Walter B. Weimer

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Psychology

Measurement theory (scaling theory) severely constrains what statistical procedures can meaningfully tell us. Nonparametric statistical procedures employ nominal, ordinal, and (some) interval scaling procedures to provide actual meaningful information in the human sciences, whereas using parametric procedures based upon ratio scaling provides misle...

Classic topics are sentience (awareness), sapience (knowledge), and selfhood (agency or the epistemic “who”), exemplifying essential, unavoidable dualisms between physical and functional domains of existence. Epistemology does not use acquaintance: someone deprived of their senses could know all of physics as a science (simply by having descriptive...

There are no laws in psychology, only probabilistic rules of behavior. The history of each unique subject and inability to impose rigid control of behavior without influencing behavior guarantees the impossibility of experimentation or the discovery of inexorable laws. Psychology is restricted to demonstration studies: empirical but not experimenta...

Knowledge is conjectures held in check by refutation attempts, never “proven” truth or justified true belief. Statistics are only descriptive, never inferential. Studying only correlations abandons causality, at the price of never being explanatory—only descriptive. There can never be algorithms of either inference or assessment. One must have a th...

Physicists measure identical objects with ratio scales to determine inexorable laws of nature by experimental control. Life has unique subjects, who cannot be measured except with less powerful scale techniques and can never be “controlled” to yield physics-like laws. Life arose without lawful (inexorable) determination, by enabling circumstances s...

Measures assign numbers to data according to scaling theory requirements. If measured numbers are not correctly assigned, no unambiguous knowledge can result. Experimentation is classical (not quantal), and involves replicable control. Experimentation requires separation of events into objects of study and the (rest of the) world. Epistemically, th...

Language functions as argument in favor of or against a position in knowledge claims. Explanations defend their conclusions, criticism (as a form of argument) challenges explanations and assumptions. The modal force of knowledge claims is best captured by adjunctive (since-necessarily) claiming rather than material implication (if–then). This makes...

Functional behavior is physically ambiguous in its surface linear realization. What it means—how it functions—cannot be determined by exhaustive specification of physical movement alone. We require a duality of descriptions: of physical movement, and a semiotic framework in which it occurs. This requires looking back over the derivational history o...

Mises’ account of Austrian subjectivism in economics is untenable. The “subjective” is actually objective (explored below in Chapters 10 and 12). Economic action cannot be a priori or certain like mathematics. Methodological individualism is not based on either subjectivism or apodictic certainty (but rather upon individual or local knowledge). Emp...

We separate the knower in the functional realm from the known in the physical (for physics), or from other functional categories (e.g., action). We make an epistemic cut—between what is the object of inquiry and the rest of the universe. As subjects our symbols and meanings impose higher order constraints determined by our choices. Life began when...

A complex phenomenon can be explained only by a model of higher complexity than itself and only by specifying abstract patterns of behavior rather than point predictions. Increased precision does not increase point prediction, it only limits generalizability. Negative rules of order—prohibitions of specified classes of action—constrain complex phen...

What we undergo in acquaintance is not knowledge. Knowledge is always in the language of description, which is interpersonal and thus always objective, never uniquely subjective. Knowledge of non-mental reality (including our own bodies) is purely of its structural or higher order properties: we can never know the intrinsic (or first-order) propert...

Political “science” does not exist—it is an attempt to control social and political behavior rather than to understand it. So-called political epistemology uses knowledge “claims” as weapons of central planning to control social behavior to achieve explicit “rational” ends. Classical liberalism emphasized that society (especially the market order)...

Skepticism and “anything goes” overtook philosophy with the acknowledgment of the failure of the justificationist metatheory of knowledge as justified true belief to be achieved by inductive inference from facts to theories. Philosophers retreated to the hope for “near” certainty or probability (in probabilistic confirmation theory), but that quick...

Choice control by higher order constraints operating through downward causation occurs when physical conditions are underdetermined by laws and permitted by boundary conditions. Life creates a web of “enablements”: newly available econiches to expand into. Competition creates cooperation. Adaptive systems—with expectations “built in”—in learning an...

Rationality is action in accordance with reason. Reason is determined by the spontaneous order of society and the knowledge of the individuals within it, and changes over time. A rationalist holds all beliefs, claims, opinions, positions, etc. open to critical assessment and replacement if warranted, while realizing that not all positions can be cr...

Explanations are functional arguments claiming that some unknown or unfamiliar (X), is equal to something familiar (Y). All knowledge claims are arguments. Learning is error correction. Empirical knowledge is never certain or apodictic. Mathematics is syntax or structure, not empirical knowledge: it functions as a shorthand notation in science. Mea...

The morality of the abstract market order is vastly superior to the face-to-face benevolence model of tribalism. Sound shocking? That’s because you are unfamiliar with abstract morality (and probably with what primitivism actually entails). Consumer-based morality is what you are used to and want, but producer-based morality from tribal organizatio...

Cartesian rationalism in social theory began with Hobbes, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, and Comte. After Descartes (who had put sovereign reason outside the natural order to judge and correct it), these thinkers glorified explicit reason (clear and indubitable Cartesian common sense) as our savior, relocating sovereign power from an arbitrary hereditary s...

Liberalism entails realism in the study of the social and psychological, unlike collectivism (which assumes alleged wholes—crowds or classes—are real and causal entities). Liberalism finds only individuals exist and act, even though they sometimes appear in groups or different occupations. Methodological individualism rules out organic and transper...

Chomsky revived Rousseau’s romantic libertarian position with a sophisticated methodological approach. Like Russell, Chomsky’s anarchist socialism combined incompatibles, attempting to graft a libertarian “flower child” approach to society as anarchistic, never realizing that his scientific achievements refuted his social-political position. In lin...

Comte was reborn in B. F. Skinner: both have elaborate (and false) theories of science as descriptive, both were terrified of freedom (it denies their god of “control”). They endorse metaphysical determinism—whereas Chomsky had a god named Creativity, Skinner’s was Control (schedules of reinforcement): no matter what happens, it is strictly determi...

Hume was a consistent evolutionary theorist, and the first significant non-justificational philosopher. Not the pure skeptic portrayed by justificationists such as Russell, he had a “positive” approach to philosophy and theory of society in his essential negatives. Hume “whittled down the claims of false—i.e., Cartesian—reason” by consistent analys...

We have no idea why we do traditional things, so we rationalize explanations. We assume “the enlightened” are right to replace grown institutions with what explicit reason dictates. But reason—rationality—lies in the fact that groups who followed those traditions survived and displaced those who did not. We resulted from group selection, not explic...

Progressivism—with top-down control by explicit reason directing behaviors specified in advance—is a return to primitivism and tribalism in a pre-evolutionary conception. Static conceptions cannot respond to unknown and unforeseen events nor provide any mechanism for novel behavior or knowledge. And there is no justice in the commands of a dictator...

Russell, perhaps the most influential philosopher of his era, felt that the lack of explicit organization was the problem facing the twentieth century. His quest for certainty and organization, as well as hatred of private property coupled with his quest for happiness, made socialism the only possible form of social-political order his Cartesian co...

Keynes’ academic scribblers need their views filtered down to the nonacademic masses. One way this occurred in the twentieth-century technological society is through music, and some lyrics of popular rock and roll music are examined in this chapter for their overt and subliminal rationalist constructivist themes. The rock ‘n roll era insinuated pro...

Seeing liberalism as outmoded and inadequate for “modern” society, constructivism rewrote history. Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy provides an example. Constructivists abhor private property (they assume one man’s gain must come at another’s expense), laissez-faire (it encourages “unplanned” organization), freedom (it is outmoded, with so...

Law, the oldest social study, distinguished between “grown” or spontaneously arisen rules of conduct (Greek Nomos) and deliberately made or explicit legislation (thesei) that serves particular purposes. Liberalism stresses the indispensable role of “grown” law and the role of the lawfinder. Found laws typically are negative in character, stating th...

Liberalism was never refuted. It was abandoned by constructivists because of alleged inadequacies (according to their Cartesian common sense). Doing so was abetted by two strategies: first, portraying liberalism as “nothing but” reactionary, a conservative defense of “laissez-faire” as the status quo; second, by “supplanting” it with freedom from w...

As a variant of justificationism, constructivism in one form or another is found in both progressivists and defenders of classical liberal tenets. Adherence to explicit rationality and the “proving power of reason” characterizes views on the political right as well as left. Among the guilty are well-known defenders of one or another liberal princip...

Study of how we come to know—the nature of modeling and anticipation of our unpredictable, often dangerous environment—is the province of evolutionary epistemology. Constructivism depends upon knowledge being static or non-evolutionary and therefore cannot address the unforeseen and unknown in either our behavior or acquisition of knowledge. It has...

Western education is a disaster. School districts have unlimited powers with no accountability. They dispense prepackaged “education” as anointed purveyors of truth, denying freedom of speech to all who disagree, in their “official” capacity as sainted book burners. Not subject to market based corrections, they are fiefdoms of momentary political c...

The inadequacy of taxis control systems (linear chains or hierarchical structures) to explain or replace spontaneously ordered complex systems (the CNS, social orders, or markets in economics) requires overviewing quantitatively and qualitatively more powerful control systems, such as Polanyi's polycentric orders and von Foerster's coalitional stru...

This chapter overviews the breakdown of the closed society, which surrounds us in our ubiquitous alienation and malaise. Manifested in generational gaps and grasping for “system” by youth clamoring for friends in an impersonal city, and desperate for a new all knowing and powerful dictator to lead them, the appeal of socialism beckons those too you...

Liberalism has never flourished as a political doctrine. Whether it ever will is an empirical issue. This chapter recaps an essential context of interlocking constraints that are necessary for its survival, and notes how constructivists have failed to understand their necessity for a free society based on the rule of law. Tacit social orders can on...

Understanding in psychological and social domains is different from classical accounts in the relatively simple physical domains, where we search for laws of nature, explanation of particulars (point predictions), and explanation as hypothetico-deductive inference from “covering” laws. The quest for an analogous “social physics” is chimerical: the...

This article draws attention to a pattern of development within science and other intellectual research communities that has received virtually no mention. We propose that subsequent dominance of a research community by a figure responsible for significant innovation often delays progress in the field. During the period in which the revolutionary c...

Purpose - Some personal reflections on the author's discovery of and promotion of Hayek's The Sensory Order.

Reports the death of F. A. Hayek, whose works have received increasing attention with developments in the cognitive sciences, psychotherapy, and the psychology of complex phenomena. At the heart of his thought were ideas about the core ordering processes by which we create the ever-changing contents of experience.

Reports the death of F. A. Hayek, whose works have received increasing attention with developments in the cognitive sciences, psychotherapy, and the psychology of complex phenomena. At the heart of his thought were ideas about the core ordering processes by which we create the ever-changing contents of experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012...

Reviews the book, Philosophy, Science, and Social Inquiry: Contemporary Methodological Controversies in Social Sciences and Related Applied Fields of Research by D. C. Phillips (see record 1987-97349-000 ). Part A attempts an overview of recent (primarily since the 1950s) philosophy relevant to the social sciences (particularly psychology and educa...

These remarks sketch a reply to Parker's attack on comprehensively critical rationalism and its relation to rhetoric. Parker confuses rationality, which is action in accordance with reason, with a self consistent language framework. Such an instrumental system, even if consistent, is irrelevant to the problems of pragmatic action to which theory of...

This essay explores inadequacies and limitations of programs of dispositional analysis in complex social and psychological domains. While dispositions (tendencies to respond in a specifiable manner given a specifiable stimulus condition) occur frequently in scientific writing they are in fact only short hand terms for bunches or groupings of facts...

Rychlak’s discussion ranges over numerous topics in philosophical psychology, centering on such issues as internal versus external perspective in observation, the theory of causality, the measurement problem in quantum physics, the relational nature of the mental order, and many more. Given such diversity, it is impossible to discuss more than a sa...

This essay argues that all knowing is rhetorical when viewed from a nonjustificational epistemological perspective. To understand how and why knowledge gathering is a rhetorical transaction one must understand recent developments in epistemology and scientific methodology. Once we abandon the justificationist conception of knowledge as proven asser...

Traditional chapters purveying philosophy of science issues to clinical practitioners have been as boring as their influence has been ephemeral. Taking an attitude similar to the missionary bringing “the true religion” to the heathen, the philosopher or methodologist has often preached the gospel of “true scientific method” to the heathen clinician...

Reviews the books, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography by Karl Popper (1976) and The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Books 1 and 2 edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (1974). Sir Karl Raimund Popper is without doubt the most influential living philosopher, and one of the most original thinkers of all time. These volumes represent his intellectual aut...

Maxwell: Pribram has emphasized that consciousness is important, practically important, even. It is very heartening to hear this coming from a tough-minded scientist. He comes to grips with Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” and comes to the conclusion that ghosts (of the kind that rile Ryle) really exist, and that they too are important. He talks about...

The conference that generated this volume focused upon brain and consciousness. Consciousness is the major mental phenomenon discussed, and recent data from brain science, neuropsychology, and technology are assayed in an attempt to understand how consciousness is related to brain, and what problems that relationship poses. Since these are focal is...

Considers 2 paradoxes in Plato's Meno: we cannot learn anything unless we already know it; we cannot learn anything new from prior learning. The Platonic epistemology rendered these paradoxes explainable with the doctrines of forms and anamnesis. Contemporary philosophers and psychologists have rejected Plato's solutions in favor of Aristotlean dis...

Verplanck (1970), responding to the current crisis in productivity in psychology, has stated a case for a new methodology for psychology (descriptive methodology) and has argued for the legitimacy of descriptive or observational dissertations. The methodolology Verplanck supports is but one facet of an inadequate philosophy of science, and the argu...