Termination,Terminable and Interminable: Commentary on Paper by Jody Messler Davies

The termination process begins while the analytic couple is preparing together to end treatment. Mourning the loss and binding the edges of the analytic relationship proceed within each participant after they no longer meet. Many of our common termination practices, however, undermine the patient's leave taking and endanger the positive internal object relationship that we hope our patient will carry into the future. Traditional teachings about how to practice termination, based on one-person psychology and classical principles of anonymity, abstinence, and neutrality, must change to reflect newer ideas about how analysis works. I propose that we think of termination as both a death and a graduation. I suggest ways in which the analyst might engage with the patient in mourning together. I stress the critical importance of follow-up sessions in which unanticipated negative reactions to the termination might be examined before the analytic tapestry has a chance to unravel.     

Default values,criteria and constructivism

Wittgenstein, in his later writings, gave an account of the meaning of expressions in terms of criteria for their application. As with many of Wittgenstein's later ideas the notion of a criterion has proved difficult to explicate. A recent account, which ties criteria to the philosophical doctrine of constructivism, provides a link between the concept of a criterion and a series of ideas about language understanding which have emerged in the past few years. It is shown that these ideas can be made to cohere within a general constructivist framework, and that an alternative realist framework is inadequate in this respect.     

Realism,relativism, and constructivism

This paper gives a critical evaluation of the philosophical presuppositions and implications of two current schools in the sociology of knowledge: the Strong Programme of Bloor and Barnes; and the Constructivism of Latour and Knorr-Cetina. Bloor's arguments for his externalist symmetry thesis (i.e., scientific beliefs must always be explained by social factors) are found to be incoherent or inconclusive. At best, they suggest a Weak Programme of the sociology of science: when theoretical preferences in a scientific community, SC, are first internally explained by appealing to the evidence, e, and the standards or values, V, accepted in SC, then a sociologist may sometimes step in to explain why e and V were accepted in SC. Latour's story about the social construction of facts in scientific laboratories is found to be misleading or incredible. The idea that scientific reality is an artifact turns out to have some interesting affinities with classical pragmatism, instrumentalism, phenomenology, and internal realism. However, the constructivist account of theoretical entities in terms of negotiation and social consensus is less plausible than the alternative realist story which explains consensus by the preexistence of mind-independent real entities. The author concludes that critical scientific realism, developed with the concept of truthlikeness, is compatible with the thesis that scientific beliefs or knowledge claims may be relative to various types of cognitive and practical interests. However, the realist denies, with good reasons, the stronger type of relativism which takes reality and truth to be relative to persons, groups, or social interests.This paper was presented at the 8th Inter-Nordic Philosophical Symposium, Oslo, 18–20 May 1989. Some ideas from this paper were first expressed in a lecture in Professor Aant Elzinga's seminar in Gothenburg, 22 April 1988.     

Exogenous, endogenous, and dialectical constructivism

Three constructivist paradigms are distinguished. Exogenous constructivism (rooted in a mechanistic metaphor) emphasizes the reconstruction of structures preformed in the environment. Endogenous constructivism (rooted in an organismic metaphor) emphasizes the coordination of previous organismic structures. Dialectical constructivism (rooted in a contextualistic metaphor) emphasizes the construction of new structures out of organism/environment interaction. It is suggested that more general metatheories integrating exogenous, endogenous, and dialectical aspects of the construction of knowledge can and should be formulated. Such formulations would not attempt an impossible synthesis of the root metaphors, but rather integrate them in a coherent metatheory by specifying the boundary conditions in which each root metaphor best applies. An example of such a metatheory, based primarily on Piagetian ideas, is presented.     

Kantian constructivism and the authority of others

I argue that Christine Korsgaard's Kantian constructivism cannot accommodate our obligations to others. Because she holds that all of our obligations are grounded in our obligating ourselves, she is committed to the view that our obligations to others are grounded in corresponding obligations to ourselves. Yet this conclusion is objectionable on substantive moral grounds. The problem is that she embraces an egocentric conception of authority, on which we originally have the authority to obligate ourselves whereas others only have the authority to obligate us because we grant it to them. The solution is to adopt a more thoroughly social conception of authority and autonomy.