The Linguistic Fore-Structure Of Psychological Explanation

This chapter extends the early work of Smedslund on the common sense underpinnings of hypothesis testing in psychology. As Smedslund argued, experiments do not test hypotheses about the relationship between psychological process and behavior because any failure to verify would defy cultural understanding. Here I propose that the intelligibility of psychological explanations does not rest so much on cultural understandings as tautological language use. The reliance on tautology is born of the impossibility for ostensively defining the states of mind presumably giving rise to action. The result is reliance on a logic of originary resemblance, that is, explaining a given behavior in terms of a “miniaturized” form of itself, displaced within the mind. Further, because each definition of a mental term relies on another mental term for its meaning, we enter a condition of semiotic slippage. It is thus possible to account for psychological explanations far removed from simple or transparent tautology. By drawing on extended definitional sequences, we find that any given behavior (or its negation) can be explained by virtually any randomly drawn motive or trait. This includes otherwise counter-intuitive or paradoxical explanations. These developments bear importantly on the potentials of psychological research, mental and diagnostic testing, and psychotherapy

Visual arts education and the formation of literacies: An exploration of visuality

This chapter will explore theories of visuality that inform conditions and formations of literacy to understand the impact of the image in thinking, practice and communication in visual arts education. The increase of visual artefacts and the accessibility of production and consumption have implications across a range of disciplines, which blurs the boundaries of knowledge formation. Theoretical constraints locate opportunities for the construction of visual artefacts as objects of knowledge that strengthen the formation of literate activities in education. We are often reminded of the proliferation of images in the world in which we live configured by the constraints of ownership and authorship. Theories of the visual are multidisciplinary and therefore mobilise discourses that are accessed by a value structure that adheres with the field itself. This chapter will outline some theoretical approaches of the imperatives within the field of visuality informed by the arts, more specifically the visual arts, and how these theories devise some of the ways literacy is constructed and manufactured in visual arts education. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the discourses of visual literacy and visual culture to situate the provocation of visuality in art education; and to consider the affordances that a conceptual framework offers to better understand ‘literacies’ in visual arts education. An exploration of visuality provides opportunities to understand the significance of the arts in situating literacy in relation to the visual as object and practice. Through an investigation of artists’ practice, audience intentionality, the artwork as artefact, subject matter as purpose and frameworks that shape and construct pedagogical understandings, this chapter considers literacy practices in visual arts education as immersed in discipline content and ontologically constructed in curriculum formations – where visuality is understood as theory as practice and practice as theory

Doing things with words: toward evocative ethnography

The concept of evocative ethnography is described and contrasted with realist representation. Two examples of evocative ethnography are provided: the plight of women as they age and the impact of digital immersion on cultural life. Discussion focuses on the benefits of expanding the repertoire of writing in the social sciences

Visual Anthropology

Visual anthropology is a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that encompasses a set of research techniques and modes of representation that are (through production and analysis) concerned with all visible aspects of culture and society. As a research technique, it uses pictorial media as a means of exploring social phenomena and of accessing, evoking, and communicating anthropological knowledge—mainly through the media of ethnographic photographs and films and, since the mid‐1990s, new digital technologies. Furthermore, visual anthropology includes the study of pictorial manifestations of culture, ranging from nonverbal communication, ritual and performance, dance, and art to material culture