Status Updates From Structuralism (Psychology R...

Alternate title: "shut up Chomsky".

"Genesis is simply transition from one structure to another, nothing more; but this transition always leads from a "weaker" to a "stronger" structure; it is a "formative" transition."

"The subject exists because, to put it very briefly, the being of structures consists in their coming to be, that is, their being "under construction.""

"Quite the contrary, it tends to integrate them, and does so in the way in which all integration in scientific thought comes about, by making for reciprocity and interaction."

"That it should have taken so long before its possibility was discovered is, of course, primarily due to the natural tendency of the human mind to proceed from the simple to the complex, hence, to neglect interdependencies and systematic wholes until such time as problems of analysis force them upon our attention."

"Not until the 19th century did man become the object of scientific study, and the human sciences will perish as surely as they came into existence. We do not and cannot know what new variety of episteme will take their place."

"We must admit that we do not really understand why the mind is more truly honored when turned into a collection of permanent schemata than when it is viewed as the as yet unfinished product of continual self-construction"

"When we consider how banal and at the same time dogmatic many of Malinovski's "Freudian" explanations are, it is no wonder that Levi-Strauss should at times take a rather Jim view of the explanatory import of biological and psychological considerations."

"So assimilation, the process or activity common to all forms of life, is the source of that continual relating, setting up of correspondences, establishing of functional connections, and so on, which characterizes the early stages of intelligence....But assimilation itself is not a structure."

"Not until he becomes old enough to reflect on his own habits and patterns of thought and action does the subject become aware of structures as such."

"Necessity, instead of being the prior condition for learning, is its outcome. Of course, human structures do not arise out of nothing."

"We answer, because we want to know, and cannot know a priori, whether man, nature, or both are the source of structure; and it is on the terrain of physics that they come together."

"We are thus brought to physics." "Physics physics physics physics physics....."-The Doctor