An interview with Kenneth Gergen

This conversation discusses the epistemology of social constructionism —theory, method, praxis—in relation with traditional psychology. The first part of the conversation deals with the places and forms of social constructionist thought and with the limits of the traditional positivistic epistemology of psychology. The next part of the conversation focuses on ...

| Quantitative Social Research

Many would say that the field of psychotherapy has lost its way, and has slipped into a lifeless space of mediocrity with an emphasis on interpretation, where therapists are more concerned with models of change than the mysteries of change itself. The field has witnessed the rise and demise of ...

With fifty years having passed since Gregory Bateson and his colleagues published their famous paper, ‘Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia’ , it is an opportune time to review the theory and its clinical relevance today. Bateson’s team began with an interest in how the identity and functioning ...

| The Double Bind Theory
PŘEKLAD

I start from a position in second order cybernetics which turns out to be a Radical Constructivist position. This position is essentially epistemological, and much of this paper is concerned with the act of knowing, crucial when we try to develop an understanding of what me mean when we discuss ...

So let me start my talk by saying I sincerely hope that a knowledgeable scholar will collect and record the history of the first ten or fifteen years of cybernetics before too many of the fascinating personal and intellectual details of its inventors are irrevocably forgotten. I, unfortunately, am anything ...

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel in August 1896. Last year’s centenary of his birth was an occasion for celebration in many places of the Western world. The basic reason for this international attention was the unquestionable fact that Piaget was the founding father of a branch of psychology that ...

| PŘEKLAD

Like any apparently novel approach to the basic epistemological problems of 'knowledge', the constructivist ideas that have spread in the last twenty years continue to generate a host of negative as well as a few positive reactions. I shall focus on some aspects of Radical Constructivism, as distinct from 'trivial' ...

In the philosophical tradition of the Western World, it is held that knowledge forms a sharp contrast to belief, opinion, hypothesis, and illusion. What is called “knowledge,” is supposed to be not only unquestionable but also independent of the knowing subject. Knowledge, therefore, is considered much more than know-how. It ...