Spiral Dynamics empirical flaw?

[Gesundheit2]

26 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Are they absolutist literalists or pluralist non-literalists?

I would say neither. They're mostly secular rationalists with a strong religious core.

[DocWatts]

34 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

I guess my point is that once you choose the empirical route, you might as well go all the way. Then again, I'm not exactly against rationalist intuition as a methodology (as with Hegel or Plato for example).

I guess that my own view is that empiricism is always going to run up against limitations when it's trying to model something that's inherently qualitative in nature, namely that of internal value systems.

In order for a model like Spiral Dynamics to work, I would argue that its body of emperical evidence would have to be situated within something like an intuitive dialectical framework in order to be useful.

[Carl-Richard]

9 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

I guess that my own view is that empiricism is always going to run up against limitations when it's trying to model something that's inherently qualitative in nature, namely that of internal value systems.

In order for a model like Spiral Dynamics to work, I would argue that its body of emperical evidence would have to be situated within something like an intuitive dialectical framework in order to be useful.

So if I understand you correctly, the way you interpret the data and create the structure for the model first requires an intuitive framework, but the quantity and order of each stage (the content) is what the empirical data is for. So Clare Graves had to first have the intuition that he could structure the student's value systems into a developmental hierarchy before he could start gathering the data, and then when he got the data, he could fill that structure with specific content. Basically, it's one example of how empirical investigation is always guided by an a priori framework of interpretation (it tells you where to look and how to look at it).

[DocWatts]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

So if I understand you correctly, the way you interpret the data and create the structure for the model first requires an intuitive framework, but the quantity and order of each stage (the content) is what the empirical data is for. So Clare Graves had to first have the intuition that he could structure the student's value systems into a developmental hierarchy before he could start gathering the data, and then when he got the data, he could fill that structure with specific content. Basically, it's one example of how empirical investigation is always guided by an a priori framework of interpretation (it tells you where to look and how to look at it).

That's it precisely.

Thomas Kuhn was quite persuasive about this overall point in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Investigation never begins from a 'neutral' perspective, what sort of problems are investigated are always guided by a pre-existing paradigm (whether one is strictly within that paradigm or pushing against it, it serves as an anchor point in either case).

What often happens is that a revolutionary scientist will have an intuition that they develop into a theoretical framework, and this can happen before they have emperical data to validate thier claim

For example, emperical proof of general relativity came years after Einstein developed his theory, carried out by scientists in Russia observing light bending around the moon during an eclipse, precisely as Einstein's theory predicted.

In the case of Graves, my guess is that he had a pre-existing intuition that the hierarchical process of adolescent development that Piaget described continued in to adulthood, which gave him a framework to begin gathering evidence. And at some point (perhaps from his collaboration with Don Beck, or perhaps before this), that there was a further intuition that adult development had something interesting or important to day about collective psychological development for societies.

The reason I brought up Hegel and Marx earlier is that both sought to identify and articulate a broader meta-paradigm via a dialectical framework, with Spiral Dynamics being a more modern attempt at such, with the added benefit of Spiral Dynamics having access to a more rigourous emperical method for grounding its claims than earlier attempts.

Edited February 1, 2022 by DocWatts

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, DocWatts said:

For example, emperical proof of general relativity came years after Einstein developed his theory, carried out by scientists in Russia observing light bending around the moon during an eclipse, precisely as Einstein's theory predicted.

I like the parallels between normal science's closemindedness to intuitive insight (metaphysics) and psychic phenomena (clairvoyance) when that is essentially all that the revolutionary scientists/philosophers are doing (somehow predicting the next empirically accepted, dominant scientific framework) 

 

4 hours ago, DocWatts said:

In the case of Graves, my guess is that he had a pre-existing intuition that the hierarchical process of adolescent development that Piaget described continued in to adulthood, which gave him a framework to begin gathering evidence. And at some point (perhaps from his collaboration with Don Beck, or perhaps before this), that there was a further intuition that adult development had something interesting or important to say about collective psychological development for societies.

The individual-collective connection was already well-established with Bronfenbrenner in 1979 (a stage-less, systemic developmental theory). Also, other adult developmental theories (defined as 18-and-up, or just unrelated to age) were also popping up in various places. I think most of the intuitive innovation in the case of SD came down to simply connecting stage theory to value systems, which is thanks to Graves' student essay methodology and Beck & Cowan's application of memetics to create vMEMEs (and other things of course).

 

4 hours ago, DocWatts said:

The reason I brought up Hegel and Marx earlier is that both sought to identify and articulate a broader meta-paradigm via a dialectical framework, with Spiral Dynamics being a more modern attempt at such, with the added benefit of Spiral Dynamics having access to a more rigourous emperical method for grounding its claims than earlier attempts.

I believe the dialectical framework is inherently baked-in to all of the structural stage theories (not just SD), mainly starting with Piaget and his logical constructivism, because they're constructivist theories that place the transaction principle (organism-environment interactions) across a developmental line: interactions forming new interactions etc., i.e. thesis, antithesis, synthesis etc.. It also applies to stage-less developmental theories like Vygotsky and Bronfenbrenner, which have a more "horizontal", social bent (focus on modelling person-person interactions).

You could say that Bronfenbrenner's theory gives a more specific account of the individual-collective connection, which can help give an expanded understanding of this aspect of SD, just like SD can give an expanded understanding of the undifferentiated developmental aspect of Bronfenbrenner's theory ("chronosystem").

[Carl-Richard]

On 31.1.2022 at 6:01 PM, Happy Lizard said:

So would you say that applying the same method of query to other nations would yield a different model ? it'd be interesting to see what that could look like in other countries. I personally think it will be the same with some small deferences.

I think the most interesting thing would be to apply it to cross-cultural persons, because that's how you can truly start to isolate universal attributes from cultural context. It's not enough to just look at different cultures, but also the interactions between cultures. Like Leo says, it's true that some developmental models have been tested in non-Western contexts, but there is still a general gap in cross-cultural developmental research that needs to be filled before we come close to something resembling true universality, especially in a growing techo-globalized world (the internet is technically a cross-cultural phenomena).

[benjamindavidsteele]

Here is the eternal problem of modern science, in terms of WEIRD bias. There is almost no where in the world that has not been impacted by Western culture, technology, diet, politics, economics, military, etc. Only a handful of isolated populations remain in the world. Over the centuries, most of the hundreds of thousands of distinct cultures that once existed were genocidally eliminated, entirely assimilated, or fundamentally altered. There are no control populations to control for confounding factors. There is no second earth to test alternative paths of development.

Consider that Joseph Henrich argues that one of the central forces creating the WEIRD mentality and culture is mass literacy of linear written text. But, besides oral cultures, there were those like the Incas and Aztecs, among the largest and most complex societies at the time, that had a non-linear method of recording knowledge using quipu (with the knotting of colored strings), more similar to the hyperlinks of the internet. Imagine how different development might have gone with non-linear thought. For certain, they would've been less likely to have formulated simplistic linear developmental theories. Think about a developmental theory that branches off in multiple ways, sometimes converging back again but sometimes not.

[Carl-Richard]

On 1.3.2022 at 0:50 PM, benjamindavidsteele said:

Think about a developmental theory that branches off in multiple ways, sometimes converging back again but sometimes not.

There is another thread where I expanded on the points in this thread, and your comment reminded me of this:

 

On 11.2.2022 at 1:48 PM, Carl-Richard said:

At some point, we'll probably have extremely advanced cross-cultural developmental models that work like computer simulations where you can plot in dozens of contextual variables (education, current nationality, past nationalities, socioeconomic status etc.) and get a detailed report of a person's developmental trajectory. It might have some linear stage theory aspects as well (maybe not an universal one, but several possible paths).

It would probably require an AI that could create standardized values for each contextual variable for each person and some revolutionary data gathering instrument (as opposed to highly inaccurate self-assessment sheets). AI would also be useful for running algorithms for things like Graves' student essay methodology with huge complex data sets.