Preface to Persons
If there was ever a volume in psychology that merited the appellation, sui generis, it is the first volume of Peter Ossorio’s works, Persons (1966). When, in 1965, the first chapters were shared with those of us in Boulder, they came like a presentation from another world. He simply was not talking or writing in the way that ordinary psychology was conducted. Persons was neither a theory presented as possibly true and certainly testable empirically; nor a methodological treatise on how to conduct some varieties of psychological research; and it certainly was not the summary of a series of empirical studies. If Persons was not one of these three recognizable forms of professional writing, what was it? The other categories of writing that come to mind—personal essay, mystical insight—all invited the dismissal of the work as not serious and surely not the work of a sophisticated professional. But those of us who had conversed and argued with Peter knew that he was both sophisticated and serious, and that Persons represented his attempt to share a vision of how to think clearly and systematically about psychological topics.
Because Peter was starting fresh—not building directly on previous psychology theory—the initial problem in understanding was that readers would assimilate Persons (1966) to something that they already knew. In my case, I initially tried to see it as an extension of the conceptual portions of Fritz Heider’s (1958) Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, and, while there are some relevant kinships, it would be inaccurate to portray Persons (or Descriptive Psychology) in that fashion, for Peter’s work built in no way on Heider’s. (Peter’s account of intentional action was informed by Anscombe’s Intention [1957], and the similarities to Heider’s discussion of “desire,” “know,” “can,” and “try” reflect his appeal to the same deep structure that Heider had apprehended rather than to direct intellectual influence.) Similar kinships could be seen with Chomsky’s Syntactic Structure (1957), with Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), or with the analyses of several of the philosophical psychologists who owed their insight to the late Wittgenstein (1953). I am thinking of R. S. Peters’ The Concept
of Motivation (1958), Strawson’s Individuals (1959), and A. R. White’s “The notion of interest” (1964), among several others.
What I, along with many others, found was that the analogies that help me to get beyond puzzlement and irritation were drawn from instruction in a new set of conceptual tools—as in a newly invented mathematics or in double–entry bookkeeping (for those to whom this way of doing bookkeeping is a new way of thinking about the world.) When I could free myself to approach Persons that way, then the structure, interrelatedness, and comprehensiveness of the presentation in Persons quickly came to have meaning. Not long after I made this break¬through, I began to see how the distinctions intrinsic to intentional action and to the larger concept, persons, came to repeat themselves in each theory of behavior that I examined. First with Peter, and then on my own, I found myself able to use Descriptive Psychology concepts. The seven illustrative analyses contained in Part Four (“Theoretical Persons”) and in Part Five (“Ubiquitous Persons”) were a crucial starting place for me. These seven topics/issues are:
1.Mediation S–R Theory (Osgood, 1957).
2.Subjective Expected Utility Theory of Motivation (Atkinson, 1964).
3.Perceptual Defense Research (Goldin, 1964).
4.Prescriptions on Psycholinguistics (Miller, 1965).
5.Social Psychology of the Experiment (Orne, 1962).
6.Cognitive Aspects of Emotion (Schacter & Singer, 1962).
7.Ideographic vs. Nomothetic Approaches to Personality (Allport, 1937, 1961).
In these short analyses, Ossorio was able to show that the Person concept contained all the elements of logical structure required to describe, represent, and explain each case. Furthermore, the Descriptive Psychology analyses did not generate the conceptual confusions that were inherent in the (sophisticated) homunculus theories and in the characteristic insistence by these seven mainstream theorists that real science requires explanations in terms of underlying processes.
My first attempt at a critical analysis of research using a Descriptive Psychology approach was contained in the chapter “The self, intentionality, and reactions to evaluation of the Self” (Ossorio & Davis, 1968). That paper played a modest role in stimulating a critical reexamination of what research was being done, what significance it had, and of how to think about the theory–empirical research relationship within social–personality psychology. Gergen’s Toward Transformation in Social Knowledge (1982) and Smedslund’s Psycho–logic (1988) have each taken a somewhat more radical stance concerning the nonempirical quality of much social psychological research—see the critiques from a Descriptive Psychology point of view by Davis (1991), Mitchell & Davis (1985) and Ossorio (1991)— but several major figures in the field have come to recognize many of the hypotheses purportedly tested within the pages of mainstream journals are in fact derivable from tautologies or near tautologies (Wallach & Wallach, 1994; and the entire issue #4 of Psychological Inquiry (1991) edited by Pervin). And even though it has taken thirty years for positions such as Ossorio’s to become acknowledged, that should not surprise anyone.
As I revisited Persons to complete this labor of love, I found that I could see brief sections which would become the kernel of entire monographs. The discussions of “description” in Parts Two and Three lay some of the key ground work for the full–length treatment in Meaning & Symbolism (1969). The development of the concepts of part– and partial–descriptions invite the systematic presentation of forms of behavior desscription in “Notes on Behavior Description” (1967/1981), and the need to represent behavior as part of the real world invited a presentation of the transition rules (appearing first in Outline of Behavior Description, LRI Report No. 4a [1967] followed by the fundamental descriptive formats appearing first in “What Actually Happens” [1971/1975/1978] and subsequently modified in “The State of Affairs System” [1971].) The need for explicit rules, making it clear how to use the conceptual elements of the Person concept consistently, led first to the statement of maxims in various parts of Persons, then to nine maxims in “Notes on Behavior Description” (1967/1981), and finally to nearly 100 principles for Status Dynamic explanations in Place (1982). In a very real sense, all of Descriptive Psychology is there in Persons. Subsequent elaborations have arisen from the great variety of issues which former students and colleagues have approached with Descriptive Psychological tools. The Advances in Descriptive Psychology series contains many of these; others form the basis of the Descriptive Psychology Press’ publishing activities. Another major theme of Ossorio’s subsequent work is the explicit systematization of Descriptive Psychology concepts.
Persons is one of those books that must be read and reread, thought about and used, argued against and fought with. But one ignores it, even today thirty years later, at peril to one’s sanity, coherence, and personhood.
Keith E. Davis, Columbia, SC, September 1994
(I am indebted to Thomas O. Mitchell for reading these introductory comments carefully and suggesting several changes that improved their clarity and force, and for confirming my sense of the initial reaction of readers of Persons.)
