Where is the Magic in Cognitive Therapy? (A philo ....doc

Draft to appear in 2008, Against and For CBT: Towards a Constructive Dialogue? Edited by Richard House and Del Loewenthal. UK: PCCS books.

WHERE IS THE MAGIC IN COGNITIVE THERAPY?

(a philo/psychological investigation)

Fred Newman, Ph.D.

Effective therapy often seems magical.

-- Kenneth Gergen (2006)1

What is the relationship between cognitive therapy and common sense?

Is cognitive therapy an effort to analyze common sense and to show how and

when commonsensical thinking can go astray and lead to emotional disorders?

Or is cognitive therapy an effort to make use of common sense in dealing with

those emotional disorders? Or is cognitive therapy an effort to do both of those

and more?

Aaron Beck’s seminal work on cognitive therapy (1979) begins its very first

chapter, “Common Sense and Beyond,” with a quotation from the distinguished

British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: 2

1 In Therapeutic Realities: Collaboration, Oppression and Relational Flow, p. 28.2 Alfred North Whitehead was President of Section A of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In September 1916 Whitehead addressed Section A -- Mathematical and Physical Sciences -- at the Association meeting in Newcastle-on-Tyne. His talk was entitled “The Organization of Thought.” It was printed in Science, September 22, 1916: Vol. 44, no. 1134, pp. 409-419.

Where is the Magic in Cognitive Therapy?Fred Newman © 2008

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Science is rooted in what I have just called the whole apparatus of

common sense thought. That is the datum from which it starts, and

to which it must recur ... You may polish up common sense, you

may contradict it in detail, you may surprise it. But ultimately your

whole task is to satisfy it. (p.6)

There is, of course, a colossal irony here. For one of Whitehead’s great

intellectual contributions (albeit a very early one) was Principia Mathematica

(written in collaboration with Sir Bertrand Russell, also a philosopher). Principia

was a monumental effort to show that all of mathematics could be reduced to

logic (in particular, to mathematical logic, provided that mathematical logic

included the supposed by Russell and Whitehead unassailable concept of a set:

Russell and Whitehead’s assumption being that nothing could be more intuitively

obvious than the notion of a collection of things or a group, which is what they

and most everyone else meant by a set).

Yet starting with Frege through Gödel and beyond, this commonsensical

notion of a set appeared to introduce paradoxes which rendered implausible

Russell and Whitehead’s, and dozens of other mathematical logicians’

reductionistic projects.

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3What if anything does common sense have to do with science?

Whitehead’s observations seem commonsensically sound, yet serious efforts to

deconstruct and analyze science and scientific method (a project which

consumed the minds of many philosophers in the first half of the 20th century)

yield distinctly uncommonsensical (and unacceptable) results. This came as a

surprise to some, but by no means to all, for the historical and mathematical

roots of science, complex as they may be, are arguably as much in magic

(somewhat broadly interpreted) as they are in common sense.3 Pythagoras

seemed to have gained genuine insight by exploring magical numerological

connections. And when Newton wasn’t downstairs “wowing” the Royal Academy

he apparently was upstairs exploring ancient alchemic relationships. And even

today, if common sense alone could do it, what need of the most interesting

esoteric elements that make up modern science from quanta to quarks to string

theory?

The first half of the 20th century was marked by many philosophers

serving as the self-appointed handmaidens of science, attempting to articulate a

logical and empiricistic model of science which would be rigorous and

unassailable. Logical positivism was its name. Its fame was worldwide; Vienna

was its home and -- while he himself denied it adamantly -- the early writings of

Wittgenstein were its inspiration. But that project (especially in the U.S.) came

3 See for example: Styers (2004). Making magic: Religion, magic and science. Or pertaining to the medical sciences, Thorndike (1941). A history of magic and experimental science.

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4crumbling down rather forcefully to the ground by the 1950s with the appearance

of W.V.O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) and “meta-ironically” with

Wittgenstein’s posthumous publication Philosophical Investigations (1953).

Quine’s American Revolution

Quine, at once a first rate logician, a philosopher of science and as well, situated

at Harvard, fully in the tradition of American psychological pragmatism (from

William James to C.I. Lewis), summed up almost a half-century of positivistic

self-criticism in his revolutionary essay. What he showed with remarkable

eloquence was that logical empiricism, which purported to be in some version or

another the model for all of science (including mathematics), was itself a

methodology which rested firmly yet fatuously on two dogmas.

The first, the so-called (dogma of the) distinction between analytical

propositions and so-called synthetic propositions, went back at least to Kant. The

distinction claimed that there were basically two kinds of scientific propositions

that could be articulated. One kind, the analytical, was definitional in character (in

many cases mathematical) and was true (or false) by virtue of the language and

definitions employed (Euclidean geometry was the best example). The other, the

synthetic, was true or false by virtue of its relationship to empirically verifiable

conditions (direct observation is the paradigm here). These two radically different

kinds of propositions, the analytic and synthetic, constituted what most people

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5accepted as the terrain of science, if not the broader terrain of knowledge. What

Quine showed was that the commonsensical notion that these two kinds of

propositions were clear and distinct (from each other) was not at all clear and

distinct.

The second and related dogma of empiricism, the dogma of reductionism,

was a critique of the commonsensical belief that complex propositions -- be they

analytic or synthetic -- could be reduced to the smallest elements of which they

consisted, and that this process made visible the significance of the more

complex proposition.

Finally, in the last sections of his essay, Quine lays down guidelines for

the creation of a science (or a conception of science) free of dogmas. His student

Thomas Kuhn, more a sociologist than a philosopher, and many, many others

advanced this conception. Quine’s and Kuhn’s (1970) work shaped a new

philosophical foundation of philosophy of science, though whether they have

anything to do with or impact at all on science as practiced is difficult to say. Yet

beginning in the 60s in both the Anglo-American tradition and the continental-

existential tradition there has been a persistent reconsideration of what science

is, of what common sense is and of whether these two have anything to do with

each other. Some have considered these explorations a component of an

intellectual movement known as “postmodernism.” Others have taken great pains

to distinguish their research from that appellation. Yet what is most interesting to

me is the extent to which contemporary science and contemporary philosophers

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6of science and others move along parallel tracks while seemingly oblivious to

each other.

Most relevant to this paper, the evolution, practice, and influence of

cognitive therapy grows abundantly while philosophers of psychology seriously

question and advance the concept of cognition itself. (It is as if Lewis and Clark

insisted that there be two different trails because they did not walk in each other’s

precise footsteps.)

Turn, turn, turn

The cognitive turn, the linguistic turn and the postmodern turn are obviously

interrelated. How is not the least bit clear to many, and probably excessively

clear to some.

To me, all seem a reaction to the arrogant and radical “deductiveness” of

a great deal of 19th and early 20th century thought, be it positivistic or idealistic

or Marxist -- they are all modernist. Many if not most reactions come from those

quite familiar with the approaches they are unraveling. So with Quine and Kuhn

and many of those who pursued their work; so, of course, with Wittgenstein who

was in fact in his Philosophical Investigations deconstructing his own earlier work

in the Tractatus (1921); and so with the therapeutic cognitivists who had grown

up under the influence of Freudian analytical theory, behavioral theory, and

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7neuropsychological theories. (So with me as an orthodox Marxist-turned-

postmodern Marxist.)

Indeed, Beck’s somewhat defensive beginning (pardon the therapeutics)

over-connecting, in my opinion, science and common sense reveals his concern

to reassure the world that a return to cognition as both a subject and a mode of

study is not to be seen as any kind of rejection of science.

From a broader perspective of the “turns of the century,” such

defensiveness was (and remains), of course, unnecessary. For not only was

consciousness in one form or another, from radical existentialism to Quine and

Gödel (who was, after all, a self-identified Platonist), coming back into fashion,

but theoreticians as well as practitioners in all these fields were beginning to

violate the constraining and narrow-minded prohibitions of late 19th and early

20th century positivistic thought.

These successful revolutions (or turns, if you like) in physics,

mathematics, psychiatry, philosophy (particularly philosophy of science),

linguistics, etc. essentially occurred (as I have said) simultaneously without very

much of an awareness of each other and resulted eventually in overstatements

to the detriment of each of the particular revolutions. By the way, the intellectual

revolutions of this period (which have been vastly more successful than the much

more publicized and deadly on-the-ground revolutions of the same period) have

yet to be synthesized, or in the minds of some, to be correctly characterized or

labeled.

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8It is not within the scope of this paper to do so (or even want to), but the

critique being offered of cognitive therapy is that it has, in general, gone way too

far in an effort to preserve a scientific character that science no longer has. And

so while it is a most significant advance in psychotherapeutics (as well as in

psychotherapeutic theory), it has done so at the expense of taking the magic out

of science and, thereby, for their purposes out of the examination of

consciousness and, therefore (and this concerns me most), out of therapy where

magic is what makes it work. Some have gone to other extremes and

characterize consciousness in such a way as to make it incomprehensible (or, at

least, barely recognizable as consciousness). The failing and irony of the

cognitive therapy movement is its excessive comprehensibility, particularly in

light of the revolutionary world, the ever turning anti-positivist world, into which it

was born.

This formulation might well seem to many like philosophical claptrap, so

abstract as to be of no value to anyone. So let me put it another way, less

precise, but more to the point. Cognitive behavioral therapy is overly decidable

(in Gödel’s sense of the word, Nagel and Newman, 2001). It is thereby

insufficiently magical (in my sense of the word) and, finally, cognitive behavioral

therapy is insufficiently political in the broadest sense of the word. It is

unrelentingly apolitical.

And this is a serious flaw. For not only is all science magical and virtuously

undecidable (Newman, 2003), all science is political. And the three are related.

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9For it is a proper combination of magic (properly understood) and politics

(properly understood) and undecidability (properly understood) that relates

science, and indeed all thought, to the world and, thereby, to the lives of people.

Politics properly understood

I have spent a lifetime writing about and, more importantly, trying to perform

“politics properly understood.” It is, first and foremost, an activity; a collective,

humanistic, creative building of new things -- large and small, mental and

physical. Science should not be performed in the service of partisan politics; nor

should it be carried out in the name of ideologically driven politics. It must “serve

the people.” While I have worked hard for almost four decades to create projects

which do just that, I have never been able to put into words this humanistic ideal.

Perhaps the closest I have come are in my psychological plays (mainly

comedies) written for and performed at several meetings of the American

Psychological Association (APA). Others have expressed the humanism of

psychology better than I -- none better in my view than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

in the following statement.

There are certain technical words in the vocabulary of every

academic discipline which tend to become stereotypes and clichés.

Psychologists have a word which is probably used more frequently

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10than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word

“maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry of the new child

psychology. Now in a sense all of us must live the well-adjusted life

in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there

are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be

maladjusted and to which I suggest that you too ought to be

maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of

mob-rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation

and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust

myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which take

necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend

to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-

defeating method of physical violence. I call upon you to be

maladjusted. The challenge to you is to be maladjusted -- as

maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices

of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries,

“Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty

stream;” as maladjusted as Lincoln, who had the vision to see that

this nation could not survive half slave and half free; as maladjusted

as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to

slavery could cry out, in words lifted to cosmic proportions, “All men

are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain

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11unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the

pursuit of Happiness.” As maladjusted as Jesus who dared to

dream a dream of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of

men. The world is in desperate need of such maladjustment.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

April 25, 1957 at the Conference on

Christian Faith and Human Relations

Nashville, TN (1992)

What Dr. King is saying with his usual extraordinary eloquence is that psychology

must never become so scientific as to abandon its humanism. I could not agree

more. Moreover, if scientific is properly (contemporaneously) understood, it need

not.

Adding Wittgenstein to Quine

Though it is a decade-and-a-half since it appeared on the bookshelves of the

world, John R. Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) still amazes and

delightfully confuses those of us, like me, who began a philosophical career in

the dying moments of logical positivism.

My first philosophical trick was to point a finger at my imaginary debate

opponent while not quite screaming, “That’s a category mistake you’ve made,”

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12and then laughing ever so quietly under my breath. This admonition came, of

course, from Gilbert Ryle. His famous, though as it turned out faddish, book, The

Concept of Mind (1949), certainly did not envision a rediscovery of mind four

decades later.

Ryle’s work, a British combination of A.J. Ayerian-style logical positivism in

its death knell and the later Wittgenstein in its birth moment, was designed to

celebrate the human intellectual capacity to finally get rid of mind. Mind itself was

a category mistake according to my reading of Ryle, or at a minimum it was a

result of centuries of category mistakes. It was ultimately indistinguishable from

Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Nothingness. It was unverifiable; invoking the

positivist cross to the devil of meaninglessness.

But even as Ryle and his friends at Cambridge and Oxford were playing

with this new idea, Quine at Cambridge, USA, was pragmatizing the entire issue

and showing in some way that the concept of science (or at least its foundations)

suffered from as much metaphysicality as the most boring existentialist on the

Left Bank of the Seine.

Forty years later, which philosophically speaking is a drop in the historical

bucket, John Searle, knowing a good deal of all of this tradition and even

something of neuropsychology, authors The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992).4

Searle, known for his contributions to philosophy of mind and

consciousness, rejects dualism, seems, to me, more comfortable with

4 More recent publications of Searle’s include (2005), Mind: A brief introduction and (2006), Freedom and neurobiology: Reflections on free will, language and political power.

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13paradoxicality, and considers language (and the ontological commitments of our

discourse) carefully -- although not with Quine’s logicality and pragmatism

(Searle, as I recall, a student of J.L. Austin, is more an ordinary language realist).

Searle locates the mind-body problem in the obsolete vocabulary and false

assumptions that philosophers and psychologists accept and with which they

perpetuate dualism: “We've inherited this vocabulary that makes it look as if

mental and physical name different realms ... I'm fighting against that. The way I

solve [the mind-body problem] is to get rid of the traditional categories. Forget

about Descartes' categories of res existence and res cogitance, that is, the

extended reality of the material and the thinking reality of the mental” (Searle,

1999). 5 Searle’s own view, which he terms biological naturalism, asserts that “the

brain is the only thing in there, and the brain causes consciousness” (Searle,

1992, p. 248). What is most critical here is that in Searle’s conception of

causation (at least psychological causation) there is no dualistic cause-effect

divide; consciousness is not an effect separate from the processes producing it.

Holding to dualism, no matter how sublimated, frequently forces

philosophers and cognitive scientists alike to posit ontological units that violate

common sense (such as it is) and ordinary experience (ontological subjectivity) --

units such as mental rules and patterns, unconscious mental phenomena -- and

some kind of mental content to mental processes are conjured up (magically

5 Richard Rorty’s dismissal of the concept of truth on the grounds that he is no longer interested in it may sound like Searle’s dismissal of mind-body, but they are quite different. For Searle is accepting the magicality of science, while Rorty is simply defending the failure of pragmatism to understand truth.

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14and/or pseudo-scientifically) in order to “make intelligible” the relationship

between the dualisms -- mind-body, cognition-behavior, and so on. (In

psychotherapeutics, witness the DSM-IV, Newman and Gergen, 1999.) It is an

error, Searle says (seemingly in a partial rejection of Hume), to assume that if a

patterned or meaningful relationship can be said to exist between entities or

events, then the process producing that relationship must be equally patterned or

meaningful. If a person thinks of B when seeing A, which resembles B, we should

not (but too many do) assume there is either any content or a particular form to

the mental process that results in relating A and B. We are not following any

mental rules when we think of B; there is no extra mental logic needed to account

for the phenomenon in question.

In sum, Searle’s point is that there is no mind-body problem. Indeed, there

is no mind-body distinction. So we should stop talking as if there is one, and

move on to the best we have at the moment -- neuropsychology. The mind is

rediscovered in this interesting relationship between the brain and conscious

thought, and consciousness, like mind, has (to vary the use of Ryle’s

extraordinary metaphor) “no ghosts in its machinery” (Ryle, 1949, pp. 15-16). The

brain produces thoughts which are transmitted to others via behavior, most

especially linguistic behavior which stimulates other brains to produce other

thoughts and so on. No mystery. A little magic, but no mystery.

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15Donald Davidson to the rescue

Another of Quine’s students, perhaps his most brilliant (in the name of full

disclosure, he was my mentor and tennis partner at Stanford University in the

early 1960s) takes it upon himself to rehabilitate some of the critical conceptions

that, for example, Rorty and Searle are justifiably if not rigorously abandoning. In

particular, Donald Davidson seeks to reintroduce into the ontology of

philosophical thought some notion of truth (a weak one), some conception of

cause (a strong one), and an idea of deducibility which goes back at least to

Hempel (a logical positivist) and perhaps to Plato and Aristotle (Greeks).

Davidson’s conservatism is formidable if not, to me, ultimately convincing.

The making of a conservative

After his work on decision theory (done early in his career) Davidson published

little for many years, focusing his attention on brilliant teaching. When he

returned to publishing in 1963 with his seminal essay, “Actions, Reasons and

Causes” (Davidson, 1980), his mission appeared to be to salvage from the

critical writings of the many anti-positivists, pro-late Wittgensteinian critical

authors of the period those key concepts we, the people, would be lost without.

Indeed, his real mission, it seems to me, was to salvage philosophy itself.

Wittgenstein, on his deathbed, had left it on its deathbed.

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16Davidson’s brilliant analyses of various features of mental activities

(intentional acts, desires, willful acts, etc.), contained as they are in separate and

discreet essays written over an extended period, make it difficult to see his

overall perspective. But it is there. And for me, it became more apparent in

viewing a dialogue that Philosophy International (PI) from the London School of

Economics produced of him and Quine in their later years before a group of

scholars and students at the London School of Economics (Davidson, 1997).

Much of what Davidson pursues in this discussion with his former teacher is what

he calls a third dogma of empiricism which Quine (claims Davidson) overlooked

(indeed, committed).

Davidson, who in the L.S.E. discussion claimed he had spent half a

century trying to convince “Vann” of his “missing dogma,” focused not on Quine’s

critical analysis in the first half of “Two Dogmas” (which most agree is analytically

valid), but rather on Quine’s efforts in the final sections to metaphorically

characterize a dogma-free sense of science.

There, Quine invokes a C.I. Lewis-like “buzzing, blooming confusion” (a

flux) upon which varying conceptual frameworks from the gods of Homer to

modern science somehow impose order. But Davidson insists that this

formulation (the idea of a flux), while perhaps useful in certain ways, invokes a

third empiricistic dogma, namely the dogma of the flux.

Davidson says, correctly it seems to me, that there is no flux: that

whatever the ordering mechanisms may be, gods, nature, particles or quanta, the

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17world appears to us and is, ontologically speaking, “already ordered.” It is a

fiction and a dogma to suppose that we humans must order a flux of subjective

experience (sense datum, phenomenological experience, or whatever). I can

recall Davidson, himself a radical naturalist, approvingly teaching in his

epistemology class of a little-known medieval theologian (Bishop Butler) who is

said to have said, “Everything is what it is and not another thing!”

Lewis, Quine’s teacher and very much a Kantian and a Humeian (a

modernist), apparently felt a pragmatic need to include in his ontology a “buzzing,

blooming confusion” to justify the function of whatever conceptual apparatus

history (and geography), i.e. culture, happens to provide us with. Quine,

according to Davidson, uncritically carries on this tradition (dating back at least to

Plato), but it is as much a dogma of empiricism (deriving from its idealistic roots)

as either the analytic/synthetic distinction or reductionism. It is classical

Davidson; for the rejection of “the flux” is not ultimately ontological; it is

epistemological. The human capacity, if you will, to connect the “flux” and the

“conceptual framework” would itself require a connector, and so on, and so on.

No, says Davidson, the connection must be as fundamental as the connected

and moreover it must be causal. For even as Davidson is cleaning out the flux,

he is constructing the broom, connecting all of his writings on these matters by

saying in his introduction to Essays on Actions and Event (the first collection of

his essays):

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18All the essays in this book have been published elsewhere, and

each was designed to be more or less free standing. But though

composed over a baker’s dozen of years, they are unified in theme

and general thesis. The theme is the role of causal concepts in the

description and explanation of human action. The thesis is that the

ordinary notion of cause which enters in to scientific or common-

sense accounts of non-psychological affairs is essential also to the

understanding of what it is to act with a reason, to have a certain

intention in acting, to be an agent, to act counter to one’s own best

judgment, or to act freely. Cause is the cement of the universe; the

concept of cause is what holds together our picture of the universe,

a picture that would otherwise disintegrate into a diptych of the

mental and the physical. (1980, p. xi)

And so we more clearly discover Davidson’s philosophical conservatism. He is,

ultimately, an anti-disintegrationist, a rehabilitationist. For all his radical analysis

of particular mental acts, he must ultimately pull everything together. He is a

systematic philosopher defending philosophy for philosophy’s sake. Using the

Wittgensteinian idea (developmental in my view) of employing philosophy to

escape the limits of philosophy is turned (reacted to) by Davidson into using

philosophy to clean up the mess made by philosophy. And then what?

Presumably wait passively for the next mess.

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19I, of course, do not favor disintegration or rehabilitation. I favor

development and, thereby, growth. Davidson seems to feel it is essential to

constantly clarify philosophy, while I feel -- deriving from Wittgenstein, Marx, and

Vygotsky -- that humankind must build a new world, not make up fantastical

categories to explain or interpret or “cement” the old one. We don’t have to hold,

and therapy must not seek to hold, the world together, i.e., we neither need the

flux nor the cement, we need to develop.6

Philosophy goes therapeutic

Davidson’s assault on Wittgenstein is equally a serious and formidable defense

of the roots of modernism. Not only is it reactionary, it is a reaction formation

(pardon the therapeutics again) and indeed it does not stand alone. For the

reaction to the postmodern assault has been powerful and, arguably, somewhat

successful, though exposing (Newman and Holzman, 1997).7

Certainly in psychology, postmodern thinking and ideas are still relegated

to the fringe while neuropsychology in its modernist guise dominates. All the

more reason why cognitive behavioral therapy (and more generally all forms of

therapy) must take a political stand. In some ways, the point of this paper is to

give therapy, a very critical component of psychology, a theoretical basis for

6 “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx, 1845).7 “In response to the postmodernist ‘attitude,’ they [the scientists] have given up objectivity, empirically based findings, and logical argumentation in favor of hyperbole, emotional outbursts, and arguments ad hominem” (Newman and Holzman,1997, p.1).

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20“going postmodern.” Cognitive behavioral therapy, the dominant therapeutic

form, must lead the way.

What is social therapy?

Social therapy is, to my way of thinking, a cognitive behavioral form of therapy. It

is, after all about helping people understand better (though not necessarily

cognitively) and thereby do better (as in performing better). But it endeavors to

return the necessary magic to therapy by insisting on its revolutionary nature.

“Revolution” as used here means neither an ideologically driven (determined) set

of views imposed on people in as traditionally an authoritarian manner as the

market will bear; nor is it an appeal to some highly abstract spirit best understood

by studying the history of the world’s varied religions. Rather, it is a conceptual

revolution we seek, not a new therapy but a new way of looking at therapy and,

thereby, of practicing it. It is a practice of method shaped by activity theorists

going back at least to Vygotsky and Marx (Newman and Holzman, 1993). Its

tools (and results) are an updated, indeed postmodernized, dialectic greatly

influenced by Wittgenstein and other relatively contemporary philosophers of

mind. As well, it relies a good deal on the concept/activity of performance and

has taken much from contemporary theatre and dramaturgy (Newman and

Holzman, 1996; Holzman and Mendez, 2003).

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21But for all that, it remains a cognitive behavioral therapy. Hopefully, it is a

positive advance, but as with all positive advances, it is to some extent a critique

of what came before.

What is that critique?

Let us go back to the beginning of our remarks. Cognitive therapy, we are told, is

scientific in that it is based on common sense. But Gödel, Wittgenstein, Einstein,

Heisenberg and others have taught us that common sense is often less than

commonsensical. The view of science invoked by the theoreticians and

practitioners of traditional cognitive behavioral therapy is based on an ignorance

or misunderstanding of contemporary thinking about the philosophy of mind, and

more generally, philosophy of science.

By way of summing up my own brief account of that history, a

revolutionary turn from modernism to a sometimes muddled postmodernism, let

us consider a final and critical element in Davidson’s defense of modernism.

More on me ’n Donald

My earliest discussions with Davidson on these matters came early in the 1960s,

while I was still a graduate student and he was justifiably identified as the genius

of Stanford’s philosophy department just about to set out to conquer the

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22philosophical world. He did. Meanwhile, I sought to turn my intellectual efforts to

radical organizing and psychology. I did not presume that Davidson and I would

run into each other again. But we have.

My Ph.D. dissertation, written under the direct supervision of Daniel

Bennett, a brilliant young Wittgensteinian at the time and ironically a former

student and then a colleague of Davidson, was a study of the concept of

explanation in history. And an analytical consideration of such matters required a

reading of Carl Hempel’s “The Function of General Laws in History” (1942).

Davidson, a friend of Hempel, very much admired some of the positions

that Hempel took in his important essay and naturally to begin with (this is the

first law of graduate school) so did I. But as I proceeded in studying what was

then contemporary philosophy of history reading Scriven, Dray and others, I grew

more and more wary of Hempel’s logical positivist position.

Davidson and I sadly parted ways before anything resembling a

deepening of that discussion. But in my own mind I have been having it with

Donald ever since. It is something like Donald’s discussion with “Vann” on “the

flux.” In many of my imaginary discussions, I say to Donald: “But look, Carl

Hempel was a highly dedicated empiricist and yet he speaks of the function of

general laws in history. But there are no general laws in history.”

Perhaps a rare historian seeks to speculate on the existence of such a

law, but in almost 100% of historical writings there are no such laws to be found.

How odd then that Hempel, a confirmed radical empiricist, is seeking to discover

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23the function of the non-existent laws. Perhaps Hempel’s essay might have been

called “Why there should be” or “How there could be” general laws in history. But

not “The Function of General Laws in History.” Many years ago, Scriven made

something very close to this point (Scriven, 1958).

I, of course, do not know Davidson’s response to my imaginary polemic

since we never had it. But in my reconsideration of Davidson’s lifelong defense of

modernism, I see what he found attractive in Hempel’s almost bizarrely entitled

paper, for the most essential claim in Hempel’s view is that there must be a

connection between what is explained and its explanation (in Hempel’s Latin, the

explanans and the explanandum).

For in the final analysis, while causality might be the cement,

connectedness (in Hempel’s case, deducibility) is the justification for the logical

positivist and indeed for the modernist and eventually for the early scientist’s

claim that everything must be connected. But if and when everything is

connected, we lose the magic (or more accurately put, we lose the space for the

magic) that is necessary for human development. Surely therapists must be

sensitive to this.

Vygotsky speaks to the child’s learning-developing process in such

language as the child growing “a head taller than him/[her]self” (Vygotsky, 1978,

p.102). Some may write this off as metaphor. I do not. I think it points to an

essential feature of growth. And it is equally applicable to cognitive growth and to

emotive growth, and to grown-ups as well as the child.

23


24Davidson, in my view, betrays the depth of his commitment to modernism

by his dogmatic defense of connectedness. There are, it seems to me, two major

arguments against connectedness. The first is that there is no need for

connectedness because everything is connected. This argument is something

like (bears a family resemblance to) Davidson’s argument against the

flux/conceptual framework picture. The second argument is that everything isn’t

connected. Why? Because there must be room for development.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (indeed all therapy) requires a theoretical

basis to move in a postmodern direction. Modernist science and the demand for

everything being “connected” costs us the space for magic, not tricks and games,

but the real magic of real science. Cognitive behavioral therapy’s argument that

science and scientific psychology is commonsensical not only eliminates the

magic, but that framework adds to people’s neuroses. For in eliminating the

“space for magic,” a concept critical for understanding human development, it

seems to me, we eliminate the possibility of cure. Vygotsky’s idea of performing a

head taller than one’s self is based on the notion of performing what one is

becoming. Is Vygotsky suggesting that one literally grows a second head, making

one a “head taller”?

In social therapy -- once again a cognitive behavioral therapy, but primarily

a group therapy -- the second head is the creating of the group. And both from

the personal or individual point of view and from the broader social point of view,

24


25it is the creating of the group that is the revolutionary activity necessary for

further human development.

Dialectics and performance (social therapy, part II)

Aristotle, who knew a great deal about both ethics and logic (indeed, a case

could be made that he invented both), noted famously that the conclusion of a

practical syllogism was an action, not another proposition. It is within that overall

spirit that several thousand years later in what is now a postmodern period as

opposed to a pre-modern period, we consider the relationship between dialectics

and performance. Aristotle set in motion an extraordinary conversation (actually

several) which ran its course throughout the entire history of modernist thought,

for it was never apparent how propositional thinking could lead to action any

more than it was apparent how mental activity could produce physical activity.

The mind and the body, which obviously work together, seem, conceptually, to

keep getting in each other’s way.

For the pre-modernist, God was allowed to solve this puzzle as well as all

other problems. But modernism’s rejection of God re-raised the problem and,

roughly speaking, starting with Descartes, the mind/body issue has dominated

epistemology/psychology. The writings of Searle, Rorty, Davidson and others

represent, to me, the best of late modernism’s efforts to solve the Aristotelian

25


26problem. But postmodernism both requires and makes possible a new way of

looking at this whole matter.

And the location of such discussions requires stepping outside of the

cognitive sciences and into the therapeutic arts, for although therapeutics are

very much a product of cognitive thinking (witness Freud and many other things

as well) they are in practice most fundamentally an art form. Such is the case

with social therapy.

An anti-dichotomist (a postmodernist) point of view such as mine would

hardly permit a rock-hard differentiation between art and science. On the other

hand, these two central phenomena in western history have very different cultural

histories and as such play very different roles in the life of the society, most

significantly in the lives of the masses of the society. Ask two people – ordinary

citizens – one of whom is off to an art exhibit and the other to a science show,

what their expectations are.

Psychotherapeutics may not be western society’s only art/science

crossover phenomenon (witness poker playing), but it is surely one of the most

important. Attempting to deconstruct a phenomenon so large and so ontologically

and methodologically confused is not only daunting; it provides no obvious

starting point. We leave ourselves open to the charge that we are fundamentally

mixing applies and oranges – and, of course, we are at least doing that. All those

authors whom we have considered (Ryle, Wittgenstein, Quine, Rorty, Searle,

Davidson and hundreds of others) have all recognized these issues and

26


27attempted to evolve a method for even considering the mind/body relationship.

Aristotle’s several thousand-year-old provocation about the practical syllogism

seems more bold to me than all the others. I seek a postmodern version of his

pre-modern audacity.

Of course I’m mixing apples and oranges (postmodernism is a fruit

cocktail)

Sentence NAD: (Not a definition)

Within a performatory (as opposed to a cognitive) modality (community), we

(social therapy/social therapists) seek to help create a pointless dialectical (a

mixture of Plato’s and Marx’s) group conversation (a conversation oriented

toward discovery/creation) in order to generate a new game (a Wittgensteinian

game) which completes (in a Vygotskian sense) the thinking, and is itself (by

magic, a.k.a. art) a performance (though more activity than an action).

That might well be the most complex sentence I have ever intentionally

created. I normally prefer simple sentences. I am very much scientific in my

orientation, and such has been the case all of my intellectual, and perhaps my

pre-intellectual, life.

What is the essence of that posture, of that attitude? Well, I’ve always felt

very close to the hardness of the subject matter of science and the effort to

account for or explain that unbelievably complex body of knowledge by the

27


28simplest of means, namely science. That has always been my ideal, but when

Carl Hempel and many others started to speak of the general laws in history

(when there are no such things) a philosopher of science like myself with a

modicum of intelligence and a reputable Ph.D. had to put his foot down … even if

it meant taking on the most intelligent man I had ever met in my life, viz. Donald

Davidson.

And so, some 50 years ago I began that process for a variety of reasons,

in a variety of ways, which at its most fundamental level, involved taking on

philosophy itself. For science, which in some ways emerged as a challenge to

philosophy, had itself gone too far. It was insisting that its methodology, probably

the most brilliant in all of western thought, somehow had gained the privilege of

applying itself to every thing in western thought.

The next thing I knew I was a practicing therapist. And as such I was

introduced to DSM-IV. The authors of DSM-IV make Carl Hempel look very

modest indeed, for though he spoke as if they existed, Hempel did not make up

any historical laws. DSM-IV, while it does not quite make up laws of psychology,

more precisely laws of emotionality, comes very close to doing so. It is something

of a Poor Richard’s Almanac of mental disturbances designed apparently for

therapists of all stripes to identify what is mentally wrong with a client and to

explain to the client what is wrong with her or him.

Gergen and I considered it in our paper on diagnosis (1999), which we

speak of as “The Rage to Order” -- it might as well be called the “Rage to

28


29Connect.” These pseudo laws (perhaps they should be called pre-laws) are

surely not scientific. Even the psychiatrists who authored DSM-IV would agree

with that. But in relatively ordinary language they as much insist upon a

connectedness as laws of optics.

The pseudo laws suggested by DSM-IV are perhaps not a bad bunch of

cracker barrel ideas in relatively ordinary language about emotional pain within

our culture. But even cracker barrels have a history. And even Poor Richard’s

suggestions as to weather conditions ten years hence can turn in the minds and

hands of some into certainties or at least serious predictions. With the weather,

this rarely turns into a serious problem. With therapy, they do. For believing that

something might well be a proper description of your disturbing emotional state is

quite different than being certain it is. You may say it is up to the therapist to

make this very distinction, but the codification of these connections into a very

official sounding book called DSM-IV, together with the rules and regulations,

often equally misleading, of the APA, make it quite difficult for all but the most

self-assured therapists to do so.

Finally, I discovered a relatively small band of scientifically-trained

academics and clinicians who are sympathetic to these concerns (Ken Gergen,

Mary Gergen, Sheila McNamee, John Shotter, Tom Strong, Andy Lock, Lynn

Hoffman, Harlene Anderson, Ian Parker, Erica Burman and others) and I am

encouraged to articulate my strong view that it is science (and hard-nosed

29


30philosophy of science) which stimulates the growth of postmodernism and not

fuzzy-headed thinking by inebriated Frenchmen, a la Sokol.8

Were there no space constraints in this volume, I would lend some

completion to this somewhat rambling paper by unpacking the Sentence NAD

(from p. __): Within a performatory (as opposed to a cognitive) modality

(community), we (social therapy/social therapists) seek to help create a pointless

dialectical (a mixture of Plato’s and Marx’s) group conversation (a conversation

oriented toward discovery/creation) in order to generate a new game (a

Wittgensteinian game) which completes (in a Vygotskian sense) the thinking, and

is itself (by magic, a.k.a. art) a performance (though more activity than an action).

I hope to do so in a subsequent article.

Address correspondence to: Fred Newman

East Side Institute forGroup and Short Term Psychotherapy

920 Broadway, 14th FloorNew York, NY 10010

[email protected]

8 In Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture (2008), Alan Sokol continues ad infinitum to do little but berate those poor hung-over Frenchmen.)

30


31Many thanks to Dr. Lois Holzman, my lifelong collaborator, for teaching me

virtually all that I know about psychology.

** Thanks to my Developmental Philosophy Class held every Saturday afternoon

at the East Side Institute in New York City for their patience and assistance.

*** Thanks to Kim Svoboda and Jacqueline Salit for their assistance in reading

and writing this paper.

31


32REFERENCES

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Brandom, R.B. (ed.) (2000). Rorty and his critics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

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33of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume IV: Symbol of the movement, January 1957-

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34Quine, W.V.O. (1951). Two dogmas of empiricism. The Philosophical Review 60, 20-43.

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