SYSTEM / INDUCTIVE
CYCLES OF
STRUCTURATION
LANGUAGE TO CONFIRM
NO-THING
ABANDON OBJECTIVITY
OBJECTIVITY/OBSCURING
SUBJECTIVE ORIGINS
LANGUAGE OF HYPOTHESIS
COMMON PREFERENCE FOR
CERTAINTY OVER MEANING
UNDERSTANDING Vs
OBEDIENCE
LAWFUL SUBORDINATION
SYSTEM / INDUCTIVE
Even the modern materialists, with all their
emphasis upon keeping one's eyes open to what is going on, are
caught 'observing' their inferences now and then, as if like the
dachshund who chased a 'strange animal' around a tree, they had
bumped into their own constructs. ...thus in some degree, the
observations of the most wide-eyed observer must be regarded as
inferential - and therefore constructive - in nature.
George Kelly
CYCLES OF STRUCTURATION
Yet none was a passive observer. Each projected
himself into his undertaking and thus marked it with his own character. ....Galileo undertook to project his notion of a
heliocentric universe into the everyday experience of man. It was
for that he was condemned, not for proposing it as an academician's hypothesis, as Copernicus before him had
done.
Humanistic science is science in the grasp of men, not men in the
grasp of science
1969/145
LANGUAGE TO CONFIRM NO-THING
It may seem that I am advocating the use of a
language in which nothing is ever confirmed. In a sense this is
true -- I am! The moment we find it practicable to regard the
floor as if it were hard we don't walk away from it leaving it
hard, but we always tack a little note on it that says, 'but
maybe its something else too'--or instead, 'I'll be back later to
see.'
1969/159
ABANDON OBJECTIVITY
I have already mentioned one surprise when I
said that we would have to abandon prejudice and objectivity both! The very thought of abandoning objectivity sounds just as
wicked to the narrowly indoctrinated psychologist of today as the
idea of abandoning other forms of revealed truth sounded to the
fundamentalists of another generation. Yet the doctrine of objectivity, as currently practiced in our world of
psychology,
looks to events as if they somehow abstracted themselves and
spoke out in their own direct revelations of profound truth.
1969/271-2
OBJECTIVITY/OBSCURING
...Escape that common pitfall of so-called
objective thinking, the tendency to reify our constructs and
treat them as if they were not constructs at all, but actually
all the things that they were originally only intended to construe.
69/85
SUBJECTIVE ORIGINS
What we tend to do is to accept familiar
constructs as downright objective observations of what is really
there and to view with great suspicion anything whose subjective
origin is recent enough to recognise. The fact that familiar
constructs have equally subjective--though possibly more remote--
origins usually escapes us.
LANGUAGE OF HYPOTHESIS
...The object of this discourse is only to
suggest how a certain kind of language form can enable us to
extricate ourselves from the kind of realism to which our
so-called objective language system has bound us. Nowhere is this
semantic enslavement clearer than in the psychotherapy room. It
is there one can see most clearly how man can be trapped by his
indicative verbs and how, in turn, he has been led to believe
that he must choose between mutually exclusive versions of reality.
69/162.
COMMON PREFERENCE FOR CERTAINTY
OVER MEANING
We would rather know some things for sure, even
though they don't shed much light on what is going on. Knowing a
little something for sure, something gleaned out of one's
experience is often a way of knowing one's self for sure, and
thus of holding on to an identity, even an unhappy identity. And
this in turn, is a way of saying that our identities often stand
on trivial grounds. If I can't be a man I can, at least, be an expert.
UNDERSTANDING Vs OBEDIENCE
A long time ago, so the story goes, man made a
fateful decision. He choose to live his life by understanding,
rather than obedience. This was doing it the hard way. The
outcome as most of you know from the story - if not from making
such a decision yourselves - was not a particularly happy one.
Because the story didn't have a happy ending. A good many people,
including the theologians who regard him as better off before the
so-called fall from grace, think Adam bungled things....in any
case, man, the poor fellow choose the toil and confusion of
knowledge instead of the pleasant and obvious rewards of
unquestioning obedience.
69/ 207.
LAWFUL SUBORDINATION
But if you lay down a set of legalisms for
governing future thought and action there can be only one outcome, and that is
this: tomorrow's vast challenges will be met
with nothing more astute than yesterday's petty restraints.
69/172
