Sunday, November 1, 2015

Empathy, Intentional Action, and The Person Concept

1st Annual Peter Ossorio Lecture - Dr. Wynn Schwartz
October 19, 2015
University of Colorado-Boulder

Empathy, Intentional Action, and The Person Concept: An Exercise in Descriptive Psychology

“The instigation of the Person Concept was a very practical one.  It was the classic problem of how to teach students something about the interpretation of diagnostic instruments, case histories, and psychological theories, and about the conduct of psychotherapy and laboratory and field experimentation, without requiring that they give up their own conceptual and theoretical preferences in favor of those of an instructor (hence the descriptive focus).  A related goal was to accomplish this within a conceptually coherent, intellectually satisfying, and substantively adequate framework….” Peter Ossorio, Persons, 1966/1995

By the 1960’s it remained painfully clear Wittgenstein’s cautionary reminder that “…in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion…”  had not been adequately addressed. This is still the case to the extent the behavioral sciences lack a common lexicon and a shared conceptual foundation. This continues to make it difficult for researchers and practitioners to agree on meanings and accurately communicate empirical findings and useful practices. 
Facing this dilemma, Peter Ossorio, during his tenure at the University of Colorado, created Descriptive Psychology:  a pragmatic, theory-neutral map for systematically describing “the world of persons and their ways”.  He called this The Person Concept, a construction that made explicit the interdependent concepts Individual Person, Behavior as Intentional Action, Language, and Reality

The focus of my lecture is Ossorio’s “Parametric Analysis of Intentional Action”, a method and formulation designed to identify how a specific behavior is similar to or different from any other behavior. 

In an application of this analysis, I’ll operationalize empathy as involving actions in which a person demonstrates to another their immediate appreciation of the personal significance of that person’s behavior and felt state in a manner that can be affectively tolerated. I’ll demonstrate how Ossorio’s parametric analysis provides a straight-forward method, a checklist, that can be used in identifying and correcting lapses in empathic engagement. 

I started my talk pointing out the problems Ossorio confronted in the academic and practitioner communities of psychologists.

From his 1983 "Why Descriptive Psychology?":

1. Psychological theories portray persons in ways which are not merely limited  but highly distorting as well.

2.  Psychological theory and method are clearly almost entirely non-empirical, yet no satisfactory account of this fact has been available.

3.  Both psychological theories of methodology and psychological theories of behavior are inadequate to provide a rationale for clinical practice.

4.  There is no general theory in psychology which is not fundamentally inadequate to account for language as a form of behavior.

5.  Finally, there is a whole set of intractable truth issues associated with traditional theorizing.

I went on to what concerned me in 1972 when I started graduate school as his student. 

1.  Given psychology's general commitment to reductionism and determinism, how to account for the choice and responsibility themes of everyday life and the legal and cultural concerns with accountability?

2.  The major personality theories taught as theology-like schools to respect like your neighbors good-faith but mistaken religion.

3.  The confusions created by the absence of a systematic and shared lexicon of behavioral concepts. 

Ossorio's answer was The Person Concept.

Here's my lecture.  I am re-introducing Descriptive Psychology to Peter Ossorio's academic home, the University of Colorado's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. I was very happy to be doing this.



  1. Thanks, Wynn. Both for giving the lecture and sharing it here. I found your discussion of anxiety and competence very helpful personally. And your fleshing out of the A-O-C diagram in terms of forms of behavior description is a very nice notational and conceptual advance. But I did have a problem with your statement that as observers we have "direct access" to Performance and Achievement, but only mental representations of Want, Know, and Knowhow. When I studied perception with J.J. Gibson there was a strong commitment in psychology and neuroscience that all we really perceive is the physical stimulation of our senses, and that from there it's unconscious cognitive/neural processes. (35 years later that commitment remains.) J.J. said said no, we perceive the world, as a whole. If understand you, you are following the same flawed logic. If so, I say no, we perceive behavior, as a whole.

  2. Thanks Greg, but notice that in Wil's and Gil's empathic engagement diagram of Wil's Cognizant Action, the value of his Knowledge Parameter is (S of Gil's P---A). That is, Wil's recognition of what he takes as the Significance of Gil's Performance and Achievement. Not just some sort of sense representation of Gil's P and A. This is the perception of behavior as a whole, since the value of S is the recursive unfolding of Gil's intentional action. Will recognizes, more or less, what Gil is up to. I haven't re-listened to my lecture but if I said otherwise, I misspoke.

  3. About a half-hour in you are introducing the parameters of behavior, and say a few times that what you observe (have access to, have direct access to) are Performance and Achievement." Which implies we must know about the other parameters by some means other than observation. So not that P and A are sense data, just that they seem to take a similar place in your logic.

    1. Greg, as an observer you see the performance and achievement. But seeing a performance as a "meaningful" intentional action logically presupposes the rest of the parameters. When we see something as intentional we also recognize what we take to be its significance. When we observe something as meaningful the fact of it having meaning requires some knowledge, more of less, of what the actor wanted, knew, knew how to do, and so on.

    2. I guess I'm still confused by your terms. "Seeing", "observing", "recognizing", what's the difference? I'm trying to avoid the trap of saying things like, "All you really observe are the performance and achievement (or sense data, or whatever), and you infer (or your brain makes up, or whatever) the rest." So if not by observation, how do we have knowledge of the other parameters?

    3. I see, observe, or recognize states of affairs as particular states of affairs with whatever significance they hold for me as an actor-observer. My knowledge comes from observation and thought (Ossorio, Place, Maxim A6). The competent knowledge of the parameters is implicit in seeing a behavior as intentional, as having significance. In making a parametric analysis of a behavior, we make what is implicit, explicit. I don't see your wants or knowledge. I see what you do as a performance in the world. But that performance has meaning to me. Also, keep in mind that what is implicit is not necessarily inferred except in special cases where inference is the performance or process of thought.