Nigel Mackay

Psychotherapy and the Idea of Meaning

A number of influential theorists in psychotherapy and psychology rightly argue that meaning is central to psychology. However, they ground this insight on further claims that persons autonomously create meaning and reality; and that a constructivist, anti-realist, postmodern philosophy offers justification for the centrality of meaning. These further claims are mistaken. They confuse symbolic meaning with meaning as salience. The latter, the meaning usually of concern to psychotherapy, is a relation between a person (specifically motives) and objects. It results from the interaction between persons and objects relevant to their motivational interests. It is part of the real, determinate world and in principle scientifiically investigable. The argument that meaning is part of autonomously created realities is incoherent. Further, anti-realist, postmodern constructivism depends on the realist assumptions about facts, truth and objective knowledge that it denies. The genuine insights of the meaning-making movement require a realist account of knowledge, truth and objectivity.

Identification, reflection, and correlation : problems in the bases of repertory grid measures

Abstract Repertory grids, deriving from George Kellys personal construct theory, have been used to provide measures of a number of personality and cognitive variables. Several of these grid measures, such as the identification index, some measures of cognitive complexity, and other indices extracted from factor analyses of grids, are based on correlations between the columns (elements) of the grid data matrix. These measures are problematic and unstable because the intercolumn correlations depend on the direction of scoring across each of the matrix rows (constructs). This direction is not guided by explicit or theoretically justified rules and appears to be arbitrary and inconsistent between researchers. Also, correlation is a poor measure of element similarity, the basis of the identification measure. The importance of the valuating aspect of construing may provide a basis for the standardization of scoring. And scoring from the valued pole of a construct may help bring stability and meaning to the cor...

Cognitive therapy, constructivist metatheory, and rational explanation

Cognitive therapies have shifted clinical explanation away from motivational formulations of disorder which employ both belief (cognitive) and desire (conative) concepts towards a purely cognitive and motivationless one. However, cognitivist explanation, when taken with the constructivist metatheory which usually accompanies it, (a) is incomplete without a conative principle—and attempts to use a self-concept fail to redress this incompleteness, and lead only to explanatory regress; (b) leaves beliefs ontologically uncertain and confused; and (c) assumes, but does not explain, rationality. In contrast Freuds metapsychology—regardless of its theoretical problems—provides a metatheory untroubled by these criticisms.

Constructivism and the logic of explanation

Abstract The abandonment of motivational concepts in personal construct theory paves the way for the metatheoretical principles of constructivism: a cognitivist mode of explanation, a constructivist epistemology, a view of the person as autonomous agent, and an anti-realist ontology. Each of these is unsustainable. A nonmotivational and purely cognitive form of explanation is deficient, and dependence on the idea of voluntary agency to redress this deficiency results in explanatory regress. Both the constructivist theory of indirect knowledge (which is necessarily representationist) and the anti-realist ontology it entails are incoherent and self-defeating. Taken as a general metatheory, constructivism fails. However, constructivist theory and practice are of value when taken as a psychological approach that encourages self-reflection and tolerance and that examines the structures of knowledge and their role in the determination of action.

Unifying psychology through situational realism

We propose that a coherent and thoroughgoing version of realism, known as situational realism, offers a unifying program for psychology. This realism emerges from the conditions of being that enable knowledge and discourse. Because this research originated largely in a centurys work by Australian psychologists and philosophers, we will introduce and explain research and vocabulary that might be unfamiliar to some readers. The approach is characterized by seven themes: ontological egalitarianism; situational complexity and process orientation; a network or field view of causality; a realist logic; a view of relations as nonconstitutive; an externalist relational approach to mind; and acceptance of critical inquiry as the core scientific method. The combination of these features offers psychology the following: a metatheoretical framework that resolves current tensions; expansion into the field of meanings and reintegration with hermeneutics and semiotics; clarification and redirection of mainstream cognitive neuroscience and information processing; an integrative approach to personality; expansion, redirection and unification of psychological research methods; and revision and expansion in psychological practice and teaching.