Transdisciplinary Research on Individuals
Transdisciplinary
Philosophy-of-Science (TPS) Paradigm
Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals (TPS Paradigm)
- Topics and findings (selection)
- Behaviour is the essential bridge from the individual's psyche to its outer world
- Explorations of the phenomena of the psyche and the pathways of their microgenetic, ontogenetic and (potential) phylogenetic development
- The role of language to overcome the imperceptibility of others' psychical phenomena
- Introspective methods contain a conceptual leap - assumptions that all psychical phenomena are quantifiable are therefore not justified
Research on individual-specificity ('personality')
- Nomothetic and ideographic approaches: Novel perspectives on a long-lasting debate
- Questionnaire methods entail that contemporary "personality" psychology is largely based on everyday psychology
Research on individuals
Explorations of the phenomena of the psyche and the pathways of their
microgenetic, ontogenetic and (potential) phylogenetic development
The concepts of the TPS Paradigm have been applied to trace the developmental
pathways through which psychical phenomena enable individuals to increasingly
become actors - as single individuals, communities and species.
The analyses explored the fundamental imperceptibility of psychical
phenomena and the impact that this peculiarity has had on the emergence of
language, social institutions and societies (Uher, 2015d).
How the phenomena of language enable humans to overcome the fundamental
imperceptibility of psychical phenomena by others
Individually developed psychical properties are perceptible only by the
individual him- or herself. Concepts of the TPS Paradigm scrutinise the ways
in which psychical properties can be communicated to other individuals and socially shared psychical representations
can be
developed, thus enabling social coordination and the transmission of
knowledge to subsequent generations (Uher,
2015d)
Introspective methods contain a conceptual leap - assumptions that all
psychical phenomena are quantifiable are not justified
The novel
concepts of
introquestion versus extroquestion introduced by the TPS
Paradigm reveal that introspection cannot be clearly differentiated from
extrospection and that psychophysical experiments and some first-person
perspective methods are not introspective, as is often assumed. The analyses
also highlighted that assumptions on the general quantifiability of
psychical phenomena are not justified (Uher,
2016b, 2019 and the
science blog: "Introspection put back on its feet: New research reveals
conceptual leap").
Behaviour - The essential bridge from the
psyche to the environment
Behaviour is the essential interface
between an individual’s psychical phenomena, which are entirely internal,
and that individual’s (abiotic and biotic, especially social) external
surrounding. Those environmental details that functionally mediate the
individual’s externalisations in the present (i.e., the individual’s
behaviour) are called the behavioural situation.
Research on individual-specificity ('personality' and individual differences)
Nomothetic and ideographic approaches: Novel perspectives on
a long-lasting debate
Research on individuals has long been hampered by the scientific dictum scientia non est
individuorum - the idea that a scientific discipline cannot be devoted to studying single cases given that science seeks regularities and lawfulness through abstraction and generalisation from unique
events. The TPS Paradigm shows that this is not the case. Rather, it
highlights that complementary applications of both
between-individual and within-individual analyses are indispensable for
exploring individuals (see the Hourglass-Shaped Methodology;
Uher,
2015c).
Questionnaire methods entail that
contemporary "personality" psychology is largely based on everyday
psychology
The focus on lexical approaches and assessment methods entails that, so
far, taxonomic "personality" psychologists have largely explored
only the person-descriptive repertoires of people's everyday language and pertinent mental representations
that they encode. But psychologists have
seriously neglected to study also the particular phenomena that are being
linguistically and mentally represented - in particular, individual-specific
behaviour and experiencing - because these phenomena cannot be explored with
questionnaire methods (Uher, 2013).
More information available in Publications and Science Blogs.
© 2013-2024