Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

In the following remarks on Dr. Gillett’s stimulating paper, I will contend that his disagreement with Hoffman and constructivism is better understood as a vehicle for promoting a physicalistic realism in psychology and psychoanalysis based on the idea that science has an exclusive access to truth. Second, rather than argue with the specific points of this position (or with the many philosophers from whom Gillett seeks support), I will briefly offer an alternative position overlooked by Gillett, which I call pragmatic realism, that might allow for a reconciliation between a genuine constructivist ontology and the reality described by natural science. Finally, I will indicate how this position enters into Hoffman’s work and indeed into broader notions of constructivism in psychology, philosophy, and social theory.

Dr. Gillett’s juxtaposition of two categories of relativism and constructivism addresses important questions about our notions of mentality and highlights the dangers of playing loose with concepts of “belief” and “reality.” However, I believe that his dichotomy of “noncontroversial constructivist relativism” versus “controversial constructivist relativism” is little more than a rhetorical device that tends only to underscore the deep cultural or “paradigmatic” rifts within psychoanalytic thought. What seems to lie beneath this dichotomy is Gillett’s wish to defend an ontological position of physicalistic realism (“a real world independent of our thought”) against what he believes to be the threat of objective idealism (“Mount Everest exists because people believe it exists”). He sees this threat lurking in the constructivist views of Hoffman (1991; 1992a; 1992b) though he fails to demonstrate convincingly Hoffman’s guilt in this matter.

Let me explain why I think Gillett’s dichotomy is a rhetorical device. He suggests that the noncontroversial relativisms and constructivisms are “noncontroversial” because they apply only to common sense, or views of reality that evolved conventionally and therefore cannot be founded on absolute truth. So in describing noncontroversial relativism, he says that “most people accept the prevailing beliefs of their culture.” But he follows this with “scientists tend to be strongly biased in favor of their own ideas.” The implication here is that “science” is not subject to the [End Page 49] prevailing beliefs of a culture because it has access to some nonculturally relative truth. If relativism has no truth value except as it applies to (naive) common sense and if, as he further argues, constructivism yields no reality except as it applies to cultural conventions, then there is really no substantial distinction between the controversial and noncontroversial types described by Gillett. Rather, he appears to be using these distinctions simply as a device for arguing for his own brand of science-dependent reality. He asserts, in discussing his choice of the correspondence theory of truth, that “philosophers who debate rival theories of truth agree that the outcome would not make a difference to the truth values working scientists actually assign to statements.” In short, “which beliefs accurately represent reality is a matter of discovery,” and true discovery is what only scientists do.

Gillett’s difficulty with Hoffman’s “ambiguous language” illustrates a familiar rift in psychoanalytic thought. Gillett wonders if Hoffman (1992) isn’t revealing a “controversial” constructivism when he refers to the active, constitutive aspect of subjective experience. He then questions the use of “constituting activity” as suggesting a “causal influence” as in “the experience as a whole is partially constituted by the act of interpretation itself” (569). Gillett argues that this would be “an untenable claim for backward causation.” Construction, it would seem, can refer only to a process involving efficient or mechanical causation. And herein lies the rift: on one side, there are those who say that things happen because real entities influence one another only in an efficient (forward) causal manner, and there are others who say that entities can influence each other in some other-than-efficient causal manner. Gillett sees this talk of another kind of influence as a threat to a rational understanding of reality because it appears to suggest that the efficient causal activity that he presumes to constitute “what is out there” would be...