APA Convention - Society for General Psychology

As I mentioned in a prior post, while I'm not a big fan of the main APA convention, I am a big fan of the APA Shadow Convention (© Charles 2012). This year I am in charge of the hospitality suite run by The Society for General Psychology (APA Division 1). We are co-hosting a number of events with The Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24) and The Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26). It is a pretty fun program, with some experiments thrown in (Post-symposium discussions, a Speed Scholars Event, etc.) as well as a lot of social activities. There is also the two-hour "Unifying Psychology" Lunch I mentioned in the last post, featuring several authors from this month's special issue. I'll do my best to get the program cut and pasted below. Hope to see some of you in Hawaii!

Unifying Psychology - RGP and APA

This month's issue of the Review of General Psychology is a special issue on Unifying Approaches to Psychology. I highly recommend it! The issue features 19 brief statements that move us towards a more unified field. Most importantly, the articles are not speculative pipe dreams; they are introductions to already existing and already productive interdisciplinary approaches also, later this week at the APA convention in Hawaii several of the authors, and anyone else who is interested, will be getting together in the Division 1 Hospitality Suite for a two-hour luncheon to discuss next-steps now that the issue is out (Friday August 2nd, from noon to 2). The ever-brilliant Daniel Hutto has generously offered to serve as host. The table of contents is:

Psychological Realism and Poker

During my post-doctoral years I played poker very seriously. For a while, my poker library grew much faster than my psychology library, and I became a profitable mid-level player. I have played very little since my post-doc ended, but I think the experience was valuable. For one thing, the mathematics of poker is fascinating, and I still nurture a hope of one day teaching a "Statistics of Poker" seminar. For another thing, I think poker provides an excellent context for thinking through theories of psychology. On the surface, poker seems like it is a game about cards, and on the surface it is. However, you don't need to get much below surface-level to see that poker is primarily a game about the behavior of the other players. The player on your right just put in a big bet: Does he have a big hand? Is he bluffing? What does he think you have, and how does he think you will respond? Given what he might have and what he thinks you might have, if you put in a huge re-reraise, how will he respond? The layers of analysis that can be applied to these situations is fun, but not really on topic for this post (though I talked a little about it here). Instead, I want to delve into a very typical poker situation from the point of view of a psychological realist vs. a dualist.

Note that this is a preliminary analysis that I hope to develop further, and I would love any feedback. 

What do we know for sure about the brain

If I was going to list everything we knew for sure about the brain, it would be a very, very long list. Instead of trying to do that, I am going to focus on things we know relevant to my last post, which was quite negative about the new "brain mapping" initiative, and which generated a lot of criticism
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201304/why-brain-mapping-is-stupid-idea). The title of the post then, should maybe be less “What do we know about the brain?” and more “What are some first principles we can use to understand how the brain operates?”

Why the Brain Mapping project is a Stupid Idea

It was just announced that President Obama wants to start spending one hundred million dollars to "map the brain", and that his oft-times rival Eric Cantor thinks it’s a great idea. But it is a terrible idea, because I can tell you, right now, about half of the big lessons they will learn. Plus, for about a million dollars, I could probably gather a group of experts together to tell you about half of what remains. I'm not sure what, exactly, would be left after that, but I'm sure it would be comparatively cheap to figure out. 

Eugene Taylor and E. B. Holt

Eugene Taylor recently passed away. For those who do not know, he was one of the world's leading experts on the works of William James, a champion of Humanistic Psychology, and a leader in integrating "Eastern" and "Western" psychology. He held positions at the Saybook Institute and Harvard Medical School. He had encyclopedic knowledge in his areas of expertise, but was also a bit of a jerk about it, insisting upon both his knowledge of the facts and his unique ability to interpret the facts correctly.  In Eugene's opinion, no more than six or seven people in history had every truly understood James's work, and the others were dead. He spoke of James's work for example, with the zeal of someone who had not only familiarized themselves with all records regarding James, but also double checked all the interpretations with James himself at an appropriate seance. Given Eugene's understanding of James's work, he might well have.

Could Affordances Structure Light?

This post should have a subtitle. It should read: Could Affordances Structure Light? Ken Aizawa gets a 10-month-delayed response

Last April I started blogging about my (now-submitted) attempt to update Cutting's paper distinguishing between Gibson's approach on ecological psychology and the emerging Connecticut approach. The first post generated many comments, and I promised to follow up on some of them soon. Well... in publishing time this is still "soon", even though in blogging time it is ages. In particular Ken Aizawa hit me with a few hard questions including the perennial stickler, "Can affordances structure light?"

I think it is important for ecological psychology that they do, and I think they do. However, my position (which I associate with Gibson's thinking) is less extreme that that promoted by the Connecticut approach (e.g., Turvey, Shaw, Mace, and the young Reed). I also think it is pretty darn simple to support: