The Ontology of Mental Behavior: Toward a Coherent Solution to the Problem of Psychology

hello everybody welcome to the active inference lab today it's october 22nd 2021 and it's actin flap guest stream number 11.1 i'm daniel i'm here with blue and our guest greg so greg thank you so much for being here and please introduce yourself and take it away we'll be monitoring the live chat so if you have any questions during the presentation please feel free to ask them and we'll talk about them at the end but otherwise thanks again for being here and looking forward to this event wonderful hey it's real honor to be here uh i've seen a couple of other presentations they're really fascinating i look forward to sharing some of my version of reality um so let me give you a little bit of orienting coordinates for me um so i am professor uh in the combined integrated clinical and school doctoral program at james madison university uh where i've been since 2003 uh the role i function there is to train individuals to be psychological doctors is the term we use uh the reason we use that is because in psychology in the profession side there are different practice areas uh clinical counseling and school are the dominant practice areas but we want to transcend those into a more general combined integrated perspective that affords us a way to kind of get out of some of the old traditional institutional silos and get a more general integrated picture so i've been there since 2003 my journey in this is i went to undergrad got my major in psychology and was just going to be a behavioral scientist that wanted to be a clinician my sense was the right thing to do was to apply the methods and findings of science to the clinical world i went off got my master's in clinical and community psychology in 1994. and um well why don't i go ahead and start the presentation and then i'll walk you through some of that history and then we'll get to this scenario where ultimately you get this weird cartoon of a garden on behind me and we'll get to there over a period and then we'll start into what we're actually dealing with let me share my screen here so so we're talking about the ontology of mental behavior um and uh just to kind of give it a context um my basic point for defining this talk is then to be in contrast to the current mainstream approach in academic psychology the mainstream approach in academic psychology is really best frame is what i would call methodological behaviorism methodological behaviorism term by jay moore but all it means is basically what is psychology in the academy right now is that it applies the methods of behavioral science to a thing very vaguely defined as behavior and mental process okay and indeed the methods of science really are what end up defining the term behavior which is the you can see from a science perspective okay uh and then the mental processes are sort of the stuff that's inferred that give rise to the change in behavior at least if you're a mentalist or a cognitivist in traditional psychology as opposed to say a radical behaviorist okay so the science of psychology is really defined by an institution that applies methods of science methods of behavioral science in particular to analyze behavior and then develop models of mental process that afford the explanation now the structure of it is broken at the level of coherence and what i mean by that is it doesn't there's no organizing framework for psychology uh psychology is not defined by and never has been defined by a paradigm meaning a full in a cuneian sense paradigm meaning a full like newton developed a paradigm for classical mechanics that then established psychology has had is a is a field that had lots of different schools of thought many paradigms that tried to manifest itself as sort of the dominant paradigm that didn't happen um there were no dominant paradigms in psychology uh it gave rise to what's called the crisis in psychology that led vygotsky specifies in 1927. so we're talking now over uh almost 100 years ago in fact it was a first…