Abstract

#2: Operational Similarity for Social-Systems Analysis

By

Dr. Russell Rhyne,

69 Lassen Drive * Santa Barbara, CA. * 93111 * USA: E-mail: RussRhyne@worldnet.att.net  

Operational similarity was woven into the practice of Mechanical Engineering more than 100 years ago. It is needed even more in social-systems analysis, but it has been shockingly neglected by there. Testing, statistical inference, and judging (or choosing) bridge across gaps in our causal understanding, allowing experience to guide us when strictly reasoned solutions cannot do so. Those devices only work well when contextual discipline is maintained, because the bridged-over causal relationships are different for operationally dissimilar contexts.

Contextual discipline will exist in the human (as in the physical) sciences when one:

• Designates the particular context or class of contexts from which test results, statistical data, and/or judgments (including assumptions) are drawn during a study or experiment.
• Stirs together only those inputs that are drawn from operationally similar contexts.

Two field conditions may be considered operationally dissimilar when the rules of interrelationship among their parts are markedly different, and when such differences exist, neither judgments nor statistical data from the two patterns may be legitimately melded. The rules of association within social fields are at least as subject to change when field conditions are altered as are the corresponding equations of state in physical fields. And yet, field tests of social-system programs regularly mix such results, and research conglomerates (such as Rand, SRI, NSF) fail to impose contextual discipline within and among their studies.

Contextual discipline still would be needed for social-system testing and statistical inference, in any case. If context matching (CM) theory of the act of choosing is even generally sound, that need extends to cover all kinds of applied social-systems research.