Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept

Essential Attributes of Persons and Behavior

Wynn Schwartz

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780128139851
• eBook ISBN: 9780128139868
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept maps the common ground of behavioral science. The absence of a shared foundation has given us fragmentation, a siloed state of psychological theory and practice. And the science? The integrity of choice, accountability, reason, and intention are necessary commitments at the cornerstone of civilization and any person-centered psychotherapy, but when taught along with a "scientific requirement for reductionism and determinism, reside in contradictory intellectual universes. Peter Ossorio developed the Person Concept to remedy these problems. This book is an introduction to his work and the community of scientists, scholars, and practitioners of Descriptive Psychology.Ossorio offered these maxims that capture the discipline's spirit: 1. The world makes sense, and so do people. They make sense to begin with.2. It's one world. Everything fits together. Everything is related to everything else.3. Things are what they are and not something else instead.4. Don't count on the world being simpler than it has to be.The Person Concept is a single, coherent concept of interdependent component concepts: Individual Persons; Behavior as Intentional Action; Language and Verbal Behavior; Community and Culture; and World and Reality.Descriptive Psychology uses preempirical, theory-neutral formulations and methods, to make explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. The goal is a framework with a place for what is already known with room for what is yet to be found.- Provides a way to compare theories, coordinate empirical findings, and negotiate competent disagreement- Offers guidance for effective case formulation and integration of therapies- Explores the dilemmas of personhood and the complexities of human and nonhuman action, investigating "what is a person, and how can we be sure?"- Follows the implications of Hedonics, Prudence, Ethics, and Aesthetics as intrinsic perspectives and reasons for action- Applies these concepts to personality and social dynamics, consciousness, relationship change, emotional behavior, deliberation, and judgment- Provides a guide to establishing and restoring empathy--especially when it's difficult

Chapter 1

What Is Descriptive Psychology and The Person Concept?

Abstract

Descriptive Psychology is the intellectual discipline that makes explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. It concerns conceptual, preempirical, and theory-neutral formulations that allow and facilitate the identification of the full range of a subject matter. Descriptive Psychology explicates the Person Concept as the fundamental structure of the behavioral sciences. The Person Concept is a single, coherent concept which involves the interrelated concepts of Individual Person, Behavior, Language, and World. Descriptive Psychology establishes the rules of construction, composition, and relationship that articulate how these concepts are interconnected.

Keywords

Descriptive psychology; Person concept; Intentional action; Cognizant action; Deliberate action; Pragmatics; Preempirical; Peter Ossorio; Social construction; Behavioral logic

Let’s Start With “People Make Sense”

“What makes an individual a person is, paradigmatically, to have mastered the concept of a Person.” (Peter Ossorio, 1998/2012, Place).

“The ability that people have that enables them to understand people is the ability to use, or act on, a certain concept. This concept is designated as ‘the Person concept’ or, interchangeably, ‘the concept of the Person.’

Mastery and use of this concept are what is universal among persons. It is universal among persons because mastery of that concept and the routine spontaneous exercise of that mastery are what make a person a person.” (Peter Ossorio, 2006a, b, The Behavior of Persons).

When I first meet someone new to my practice, before I spend much time introducing myself, I ask them to orient me. I want to learn something about how they construct their concerns before I impose mine. Given my shopworn appearance, people sometimes suppose I’ve heard a story like theirs before. I am careful not to dismiss this recognition, but I point out I do not know them yet, and it will take time before I do.

Introducing the Person Concept creates a similar dilemma. Much will be familiar, because it is something every competent person already knows, but when the Person Concept is made explicit, when offered as the foundation of a unified behavioral science, it can be confused with something else already known. For example, it can be taken as some variety of philosophy or psychological theory. Wait before placing the Person Concept in any of those other already known categories. What follows is not conventional psychology in the form of a theory or a set of empirical findings. Rather, it is something prior to that, something preempirical, a foundation that provides a place for theory and data to coherently engage. Assembling this foundation will require patience; it will be akin to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The picture we will construct is the conceptual structure of persons, a subject matter in which, one way or another, all the facts of behavioral science must have a place. This includes what people know about themselves and others; their theories and methods; and since every idea is someone’s idea, what people take to be the case about their worlds. The goal here is that inclusive and that ambitious. As daunting and grandiose as it sounds, remember: we are already prepared, because we already know how to act as persons. And since concepts guide action, to the extent we act as “one of us persons,” we practice the Person Concept, even if we have never put this understanding into words. My job here is to find the right words.

The Person Concept is not the same as a theory of persons nor is it an assemblage of empirical findings about us. Instead, it is a structure, scaffold-like, with places to hang whatever we know or come to find out. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the Person Concept is constructed from other interlocking pieces, but here the metaphor breaks down. A jigsaw cuts up the image in some meandering way to make it a puzzle and make it challenging. Any orienting shapes will come from the straight edges and right-angled corners that framed the precut image. This is not how we are going to construct the Person Concept.

Contrast a jigsaw puzzle with a scale model airplane, fresh out of the box, parts and instructions on the table. Even without the directions, many components can be recognized for their function: a propeller, a clear cockpit, wheels and struts, parts for wings and fuselage. Since we already know about airplanes, we can make sense of what is spread before us. The foundational concepts, the parts of the Person Concept, are more like the airplane to be: each concept is already meaningful and scaled to fit the others. The Person Concept’s box holds the primary interdependent concepts: Individual Persons, Behavior as Intentional Action, Verbal Behavior and Language, Community and Culture, and Reality and World (Fig. 1.1). In turn, each of these concepts is formed from other concepts. Since these complex parts need to fit together properly, we will need guidance. As with the model airplane, there is a set of instructions: The Relationship Formula and The State of Affairs System provide the rules for transforming and interconnecting the concepts, at whatever level of abstraction we need.

Fig. 1.1 The Person Concept.

A brief thought. Think of the box of the model that caught your eye in the hobby shop. Its cover had an image of the assembled whole. Consider the Person Concept in this light. We already understand people, akin to the way we understand the image on the box. Do the standard behavioral sciences have a box that shows what competent people already know about people?

Maps, puzzles, and model kits are a bit misleading. The primary components of the Person Concept are more like perspectives than parts. They are not simply parts that make up the whole. They are distinct ways of accessing the full logical domain of Persons. All of what we can attribute to an individual can be represented by that individual’s behavior. All behavior corresponds to something that can be represented verbally. And all the distinctions that can make a difference in behavior and language are distinctions in the world.

Peter Ossorio created what he called Descriptive Psychology as the domain for exploring and mapping the Person Concept. No one I know, including Ossorio, has ever been happy with the subject matter’s name. (It is not even really a psychology; nor is it Franz Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology, although both subject matters focus on intentionality.) The justification for “Descriptive” comes from the sense that if a description is clear enough, no further explanation is ordinarily required. This underscores the value of lucid, logically sound description. Descriptive Psychology is stocked with guidance and reminders for accomplishing this.

In orienting people to Descriptive Psychology, Ossorio offered these claims that capture the discipline’s spirit. The devil, of course, is in the details.

1. 1. The world makes sense, and so do people. They make sense to begin with.
2. 2. It’s one world. Everything fits together. Everything is related to everything else.
3. 3. Things are what they are and not something else instead.
4. 4. Don’t count on the world being simpler than it has to be.

If everything fits together, any opening should connect to the entire world. Let’s consider an ordinary encounter. On my way to meet a friend I see a young woman, a current student—I’m not sure—texting while walking in my direction. I can be ill at ease, awkward when bumping into students and acquaintances outside our usual context. As we pass, I hesitantly say hello—I fear she’ll think I’m a stranger and not appreciate being greeted by an older man. Fortunately, just in time, she looks up and smiles in recognition. My discomfort ends. We chat a bit and go our separate ways.

These few details offer an example of mundane social engagement. The actors have common and differing statuses. They have some idea where they stand with each other and can appreciate what is afoot. Any competent member of the culture that includes the young woman and me, understands what’s in play, including what would benefit from further inquiry. For example, what I just told you is not sufficient to definitively explain my awkwardness. What we have observed is easy to see, but further inquiry is required to understand the significance of what we observed.

This illustrates my first point: implicit understandings of this sort are expected. In ordinary interactions, each actor has a self-perspective and an observer’s perspective on the circumstances. This includes what they take to be appropriate behavior, including recognition of the uncertainty of their understanding. These perspectives could be further elaborated, but usually aren’t if things make enough sense for everyone to get along. Unless the interaction goes awry, there is usually little point explaining it further. Questions are mostly asked when something goes wrong or does not make sense.

Here is the second point: it is normal for things to make sense when people act together in a shared culture, not the exception. Generally, if we did not understand people, life would be chaotic. We could not cooperate. You could not understand this sentence. Understanding people is the central competence involved in being a person in a world of others.

Ordinary social interaction is predicated on most behavior going well enough, and this is my third point: that to recognize things not going well, a person must have the competence to recognize how it would appear going right, performed as expected, and achieving its desired goal. To recognize something as ineffective, there must be some concept of proper effect. Behavior going wrong is a variation of it going right. This goes for shared understandings too. Misunderstanding is the exception, not the rule. Before disagreement and misunderstanding can be identified, there must be some appreciation of what agreement and understanding looks like in a coherent world. We first need some sense of what it means to get along and communicate before we can identify its absence.

Some implications and reminders: people always act under some degree of uncertainty but always have enough information to attempt something. Normally behavior goes right. That is, unless it goes wrong in one of the ways it can go wrong.

This then follows: a person’s actions can go wrong go in all sorts of ways, so explicitly identifying the conceptually distinct, changeable dimensions that constitute “doing something right” are relevant parameters for diagnosis and correction. Later, this will be formally reintroduced using a Parametric Analysis of Intentional Action, but for now, these few sentences should suffice. First, of primary social interest to people are intentional actions: behaviors that involve attempting to achieve some desired state of affairs. People are very interested in meaningful performances done on purpose. Second, a person’s values, knowledge, and competencies are expressed in performances that try to achieve the person’s goal. Intentional behavior involves recognizing an opportunity to get something wanted and having sufficient skill to try to get it. Doing this involves a performance, an implementation in real time.

The pragmatics of effectiveness is at the heart of this. There are many ways to skin a cat, an image not to be confused with all roads lead to Rome. Some ways work, some don’t. (The infinite possibilities of doing something should not be confused with the random and arbitrary. A trillion chimps with typewriters might produce the works of Shakespeare, but don’t hold your breath.) Here’s the rub: there is no intellectually honest way to deny (1) that various performances can achieve or fail to achieve a goal and (2) that various personal characteristics can successfully or unsuccessfully be employed.

Despite complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, ...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Preface
• Chapter 1: What Is Descriptive Psychology and The Person Concept?
• Chapter 2: Individual Persons, Personhood, and the Problem of Definition
• Chapter 3: Behavior as Intentional Action
• Chapter 4: The Judgment Diagram, Some Categories of Cognizance, and the Unconscious
• Chapter 5: Relationships, the Relationship Formula, and Emotional Competence
• Chapter 6: Verbal Behavior, Language, and Linguistic Self-Regulation
• Chapter 7: Community and Culture
• Chapter 8: Reality and the Worlds
• Chapter 9: Empathy in Practice: A Demonstration of Some Person Concepts
• Afterword and Summary: Satisfaction and the Construction of Worlds or, At the End of the Day, How Does It Feel?
• Appendix One: Ossorio’s Status Dynamic Maxims, Behavioral Logic, and Reminders for Proper Description (Place, 1998)
• Appendix Two: A Glossary of Descriptive Psychology Concepts Compiled by Clarke Stone
• References
• Index