The SV Project
It’s a dilemma. How can you conceive a psychology of the person, when the only subjective experience of a person you can know is your own? The psychology has to be from an ‘outside’ perspective. Yet, this perspective would be a viewing angle extending from a person. Imagine that person to be ‘you,’ viewing Rodin’s ‘The Thinker.’ The object you are viewing is a depiction of a person, who appears to be in thought. You, the person viewing that depicted object, view its ‘thinking’ as an object outside yourself. What is an outside perspective from which you view and seek to know about your own thought? The given locus of thought you are thinking about is your own thought. So, ‘outside’ perspective is intimately a matter of you as a viewer. Yet, you are outside your own thinking: You can draw lines of its perspective on what you are thinking about. These are lines from a viewing angle. They will extend to, indicate, and demarcate a relation of phenomena within the given locus—the domain of those thoughts you are thinking about. That relation (and its subset of relations) then identified is of phenomena within that locus, which can be designated from that viewing angle. This designation is a structural indication.
The set of viewable relations includes an involution such that phenomena of the viewing angle become part of the structure and structuring. My purpose in this book is to develop a structural approach to the psychology of the person. To relate to the dilemma of the person’s thought as an ‘outside’ perspective on his own thought as an internal experience, the structural approach will have to simulate what happens within the person. To do so convincingly, the view chosen impels a new kind of structural approach (SV) for the philosophy of psychology. This approach is inspired by Kenneth Colby’s computer generated simulation (Colby 1974, 1975, 1981; Colby et al. 1972; Faught 1978; Heiser et al. 1979). The simulation was of a paranoid psychological state of affairs, represented in forms of the person’s logic and syntax, as these would be evidenced in a communicative display.
In a more recent ‘attention schema theory’ (Webb and Graziano 2015) determinative nexuses of representational forms, their computer generated simulation, and psychological chain of causes and outcomes come together.
The core claim . . . is that the brain computes a simplified model of the process and current state of attention, and that the content of this model is the basis of subjective reports’ . . .
Still, this theory (Graziano 2017; Webb and Graziano 2015) does not solve the problem of the ‘outside agent.’ It does provide for selection of elements and conditions. The selection is via ‘structuring’ the perceiver/thinker’s perspective on an ‘object.’ The object is characterized in relation to action and outcome. This is structuring guided by schematic organization; it confines and characterizes the logical domain, elements, and their organization. In short, that process perspectivizes. Within that organization, the particulars’ relations are re-proportions. Particulars emerge with a logical identity, but their relations are analogical in respect to their structural relations. These are not only relations within the domain of the object. They are also relations to ‘outside’ elements and functions of agent origins, selections, activity, and of generative and formative forms. These forms, such as the schema, reflexively provide for matters of logical form and modality rules for logical transactions.1
The book’s main issues and target problem involve cognitive patterns crossing current psychiatric and sociopolitical contexts. The target is a central and specific example, providing explication for similarities in the logical form of the linguistic representations of Trump, the paranoid person, and the Trump follower (Trumper.) Structural analysis can widen its perspectivizing by identifying logical and schematic forms and specific contingency modes. These forms, as applicable to a psychology of thought, lead to an understanding of the basis of different persons’ thought patterns. Through their representation in a symbolic language, the forms are expressed and accessible to transformation and transaction. They not only lead to a deep understanding of cognitive phenomena. They also reveal isomorphic relations in different levels and types of determinants, despite their distance in a hierarchy from one to another level. Resultant possible understanding structurally becomes a ‘knowledge complex.’
To broaden SV enough for psychologists to apply to historical and developmental context, I look to Heinz Werner’s orthogenetic view of change in and of the structural determinants of thought (Werner 1926, 1957; Werner and Kaplan 1956.) Multi-dimensionality and directionality in Werner’s account are both developmental and dynamic. This combination provides for a novel and fertile integration with the broadening of the structural approach. The resultant SV is unlike most structuralist approaches. The structural similarities accessible within a mediating set of representations function metaphorically. Applied to a multiplex of contexts, they serve to make highly fertile analogies.2 In sum, two requirements of comparisons would illuminate thought patterns: (1) A manifold of contexts, (2) A viewing perspective, enabling means to articulate analogies that illuminate inter-contextual relations. That perspective is accessible by way of the semiotic functions of a set of representations. Thereby representations can be variously related to a given phenomenon or to different kinds or orders of phenomena.
We seek representations that can—like metaphors—penetrate different orders and relate equivalences of phenomena from one order to phenomena within another. In a word, representations become means of comparison.
The terms of the SV comparison cross over a series of contexts. The relations are drawn from computer program-compatible logic and schema forms. They yield conceptual equivalences with the forms of logical and schematic representations in the logical and psychological relationships of persons’ thought. The forms can be isolated as abstractions, hence in a context of symbolized relations. The person’s thought and its specifics as logical and psychological relations constitute another context (divisible into sub-contexts).
The relation of metaphor and analogy to a structural view of knowledge. Suppose we want to know as much as we can about Trump, the Trumper, and the paranoid—the ‘Trio.’ That manifold would be a ‘knowledge complex.’3 To penetrate and advance such a corpus, we try navigating structural relations. They have the capacity to reveal and illuminate equivalences in crossover points of comparison of the different persons’ representations, thoughts, and representation-thought interrelations. To complete that knowledge complex with all due relevance is quite a task. Full review of approaches to this kind of objective is beyond the scope here. I will cite two influential contemporary views from which to build a structural approach to view how each ‘person’ of the Trio’s thinking relates to his or her representations and how each person’s representations relate to the ‘Other’s.’
- 1.Lakoff and Johnson (1980) set theoretical groundwork for the relations between different conceptual and categorial levels. Kendall (2008, first page.) summarized their proposition this way:
‘ . . . our recurring patterns of spatial understanding are captured as image schemas, among which they identify CONTAINMENT, PATH and SOURCE-PATH-GOAL. These are understood to be pre-linguistic cognitive structures established through multimodal body experience....