Preface to "What Actually Happens"
Sometimes it is better just to make a fresh start.
Just as a building may be so ramshackle that it can neither bear the weight it must nor be refurbished or enlarged effectively, so also may a social or intellectual structure be so deficient and self– defeating that any procedure which involved accepting it in general in order to correct some deficiencies in particular would be as hopeful and productive as slapping Uncle Remus’ Tar Baby around. In such circumstances one naturally tries to salvage what one can, but a fresh start is indicated.
I take this to be evidently the case with the social and intellectual institutions which have come to be self–characterized as “behavioral science” and, further, with the more general social–intellectual structure within which “behavioral science” is carried on. Under the former heading I include at least (1) a miscellaneous collection of behavioral theories and models, including the psychoanalytic, phenomenological, cognitive–developmental, S–R, physiological, “systems,” and “miniature theory” genres, and (2) a miscellaneous body of customs and practices, one among which is to give some of the others such honorific designations as “methodology,” “metatheory,” “experimental design,” and so on. Under the latter heading I would include at least the disciplines of philosophy of science, semantic theory, moral philosophy, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.
I report these as observations, not as a bill of particulars, for I do not intend to come to cuffs with that Tar Baby. Part of what is involved in making a fresh start is that I shall not survey or critically examine the most nearly related work in behavioral science or philosophy as it now exists, except occasionally, and then for heuristic purposes, not scholarly ones. The work of introducing an alternative intellectual climate and conceptual idiom must precede any work of comparison and appraisal. Moreover, it may be advisable to leave these later tasks to others.
The Tar Baby problem may be put in this form: Any present critical survey or critical analysis of theories or theses within the traditional intellectual structure could be accomplished only by recourse to theories, disciplines, vocabularies, customs, or norms within the same general structure and would therefore be vitiated by the deficiencies of the structure as a whole and at these points. And any attempt to clear up these difficulties would face the same problem. And so on. The more we struggle with the deformities and deficiencies of our traditional intellectual framework, the more we are stuck with it. Since there appears to be no way out, the prudential course is not to get in. If there is an alternative, we do not have to get in.
It is a general feature of traditions and ways of thinking that in–house technical criticism will be provided for, and even encouraged, whereas fundamental criticism will appear to be wrongheaded, incomprehensible, naive, or blindly antagonistic, except within an alternative outlook. It is not merely that to a tic–tac–toe player the world consists of noughts and crosses. It is also that his ultimate standard of criticism and the ultimate form of his reality testing is “But will it get me three in a row?” The way to avoid this particular form of self–validation is to do something else instead.
By a “fresh start” I do not mean anything very dramatic or exotic. The reference is essentially to a procedure and only consequently to a product. The procedure is simply to be directly responsive to the fact of persons and behavior and to our intellectual, practical, and scientific needs in respect to them and to give these concerns complete priority over any concern for preserving traditional or current scientific or philosophical theories, methodologies, vocabularies, customs, practices, or social norms. I do not, therefore, in any way wish to suggest that the alternative outlook I shall present has no connection and no resemblance to anything at all in our intellectual and scientific history or that it could not be categorized within any of the traditional taxonomies. At most, I should want to suggest that to understand it primarily in such terms is to miss the point entirely.
I shall be concerned primarily with the presentation of an alternative outlook. I take it that most of those who can see or sense that there is something fundamentally defective in the way we have gone about our efforts at a behavioral science are properly more concerned with an alternative that is not hopeless than they are with an impeccable demonstration of what it is that has gone wrong. And since understanding the alternative involves not only mastering some explicit formulations but also acquiring some level of implicit competence (“tacit knowledge,” “apperceptive mass,” “know–how,” etc.), I have chosen for this presentation the relatively free form of a monograph, or extended essay, rather than a more mannered academic form such as would be appropriate for an introductory textbook, a theoretical presentation, a philosophical argument, a critical review, or a technical exposition.
Formally, the alternative is a single complex concept, or conceptual system, in which we can distinguish four major, logically interrelated components. The overall concept is currently designated as the “Human Model” or “Person Concept.” (At various times I have referred to it as the “Behavioral Model,” “Intentional Action System,” “Reality System,” and “Three–system System.” There does not seem to be a really satisfactory term to use here.) The four major components are the concepts of Reality, Person, Behavior, and Language. The social enterprise of generating and using these and related formulations as technical resources in a behavioral science has been consistently designated as “Descriptive Psychology.” I expect that at least three monographs will be necessary for a minimum presentation of the Person Concept. Of these, the present volume deals with reality concepts. As now envisaged the second will deal with persons and behavior. The third will deal with language and science. The fourth and subsequent volumes will deal with behavior theories, status dynamics, personality assessment, psychopathology, personal change, and other topics.
Because of its complexity and scope, I do not believe it is possible to give a satisfactory orienting characterization of the Human Model any more than it is possible to give a perspicuous characterization of the general intellectual and human outlook to which it provides an alternative. Instead, I will simply warn against approaching it or reflecting upon it as though it were a familiar something such as a psychological theory, a metatheory, an experimental methodology, a metaphysics, a philosophy of science, a system of psychotherapy, a piece of linguistic analysis or conceptual analysis, an axiomatic formal system, et cetera. It is not a way of getting three in a row.
Obviously, any claim to be offering an alternative of the scope suggested above will smack of grandiosity. I make no apologies for that. It is highly unlikely that any such alternative would be recognized as being of this kind if it were not presented as sui generis and with suitable disclaimers, for nothing could be more inevitable than for a member of la dolce vita academica to recognize it as a familiar nought or cross and treat it accordingly. Perhaps the most that can be done here is to call attention to the kind of difficulties, ambiguities, and temptations to which the reader will be exposed in the course of the presentation. Most of these are captured elegantly in the classic two liner:
Gil:Do you believe in baptism?
Wil:Believe in it? Man, I've seen it done!
I am presenting an alternative, not describing one or arguing that there is one.
One of the novel features of the presentation of the Person Concept is that, although it involves many declarative sentences, it does not involve making statements or assertions. Instead, what I shall be doing with those verbal performances is (a) delineating concepts, i.e., constructing or exhibiting forms of representation (corresponding to articulated concepts), or else (b) illustrating the use of these concepts in behavioral science both as pre–empirical foundations and workaday technical resources for empirical and explanatory efforts. (Note that doing the first of these is a way of doing the latter and that frequently the reverse is the case.) Thus, unlike the usual technical exposition, the presentation is one for which questions of truth cannot arise (logically cannot arise, since concepts cannot be true or false and neither can behaviors). Rather, questions about the truth of any statement presuppose the Person Concept or some equivalent thereof, since it is only within such a framework that any such question can be formulated, understood, reacted to, or acted upon.
The form of presentation is something of a necessity. Concepts cannot be told, nor can they be stated. This is a concomitant of their not having any possible truth value. Further, unlike the case of presenting a thesis or a theory to an audience, the presentation of a concept is a rare undertaking, and there is no conventional or reliable way to accomplish it. In general, if one does anything, one teaches concepts rather than presents them. The task of presenting a concept is, in Cavell’s phrase, the task of getting someone to see, and that falls in some unknown region between teaching and telling. Generally, technical concepts are presented in the form of (and incidental to) a set of paradigmatically True statements which make up a theory or model. The use of these concepts is, therefore, preempted by the paradigmatic statements, and that is reasonable because for such concepts those verbal paradigms do indeed define their use as technical terms. In the present case it is of critical importance not to preempt either the use of the central concepts or the truth about the real world in this way. The central concepts are not invented technical concepts, and their primary use is neither in verbal behavior nor in the search for truth. Hence the reliance on illustration rather than definition and on the general behavioral use of language rather than its specifically statement making use. (The systematic formulation of language as a form of behavior will be given in a subsequent monograph.)
Just as concepts cannot have truth values, neither can they have assumptions or presuppositions, and the present behavioral form of presentation is in accordance with this limitation. The procedure illustrates an alternative to the traditional academic folk wisdom which has it that “You have to make some assumptions.” Heuristically, the procedure provides a kind of antidote to the myopic preoccupation with Truth and deduction which is endemic to philosophers and experimental technicians. Such a preoccupation would be a severe handicap in understanding the Human Model. After all, there is nothing there that could be believed—or doubted.
The preoccupation with Truth is not merely a handicap. It leads to many incidents of the Wil and Gil variety. For example, typically, a philosopher who encounters some portion of the Person Concept will do more or less the following. (1) He will invent some statements which are being made, and he will be (properly) dubious of their Truth value. (2) He will invent some assumptions or presuppositions which ‘underlie’ these statements, and he will be (properly) dubious about their Truth value also. (3) He will categorize the ‘theory’ under one of the traditional philosophical rubrics (which one depends on who is doing the categorizing; they have ranged from idealism to behaviorism). (4) He will condemn or disdain the ‘theory’ on the grounds that that kind of theory encounters known difficulties. Since all existing philosophical theories are criticizable in this way that is not a risky judgment. (5) He will disdain the whole enterprise as philosophically naive (because it was not presented under the philosophical rubric, because it’s naive to think that philosophy offers fundamental answers or solutions, and because everybody knows there’s nothing new under the sun). Or else he will condemn the enterprise as evasive or disingenuous, because you have to be making assumptions, and anyone who denies it has got to be joking, or, . . . , et cetera. (6) Finally, he will ignore warnings to the effect that he is completely off target (for he knows better than that) or he will address himself to such warnings as naive or disingenuous statements. Having got three in a row, he retires from the field.
There are exceptions, of course, but they are not frequent among American philosophers. We may note the incidence of such imperviousness, but without a common ground, e.g., in competence, coercion, or good faith, there appears to be no effective way to get around it. Indeed, such a transcendent and savage attachment to Truth is perhaps best left untouched by merely human agency. What we can do is to go on about our business as behavioral scientists and keep somewhere in mind the moral that our past preoccupations with Truth (no less in denying it than in searching for it) have limited our understanding of the real world and thereby limited severely the kinds of truth we have thought to inquire about empirically and the ways in which we have gone about the inquiry.
Ordinarily, to present a single monograph as the first of four or five is to invite the judgment that one is trying to live off promissory notes as though they were hard cash. I do not have any qualms of this kind about such a commitment. Descriptive Psychology is an actuality, not an IOU. Most of the material for these volumes is already at hand, and most of that has borne from three to ten years of criticism and revision in consultation with students and colleagues. Several partial or preliminary formulations have been published previously and others have been in existence for years as instructional materials. For example, the transition rule formulation of the reality concepts (Section II of the present volume) was initially accomplished in 1964 in connection with the original draft of “Persons,” being published for limited circulation in 1966, and the three–element formula for verbal behavior had already been achieved in 1962.
It is characteristic of Descriptive Psychology that, although systematization is insisted upon, a priori formalization is resisted. Typically, the descriptive and notational system has been extended by first dealing successfully with a conceptual, clinical, or experimental problem, then asking in retrospect “What did we do that was decisive?” and only later systematizing and extending the answer and using it elsewhere. For example, the reality formats introduced in Section III of the present volume reflect a solution to some technical problems in optimizing communications networks and in providing computer systems with functional self–knowledge; similarly, the “theory of empiricism” presented in Section III and elsewhere is partly a development in the field of “status dynamics,” which in turn is an outgrowth of a conceptual analysis and therapeutic strategy for dealing with clinical depression; likewise, the calculational formulation of the concept of behavior to be presented in Volume II stems from the ad hoc use of a defective form of behavior description in analyzing and comparing apparently incommensurable theories of schizogenic family interaction. Thus “the system” has grown in a fragmentary and saltatory way, with reconciliation and dovetailing of the disparate elements coming generally after the fact and with some unexpected rewards. Descriptive Psychology is primarily an intellectual and human outlook, competence, and enterprise, not a verbal technology; and it is from that outlook and competence that the various phenomena of behavior and persons can be dealt with, codified, and understood.
The field is developing at a sufficiently rapid pace to make a definitive summary of the state of the art impossible. As a result of recent developments an up–to–date systematization of the Person Concept is due. And one might say that a comprehensive presentation of some fundamentals to a general audience is long overdue. This tardiness is not accidental. If its practitioners are unanimous about anything it is that although Descriptive Psychology is effective and rewarding as a way of being an intellectually responsible scientific practitioner (clinician, experimenter, teacher), it is painful and unrewarding as a subject matter for a merely discursive presentation to any kind of traditional audience. Indeed, if one had to assume that such an effort would be substantially successful in order for it to make sense to try, no such effort would be forthcoming. Thus, it is after some years of delay and with some distaste and serious reservations that I have undertaken the systematic presentation. Since public commitment increases the likelihood of performance, it seems advisable to make the commitment public and to begin now.
Peter G.Ossorio, 1976
