Truth and Pragmatism
or Are my Ideas true for Everyone Else?

My descriptions of emotions are true for me. My ideas on abreaction are true for me as well.  Are they also true for other people?  This is a question that I was well aware of during my years of self-analysis.

The exploration of anything is always governed by the paradigm in which that something is set. The usual examples are: each branch of science has pre-set rules for analysing anything ; religions have their own sets of rules ; artists are governed by the rule that they have poetic licence to flout all other rules. However, there is one major limitation of a paradigm:

once a person chooses a paradigm to base his ideas on, then he is not usually free to choose alternative explanations that are outside that paradigm.

This view can be applied to the study of emotions: at present the analysis of emotions in mainstream psychology is a mess. Study any college entry-level textbook on psychology, turn to the section on attitudes and emotions, and all you find is a wide selection of disparate ideas on what emotions are. There is no consensus at all. What my ideas offer is a definitive way of exploring and describing emotions, a way that is coherent and logical. There is no realistic alternative in mainstream psychology.

I was able to develop my ideas because I was not constrained by academic orthodoxy in psychology. My scientific training was in physics, not psychology. I am primarily an empiricist. I subjected my ideas to the basic principle of science, that of the repeatability of experimental results. In general, this is a common way that any branch of knowledge makes a radical departure into a new direction : a thinker from one branch of knowledge applies his training and expertise to a different branch.

I expect that eventually my ideas will become mainstream, and this will offer other theorists a common base for developing and extending ideas on emotions.

Are my ideas empirically true for others?

This can be debated between individuals. However, at the paradigm level this question actually contains two separate questions, or two separate factors. When considering whether my ideas can be taken as a paradigm for all or most other psychology thinkers, the questions are:

1). Are my ideas empirically true for all people ? (Truth factor).

2). Do my ideas work ? (Pragmatic factor).

A lot of scientific thinking, in any field of endeavour, is more concerned with pragmatism than with truth. So what I expect to happen is this: if sufficient numbers of psychologists discover that my ideas work, then they will accept them as being true. To discover if they are really true, any theorist would have to undergo a deep psycho-analysis for many years in order to investigate how their own mind works. But there is a major catch here.

To understand the fundamental issue that always surrounds the thinker when he is exploring some feature of the unknown, I give an analogy.

Suppose that you wake up tomorrow and find yourself in the Sahara desert, with a uniform expanse of flat sand-shingle in every direction. You have no compass. There is no landmark feature that you can navigate by. We also assume that the sky is overcast (we are stretching the imagination here !) so that you cannot navigate by the sun or stars. How do you work out what direction to travel in order to reach the nearest town?  The answer is that you cannot  – all you can do is try pot-luck, and hope.

Now suppose that suddenly you see a set of footprints in the shingle  – perhaps coming from the left and going on to the right. Now you can reason that perhaps that traveller knew his way. Therefore, in the expanse of featureless desert, you follow in the footsteps of that traveller. When you reach a town, all you have proved is that the path you followed reached an objective. That path does not by itself prove that it is the best, or worst, path. It only proves that it is effective (it works).

That is the analogy.

What it means is this. When a thinker finds himself in an unknown aspect of consciousness, and no obvious way of understanding it, the sheer effort to understand it is enormous. He has to try to pick features out of that unknown, and then identify something useful about those features. However, if he is aware of the ideas of a previous thinker who has been in that place before, he will automatically use those ideas as a means of making sense of his predicament (that is, he is now following in the footsteps of that earlier thinker).

This is the reason why, when a paradigm is set up, all later thinkers use it to explain their ideas. A common paradigm reduces the intellectual effort necessary to understand something. A paradigm provides a common path through the unknown.

This is why, after Buddha produced his ideas, all later Buddhist thinkers never produced theories that are outside the paradigm that he created. And why all Christian thinkers follow the paradigm set up by the early theorists (mainly St. Paul). Hence, if my ideas become a paradigm in psychology, all later thinkers will follow it. This is the pragmatic issue and is not specifically allied to whether my ideas are true or not.

There may exist alternative ways of understanding emotions, but I expect that their discovery will lie a long time into the future.

Because of the sheer difficulty of exploring the subconscious mind, I do not expect any thinker to duplicate my efforts during my lifetime. Hence the rule that I set myself during my analysis was to depend only upon my integrity and not upon my prejudices. So even when I was analysing the repugnant features of the subconscious mind, I tried to remain fair and impartial. I suppose that I did not always succeed, but I did my best. And that’s all anyone can ever do.

Copyright @2003  Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.