Ethics: A Radical-constructivist Approach (via Constructivist Foundations)

From the open access journal Constructivist Foundations [9(2), March, 15, 2014], this is an interesting and somewhat philosophical exploration of taking a radical constructivist approach to ethics.

While radical constructivist models generally deal only with cognitive knowledge, Quale seeks to find a way to also include non-cognitive knowledge as a way to expand the parameters of radical constructivist theory to include the capability of constructing ethical frameworks.

Presented below are the first two sections of the text, as well as the commentaries on this article from other scholars. Complete references are available at the CF site. PDF is free to download following registering name and email address.

Ethics: A Radical-constructivist Approach

Andreas Quale • Dept. of Teacher Education, University of Oslo, Norway

Context • The theory of radical constructivism offers a tool for the evaluation of knowledge in general: especially with regard to its epistemic and ontological character. This applies in particular to knowledge that is non-cognitive, such as, e.g., ethical convictions.  
Problem • What impact can radical constructivism have on the topic of ethics? Specifically, how can ethical issues be resolved within a radical-constructivist epistemic approach?  
Method • I extend the theory of radical constructivism to include also items of non-cognitive knowledge. This makes it possible to discuss ethical issues, which are non-cognitive, in a constructivist epistemic and ontological perspective. Some arguments against this conception of “strictly personal ethics” are discussed.  
Results • Radical constructivism is neutral on ethical issues, and thus cannot be invoked to endorse any particular ethical position. However, this causes no problem for the theory: the individual knower will construct her own ethical values and convictions, as part of her store of noncognitive knowledge, in interaction with her environment (including other individuals). Hence ethical values cannot be argued in cognitive terms; and this elevates the knower into a position of personal responsibility with respect to ethical issues.  
Constructivist content • I focus on the role played by radical constructivism in the approach to cognitive vs. non-cognitive knowledge. The construction of knowledge (of any kind) emerges as a strictly personal enterprise. For instance, in the context addressed here, constructed non-cognitive knowledge forms a basis for the individual knower’s ethical position.

Radical constructivism and the notion of cognition

« 1 » Ernst von Glasersfeld [1] defines radical constructivism (rC) as an epistemic theory, based on two fundamental propositions, which may be summarized as follows (Glasersfeld 1995a):

rC1: Knowledge is not passively received, but is actively constructed by the cognising
subject.
rC2: The function of cognition is adaptive, and serves the subject’s organization of her own experiential world, not the discovery of an objectively given reality.

« 2 » Thus, knowledge is constructed by, and resides in, the individual knower – i.e., the person who possesses this knowledge. it is based on her sense perceptions and her reflections upon these, and serves as a model describing some part of her own experiential world. According to rC there is no “right way” to perform such a construction: in other words, it is not possible to identify a “correct” model – i.e., one that gives a faithful and correct description of the world.

« 3 » For the arguments that follow below, it is important to observe that these two propositions make explicit reference to cognitive knowledge, and to the role played by cognition in our construction of knowledge.

« 4 » The term “cognition” is generally taken to denote mental activities of rational thinking, knowing and reasoning. There is an extensive amount of discussion of this topic in the literature – see, e.g., the comprehensive and exhaustive article by Robert Wilson and Lucia Foglia (2011). Here I propose to “sharpen” this concept a little, focussing on its significance for communication of the knowledge that is constructed. Thus, I take the term “cognition” to refer to aspects of knowledge that are not based on emotion or volition. The “product of cognition,” here regarded as a result of learning, will be denoted as “cognitive knowledge.” [2]

« 5 » To illustrate, let us consider some examples of knowledge that is not cognitive. It will be convenient for our purposes to take the notions of “personal preference” and “personal belief ” to be subsumed under the general category of “emotion.” so, consider the following statements, which might be made by an individual knower:

ƒ “I shall now leave this room” (volition, an act of decision by the knower)
ƒ “I love her” (an emotion, as felt by the knower)
ƒ “I like jazz music” (a personal preference of the knower)
ƒ “I believe in God” (an element of the knower’s personal faith)

« 6 » These statements describe different types of non-cognitive knowledge, as experienced by the knower, and hence they may serve to illustrate some aspects of “what cognition is not.” So, with this as background, let us ask: What is it then?

« 7 » According to the viewpoint that will be adopted here, the most important characteristic of cognitive knowledge is that it is based on reasoning of some kind, using rules and procedures that can be agreed on, and the knowledge thus subsequently demonstrated and communicated by the knower
to other individuals. (The natural sciences, such as physics, of course offer prime examples of such knowledge.) On the other hand, non-cognitive – sometimes termed “affective” or “emotive” – knowledge deals with personal experiences that cannot be thus demonstrated or communicated: emotion, volition, preferences, values, likes and dislikes, beliefs, etc. Two simple examples illustrate this distinction: I can demonstrate and communicate to you how newton’s law of gravitation operates, and how it describes many observable features of the solar system – this forms part of my store of cognitive knowledge; but I can not demonstrate or communicate to you how it “feels” for me to like a particular piece of music, why I like it (and why you should like it too..!) – this is an instance of non-cognitive knowledge on my part.

« 8 » Thus knowledge, as possessed by a knower, may be described by two mutually exclusive attributes: cognitive and noncognitive. Note that any particular item of knowledge, as constructed by a human knower, will in general have both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects: i.e., aspects that are communicable to other knowers, as described above, and aspects that are not. Thus, consider, e.g., the knowledge experienced by an individual person, embodied in the statement “I shall now leave this room” given above. As it stands, this statement is an expression of non-cognitive knowledge, describing volition: a decision of the individual knower that he intends to leave the room. But this decision will only make sense if this person knows that he is present in a room, and that there are means of exiting (say, an unlocked door) – and these items will be experienced by him as cognitive knowledge, which can be demonstrated and communicated to other individuals in the room. It is in this context of communicability that knowledge is characterised, in the argument presented here, as being cognitive or non-cognitive. [3]

« 9 » With this in mind, we shall now widen the scope of the two basic propositions rC1 and rC2 of rC, shown above. As they stand, they deal only with cognitive knowledge, and with cognitive learning as the procedure for gaining such knowledge. So, let us consider the following slightly amended versions of these two propositions (with changes from the original text shown in italics):

rC1ʹ: Knowledge of any kind is not passively received, but is actively constructed by the knower.
rC2ʹ: The function of the process of construction is adaptive, and serves the knower’s organization of her own experiential world, not the discovery of an objectively given reality.

« 10 » As is evident, the propositions rC1ʹ and rC2ʹ now address any kind of knowledge, not only the cognitive kind. Or, equivalently: the theory of rC, originally restricted by rC1 and rC2 to apply to cognitive knowledge only, is now extended to apply to all kinds of knowledge construction.

« 11 » With this extension in mind, we now move on to the topic of ethics.

Ethics: A non-cognitive dimension of RC

« 12 » I maintain, and will argue here, that ethical issues belong to the non-cognitive dimension of knowledge, and hence fall outside the scope of cognitive knowledge, (based on reasoning using agreed-on rules and procedures), such as described above. Thus, the truth value of an ethical proposition cannot be communicated between individual persons in the form of cognitive knowledge, as this is defined above. In this sense, then, it seems appropriate to describe rC as being ethically neutral. However this claim, while valid as far as it goes, needs some further elaboration. So, let us take a closer look at some of the implications of rC for ethical issues.

« 13 » It may be noted that the purported ethical neutrality of rC has acquired certain strongly negative connotations. For instance, it has been taken by some to have rather ominous political implications – thus, it has been claimed that for radical constructivists “there can be no commitment to democratic values…,” and (even worse) that this theory “…seems far more at home with non-democratic forms of educational and governmental practices” (McCarty & schwandt 2000: 77f). Now, these are grave charges, and they need to be seriously addressed. We will return to this issue below, and demonstrate that the charges are unfounded.

« 14 » It is a notable fact that several authors have maintained that the ethical neutrality of rC does indeed constitute a problem for the theory. among these authors we find many of its critics (e.g., nola 1997 and slezak 2000), but also some of its supporters (e.g., Hardy & taylor 1997). in fact, in a book by Leslie steffe & Patrick Thompson (2000b) dedicated to the epistemology of rC, a number of  articles address the relevance of ethics in this context; and in this book von Glasersfeld himself states that one desirable goal for the future is that “the radical constructivist agenda should include an effort to develop viable theoretical models in the areas of ethics and social interaction” (Glasersfeld 2000: 8).

« 15 » So, one may well ask, must the self-professed ethical neutrality of rC with respect to ethical issues be considered as a deficiency of the theory? To answer this question, we shall have to take a closer look at the meaning of ethics, when considered in a radical constructivist perspective. Let me hasten to say, though, that this is not the place to undertake a thorough discussion of the discipline of ethics, which indeed constitutes a broad and diverse branch of philosophy, extensively discussed in the literature. Here, we will adopt a rather narrow and simplistic viewpoint, and discuss how ethical issues may connect with the theory of rC.

« 16 » The term “ethics” is generally taken to address issues of morality in a wide sense (e.g., Gert 2012) – with the underlying idea of establishing standards of right and wrong, or of good and bad, with regard to human character and conduct. This has been a major topic of investigation by philosophers throughout human history. Moreover, it constitutes an important aspect of many religious beliefs, where it is generally grounded in the notion of divine decree: to the believer, it is the authority of her religion that gives support to her ethical convictions. In general, it deals with interpersonal relationships, addressing the issue of what is the “right way” for us to behave towards other people. [4] Note that the existence of this environment is accepted as given (thus repudiating the philosophical position of solipsism); on the other hand, any knowledge of it must be constructed in the mind of the knower, and there is no way to identify any one construction as being objectively “right” or “true.”

« 17 » We shall be concerned with what is known to philosophers as normative ethics. This is an inquiry into, or a theory describing, standards (norms) of right and wrong as guidelines for human behaviour – it aims to prescribe what people ought to do, or how they ought to behave, in various concrete situations. it should be noted that such a theory requires ethical argumentation: it must provide some answers to questions of why a given course of action is ethical, while another is not. [5]


NOTES for the above sections.

1 | The theory of rC was originally proposed by von Glasersfeld (1974, 1983, 1991, 1995a, 2000). Cf. also the discussion in Quale (2008).
2 | it should be noted that this is a somewhat restrictive definition of the concept of cognition. Indeed, von Glasersfeld generally uses this term in a wider sense in his discussion of the construction of knowledge in rC (e.g., Glasersfeld & Varela 1987; Glasersfeld 1991b). However, I am arguing that this restriction, as presented here, can provide some additional insight into the construction in rC of “intangible” items of knowledge, such as, e.g., ethical convictions.
3 | I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the need to clarify this point.
4 | In fact, many would extend the notion of ethics to address our relationship with all living organisms, now and in the future; in this wider perspective, maltreatment of animals and damage done to the environment would also become ethical issues.)
5 | of course, such argumentation will generally tend to reflect the actual practices of whatever cultural context it originates in. For instance, in a society using slave labour – as many societies have done throughout history right up to recent times – one might expect to meet ethical arguments defending the proposition that there is nothing morally reprehensible about the institution of slavery, and that it is in fact a perfectly acceptable way to organise the labour force.

Commentaries on this article from other scholars (published in the same journal, same issue):

Constructing Models of Ethical Knowledge: A Scientific Enterprise (Open Peer Commentary)

Leslie P. Steffe

Abstract · Full text in PDF (113 kB)

Ethics: A Sociological View (Open Peer Commentary)

Philip Lewin

Abstract · Full text in PDF (75 kB)

Can a “Generic” Subject Produce an Ethical Stance through Its Own Cognitive Operations? (Open Peer Commentary)

Jacques Désautels

Abstract · Full text in PDF (94 kB)

Cognition Made Neat and Tidy (Open Peer Commentary)

Marie Larochelle

Abstract · Full text in PDF (99 kB)

Radical Constructivism Is Neutral (Open Peer Commentary)

Hugh Gash

Abstract · Full text in PDF (93 kB)

When Sharp Distinctions Fail to Be Useful (Open Peer Commentary)

Armin Scholl

Abstract · Full text in PDF (78 kB)

Constructivists Should Drop the Claim of Ethical Responsibility (Open Peer Commentary)

Mathis Danelzik

Abstract · Full text in PDF (75 kB)

Some Questions about Responsibility (Open Peer Commentary)

Jack Lochhead

Abstract · Full text in PDF (75 kB)

Søren Brier - Cyber[bio]semiotics: Through Bateson, Luhmann, & Peirce

In this talk from University of Oregon Conference on Biosemiotics and Culture, Søren Brier, Professor of Culture and Communication Studies, Copenhagen Business School, gives a presentation on the development of cyber(bio)semiotics. You can read more of his papers on Academia.edu.

What is Cybersemiotics? 

What makes Cybersemiotics different than other approaches attempting to make a transdisciplinary theory of information, cognition, and communication, is its combination of four approaches:

1. A physic-chemical scientific paradigm based on third person objective empirical truth and mathematical theory but with no conceptions of experiental life, meaning and first person embodies consciousness and therefore meaningful linguistic intersubjectivity. 

2. A biological and natural historical science approach understood as the combination of genetic evolutionary theory with an ecological and thermodynamic view based on the evolution of experiental living systems as the ground fact, engaged in a search for empirical truth, but with no theory of meaning and first person embodied consciousness and thereby linguistic meaningful intersubjectivity.  

3. A linguistic-cultural-social structuralist constructivism that sees all knowledge as constructions of meaning produced by the intersubjective web of language, cultural mentality and power, but with no concept of empirical truth, life, evolution, ecology and a very weak concept of subjective embodied first person consciousness, but taken conscious intersubjective communication and knowledge processes as the basic fact to study (the linguistic turn).

4. A phenomenological (Husserl) or actually phaneroscopic (Peirce) first person point of view taking conscious meaningful experiences before any distinction between subject and object as the ground fact, on which all meaningful knowledge is based, considering all result of the sciences including linguistics and embodiment of consciousness as secondary knowledge. This includes an intersubjective base in that Peirce considers all knowledge as intersubjectively produced through signs only emotions are Firstness.

The integrative transdisciplinary synthesis is done in two steps: The first one is to accept two major but insufficient and very different transdisciplinary paradigms as both legitimate:

1. The second order cybernetic and autopoietic approach of Luhmann’s triple autopoietic system theory of social communication  

2. The Peircean phaneroscopic, triadic, pragmaticistic, evolutionary, semiotic approach to meaning, which is leading to modern biosemiotics, based in a phenomenological intersubjective world of partly self-organizing triadic sign processes in an experiental meaningful world.

In the final step the two are integrated in the Peircean framework by inserting the modern development of information theory and self-organizing emergent chemo- biological phenomena as an aspect of semiotic evolution creating the Cybersemiotic framework, where sign process and evolution become the ground reality, on which our conceptions of ourselves, action, meaning and the word are built.

Interesting stuff . . . .

Cyber[bio]semiotics: through Bateson, Luhmann, & Peirce

Søren Brier, Professor of Culture and Communication Studies, Copenhagen Business School, gives a presentation as part of the University of Oregon Conference on Biosemiotics and Culture. This conference, organized by Visiting Professor Wendy Wheeler and Molly Westling, focuses on the cultural dimensions of this new interdisciplinary field that explores meaningful relationships and communication throughout the living world. This communication includes the whole range of behaviors from intracellular code exchanges to interspecies communication and human language and culture. This new field has enormous potential for reintegrating cultural studies with the life sciences and opening new perspectives on the evolution of language and the arts.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman on Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Back in 2011, neuroscientist David Eagleman spoke with Wired's David Rowan about his then-new book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. I seriously enjoyed this book as an excellent complementary text to Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Here is the text from the dust jacket:

If the conscious mind--the part you consider you--is just the tip of the iceberg in the brain, what is all the rest doing?  Neuroscientist David Eagleman plumbs the depths of the subconscious brain to illuminate surprising questions: Why can your foot jump halfway to the brake pedal before you become consciously aware of danger ahead?  Why do strippers make more money at certain times of month, even while no one is consciously aware of their fertility level?  Is there a true Mel Gibson? What do Odysseus and the subprime mortgage meltdown have in common?  How is your brain like a conflicted democracy engaged in civil war?  Why are people whose name begins with J more likely to marry other people whose name begins with J? Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? Why did Supreme Court Justice William Douglas deny that he was paralyzed? The subsurface exploration includes waystops in brain damage, drugs, infidelity, synesthesia, criminal law, the future of artificial intelligence, and visual illusions--all highlighting how our perception of the world is a hidden and awe-inspiring construction of the brain.

At The Hospital Club on 6 April 2011, Wired magazine's editor David Rowan sat down in conversation with David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The SecretLives of The Brain, who spoke at length about some of the fascinating insights contained within it. The invite-only conversation is now available to all in the video below.

Intersubjective Systems Theory in Psychoanalysis - An Overview

George E. Atwood, Robert D. Stolorow, and Donna M. Orange are the core theorists of intersubjective systems theory, a form of psychoanalytic practice that focuses on the relational origins of mental distress and does so through the interpersonal and intersubjective relationship of the analyst and analysand. 

These theorists, all of whom are practicing psychoanalysts, have rejected the Cartesian version of self as a unitary, isolated entity, and have likewise rejected mental illness as an intrapsychic dysfunction. In their model, which relies heavily on phenomenological philosophy as its explanatory foundation, the patient's troubles (excluding organic disease or physical trauma) exist only within the experiential and relational contexts in which they developed.

There are two powerful and often implicit beliefs that underlie most current psychotherapeutic models: (1) the Myth of Modeling, "a way of thinking which over-emphasizes the conscious, cognitive, rational and technique based aspects of the psychoanalytic encounter" (Mikko Martela and Esa Saarinen, 2008), and (2) the Myth of the Isolated Mind (Stolorow and Atwood 2002), a remnant of the Cartesian dualism that has infected Western philosophy until the middle of the 20th Century and still is embedded in modern psychology.

Intersubjective systems theory (IST, or intersubjectivity theory) proposes that minds are not isolated, unitary things that exist as individual entities, as though in a vacuum. Rather, minds exist within interpersonal and intersubjective relationships, beginning at birth (and even before) with the attachment bond to the mother, and they develop within interpersonal, intersubjective, relational contexts. 

Here is a wide-angle definition of intersubjectivity from Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish (2009):

Gillespie, A. & Cornish, F. (2009). Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40:1; 20-46.

Intersubjectivity is central to the social life of humans. Thus, unsurprisingly, research pertaining, either directly or indirectly, to intersubjectivity spans many research areas of psychology. In developmental psychology it lies just below the surface of widely used concepts such as decentration (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), theory of mind (Doherty, 2008) and perspective taking (Martin, Sokol and Elfers, 2008). In neuroscience, intersubjectivity has recently become a popular topic with the discovery of “mirror neurons” which are thought to provide a neurological basis for imitation, theory of mind, language, and social emotions (Hurley & Chater, 2005). In the field of comparative psychology, there has been a surge of interest in intersubjectivity, in the form of investigations of possible perspective-taking amongst, for example, monkeys (Tomasello, Call and Hare, 2003) and scrub jays (Emery & Clayton, 2001). Intersubjectivity, going by various names, is also central to research on communication. Phenomena such as addressivity, double voiced discourse, and dialogue are deeply intersubjective (Linell, 2009). Intersubjectivity has also been identified as important in small group research because it has been found that mutual understanding within small groups creates increased efficiency, reliability and flexibility (Weick & Roberts, 1993). Research on self and identity has long emphasised the importance of Self’s perceptions of Other’s perceptions of Self (James, 1890; Howarth, 2002). In the field of counselling, much therapeutic effort is directed at resolving misunderstandings and feelings of being misunderstood both of which indicate dysfunctional intersubjective relations (Cooper, 2009). (p. 20)

Unfortunately, intersubjective theory falls into an area of overlap between psychology and sociology, and the insularity of each has precluded any serious cooperation in terms of research. Most of the research has been done in the realm of psychology and philosophy (especially by Stolorow and Orange).

Peter Buirski (Practicing Intersubjectively, 2005) offers a concise explanation of mind as understood by IST:

Mind, as understood by current developmental research, is a relational construction. As we have discussed previously, there is no subjectivity without intersubjectivity and there can be no intersubjectivity without subjectivity (Buirski and Haglund, 2001). That is, subjective worlds of personal experience are inextricably embedded in intersubjective systems. When viewed from a systems or contextual perspective, distinctions, like those between one-person and two-person psychologies, are revealed as too limited because worlds of personal experience encompass more than just the two people involved. (p. 4)

Kenneth Gergen (Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community, 2009) offers another way of looking at this, specifically at the therapeutic relationship within a relational context.

We now turn to the therapeutic relationship itself. From the present standpoint, how are we to understand the relationship between therapist and client, its potentials, and its efficacy? In responding to this question, we are invited to think beyond the tradition of bounded being in which the aim of therapy is to "cure" the mind of the individual client. The metaphors of the therapist as one who "plumbs the depths," or serves as a mechanic of the cognitive machinery must be bracketed. We also set aside the causal model in which the therapist acts upon the client to produce change. Rather, we are invited to view the therapist and client as engaged in a subtle and complex dance of co-action, a dance in which meaning is continuously in motion, and the outcomes of which may transform the relational life of the client.

Consider the situation: Both therapist and client enter the therapeutic relationship as multi-beings. Both carry with them the residues of multiple relationships. Therapists bring not only a repertoire of actions garnered from their history of therapeutic relations; they also carry potentials from myriad relations stretching from childhood to the present. Likewise, clients enter carrying a repertoire of actions, some deemed problematic, but alongside a trove of less obvious alternatives. The primary question, then, is whether the process of client/therapist coordination can contribute to a transformation in relationships of extended consequence. Can their dance together reverberate across the client's relational plane in such a way that more viable coordination results? This is no small challenge, for the client's plane of relationships is complex and fluid. (p. 282, Kindle Edition)

Much of IST is based in philosophy. Stolorow and his collaborators believe that in order to make sense of the therapeutic relationship, we need make objects of our subjective beliefs about the mind. If we believe in a unitary, isolated mind, we are going to relate to our clients as objects to be fixed, to see their pain as faulty scripts that we have the expertise to reprogram.



But if we believe in the social construction of mind within its physical, intrapsychic, intersubjective, and environmental contexts, then we are more likely to approach the client with a relational and co-constructive perspective on the therapeutic process, where healing comes from relationship and process (for example, the co-transference process).

This is how they explain the need for self-analysis:

Atwood, G.E., Stolorow, R.D. & Orange, D.M. (2011, Jun). The Madness and Genius of Post-Cartesian Philosophy: A Distant Mirror. Psychoanalytic Review, 98(3), 263-285.

In studying the psychological sources of philosophical ideas, we go against a pervasive opinion in contemporary intellectual circles that is rooted in Cartesianism. This opinion, perhaps surprising in its prevalence so long after the life and death of Descartes, arises from a continuing belief—one could almost say a mystical faith—in the autonomy of the life of the mind. The products of the mind are in this view to be treated as independent, self-sufficient creations, verified, falsified, or otherwise evaluated according to criteria that exist apart from the personal contexts out of which they arise. Any attempt to bring considerations of origin to bear on the understanding and development of intellectual works is seen to exemplify the unforgivable fallacy of ad hominem reasoning. It is therefore said that the study of the individual details of a thinker’s life, although perhaps of some limited interest as simple biography, can in principle have no relevance to the broader enterprise of the development or evaluation of that thinker’s work in its own terms. Intellectual constructions are claimed to have a life of their own, freely subsisting in the realm of public discourse, above and beyond the historical particularities of specific contributors’ personal life circumstances. (p. 264)

Our thesis here is that the task of self-analysis must be extended to the philosophical premises underlying psychoanalytic inquiry which, like all specific theoretical ideas in the field, also necessarily embody the analyst’s personal forms of being. Our approach to this great task is to study the individual worlds of selected post-Cartesian philosophers, with the aim of comprehending the psychological sources of each thinker’s specific repudiation of Cartesian doctrines. We hope to use the insights gained in this study as a distant mirror to which we may turn for a clarifying glimpse of how our own departures from the Cartesian view also reflect the patterns of our specific personal worlds. It is our additional faith that such an undertaking of self-reflection carries with it the possibility of the opening up of new pathways of inquiry for our discipline and the enrichment of psychoanalytic practice. (p. 266-267)

The following quotes are from Stolorow (in an interview) on the practice of IST in a clinical setting, which is it becomes useful for me as a clinician. It is important to note that there is no uniform body of technique to which all proponents of ITS adhere, nor is there any standardized or manualized series of interventions. If there is one thing upon which they all agree it's that every treatment is unique and must be created anew by its participants. So even Stolorow is only speaking for himself here, not for all the other advocates for ITS. 

Stolorow, R., & Sassenfeld, A. (2010, Summer). A Phenomenological-Contextual Psychoanalyst: Intersubjective-Systems Theory and Clinical Practice. Psychologist-Psychoanalyst: APA Division 39, Psychoanalysis; 6-10.

I describe intersubjective-systems theory as a "phenomenological contextualism." It is phenomenological in that it investigates organizations or worlds of emotional experience. It is contextual in that it claims that such organizations of emotional experience take form, both developmentally and in the therapeutic situation, in constitutive intersubjective contexts.
 

Developmentally, recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system give rise to principles that unconsciously organize subsequent emotional and relational experiences. Such unconscious organizing principles are the basic building blocks of the personality. They show up in the therapeutic situation in the form of transference, which intersubjective systems theory conceptualizes as unconscious organizing activity. The patient's transference experience is co-constituted by the patient's unconscious organizing principles and whatever is coming from the analyst that is lending itself to being organized by them. A parallel statement can be made about the analyst's transference. The interplay of the patient's transference and the analyst's transference is an example of what we call an intersubjective field or system.

From an intersubjective-systems perspective, all of the clinical phenomena with which psychoanalysis has been traditionally concerned: manifest psychopathology, transference, resistance, therapeutic impasses, therapeutic action, emotional conflict, indeed, the unconscious itself are seen as taking form within systems constituted by the interplay between differently organized, mutually influencing subjective worlds. (p. 6)

And more from the 2010 interview with Sassenfeld:

One's philosophical presuppositions, and one's awareness or unawareness of them, can have a monumental clinical impact. For example, the Cartesian objectivist analyst who sees himself/herself as treating deranged isolated minds and correcting "distortions" of what he/she "knows" to be true can unwittingly retraumatize his/her patients by repeating devastating early experiences of massive invalidation. On the other hand, the phenomenological-contextualist analyst, in seeking to understand and make sense out his/her patients' experiences in terms of the contexts of meaning in which they occur, no matter how bizarre these experiences may seem to be, helps to create a therapeutic bond in which genuine psychological transformation can gradually take place. (p. 6-7)

But this does not lead inevitably to some form of navel-gazing relativism.

A phenomenological, contextualist, perspectivalist stance, although embracing a fallibilistic attitude of epistemological humility and a level epistemological playing field in the therapeutic situation (no one has privileged access to truth and reality), should not be confused with postmodern nihilism or relativism. Relativity to context and to perspective is not the same thing as a relativism that considers every framework to be as good as the next. Pragmatically, some ideas are better than others in facilitating psychoanalytic inquiry and the psychoanalytic process. Moreover, we do not abandon the search for truth, that is, for lived experience.

Intersubjectivity theory holds that closer and closer approximations of such truth are gradually achieved through a psychoanalytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective awareness is enlarged for both participants. Truth, in other words, is dialogic, crystallizing from the inescapable interplay of observer and observed.

My own phenomenological orientation did not, by the way, originate in Kohut's self psychology. Its origins go back to a series of studies that George Atwood and I conducted in the early and mid-1970s investigating the personal subjective origins of four psychoanalytic theories. These studies were collected together in our first book, Faces in a Cloud, which was completed in 1976 (although not published until 1979), one year prior to the birth of Kohut's self psychology. In the concluding chapter of our book, we reasoned that, since psychoanalytic theories can be shown to a significant degree to be shaped by the personal subjectivity of their creators, what psychoanalysis needs to be is a theory of subjectivity itself--a depth psychology of personal experience broad enough to encompass, not only the phenomena that other theories address, but also these theories themselves. We christened pur proposed framework "Psychoanalytic Phenomenology," but that appellation never caught on. It was that framework that gradually evolved into intersubjective-systems theory.

A phenomenological emphasis does not in anyway entail abandonment of the exploration of unconsciousness. Going back to the father of philosophical phenomenology; Edmund Husserl, phenomenological inquiry has never been restricted to mere description of conscious experiences. Phenomenological investigation has always been centrally concerned with the structures that unconsciously organize conscious experience. Whereas philosophical phenomenologists are concerned with those structures that operate universally, a psychoanalytic phenomenologist seeks to illuminate those principles that unconsciously organize individual worlds of experience. Such principles include, importantly, those that dictate the experiences that must be prevented from coming into full being, that is, repressed, because they are prohibited or too dangerous. Intersubjective-systems theory emphasizes that all such forms of unconsciousness are constituted in relational contexts. The very boundary between conscious and unconscious (the repression barrier) is seen, not as a fixed intrapsychic structure within an isolated mind, but as a property of ongoing dynamic intersubjective systems. Phenomenology leads us inexorably to contextualism. (p. 7)

One of the key phrases, coming originally from Donna Orange, that explains ITS is "making sense together." In fact, Peter Buirski and Pamela Haglund used it for the title of their book (Making Sense Together: The Intersubjective Approach to Psychotherapy, 2001).

According to Orange (1995, p. 8), "Intersubjectivity theory sees human beings as organizers of experience, as subjects. Therefore it views psychoanalytic treatment as a dialogic attempt of two people to understand one person's organization of emotional experience by 'making sense together' of their shared experience" (p. 26)

Another note of clarification is needed here. Although ITS makes a point of the co-transference and the co-creation on the intersubjective space, there is not full equality in the relationship. I, as the therapist, am talking less than my client and offering questions, clarifications, or interpretations when I do speak, while the client is telling me the story of who s/he is and how it feels to be in that subjective space. 

In practice, what a ITS psychotherapist says in a session may look no different than what any experienced psychotherapist might say in a session. Buirski (2005) notes:

I try to articulate my grasp of the other's subjective world of experience, which is what I believe most good therapists, regardless of theory, do most of the time. Perhaps the difference lies in the inverse: what distinguishes the therapist working from the intersubjective systems perspective from the therapists working from other orientations is to be found more in what they do not do or say than in what they actually do or say. For example, we try to avoid taking an objectivist stance, assuming that we are privy to some greater authority or knowledge than the other. And we avoid pathologizing, which is revealed by a focus on the person's maladaptive behaviors or motives, like his masochism. Instead we wonder about how the person's striving for health might be obscured by behaviors or motives that appear self-defeating. (xvi-xvii). 

Finally, the following comments from Stolorow come from a 1998 article/response to another author (George Frank) who had raised objections to the ITS model. This piece is an attempt to explain the foundational ideas of intersubjective systems theory more clearly (and to discredit the critic). Stolorow and his collaborators were getting a lot of push-back from more traditional psychoanalytic therapists who thought they were staging a coup (they were, really, bringing a whole new perspective into the psychoanalytic and therapeutic equation). There are many similar articles from the 1990s, including some from Donna Orange, as well.

Stolorow, R.D. (1998). Clarifying the intersubjective perspective: A reply to George Frank. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(3), 424-427. doi: 10.1037/0736-9735.15.3.424

In response to Frank, G. (1998). The intersubjective school of psychoanalysis: Concerns and questions. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(3), 420-423. doi:10.1037/0736-9735.15.3.420

I have quoted almost all of the article since it was short and the material is less coherent without the full context.

First, the collaborators of intersubjectivity theory have not sought to create yet another "school of psychoanalysis," if what is meant by that phrase is a fixed metapsychological doctrine with accompanying rules of technique. Rather, the intersubjective perspective offers a unifying framework for conceptualizing psychoanalytic work of all theoretical schools. The hallmark of our viewpoint is a clinical sensibility emphasizing "the inescapable interplay of observer and observed" (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, p. 9). It is not our aim to have our theory replace Freud's "as the theory that can explain the psychological life of humans" (Frank, 1998, p. 420). On the contrary, intersubjectivity theory exists at a different level of abstraction and generality than does Freud's and other psychoanalytic theories, in that it does not posit particular psychological contents that are presumed to be universally salient in personality development and in pathogenesis. It is a process theory offering broad methodological and epistemological principles for investigating and comprehending the intersubjective contexts in which psychological phenomena, including psychoanalytic theories (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993), arise. It also provides a framework for integrating different psychoanalytic theories by contextualizing them. From an intersubjective perspective, the content themes of various metapsychological doctrines can be de-absolutized, de-universalized, and recognized as powerful metaphors and imagery that can become salient in the subjective worlds of some people under particular intersubjective circumstances (Orange et al., 1997).

Second, we have never made the absurd claim, which Frank attributed to us, that "there is no objective reality" (Frank, 1998, p. 421). We have instead consistently maintained that objective reality is unknowable by the psychoanalytic method, which investigates only subjective reality as it crystallizes within the intersubjective field of an analysis. Frank was correct when he concluded that from our point of view the analyst has no privileged access to "what is really going on between patient and analyst." All psychoanalytic understanding is interpretive. This means that there are no neutral or objective analysts, no immaculate perceptions, no God's-eye views of anything. Intersubjectivity theory holds that closer and closer approximations of "what is really going on" are gradually achieved through an analytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective selfawareness is enlarged for both participants. There is no danger of solipsism or of relativism here, only a contextual, perspectival, and fallibilistic epistemology (Orange, 1995) that consistently "opens our horizons to expanded possibilities of meaning" (Orange et al., 1997, p. 89).

Third, Frank was incorrect when he inferred that our intersubjective contextualism means that we "have moved away from" (Frank, 1998, p. 422) our focus on the invariant principles that unconsciously organize experience:

Some may see a contradiction between the concept of developmentally preestablished principles that organize subsequent experiences and our repeated contention that experience is always embedded in a constitutive intersubjective context. This contradiction is more apparent than real. A person enters any situation with an established set of ordering principles (the subject's contribution to the intersubjective system), but it is the context that determines which among the array of these principles will be called on to organize the experience. Experience becomes organized by a particular invariant principle only when there is a situation that lends itself to being so organized. The organization of experience can therefore be seen as codetermined both by preexisting principles and by an ongoing context that favors one or another of them over the others. (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 24)

Fourth, Frank confused the aim of analysis with the method of analysis when he mistakenly concluded that we advocate "analyzing] the interaction between patient and analyst to understand the nature of that interaction" (Frank, 1998, p. 422). From our perspective, the aim of an analysis has always been the illumination of the patient's world of personal experience, but the method of investigation must continually take into account its own exquisite context sensitivity:

The development of psychoanalytic understanding may be conceptualized as an intersubjective process involving a dialogue between two personal universes. The goal of this dialogue is the illumination of the inner pattern of a life, that distinctive structure of meanings that connects the different parts of an individual's world into an intelligible whole. The actual conduct of a psychoanalysis . . . comprises a series of empathic inferences into the structure of an individual's subjective life, alternating and interacting with the analyst's acts of reflection upon the involvement of his own personal reality in the ongoing investigation. (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 5)

[Intersubjectivity theory] views psychoanalysis as the dialogic attempt of two people together to understand one person's organization of emotional experience by making sense together of their intersubjectively configured experience. (Orange et al., 1997, p. 5)

Fifth, contrary to Frank's misperception, there is nothing in our view of psychoanalytic investigation that could result in "ignoring the patient's history" (Frank, 1998, p. 423):

Clinically, we find ourselves, our patients, and our psychoanalytic work always embedded in constitutive process. Process means temporality and history. To work contextually is to work developmentally. To work developmentally is to maintain a continuing sensibility to past, present, and future experience.... [It] affirms the emotional life of persons who have come from somewhere and are going somewhere. (Orange et al., 1997, p. 77)

Sixth, it is clear, I hope, that Frank (1998) seriously mischaracterized our views when he claimed that we "abandon" the intrapsychic world or adopt "an extreme position contra Freud's intrapsychic orientation" (p. 423). I close with an explicit statement of our position on this matter:

We must emphasize, because we are often misunderstood on this point [!], that the intersubjective viewpoint does not eliminate psychoanalysis's traditional focus on the intrapsychic. Rather, it contextualizes the intrapsychic. The problem with classical theory was not its focus on the intrapsychic, but its inability to recognize that the intrapsychic world, as it forms and evolves within a nexus of living systems, is profoundly context-dependent. (Orange et al., 1997, pp. 67-68)

Additional References:

Buirski, P. & Haglund, P. (2001). Making Sense Together: The Intersubjective Approach to Psychotherapy. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson.

Buirski, P. (2005). Practicing Intersubjectively. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson.

Gergen, K. (2009). Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. NY: Oxford University Press.

Martela, M. & Saarinen, E. (2008). Overcoming the objectifying bias implicit in therapeutic practice – Intersubjective Systems Theory complemented with Systems Intelligence. Unpublished manuscript.

Stolorow, R.D. & Atwood, G.E. (2002). Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life. Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ.

Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape our Lives by Jesse Prinz

Sounds like an interesting new book from philosopher Jesse Prinz - reviewed by Simon Blackburn at The New Statesman. It looks like Amazon has it for the Kindle, but the hardcover has to be ordered from other vendors. The U.S. version is not out until November - but it can be pre-ordered.

Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape our Lives

By Jesse Prinz

Reviewed by Simon Blackburn Published 16 January 2012
 

Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape our Lives
Jesse Prinz
Allen Lane, 416pp, £22

It is astonishing how quickly nature has gone into retreat. Until five or ten years ago, the dominant story was that our genes were our fate. Our fixed endowments in the shape of unlearned capacities, innate modules, biologically hard-wired dispositions and evolutionary inheritances from the savannah dominated the scene, with culture and history relegated to mere bit players.

The first cracks in the consensus appeared with the realisation that genes work differently in different environments. For example, it was discovered that if rats were separated into two groups, one of which received maternal care and love while the other did not, parts of the brain grew better in the former group and they were less likely to flood themselves with stress hormones such as cortisol. So, if you want a laid-back rat, mother it properly. Epigenetic factors began to muscle in on the DNA monopoly.

Of course, in human beings we already knew - didn't we? - that such environmental factors affected children's characters. And it didn't take much guessing to suppose that it did this by making some difference to their brains. But somehow it took the addition of brain scans and neurophysiological and endocrinal data from rats to make such beliefs respectable again, so that anthropology could begin to claw back ground from biology.

Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at the City University of New York, has written an excellent guide to the current state of play. Prinz is admirably cautious about the nature-nurture dispute, which always has to come down to matters of detail and degree. His interest is in human flexibility, although he freely admits that "we need very sophisticated biological resources to be as flexible as we are". Nevertheless, it is clear where his sympathies lie. Early in the book he tells us that only "a tiny fraction of articles in psychology journals take culture into consideration". So it is time to redress the balance, and Prinz does it with insight, learning and above all a wonderful eye for the weaknesses in biological reductionist arguments.

Prinz lays out his case by first considering the difference between colour vision, which is a natural capacity with a well-understood biological underpinning, and the capacity to play baseball, which requires putting together a number of general capacities in a way that takes a great deal of nurture to develop. The question, then, is the size of the innate inventory of capacities, rules, dispositions and tendencies, shaped over time by evolution, and themselves constituting adaptations to older environments. Are they large, computationally fixed and relatively inflexible, like colour vision? Or is it more a matter of general-purpose abilities (running, balancing, throwing, remembering) exquisitely tuned by culture and learning into one form or another, like baseball?

In the former camp we have evolutionary psychologists, nativists and those who like a picture of the mind as a kind of Swiss Army knife: an aggregation of dedicated modules rigidly shaped by evolution. In the latter camp, we have those who stress general purpose learning capacities, which in one environment might enable you to become a cricketer, but in another a baseball player. At the dawn of the scientific revolution, the philosophical ancestors of the first group were rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz, who saw the mind as ready-furnished by God with a nice array of innate capacities. The ancestors of the second group were the empiricists, who thought that we needed no such interior designer. Experience could do the furnishing all by itself.

Ever since the work of Noam Chomsky in the middle of the 20th century, our capacities with language have been one of the major battlegrounds. The trump card of Chomsky and his followers is the "poverty of stimulus" argument. This alleges that empiricism cannot account for language learning. We learn too much, too quickly, making too few mistakes, extrapolating what we learn too accurately, for this to be the result of any general empirical learning process. Out of all the myriad possible patterns linguistic systems might implement, the infant almost miraculously picks up the right one, with far too little experience or correction to explain the unfolding capacities. Only a few theorists have dared to challenge this Chomskyan consensus. And Chomskyans are certainly right that the infant cannot be doing it by consciously formulating rules, since even expert linguists often cannot do as much.

Prinz makes a strong, detailed case that statistical learning, the poster child of empiricism, can account for everything we know about language learning. Children do not just imitate, they extrapolate. They try things out. They take patterns they hear and extend them experimentally. They are unconsciously nudged into shape by the regularities in the data sets to which they are exposed. And this makes sense: the brain is designed to pick up on patterns in the environment, whether they indicate edibility in food, change in the weather, the passage of a predator, the way to cook a squirrel, or the acceptability of a new sentence. Instead of arriving packed with innate universal grammars, we come ready to pick up whatever the world is going to throw at us. The quicker we learn its ins and outs, the better.

The example may sound dry, but there is a vital humanistic lesson in the book. It has been all to easy to cite "innate" differences as justifications of the social status quo, when too often it is the social status quo that generates the illusion of the innate differences. For example, the belief that girls are naturally girlish and boys naturally boyish ignores the ubiquitous pressures to conform to the acceptable pattern, starting well before birth and reinforced throughout life. Prinz writes well about this, too. Similar remarks apply, of course, to those who, themselves belonging to the supposedly superior group, put different IQ scores or arithmetical or musical ability down to differences of race, before reflecting on the social and cultural environments of those who are being compared.

Prinz's final chapter is about sex, but I shall not spoil the plot. Suffice it to say that we are not naturally polygamous, or monogamous, or anything else, except perhaps naturally inclined to bend the truth on questionnaires. "Those who want to understand our preferences will learn more from history books than from chimpanzee troops in the Gombe," Prinz tells us. "[B]iology can help explain why we are more likely to flirt with a person than a potato, but that's just where the story begins."

From start to finish this book is a fine, balanced, enormously learned and informative blast on the trumpet of common sense and humane understanding. The story is largely optimistic but also reminds us that when things go wrong around us, we are all capable of going wrong with them.

Simon Blackburn is Bertrand Russell professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. His most recent book is "Practical Tortoise Raising and Other Philosophical Essays" (Oxford University Press, £25)