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Golden Mean (Aristotelian) scales

The issue is whether to have unipolar (zero to big) scales; or Aristotelian bipolar scales; with zero in the middle, and the optimum being the middle (golden mean). The "Golden mean" comes from Aristotle, and his view is that all virtues are of this type e.g. cowardice vs. foolhardiness, with the good point being between the two.

Much psychology describes things in terms of unipolar scales when perhaps bipolar would be more appropriate for the underlying concept.

Big 5 personality dimensions (FFM = five factor model) (OCEAN) re-expressed as Aristotelian scales

• Openness Curiosity — Conservative, closed-minded, traditional, concrete thinker. Creative vs. imitative. High vs. low value for experience, and staying with what you know about. ? Valuing what is different vs. what is the same, in common. (Also: prefer abstraction/generalisation vs. concrete.) (or: prefer reasoning vs. memory.) Prefer novelty vs. familiarity (in goals? or ideas?). Put like that, the golden mean is some of each; not just fashion or just tradition.
  Willing vs. reluctant to do any more thinking rather than staying with established ideas. I put it like this, because Open people can stay with their new ideas forever, so novelty is not itself the heart of it.
• Conscientiousness — Attention to details — spontaneous, focus on the bigger picture and goal. High/low impulse control. Attention to external measures of achievement VS. internal ones, multiple goals, pleasure. (Or is it: attention on performing the actions more than checking the effects and/or the underlying goal.)
• Extraversion / intraversion. Outgoingness — Roughly: liking for other people, sociability? Highly reactive and responsive vs. more responsive to internal goals and values. Do/not think before I act; vs. driven by outside stimuli. Action driven by external vs. internal cues. Presence vs. absence of extraversion. (Actually, a unipolar scale in essence.)
• Agreeableness Friendliness — How much you care about pleasing other people; about social harmony. [Cf. Truth, relevance, and emotional impact on the hearer, as the criteria for selecting what to say / suppress.] Prefer social vs. non-social goals or Agreeable vs. antagonistic or Social harmony vs. conflict. But can you say this is a clear preference for honesty, straightforwardness, truth-telling?
• Neuroticism Nervousness — Tendency to express negative emotion. Emotionally un/stable. How easily upset vs. calm. Not about positive emotion: only about how easily negative emotion is aroused. [hard to see this as valuable.] Perhaps: instant desire to fix any problem, vs. tolerate problems without acting on making improvements. I.e. a threshold of how-negative before action is taken. Sensitivity to goal-violation / maintainence. Good for preserving goals through restless maintainence vs. conserving energy. Or focus on avoidance vs. approach goals.

Why use Aristotelian for IDiffs?

You say that doesn't apply to IQ? but actually you have a hard time showing that IQ isn't just a cultural value: if it were objective then you should be able to show both that IQ has relentless selection pressure for high IQ, and that these with high IQ are functionally more successful.

What is wrong with unipolar scales; what diff. scales are poss.

Scales may be open-ended at one or both ends: unipolar, bipolar.
E.g. Money: zero is clearly defined, unbounded in the other direction.

Separately, you can ask where the optimum point is:

At both ends, with the midpoint being worst.

An opposite case

An opposite point is made in Positive Psychology, that a focus on clinical disorders leads to a field that is dedicted to lifting great unhappiness up to a clinical threshold of ordinary unhappiness, but failing to study normal people, and how to go beyond zero to higher well-being. So this is another example about how research focussed on dysfunction leaves us with an unbalanced understanding of human experience (in this case, failing to study happiness and different degrees of excellent functioning); but where a better scale should be unipolar, and the midpoint would be the clinical threshold where dysfunction borders with function.

Yin and Yang

At first you might think that Yin/Yang is a classic dichotomous contrast of opposites; or possibly an Aristotelian 2-extreme case, where almost everything (and certainly the best) is in between. But actually it is an opposite of either-or, thesis-antithesis, where the law of the excluded middle holds, and only one opposite or the other is allowed. Similarly it is the opposite of a digital setup. In most digital electronics, a value may be 0 or 1, but nothing else nor anything in between. With an ordinary flight of stairs, you can be at rest on one step or another, but not in between two steps.

But Yin and Yang is also different from a golden mean where the midpoint is the ideal. Instead it is for those obsessed with wholeness, of the inescapability of having both: life and death; darkness and light; two faces of a single coin. It is a dualist concept, where the opposites depend on each other.

This was drawn to my attention by a passage in Ursula Le Guin's "The left hand of darkness".

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