Deployment of attention has three sub-categories: distraction, concentration, and rumination.
I have a query about what kind of sentence this is. Is it teaching me a taxonomy, so that we have a common language for discussing the deployment of attention? Is it teaching me an empirical finding, that researcher have found natural clusters and, having agreed that there are three of them, have given them names. Perhaps I need to step back and say how I imagine research in psychology working.
I imagine that psychologists start off by drawing up taxonomies that make lots of fine distinctions. Perhaps, sitting in their armchairs on a Sunday afternoon, they dream up five kinds of attention: A, B, C, D, E. Over the next few months they classify hundreds of instances of the phenomena they are researching. Next they settle to counting and analyzing. Perhaps they have lots of A and C but hardly any B. And perhaps they never find a D that couldn’t just as well be an E, or and E that couldn’t just as well be a D.
So they end up with an empirical discovery, that there are three kinds of attention, A, C and D/E. it is a weak kind of knowledge; it is relative to the initial taxonomy. Had they started with a different list they would have got a different result. Nevertheless, it could be solid progress in a difficult area.
I hope that the previous two paragraphs clarify my query. When I read that there are three kinds of attention I don’t know whether I’m reading definitions (and should passively accept, since a definition cannot be an untrue statement of fact) or whether I’m reading an empirical claim (and should be trying to assess its plausibility and not lose track of who told me in case I want to update later).
Since my comment is obviously too long for what it asks, I’ve also got a meta-query. How should I be asking my base-level question? I hope that there is some standard terminology which makes it easy to ask whether a sentence such as “Deployment of attention has three sub-categories: distraction, concentration, and rumination.” is taxonomic or empirical.
Excellent comment! I’m not majoring in psychology, and although I find it fascinating, I don’t understand the vocabulary and conventions that well. I took the phrase to mean “this is a non-exhaustive list of the general strategies with which people have been found to use their attention to regulate emotions.” It’s obviously a simplification–there’s probably a thousand different variants on ‘rumination’, some of them blending into the other categories, etc–but it’s a more useful statement than individually detailing the emotional regulations strategies of 5000 people in a study.
I’d say it’s an empirical statement, based on the fact that the articles I read were in general meta-overviews of research in emotional regulation. A lot of that research involved your standard psych-study tasks–having people think about an emotional event and then do a fine-motor task, or weird stuff like that where it seems hard, to me, to know for sure what you’re actually measuring. So it’s not an incredibly rigorous empirical statement, but it’s not an armchair-philosophy statement either.
And as for your meta-query, your comment seems neither too long nor a bad way of asking the question.
I have a query about what kind of sentence this is. Is it teaching me a taxonomy, so that we have a common language for discussing the deployment of attention? Is it teaching me an empirical finding, that researcher have found natural clusters and, having agreed that there are three of them, have given them names. Perhaps I need to step back and say how I imagine research in psychology working.
I imagine that psychologists start off by drawing up taxonomies that make lots of fine distinctions. Perhaps, sitting in their armchairs on a Sunday afternoon, they dream up five kinds of attention: A, B, C, D, E. Over the next few months they classify hundreds of instances of the phenomena they are researching. Next they settle to counting and analyzing. Perhaps they have lots of A and C but hardly any B. And perhaps they never find a D that couldn’t just as well be an E, or and E that couldn’t just as well be a D.
So they end up with an empirical discovery, that there are three kinds of attention, A, C and D/E. it is a weak kind of knowledge; it is relative to the initial taxonomy. Had they started with a different list they would have got a different result. Nevertheless, it could be solid progress in a difficult area.
I hope that the previous two paragraphs clarify my query. When I read that there are three kinds of attention I don’t know whether I’m reading definitions (and should passively accept, since a definition cannot be an untrue statement of fact) or whether I’m reading an empirical claim (and should be trying to assess its plausibility and not lose track of who told me in case I want to update later).
Since my comment is obviously too long for what it asks, I’ve also got a meta-query. How should I be asking my base-level question? I hope that there is some standard terminology which makes it easy to ask whether a sentence such as “Deployment of attention has three sub-categories: distraction, concentration, and rumination.” is taxonomic or empirical.
Excellent comment! I’m not majoring in psychology, and although I find it fascinating, I don’t understand the vocabulary and conventions that well. I took the phrase to mean “this is a non-exhaustive list of the general strategies with which people have been found to use their attention to regulate emotions.” It’s obviously a simplification–there’s probably a thousand different variants on ‘rumination’, some of them blending into the other categories, etc–but it’s a more useful statement than individually detailing the emotional regulations strategies of 5000 people in a study.
I’d say it’s an empirical statement, based on the fact that the articles I read were in general meta-overviews of research in emotional regulation. A lot of that research involved your standard psych-study tasks–having people think about an emotional event and then do a fine-motor task, or weird stuff like that where it seems hard, to me, to know for sure what you’re actually measuring. So it’s not an incredibly rigorous empirical statement, but it’s not an armchair-philosophy statement either.
And as for your meta-query, your comment seems neither too long nor a bad way of asking the question.