Friday, Aug. 7, 2015)
George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs Part I What is a construct and how does it work?
      Dr. Kelly wrote this two volume book in 1955 but I believe his work is more important now than it was then. He died in 1965 so he was not able to witness the vast and complex changes in social and cultural constructs (he called them "public constructs") that have developed since then, due to the internet and the ubiquitness of digital social media.
      Dr. Kelly was a psychotherapist and his work is always referenced as psychology but this writer will always think of him as a great philosopher. Ironically, he emphasized that his theory of constructs, as well as people's personal constructs, are interdisciplenarian. He devotes a whole section in chapter one to pointing out the overlapping of psychology and philosophy, so he would probably call me to task for labelling him as either one. My bad. My own papers on process epistemology stress that same point, but it is hard not to fall back into the language pre-postmodernism. After all, our schools still divide up our areas of study into discrete disciplines whereas all knowledge is analog, not digital.
      Kelly is more specific when he talks about the difference between physiology (how our bodies work) and psychology (how our minds work). Using the quantum mechanics analogy again, our physiology operates by digital particles and our psychology is driven by analog waves. But our minds and our psychological constructs are just as real as are our livers and hearts. Plus, (since postmodeernism rejects Descartes mind/body duality) our minds and our bodies do interact. Or, as we "pre-postmodernists" (ha ha I'll explain that term in a later blog post.) always say "You cannot separate ontology from epistemology."
      The main point of Dr. Kelly's work is that we are all amateur scientists. The goal of science is to predict and control, and all of us, no exceptions, are always creating our constructs of what we think reality is all about. Through our experiences we try to predict how our lives will turn out and control our environments to create more beneficial outcomes. Not all personal constructs are practical or benefsicial, so the more alert we are, the more often we test our constructs for accuracy and predictability, and either discard or modify those ideas that do not work. Kelly even goes so far as to say that a bad personal construct is still better than no construct at all. (In later posts I will be discussing how many social and cultural constructs are also harmful and need replacing or modifying.)
Monday: George Kelly's Philosophical Position
Alert all your friends who won't give up their racial identities and/or who make money from owning private property, that this blog challenges their personal and social constructs.
For those of you who have only recently joined us, my rants began on January 1, 2011. Scroll down to that date to begin.
My rants on racial identity began on July 9, 2015
My rants on private property began on July 14, 2015 My website