Human Controls as Situation-Processes

An argument for the adoption of a terminology of social interaction and controls better adapted to the now accepted viewpoints of modern physics, biology, and general semantics. The word alone is spatial and static. The word process alone has only the time dimension. Both represent abstractions from the totality of actuality-experience. A changing through time, a situationprocess, is still an abstraction in the sense of being a selected segment-period of the Total Space-Time Manifold; but it does include and suggest the undivided and indivisible reality within its field. The social controls, especially telic (purposive) controls, are reconsidered as situation-processes, in which each situation produces or emerges as its own successor in toto. Reversibility, reflexion, prediction, compensation, and emergence of novelty (impredicted, predicted or chosen), are discussed. In a sense, the greater the possible control, the less reliable can prediction of behavior be, on the human level. The applicability of the situational approach to personal and societal problems is further expanded by the conception of situation-process

Complex Systems and Decision Making · Mental Health Research Topics · Philosophy and History of Science · Psychology

• Freud and American Sociology, 1909-1949

  Open Access•Robert A Jones•Journal of the History of the…•1974

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• Reactions to Predictive Assumptions

  Thomas D Eliot•American Sociological Review•1937

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