Bibliography and Fidelity to the Subject Matter

• bibliography on Affect theory by rando, 12/9/97
  
  

For a bibliography of the research and literature in support of and consonant with Affect Theory, check out Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume IV, Cognition: Duplication and Transformation of Information, by Silvan S. Tomkins (NY: Springer Publishing Co., 1992), pp. 373-405.

If you are concerned about possible limitations on the empirical warrent for Affect Theory, some remarks made by Tomkins himself are relevant. In considering empirical tests of his theory, Tomkins had some brilliant insights appropriate for someone with his extensive philosophical training. For example, Tomkins noted two important biases underlying certain commonplace methods of verification thusly, "I would suggest that such [incomplete and inadequate empirical] tests are a consequence of two biases. First is the perennial tension between the logic of verification and the logic of discovery. There is an ideologcial and tempermental difference between those who are excited by the possibilities of discovery and those who are excited by the possibilites of verification or disconfirmation. Just as the policeman dreads losing a criminal and a judge dreads punishing the innocent, so sceintists may lean toward discovery even at the price of ambiguity and error or toward certainty in verification even at the price of loss of information. If it becomes critically imortant to verify a theory, many experimenters are prepared to test more "testable" versions of a theory in the interest of combating error. These sceintists enjoin us to let many exciting possibilities go lest we contaminate the house of science with one lie.

"The second bias, which is often (but not always) conjoined with the first, is one toward simplicity rather than complexity, toward analysis rather than complexity, toward analysis rather than synthesis, toward sharp distinctions of independent, dependent, and interdependent variability. Even though the theory asserts that the biological evolution of this system [of affects] produced correlated programs of activation and response, one tries nonetheless to distill from this complex a simple distillate as the core of the phenomenon. In this view complexity is the low-grade ore that contains gold that must somehow be centrifuged and de-contaminated. I would suggest that many tests of my theory have thrown away more of the gold than they have reclaimed."

Then Tomkins aptly noted, "The complexity of this mechanism lends itself to fragmentation and the posing of either-or questions in an adversary mode." {I have been quoting from an article by Tomkins in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1981, 41, p. 316.)

Sigmund Koch, another genius philosopher/psychologist of this century, wrote a masterful piece criticizing the way psychological research has been conducted for more than a century, leaving us almost worse off than when psycholgy-as-science began. (I refer to a book chapter in A Century of Psychology as Science, edited by Koch and D. Leary. The chapter is titled The Nature and Limits of Psychological Knowledge: Lessons of a Century Qua "Science.") The basic problem, as Koch explains, is what he calls "ameaningful" thought, a mode of thought or inquiry, pandemic among psycholgical researchers, in which "thought or inquiry regards knowledge as a result of "processing" rather than discovering. It presumes that knowledge is an almost automatic result of a gimickry, an assempbly line, a 'methodology'. It assumes that inquiring action is so rigidly and fully regulated by rule that in its conception of inquiry it often allows the rules totally to displace their human users. Presuming as it does that knowledge is generated by processing, its conception of knowledge is fictionalistic, conventionalistic. So strongly does it see knowledge under such aspects that it SEEMS TO SUPPOSE THE OBJCET OF INQUIRY TO BE AN UNGAINLY AND ANNOYING IRRELEVANCE. [Emphasis mine.] If we allow our research methodology, our "processing," to limit what we can try to understand, we may never be able learn more than how to use these methods, and we also may never be able to invent any other methods to study things the original methods cannot accommodate.

In this regard, our dominant methodolgies and reductionistic reality-assumptions have been inadquate to the task of solving the "hard problem" (as opposed to the easy problem) of consciousness. Tomkins took it as a given, from direct observation, than patterns of stimulation create analogous patterns of general bodily responding (affects). In identifying this analogue of bodily reactions to stimulation patterns as the foundation of affect and, concomitantly, the source of consciousness, Tomkins also created something that actually tackled the "hard problem" of consciousness. The "hard problem" of consciousness, a phrase used by the philosopher David Chalmer's in his work titled The Conscious Mind, is the problem of being able to explain why ANY event (psychological, physiological, environmental) that is correlated with consciousness should ENTAIL consciousnes. The easy problem, then, is to note what sorts of events happen when consciousness occurs. The hard problem cannot be addressed by reducing consciousness (nor affect) to something other than what it is directly observed to be. Reductionism in the form of "hard empirical tests of the theory" typically cannot address the hard problem. This is a subtle, difficult, but immensely important idea to grasp if one wants to have a true science of consciousness. My explanation of Chalmer's thinking so far is much too brief in this short posting.

But my reason for saying all this is to welcome your interest in Tomkins's work and to invite you to take his theory to be the creation of a tremedously creative and original mind--the work of a genius whose ideas just may have gone far toward a science of consciousness and affect. Moreover, Tomkins has made great strides in helping to remedy the problem Signmund Koch complains of--the problem of a psychology less interested in what can be directly observed and thus often unrelated to what matters most to human beings. This is a problem born of psychology's reliance on methodologies that are unaccommodating to the subject matter of psychology. Tomkins developed what he called human being theory. He tried, that is, to remain faitful to the obejct of study, the subject matter, that is, that we are really interested in learning about in psychology. The result of contrived efforts to force specific methodologies where they do not fit is something Koch referred to as epistemopathology. Certainly Tomkins will not be found guilty of the charge of being so deferential to rigid methodologies that he lost sight of what he wanted to study.

• Erratum: Closing Koch's Quote by Jim Duffy, 12/10/97