"A bubbling caldron of ideas . . . Enlightening and valuable." Mervyn Jones, New Statesman. The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the oldall have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual flux "is" possible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society."

All that is solid melts into air : the experience of modernity

This book describes the new perspective of naturalistic decision making. The point of departure is how people make decisions in complex, time-pressured, ambiguous, and changing environments. The purpose of this book is to present and elaborate on past models developed to explain this type of decision making. The central philosophy of the book is that classical decision theory has been unproductive since it is so heavily grounded in economics and mathematics. The contributors believe there is little to be learned from laboratory studies about how people actually handle difficult and interesting tasks; therefore, the book presents a critique of classical decision theory. The models of naturalistic decision making described by the contributors were derived to explain the behavior of firefighters, business people, jurors, nuclear power plant operators, and command-and-control officers. The models are unique in that they address the way people use experience to frame situations and adopt courses of action. The models explain the strengths of skilled decision makers. Naturalistic decision research requires the examination of field settings, and a section of the book covers methods for conducting meaningful research outside the laboratory. In addition, since his approach has applied value, the book covers issues of training and decision support systems.

Decision Making in Action: Models and Methods

Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, historians - and even scientists themselves - have often tried to decipher the basis for creativity in science. Some have attributed creativity to a special logic, the so-called scientific method, whereas others have pointed to the inspirations of genius or to the inevitable workings of the zeitgeist. Finally, some have viewed scientific breakthroughs as the product of chance, as witnessed in the numerous episodes of serendipity. Too often these four alternative interpretations are seen as mutually exclusive. Yet the central thesis of this book is that the chance, logic, genius, and zeitgeist perspectives can be integrated into a single coherent theory of creativity in science. But for this integration to succeed, change must be elevated to the status of primary cause. Logic, genius and the zeitgeist still have significant roles to play but mainly operate insofar as they enhance, or constrain the operation of a chance combinatorial process.

Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist

We review research on accurate social perception at zero acquaintance and apply a Gibsonian ecological approach to redress several shortcomings. We argue that recent use of Brunswik's lens model to determine what physical qualities accurately communicate psychological traits has limited utility because it fails to consider the structured information provided by configural physical qualities that is central to Gibson's (1979) theory. We elaborate a developmental model of relationships between physical and psychological qualities that highlights research needed to identify configural physical qualities that may inform accurate perceptions. This model and tenets of the ecological theory yield several hypotheses regarding such qualities. Finally, we advocate the value of studying perceived affordances (opportunities for acting, interacting, or being acted upon) because this will focus attention on the neglected issue of contextual influences on social perception accuracy, and because affordances may be perceived more accurately than global personality traits.

Accurate Social Perception at Zero Acquaintance: The Affordances of a Gibsonian Approach

Classifying is a fundamental operation in the acquisition of knowledge. Taxonomic theory can help students of cognition, evolutionary psychology, ethology, anatomy, and sociobiology to avoid serious mistakes, both practical and theoretical. More positively, it helps in generating hypotheses useful to a wide range of disciplines. Composite wholes, such as species and societies, are “individuals” in the logical sense, and should not be treated as if they were classes. A group of analogous features is a natural kind, but a group of homologous features is not. Imposing hypotheses justified only on the basis of nominalist, realist, phenomenalist, or conceptualist metaphysics upon the neurophysiology of organisms or upon the causes of behavior exemplifies the “psychologist's fallacy” of William James. Levels should be distinguished from their members and from classes of levels, and the ontological status of entities ranked at levels should be made clear. It is important not to confuse such categories as substance and process with one another. Several genetical terms, such as “gene” and chromosome,” are even more equivocal than has been realized. Discussions about units of selection, behavior, and thinking suffer from the ambiguity of a “unit of” an entity. An important source of misunderstanding about natural selection is the habit of treating it as an “agent”: in an important sense, natural selection does not “act” at all.

Judith Wechsler

Papers

On Aesthetics in Science

On Aesthetics in Science

On Aesthetics in Science

A human comedy: Physiognomy and caricature in 19th century Paris

Aesthetics in Science