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Logic, Syntax, and a Structural View

The Psychology of Trump's Hall of Mirrors

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  • © 2020

Overview

Authors:
  1. Harwood Fisher

    1. City College - CUNY, New York, USA

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  • Offers a new structural approach for the philosophy of psychology
  • Applies Colby’s PARRY project to generate insights into Donald Trump and his followers
  • Demonstrates how structural view provides a view of the person's logic and syntax as revealed in a communicative display

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
    Download chapter PDF

  2. The Structural View

    • Harwood Fisher
    Pages 1-17

  3. Values, Features, and Heuristics of a Structural View

    • Harwood Fisher
    Pages 19-31

  4. Reduction Versus the Expanding Manifold

    • Harwood Fisher
    Pages 33-41

  5. Development and History as Parameters of the Expanding Manifold

    • Harwood Fisher
    Pages 43-50

  6. Metaphor, Geometric Space, and the Structural View

    • Harwood Fisher
    Pages 51-57

  7. Logic and Schema Modalities

    • Harwood Fisher
    Pages 59-94

  8. The Proactive SV: Logical Form, Truth, and Sociopolitical Analogies

    • Harwood Fisher
    Pages 95-118

  9. The Metaphoric Float

    • Harwood Fisher
    Pages 119-129

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 131-167
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Keywords

About this book

This book presents a new structural approach to the psychology of the person, inspired by Kenneth Colby’s computer-generated simulation, PARRY. The simulation was of a paranoid psychological state, represented in forms of the person's logic and syntax, as these would be evidenced in personal communication. Harwood Fisher uses a Structural View to highlight similarities in the logical form of the linguistic representations of Donald Trump, his avid followers (“Trumpers”), and the paranoid—referred to as “The Trio.” He demonstrates how the Structural View forms a series of logical and schematic patterns, similar to the way that content analysis can bring forth associations meanings, and concepts held in the text. Such comparisons, Fisher argues, can be used to shed light on contingencies for presenting, representing, and judging truth. Specifically, Fisher posits that the major syntactic and logical patterns that were used to produce the computer-generated “paranoid” responses in Colby’s project can be used to analyze Donald Trump’s rhetoric and his followers’ reactions to it. Ultimately, Fisher offers a new kind of structural approach for the philosophy of psychology. This novel work will appeal to students and scholars of social and cognitive psychology, psychology of personality, psychiatric classification, psycholinguistics, rhetoric, and computer science.

Authors and Affiliations

  • City College - CUNY, New York, USA

    Harwood Fisher

About the author

Harwood Fisher is Professor Emeritus at City College, City University of New York, USA, and author of Schema Re-Schematized (2017), Self, Logic, and Figurative Thinking (2009), and The Subjective Self (2001). He researches subjective experiences as related to the logic of thinking, including logical and syntactic forms of metaphor and analogy.

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