Ecological Psychology and Homeokinetics

 

Fall 2018

This is a “specialized” course if taken for the Psychology Major.

Instructor
William M. Mace
Office: Life Sciences 209A
Office Hours: Tuesday – Thursday 11:30 am-1:00 pm

and especially by Appointment

Contact —  E-Mail: william.mace@trincoll.edu
Personal Website

Required Reading

Books — E. H. Gombrich,  Art and Illusion
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

Reading for this course is extremely important. The core reading E. H. Gombrich’s book, Art and Illusion, is interesting and provocative. It should make you think about a great deal that you have not thought about before. For the reading to work its magic, you have to cooperate by giving it substantial hunks of time. When you get a “reading” assignment, the goal is for you to have learned the material in the reading, not just to have passed your eyes over each page once or twice. To emphasize this,for the first several assignments, I did not say simply “read” but “read, learn and digest.” You ought to approach any reading assignment this way, but sometimes people do not, so I’ll say it more explicitly and more often.

There are 29 pages in the introductory chapter of Gombrich. This Introduction, called “Psychology and the Riddle of Style,” is divided into six sections with Roman Numeral headings. There are 61 paragraphs. Some of the paragraphs are short transitions to the others. Some are long and dense with information. For carefully presented and argued material like this, it is not unreasonable to guess that an average of 5 minutes per paragraph is minimal to get what you need to get. If we round the number of paragraphs to 60, then we’re talking 300 minutes already for the chapter. How long is that? How many minutes in an hour? Good. So how many hours? That’s not counting the pictures. The topics at hand concern what can be seen in pictures, so the pictures in the book are there to make a point. You need to look carefully at the pictures, see what you see, and understand what the point is meant to be. Do they succeed in making the point for you? There are only 4 pictures in this Introduction. What are they? Why are they there? Integrating those into your understanding takes some more time. Putting it all together, I’d say that 6 hours is a reasonable beginning for the amount of time to allocate to this introductory chapter.

QUESTIONS AS IMPORTANT AS ANSWERS

Sometimes students approach a course as a source of answers, thinking that the goal of a course is to teach students what experts know about a topic. The surprise for students is that what they often find is that much of a course is about what experts ASK about a topic. Much of any discipline involves learning how people package their questions in order to make progress. The questions you have when you are not an expert don’t necessarily lead to answers that look like they address the question you had.

Consider the Introduction. The title is “Psychology and the Riddle of Style.” A riddle is a kind of question, so we’re already orienting to questions. Because that’s the main topic, you ought to start reading, thinking to yourself “What is the riddle of style?” or even, “Can there be more than one riddle of style?” And, “what does Gombrich think the Riddle of Style is?” So you don’t just plunge in, but you plunge in knowing some of what you have to look for. In past classes, I have asked students, AFTER several class sessions, and AFTER doing the reading, what the Riddle of Style was to Gombrich. The reply of some was a list of styles. But I didn’t ask what some styles were or even what was meant by style. I asked, with Gombrich, what the “Riddle of Style” was. You cannot appreciate the riddle of style without good examples in mind, but those examples are not themselves what the question asks.

The first sentence says “The illustration in front of the reader should explain much more quickly than I could in words what is here meant by the “riddle of style.” See — Gombrich directly addressed the main point right from the beginning — but he also asked you to look at the first Figure. So you have to look at the Figure. Do you get the joke? Is it funny to you? If so, why? Gombrich’s second sentence says how important the cartoon is as an illustration of what he’ll get to, then he asks a question. Gombrich asks SIX questions in the first paragraph, and SEVEN in section I. You’ve got to stop and think about each question in order. (1)”Why is it that different ages and different nations have represented the visible world in such different ways?” Does that sink in as a real question? Can you think of some possible answers? At least to illustrate what the question is about?

What I’m try to do here is to alert you to the level of detail to be grasped and the tempo required to grasp it. If you do that, then you’ll participate well in class and write your papers at the correct level.

 

Course Work

Grades will be based on written work (90%)  and class participation (10%).

Class participation will be based on attendance, your willingness to talk in class, and performance on occasional exercises that I’ll call “homework.”

Papers

Your main written work for the semester will be a series of 4 modest papers and a more comprehensive final paper.

The assignments and dates due are these: