Monday 31 May 2010

Wrong turn

I recently bought this book, as Carol Dweck references it in the rather ace Self-Theories. Though I find psychological stuff interesting, this is way off my normal terrain. The book itself is just three chapters of a two volume theory, and much of what I have read so far goes into a lot of detail about the nature of psychological hypotheses. I guess this is really a book for propah psychologists.

Still, the central concern - the interpretive frames that we develop to understand the world - is quite interesting, and there are odd bits in it that leap out:
Sometimes the notion of the world as an orderly development of events seems downright threatening to a person. Particularly is this likely to be true when he deals with psychological events. If he sees orderliness in the behaviour of a friend or in his own behaviour, it seems to preclude the possibility of seeing the actions of either as being free... If [he] perceives himself as an orderly succession of events, he feels trapped by his own structure or by the events of his biography. Yet if he sees himself as deciding each moment what he shall do next, it may seem as though one false step will destroy his integrity.

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