) a physical reality. In doing so, his contribution to this text makes it a must-read for folks in and out of the social constructionism circle. Four stars were given only because social constructionism begs to elude definition and insists upon constant reflection and change. Thankfully, this book breaks that mold, even for a moment.

Editorial Review:

(Open University Press) Bolton Institute, UK. Addresses emerging issues, ideas, and discussions in constructionist psychology. Shows how ideas about the social construction of reality are relevant to everyday life. Uses examples to illustrate arguments. For sociology and psychology students and practitioners. Hardcover, softcover also available.

A Slim Book about Narrow Content (Contemporary Philosophical Monographs)

Gabriel M. A. Segal

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A good understanding of the nature of a property requires knowing whether that property is relational or intrinsic. Gabriel Segal's concern is whether certain psychological properties—specifically, those that make up what might be called the "cognitive content" of psychological states—are relational or intrinsic. He claims that content supervenes on microstructure, that is, if two beings are identical with respect to their microstructural properties, then they must be identical with respect to their cognitive contents.

Segal's thesis, a version of internalism, is that being in a state with a specific cognitive content does not essentially involve standing in any real relation to anything external. He uses the fact that content locally supervenes on microstructure to argue for the intrinsicness of content. Cognitive content is fully determined by intrinsic, microstructural properties: duplicate a subject in respect to those properties and you duplicate their cognitive contents.

The book, written in a clear, engaging style, contains four chapters. The first two argue against the two leading externalist theories. Chapter 3 rejects popular theories that endorse two kinds of content: "narrow" content, which is locally supervenient, and "broad" content, which is not. Chapter 4 defends a radical alternative version of internalism, arguing that narrow content is a variety of ordinary representation, that is, that narrow content is all there is to content. In defending internalism, Segal does not claim to defend a general philosophical theory of content. At this stage, he suggests, it should suffice to cast reasonable doubt on externalism, to motivate internalism, and to provide reasons to believe that good psychology is, or could be, internalist.

The Human Quest for Meaning: A Handbook of Psychological Research and Clinical Applications (Personality and Clinical Psychology)

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For studies of personal meaning - this is it! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This collection of academic but very readable papers covers three general areas:
1) Theoretical approaches to personal meaning.
2) Research in personal meaning.
3) The Role of personal meaning in counseling and psychotherapy.

Under each of these headings are a half dozen chapters by various researchers in the field. The reader is exposed to a variety of concepts and views across a wide spectrum of the topic.

I only read the first two sections because they are relevant to my project. I have a pile of little Post-It Notes bookmarking the sections that I consider important and I need to go back through them to develop a concept for my project - meaning design for residential interiors and products. However, I think that anyone interested in meaning in human lives, including religion students, would find much of interest here.

- jim

Editorial Review:

The time is ripe to present a comprehensive and state-of-the-art handbook on the converging developments of research and applications employing personal meaning research and logotherapy. It may be considered a sequel to Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", because it covers all the significant developments related to the theme of meaning.

Psychology and the Soul: A Study of the Origin, Conceptual Evolution, and Nature of the Soul

Otto Rank

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An important neglected study of religion and psychology 5 out of 5 stars.
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Published in German in 1930, this book was poorly translated in 1950 but influenced writers like Ernest Becker and Ira Progoff. This is the first complete translation of a work which places soul and will in historical context from the standpoint of Freud's once-closest colleague. Introduction by E. J. Lieberman, author of _Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank_.

Editorial Review:

In his last years, Otto Rank turned his lifetime of thought and learning toward two of the most difficult topics in human history: religion and the soul. The result was this now-classic work, available in this new, very accessible English translation. Unlike many other intellectuals of the twentieth century, Rank maintains a place for the soul rather than dismissing it as a fantasy. The soul and the beliefs about it, he argues, set forth the foundation for psychology, with its complex analyses of consciousness, self-consciousness, and personality. Rank's commentary is not limited to beliefs about individual souls but includes ideas about group souls, sometimes encompassing nations or generations. Rank suggests that it is in expression of group beliefs that the idea of the soul attains its greatest power.

Transformation in Clinical and Developmental Psychology

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what's beyond mechanicism? 4 out of 5 stars.
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The term "transformation" in the book's title has a twofold meaning, as the introduction states. Firstly, it naturally implies the book's main concern within the fields of developmental and clinical psychology - how to conceptualize change and development - and secondly, it's about the transformation of these fields themselves as they currently exist. In addition to these two levels of abstraction present in the articles, as the names "The implications of relativity/quantum revolution for psychology" and "Independent dependence in child-adult relationships" for example suggest, there are two basic approaches pursued in them: organicism/dialecticism on the one hand, and contextualism on the other.
While both rejecting the traditional mechanical reductionism obviously unsuited for treatment of phenomena at hand, the way each tries to remedy its shortcomings turns out to be rather different: organicism/dialecticism (or the Systems Theory approach, also) working with the metaphor of accumulative growth with a certain "direction", and contextualism (with William James as the intellectual father of, as another article has its topic) remaining essentially neutral about any "progress" inherent in the processes of change and careful not to ascribe them too much lawfulness. For me, this methodological distinction was one of the most interesting points this work had to offer.

So while appriciating this plurality of approaches in terms of abstraction and methodology, I must say I'd have expected a little more: the trees are there, and the forest too - but for most of the time the dialectics between them falls a little short. Perhaps the sense of discontinuity was due to my expectation of some clinical-developmental model that would immediately strike as relevant beyond any of the applied forms here, and yet concrete enough as not to be purely declarative of some methodology... that this is not an impossible expectation to meet is best demonstrated by the contribution of Micheal Basseches: "Toward a constructive-developmental understanding of the dialectics of individuality and irrationality". His constructive-developmental approach represents what for me seems to be the most promising merger of clinical and developmental psychology out there, a kind that I actually was looking for or had in mind when I bought this book. However, for a full account of this exceptionally holistic approach see Robert Kegan's brilliant "The Evolving Self: problem and process in human development."

Editorial Review:

One goal of this volume is to critically examine existing metatheory in psychology. Its second goal is to portray how particular psychological endeavors can be enhanced by the application of metatheories, alternatives to the traditional mechanistic outlook. The alternative conceptual frameworks explored in this volume, namely, contextualism and dialectics, assume a fluid and metaphorical view of change, growth, development, and transformation. The areas of clinical and developmental psychology are fields wich are primarily concerned with explaining and promoting change. This volume offers a fresh conceptual perspective on psychological change.