George Kelly called his philosophy "Constructive alternativism." It assumes that the universe is constantly changing. In trying to figure out our changing environments we try out different constructs of reality to see how well they work for us, i.e. how accurate they are at predicting events so that we can control them rather than being enslaved to our past experiences. There are always alternative constructs and since, as amateur scientists, our experiences are also experiments, we can change the variables in our environments if our original constructs (hypotheses) prove to be unsound.
Kelly mentions several philosophical positions that have many elements in common with his own Constructive Alternativism including American Pragmatism. He does not mention European Existentialism by name but his section on free will and determinism seems, to this writer, to be very much in keeping with existential philosophy and, more to the point, Existentialist Psychology.
Kelly is not only a Pragmatist and an Existentialist, but his philosophy also fits perfectly into framework of Process Epistemology. Kelly was so far ahead of his time (he died in 1965) that he didn't seem to be aware of the newest, developing field of process philosophy, at least not by that name. Since Process philosophy and Process Epistemology are my specialty, I will talk more about them later, but first I want to discuss how Kelly's Constructive Alternativism ovrlaps with Pragmatism and Existentialism. Tomorrow: Kelly and Existentialism.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment