Conceptual Therapy: an Introduction to Framework-Relative Epistemology

CONCEPTUAL THERAPY: AN INTRODUCTION TO FRAMEWORK- RELATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY STEVEN ~ BARTLETT CONCEPT[JAL THERAPY: AN INTRODUCTION TO FRAMEWORK-RELATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY STEVEN J. BARTLETT Copyright © 1983, 2014 Steven James Bartlett Website: http://www.willamette.edu/~sbartlet STUDIES IN THEORY AND BEHAVIOR Saint Louis, Missouri Printed in the United States of America First printing, 1983 eBook edition, 2014 The author has decided to make this copyrighted work available as an open access publication, freely available to readers through Project Gutenberg under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which allows anyone to distribute this work without changes to its content, provided that both the author and the original URL from which this work was obtained are mentioned, that the contents of this work are not used for commercial purposes or profit, and that this work will not be used without the copyright holder’s written permission in derivative works (i.e., you may not alter, transform, or build upon this work without such permission). The full legal statement of this license may be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode To err is human; To remain in error is crazy. (Found in a Chinese fortune-cookie) Human history presents a spectacle of the repeated failure of great ideas to penetrate the human heart. (Jacob Needleman: The Heart of Philosophy) Note to the reader Blank pages contained in the first edition have been allowed to remain in this eBook edition in order to preserve the original page numbering. CONTENTS Acknowledgements 7 Background 9 Forew~rd 11 To the Teacher 13 PART I. THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CONCEPTUAL THERAPY Chapter 1. Conceptual Therapy 19 Introductory Note 21 Overview 23 The Idea of Conceptual Therapy 25 Chapter 2. Detecting Conceptual Short-Circuits: Preliminary Self-Tests 31 A Nice March Day 35 Analysis of Philosophical Belief System 39 A Cha II en·ge to the Reader 45 Chapter 3. How to Show that You Know that You Know: Methods for Epistemological Demonstration 47 The Three Principal Methods 51 Examples 54 Transcendental Deductions 57 On Self-Referential Argumentation 63 Problems 64 Chapter 4. The Metaframework of Framework-Relative Epistemology 67 A Basis for Epistemology 69 A Self-Validation of the Metaframework 73 Some Reflections 73 Chapter 5. The lnescapability of Conceptual Therapy: Epistemo- logy and the Double-Bind 75 Chapter 6. The Practice of Epistemology 81 Sample Epistemologial Analyses 84 Carnap's Criterion of Meaning 84 Poincare, on Mathematical Creation 88 A Gap in Memory 90 Mathematics and Linguistic Relativity 92 Exercizes 95 Some Epistemologically Problematic Issues 97 Symptoms of Epist~mological Pathology 99 Argument Assessment Guidelines 103 Instructions for Argument Assessments 106 From Dangerous Pitfalls to Firm Ground 107 Contextually Relative Justification 110 Chapter 7. Postscript to Part 1: On Framework-Relative Epistemology 113 PART I I. APPLICATIONS AND EXTENSIONS Chapter 8. Towards a Unified Concept of Reality 123 Chapter 9. The Idea of a Metalogic of Reference 133 Chapter 10. Phenomenology of the Implicit 143 Chapter 11. Self-Reference, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Science 161 Chapter 12. Referential-Consistency as a Criterion of Meaning 189 Suggestions for Further Study 207 Acknowledgements The belief that the subject-matter of this book is relevant, important, and interesting is due in large measure to the encouragement I have received over the years from three men. Robert M. Hutchins, whose presence in the world is now sorely missed, offered an example of dedication through his 1 ife and his work, to the ideals of what he 1 iked to call The Great Conversation, the dialogue of the past two thousand years which is the foundation of western civilization. I am indebted to Paul Ricoeur, who gave his strong support to the early thought this book rests on. He is a true scholar, a generous teacher, and a person of rare integrity. I would 1 ike to express my thanks to C. F. von WeizsMcker, former Director of the Max-Planck-lnstitut in Starnberg, West Germany, for his invitation to continue my research in Starnberg during the period 1974-75. My indebtedness of course goes beyond these men. I am grateful to my colleague and good friend, Raphael J. Becvar, whose general systems approach to family therapy greatly encouraged my interest in building bridges between epistemology and therapy. Finally, and perhaps most of all, I am indebted to my mother, Elizabeth Bartlett, whose sharp intellectual curiosity and excitement in the company of great ideas were conveyed to me in many formative philosophical conversations which usually lasted hours beyond midnight. Acknowledgement is gratefully made of the following journals, from which these papers by the author are reprinted: "Towards a Unified Concept of Reality", ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1975, pp. 43-49. "The Idea of a Metalogic of Reference", Methodology and Science, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1976, pp. 85-92. "Phenomenology of the Imp! icit", Dialectica: Revue internationale de philosophie de la connaissance, Vol. 29, Nos. 2-3, 1975, pp. 173-188. "Self-Reference, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Science", Methodology and Science, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1980, pp. 143-167. "Referential Consistency as a Criterion of Meaning", Synthese, Vol. 52, 1982, pp. 267-282. 7 Background The main ideas in this work have been a long time incubating. Many can be traced back twenty years, when 1 was majoring in physics as an undergraduate. At that time, it seemed to me that many of the basic principles we were taught to use in solving physics problems were doubtful and frequently unclear, through no fault of my teachers. It gradually became evident to me that the questions I wished to ask could not be answered in physics, for they . were questions about the foundations of physics, which physicists must presuppose in order to get on with their tasks. In my last year in college, I therefore decided to shift my major to philosophy, hoping to find there a metaframework which would make possible the reflective enterprise I wished to participate in. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that philosophy is made up of competing philosophies, in any one of which the practitioners of that branch seemed reluctant~ ask foundational questions about their own approach. Phenomenology, at least the phenomenology of the young Husser!, captured my interest and taxed my patience for about seven years, seeing me through graduate school and my first university teaching appointment. Phenomenology promised to provide a meta framework of the sort I wished for, one that could be used to examine critically and reflectively the special theories of the sciences, and, at the same time, provide a clarity of self-understanding that would make the choice of the phenomenological perspective non-arbitrary, and, in some sense, self-justifying. However, after seven years of effort, it seemed clear to me that this promise of Husser! 's phenomenology was still a promise-- in fact, a group of promises of a metaframework that had still to be evolved. During the more than half a century since Husser! published the first volume of his ldeen in 1913, phenomenology had fragmented into many provincialisms, some existentialist, some more methodologically oriented, but none any closer, I felt, to fulfilling the original set of promises. Too, the terminology of phenomenology, which began badly in Germanic convolutedness, ended badly: it was excessively inbred, top-heavy, and unnecessarily obscure. Phenomenology had itself become a branch of philosophy, one of the competing alternative paradigms, rather than a neutral metasystem for critical investigation. And so, disappointed, I decided to try to make my own path. My dissertation was a first attempt. It sought to use some of my phenomenological studies as a basis, in order to develop a self-referential metatheory of the sort I was aiming at. Since I found the vocabulary of concepts in phenomenology problematic in its own right, I set out to construct my own. It was, in retrospect, something of a philosophical private language: at least the 9 concepts I tried to develop and name were fami 1 iar only to a minority of one! It was a tribute to French open-mindedness, the true spirit of the liberal arts, and in particular a tribute to Paul Ricoeur, involved in creative work, to tolerate and even encourage efforts that claimed to stand against so much of tradition and against much that defined philosophy. This was more than a decade ago. Since then, I have tried to translate this early, technical vocabulary into a less specialized, more open system of concepts. The result is something I have come to ca 11 "conceptua 1 therapy". Whether it can serve as a basis for a neutral metaframework for philosophy as well as other disciplines, the tests of time will determine. 10 Foreword The history of science and technology could be re-written to show that their source is man's intellectual and physical laziness. As Whitehead pointed out, the whole object of science is to avoid thinking as much as possible. The progress of science coincides with progress in the effectiveness of its models. A model is a simplified representation of (usually only some aspect of) reality. Science concerns itself with investigating its own models, their predictive capabilities, their descriptive and explanatory power, their consistency. When a model shows signs of misfit, when the data do not conform to the expectations of a theory, the model is revised or discarded. Already, this is an admission that we require simplified representations to cope with a complex reality. It is also an admission that we expend our efforts in working on those representations, improving and developing them. We don't confront reality "head on".

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