Yesterday we looked at Kelly's philosophical system George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs Part III Constructive Alternativism and Existentialism
      As an undergraduate philosophy major I developed a theory that American Pragmatists and European Existentialist were really saying the same thing in different languages. Pucture yourself sitting in a cosmopolitan restaurant near two other tables and you can overhear the conversations going on at the other tables. Now let us suppose that by a very strange coincidence, the people at one table speak French but not German, and the at the other table the conversationalists speak German but not French. And by an even wierder coincidence they are both having the exact same conversation. And you are able to know this because you happen to speak both German and French.
      My point is that Pragmatists, having arrived at their constructs by specifically American experiences, and using their specific philosophic vocabulary in their dialect of English are discussing their philosophy of life, while the Existentialists, having arrived at their constructs by the specifically European experience (Russian, German and French), and having their own philosophical vocabulary, do not realize that they are mostly saying the same things.
      George Kelly, being an American, understood how his philosophy was in line with Pragmatism, but we can also see in his work many parallels with Existentialism. Existentialism begins with the notion that existence precedes essence. That is, first we are born and we just exist. But our essence, that which makes us human, has to be deliberately developed by ourselves. Existentialists also have a concept called "choice by default." If some of us are not alert to the absurdity of our human condition, and do not consciously make choices that will give us freedom from deterministic forces, then Reality has a way of making choices for us that, in all probability, will not result in freedom. In other words, if you do not choose, then you have made a choice, by default, not to choose, and you are still held responsible for the consequences of your choice not to choose.
       You do not even have to believe in free will, you just have to act as though you had free will. Many people think of Existentialism as an atheist philosophy, and many Existentialists are atheists, but many other important Existentialists were/are Christians and Jews.
      As you can see, I find George Kelly to be a convenient link between Existentialism and Pragmatism. Read yesterday's (Mon. Aug. 10th) blog again and see how Kelly views the consequences of our choices. Remember, just as not all choices are good ones, so not all personal (and social) constructs are good ones. We have to live by the ones that Reality chooses for us, or we can choose better ones.
       Tomorrow: More about Constructive Alternativism and Existentialism. Determinism and free will
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last week we began with Kelly's overall personal construct about personal constructs. George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs Part II Kelly's Philosophical Position
      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.
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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
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For those of you who have only recently joined us, my rants began on January 1, 2011. Scroll down to that date to begin.
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Yesterday we finished up our rant on private property with a conclusion, including a page of cited references. Getting & Putting It All Together       Previously we covered racial identity and private property. Tomorrow we will be looking at personal (psychological) constructs, and culture (social constructs). We will then go into the areas of process philosophy and process epistemology and see how they are informed by neuroscience and quantum mechanics. Eventually we will be designing a meta-algorithm; an algorithm for creating other algorithms. And this is where you, the reader, can participate.
      No matter who you are, where in the world you live, or what culture you grew up in, you will be able to design your own World Peace Algorithms in your own local areas. You will be thinking both globally and locally as you network with all the other agents of the World Peace Algorithm.
      So stay tuned to this blog and tell all your friends that, not only is world peace a possibility, but you will be able to make it happen!
Tomorrow: I begin a series on Psychologist Dr. George Kelly and his work on personal constructs.
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

Yesterday we (again) looked at what Locke, Hobbes & HUme had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XXI Conclusion(s)
       Aristotle said that “in some sense” property should be held in common but privately owned. Since we are talking about the possibility of creating a new social contract wherein the people finally get to view the government as themselves (by the people, for the people) rather than as some outside, hostile entity, it is also possible to consider that all the environment, land, water, air, sunshine, &c. really are owned by all of us, collectively. In order to allow the occupation of land for home or work use by individuals, it is only necessary to collect rent. Without all the externalities and land speculation that comes with corporate ownership of the land, I am convince that rent for the average individual would be much less than it is in our present economy. That rental income could also pay for a lot of good social programs.
       I have already discussed the differences in the programs proposed by Paine, Skidmore, and George, but what they all had in common was a non-violent, legal, democratic, political solution. Thomas Paine and Thomas Skidmore were innocently naïve in that they believed in democracy and thought that it actually existed in their time and place. Skidmore even appealed to the literate citizens of New York State which he estimated to be a full 19/20 of the population (Skidmore [1829], 9), apparently assuming that literate also meant educated. It is true that in their time the industrial revolution had not yet reached its apex, and the power of corporations was not as overwhelming as it would later become in Henry George‘s (and Karl Marx’s) time. But both Paine and Skidmore, in their earnest appeal for a new social contract, overestimated the power of the educated masses, and underestimated the political power of wealthy landowners. Skidmore argued against Locke’s theory of labor, but too late. The U.S. Constitution had already been designed, a generation before his time, to use Locke’s theory to justify the government’s obligation to protect individual property ownership rights, and to bias the law in favor of property owners.
       How prophetic that Skidmore should write, in 1829, that 1% of the population owns most of the wealth and the other 99% own very little or none at all, (Skidmore [1829], 17) about one hundred eighty years before the Occupy Wall Street movement of the 21st century.
       So now, in a political/economic climate dominated by the wealthy 1%, and with the 99% of citizens undereducated and underrepresented (and under insured), I find myself in the unenviable position of the non-violent political philosopher, paraphrasing Skidmore, who was paraphrasing Rousseau. Their sentiment, and mine, is that if I were a legislator I would not bother writing my opinions, but would put them into action. Not being a legislator, I can only hope that the publication of my opinions can influence those who do have political power. (Rousseau [1762], 5) and (Skidmore [1829], 7-8).
       Ethically any right to private property, either collectively or individually, should be justified on consequentialist grounds, but the consequences of making land, as well as labor, a commodity for sale, has not been morally justified by empirical evidence. Here are some idea for future lawmakers to kick around. 1. Real estate is treated by the market system as a commodity to the detriment of society.
2. The price, or value, of Real estate is a derivative, based on purely speculative psychology and economic externalities..
3. Derivatives, of any kind, also create more negative externalities and should be regulated , taxed, or outlawed altogether
4. Rent on property should go to the government, not to the private sector.
5. The cost of negative externalities can be taxed to the appropriate corporations and converted to benefit to society in the form of progressive social programs.
6. To be really generous, the benefits of positive externalities could go back to environmentally and ecologically friendly corporations in the form of tax credits but the education of the public about the benefits of positive externalities has to be made more clear. (end)
Tomorrow I explain how all of this fits into the World Peace Algorithm (WPA)with previews of coming attractions

Friday: I begin a series on psychologist, Dr. George Kelly and his theory of personal constructs. References
Adams, John. [1776] 2000. “Letter to James Sullivan.” University of Chicago.
       http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s10.html
       Accessed 4/27/2012.
Aristotle. [350 B.C.E.]. Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. http://classics.mit.edu/
       Aristotle/politics.html Accessed 8/24/2011.
Avalon Project. (no date) “Agrarian Law, 111 B.C.” Yale Law School Lillian Goldman
       Law Library. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/agrarian_law.asp. (Accessed
       3/20/12)
Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the great west. New York:
       W. W. Norton.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. [46 B.C.E.?] 1998. The Republic and The Laws. Intro. Johnathan
       Powell. Trans. Niall Rudd. New York: Oxford World’s Classics.
Daly, Herman E. and John B. Cobb, Jr. 1989. For the common good: Redirecting the
       economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future.
       Boston: Beacon Press.
Federal Farmer. [1787] “Letter from the Federal to the Republican”
       http://www.constitution.org/afp/fedfar03.htm accessed 4/27/2012.
George, Henry. Progress and poverty. [1879]
       http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPP.html Accessed 3/15/2012
Hobbes, Thomas. [1651]1962. The leviathan. New York : Touchstone
Hume, David. [1740] 1967. A treatise of human nature. London: Oxford University
       Press.
Jefferson, Thomas. [1816]. “Letter to Samuel Kercheval.” June 12, 1816.
       http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=459
       Accessed 4/27/2012.
Locke, John. [1690] 1965. Two treatises of government. Intro. Peter Laslett. New
       York: Mentor, New American Library.
Macpherson, C.B. 1978. Property: Mainstream and critical positions. Toronto:
       University of Toronto.
Madison, James. [1778] “Federalist paper #10”
       http://www.foundingfathers.info/federalistpapers/fed10.htm
       Accessed 4/27/2012.
Newcomb, Steve. 1992. “Five Hundred years of injustice: the legacy of fifteenth century
       religious prejudice.” http://ili.nativeweb.org/sdrm_art.html. Accessed 5/01/2012.
Paine, Thomas. [1795] 2012. Agrarian justice. Lexington, Kentucky: Wildside Press.
Plato. [360 B.C.E.] 1987. The Republic. Ed. Desmond Lee. London: Penguin Books.
Plato. [350 B.C.E]. Laws. The Internet Classics Archive.
       http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.mb.txt Accessed 3/15/2012.
Polanyi, Karl. [1944] 1975. The Great Transformation. New York: Octagon Books.
Property, Mainstream and Critical Positions. 1978. Ed. By C.B. Macpherson.
       Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Rohrbough, Malcolm J. 1968. The land office business. New York: Oxford University
       Press.
Rousseau, J.J. [1762] [1761] 1964. The Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality.
       Ed. Lester G. Crocker. New York: Washington Square Press Pocket Books.
Schlatter, Richard, 1951. Private property: The history of and idea. London: George
       Allen & Unwin.
Skidmore, Thomas, [1829] 1964. The Rights of Man to Property. New York: Burt
       Franklin.
Stephenson, Andrew. [1891]. “Public lands and agrarian laws of the Roman Republic” in
       Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Ed. Herbert B.
       Adams. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
       http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12638/12638-h/12638-h.htm Accessed 4/10/2012.
Wilkins, David. 2002. “A history of Federal Indian policy.” American Indian politics and
       The American political system. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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

Yesterday we looked at what Herman Daly & John Cobb had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XX Recap: Locke, Hobbes & Hume
       As was mentioned earlier, John Locke’s philosophy was the one adopted by the Founding Fathers of the United States, but let us consider its merits and demerits, and then consider what could have been the alternatives, Hobbes or Hume. Locke (again)
       When Locke tried to theorize about the origins of government and the justification of same, he went into more detail than had been done previously, about how property is acquired. In his logical progression from the “state of nature” to the advent of “civilization,” Locke’s argument centers on property as personal possessions. It is only later that he makes the rhetorical leap to real estate as “property” and tries to convince us that the same rules apply to both, as if they were both the same thing. I maintain that his defense of private property as personal possessions acquired and made legitimate by labor, is well founded, but breaks down when he applies it to property as real estate.
       The taking of natural resources and using them to support oneself and one’s family, according to John Locke, gives ownership of those resources to the individual, as long as he only takes what is immediately needed, “at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others” (Locke [1690], 329). Also, creating something new from those resources, such as toys or tools, also confers ownership. Labor, then, is what makes property legitimate, and Locke specifically argues against both waste and greed. In the case of land-property, however, his arguments do not apply.
       In a simple scenario, a man can fence off some land to build a home, plant some crops, or raise some livestock. If a miner, he can dig for valuable minerals. In a more urban setting, a man can set up a shop and manufacture goods. As long as he is living in his home, harvesting his crops and/or his livestock, the house, the crops, the livestock, the minerals, the manufactured goods, are all his personal possessions because he has earned them by his labor. And the importance of protection of this right by the government should be obvious. But Locke just assumes that we are all going to accept his logic as applicable to the land itself, when he has actually failed to show cause.
       In all the above scenarios, the individual is using the land to create something else, he has not created the land. He also has not improved the land. The land is being used as long as someone is creating something on it, but no value is added to the land. When he stops laboring, stops creating, the land is no more valuable than it was before. In fact, if he stops harvesting, stops raising livestock, stops mining, stops living in his house, the land is then going to waste, becoming less valuable. He can sell his crops, sell his house, sell his livestock, sell his manufactured goods and the minerals he has mined, but none of these things are part of the land, they only exist on the surface of the land and they can be bought, sold, and distributed elsewhere. In fact, the land, as an object to be possessed, does not even exist. It is just an abstract concept. The earth does not come with natural boundary lines marking off pieces of it as things, but as we have seen (Rohrbough 1968), (Cronon 1991), and (Polanyi 1968), the U.S. government did just that; marked off pieces of the earth as things, as commodities for sale. It is a metaphor, a social construct, that humans use to navigate in.
       Locke, I maintain, has not shown logically how anyone can own the land underneath all of this. His arguments only apply to personal possessions. In other cultures, notably that of Native Americans, (to which Locke pays lip service and of which he ignores the implications) the ownership of the land is not necessary for a viable economic system, and therefore does not justify a government that feels it has to protect land ownership rights. As Henry George has stated, “It is not necessary to say to a man. ‘this land is yours’ in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it, it is only necessary to say to him, ‘whatever your labor or capital produces on this land shall be yours’” (George [1879] 398). And that brings me to two more fallacies; Locke’s commingling of the terms “common“ and “uncultivated“ in one instance, and “industrious” and “rational” in another.
       Locke admits that originally the land was held in common, but he argues that God did not intend for it to “always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational” (Locke [1690], 333).
       Common does not mean uncultivated, as any collective farm or coop can attest. And not all rational people are “industrious” as Locke defines industrious. And conversely, not all industrious people are rational, however much those businessmen who fit Locke’s definition of “industrious” would like us to believe. Before colonialism, Native Americans had no concept of “owning the land,” and yet they were able to create a valid economic system, using Locke’s labor justification for private possessions (of which they were unaware). They owned what they hunted, harvested, or manufactured, and had no need for ownership of land. In other words, they were both “rational” and “industrious,” by their own definition of the terms, but Locke would have said they were not rational, and only industrious in a limited way. And the social construct (read social contract) by which the colonists guided themselves justified taking the land away from the Native Americans, often by force and violence, and using it in an entirely different way.
Hobbes & Hume (again)
       In America, nobody likes a smarmy monarchist, but let us give Hobbes his due. Like Machiavelli before him, Hobbes understood realpolitik, and probably would be welcomed as a brother-in-arms by the Neo-conservatives of today But his point is still a good one, even if it is expressed in too extreme terms: We need a government to keep law and order, but any laws about property rights do not come from natural law, they come from lawyers, and everyone knows that lawyers can argue any position that suits their fancy. David Hume said pretty much the same thing and he also added that it was all just so much psychobabble anyway.
       If the founding fathers had favored Hobbes…oh wait, they did, that is what Republicanism is all about, and now we don’t need Locke any more. If they had paid more attention to Hume we might have an understanding about how relationships can be changed if they don’t work out. Oh, well, let’s just do it anyway, since we don’t need Locke anymore. Real Estate as a Derivative
       Economically, land as a commodity is also derivative, one of those artificial financial instruments that allow clever people to manufacture wealth out of nothing. Property values are based on the value of adjacent property in a complicated feedback loop using hidden externalities, so land speculators can buy land in anticipation of changing property values and even artificially manipulate property values through designed externalities. Also land developers can buy large tracks of land, subdivide them, and resell smaller but more expensive tracks, much the same way that drug dealers buy kilos of heroin and cut it into baggies to sell at a profit. Wednesday: Conclusion and citations page 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 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th My website

Yesterday we looked at what C. B. Macpherson had to say about private property Private Property as a Commodity (and a derivative at that) Part XIX
Daly & Cobb knew that the Native Americans had the right idea all along
       Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr, in their book ,For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a sustainable Future, make the point that our modern problems with the environment, stem from the economic theories based on land as a commodity rather than as our environment. They don’t have to specifically mention Locke, to point out that seeing the land as something than men labor with, land being passive and men being active in the relationship, ignores the empirical fact that the land, (as well as the rest of the environment), is perfectly productive on its own, without any labor from humans (Daly 1989, 99). They call this misplaced concreteness because economists have abstracted land as a labor/property relationship but have tried to use it as a concrete, empirical fact in their economic theories. We would have a whole different (and better they say) political economy if we had paid more attention to ecological relationship of people to their environments, instead of looking at the land as something to be divided up and resold at a profit. Summary of arguments
       We have learned that property is considered a “right” but, depending on the specific argument, it can be either an individual right or a collective right. We have also learned that “property” means different things to different people. It can mean personal possessions, or land, or both. But “land” can also be thought of as nature, a relationship to human beings that also includes the water and the air. But there can be different relationships, depending on whether humans look at land as a commodity or as an integral part of their whole environment.
       We have learned from the ancient Greeks and Romans that, in real politics, landowners (those who have a right, as individuals, to own as much land as they can get their hands on) tend to form oligarchies to perpetuate their power, and we have seen how this power was specifically perpetuated in the United States legal system. We have read some philosophers who tried to address this injustice: Paine, Skidmore, and George. We have also seen them ignored in real politics, as the oligarchies prefer to cite the philosopher (John Locke) who favored their point-of-view. But we have also seen that any point-of-view can only be enforced by a social contract, not from any “natural law,” and there is something to said for the writings of both Hobbes and Hume.
Tuesday: "Recap: Locke, Hobbes & Hume
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 9th
My rants on private property began on July 14th

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