In hmolscience, Charles Cooley (1864-1929) (Scott 50:5) was an American social psychologist noted for his anti-reductionist and unbridgeable gap arguments, generally being against any attempts to explain human faculties in physical science terms.
Overview
In 1926, Cooley, in his “The Roots of Social Knowledge”, argued the following: [3]
“When in reading a meditative writer like Marcus Aurelius, we know his consciousness and nothing else. There is no good reason to think that statistical methods can anticipate that which, after all, chiefly distinguishes human life from physical processes, namely, original mental synthesis.”
Cooley, according to American philosopher-sociologist George Mead, questioned the validity of applying theories taken from the physical sciences to the activities of human beings—to the effect that thermodynamic laws, in their view, did not appear to make sense of psychological realities; Cooley wrote, for example: [1]
“The physical law of persistence of energy in uniform quantity is a most illusive one to apply to human life. There is always a great deal of more mental energy than is utilized, and the amount that is really productive depends chiefly on the urgency of the suggestions.”
In 1983, American sociologist Philip Rieff, in his introduction to a reprint of Cooley’s 1902 Human Nature and the Social Order, employs a whole coterie of thermal words: [2]
“Human Nature and Social Order is a classic examination, first published in 1902 and then again in a revised edition in 1922, of the flash point at which the human imagination ignites to produce the infinitely adjustable social temperature without which man has not yet learned to live. That flash point may produce the cold of the concentration camp or the warmth of family.”
There is a lot going on in this statement, to say the least.
See also
● Human thermodynamics (objections to)
References
1. (a) Russett, Cynthia E. (1991). Sexual Science (pgs. 162-63; also: entropy, pg. 128). Harvard University Press.
(b) George Herbert Mead – Wikipedia.
2. (a) Cooley, Charles H. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order (Introduction by Philip Rieff, pg. ix). Transaction Publishers, 1983.
(b) Philip Rieff – Wikipedia.
(c) Flash point – Wikipedia.
3. (a) Cooley, Charles H. (1926). “The Roots of Social Knowledge” (pgs. 65, 77), American Journal of Sociology,12:59-79.
(b) Brown, Richard H. (1977). A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences (pg. 145). University of Chicago Press, 1989.
External links
● Charles Cooley – Wikipedia.
