Monthly Archives: February 2010

Clash of kinds of knowledge

There is a clash at the moment: two ways of knowing about ourselves are on offer, and they are very incompatible.  From where I’m standing, it looks as if both grew out of psychology, but in fact one *is* latter day cognitive psychology and much attendant baggage, while the other looks Eastern, almost Taoist at times.  The latter emerges from a consideration of the combined insights of the enactive tradition (both Noë and Varela), Harry Heft’s synthesis of Gibsonian Ecological Psychology and Barker’s Ecobehavioral Psychology, Coordination Dynamics and similar Dynamical approaches, Radical Constructivism, and more besides, I’m sure. Continue reading Clash of kinds of knowledge

Escaping solipsism

Conventional psychology condems its believers to solipsism.  P-world theory may look similar at first blush, but it is important not to identify with the P-world.  The P-world is all that is first-person: born of the lawful relation between sensory flux and attendant movement that arises in an animate being.   It brings forth the raw material for a world, but that, alone, could never account for the world we encounter.  Our world, in turn, arises from our collective constitution.  Collective constitution is the means by which we escape the prison of solispsim built by psychology.  Continue reading Escaping solipsism