I just read this article by Adam Mastroianni, and liked it. What follows is a series of mostly incoherent thoughts on the article and on psychology as a whole. It’s important to remember I’m not an expert in this field; I’m just a guy who finds the mind interesting. The second disclaimer is that I will use “Cognitive Science” and “Psychology” fairly interchangeably—in either case, I’m referring to the study of the human mind.

Units and Rules

In his article, Adam makes the case that for psychology to be good science, it should work with well-defined “units” and rules that act on those units. From what I’ve learned, some fields studying the mind. seem to come quite close to this. For example, in Words and Rules (1999), Steven Pinker provides evidence for word generation being a result of both a memorised lexicon and rules acting on that lexicon (prefixes, regular past tense verbs, etc). This feels quite closely linked to the definition of good science Adam suggests.

Massive modularity from evolutionary psychology is another good candidate. In this theory, the units would be “modules,” but I’m not sure what the rules would be. This seems like a good area to explore though. It feels almost as structured as Cybernetics.

Now is a good point to mention that I have a strong bias to this structure that Adam mentioned, because of my interest in mathematics, specifically group theory, which is also concerned with its own units and rules, or elements and operations, respectively. With that in mind, I’m not fully sure whether the unit-rule framework is the only way of defining “good science,” or if I’m simply predisposed to like structure when presented in this exact way.

“That’s a great question”

I’ve long had gripes with what Adam describes as naïve research. The idea is that flinging questions at a wall will eventually lead to truth if we go at it for long enough, which is just grossly ignores the importance of asking good questions. This extends far beyond science, applying even to art analysis. Consider these questions:

• “Can infants represent occluded objects?”
• “Why can newborn chicks perceive centre-occluded objects as connected?”
• “Is Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings a good poetry collection?”
• “Do Chimps have a theory of mind?”
• “Why does the Bell Jar have the fig tree imagery?”
• “Why is this Queen sacrifice winning for White?”

Some of these can be answered definitively; others cannot. Regardless, an answer to every one of these questions requires asking smaller, more precise questions, and answering those sub-questions requires asking sub-sub-questions, etc. I love questions, and I believe asking the right questions is a true skill.

All that to say, good frameworks help generate good choices, and bad ones don’t. That’s another reason I like this “cybernetic theory” a lot.