Frank (2019): Chapter 1, Introduction

This is the first post to a new book that I'll be starting by Till Frank (2019), Determinism and Self-Organisation of Human Perception and Performance. From my understanding, this book represents Frank's attempt at a universal, law-based approach to understanding human behaviour. I was particularly drawn to the focus on applying concepts from complex systems theory to the understanding of human behaviour. Ideas from complex systems theory (as well as dynamical systems theory and synergetics) have found a home in ecological psychology as the appropriate methodological and conceptual frame to study human behaviour. However, while I've mostly explored topics such as affordances, information, philosophy of mind, etc., I've largely neglected the dynamical part of the picture. Hence, this series of blog posts represents my effort to better understand such concepts, especially as they apply to human behaviour.

At the moment, it's unclear how much of the book draws explicit links to ecological psychology (there are only 2 mentions of ecological psychology in the book, at least from a preliminary search). However, this shouldn't be an issue. As mentioned, the main aim of this study is to get familiar (and hopefully, comfortable) with the language of dynamics, so that I may be better positioned to critically engage with the plethora of (ecological) literature that is complemented with dynamical approaches. Besides, Frank is an associate professor at the famed CESPA programme at UConn (that Turvey helped create), so I'm sure the ideas introduced will meld well more generally with ecological psychology.