Abstract
In this chapter, structural-systemic causality theory that can ground metaparadigmatic science is defined. This theory is not new; it grounded continental European psychology already more than century ago but disappeared after North-American behaviorism based psychology became dominant after the WWII. Arguments are provided to support the idea that structural-systemic causality theory is more powerful and may be better suited to ground psychology than the theories of causality followed in psychology today.
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Notes
- 1.
Cartesian-Humean causality is naturally connected to quantitative “interpretation” of the collected observations about the world. Yet it is not necessary; efficient causality theories can equally be developed without any statistical data analysis in particular or any mathematics in general. I bring as an (absolutely randomly chosen!) example from biology where efficient causality thinking is also widespread, but not almost exclusive as it is in mainstream psychology today. In an article dedicated to some issues in evolutionary biology, it was proposed that causes or events that can have “effect” on something else are, among others, human harvest of wild animals and evolution (Allendorf & Hard, 2009). No process can be a cause of anything because process is a change of the organization. Evolution is not something that can cause other things to happen, evolution—as well as harvest or whatever other process of a similar kind—is actually a name of an efficient cause. Names are not explanations, as it was discussed in the previous chapter. There is no quantitative data analysis or interpretation necessarily involved in such theories. And yet they are essentially quantitative, as Hume demonstrated.
- 2.
Von Bertalanffy’s ideas may seem to disagree with my verdict about his theory. He did not claim that his theory is only about general universal principles. On the contrary, he wrote: “The third level finally is explanation—i.e., the statement of specific conditions and laws that are valid for an individual object or for a class of objects” (von Bertalanffy, 1968, p. 85). The way he continued, however, supports my suggestion that the most important question—what the studied thing or phenomenon is—is not answered by his theory: “In logico-mathematical language, this means that the general functions f of our equation (3.1.) [A.T. This is a system of simultaneous differential equations on p. 56 of his book] are replaced by specified functions applicable to the individual case. Any scientific explanation necessitates the knowledge of these specific laws as, for example, the laws of chemical equilibrium, of growth of an organism, the development of a population, etc.” (ibid. p. 85). From a structural-systemic perspective I am developing in this book, no mathematical function can be sufficient as a scientific explanation. Mathematical functions are about relations, about processes, but they are not about what the thing is. There might be a law of growth of organism but this law does not tell us what an organism is. All quantitative formalized versions of systems theories have lost the most important, the object what is studied.
- 3.
This is one of the main reasons why I prefer to call my approach to causality “structural-systemic” instead of structural or systemic alone. Another reason, the nonstructural nature of dominant systems theories I mentioned above.
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Toomela, A. (2019). What Next? Back to the Future. In: The Psychology of Scientific Inquiry. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31449-1_8
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