I’ll close by saying that, like Geoff, I do not believe that CT is literally true. My current belief is that it is worthy of serious investigation and that the approach to psychology that it has inspired—that of mapping out individual beliefs and actions in a detailed and systematic manner, will be of great value even if the theory itself turns out to not be.
FWIW, the idea of a person’s belief system having some fundamental criteria has been influential on my work with what I call EPIC beliefs (beliefs that are necessary for a person to see themselves and the world as having Esteem, Predict/ability, and being an Independent Collaborator).
However, I have not found intermediate mapping of beliefs to be all that helpful, since the kinds of things I help people with tend to center on concrete childhood experiences (or patterns thereof), and most all of the relevant beliefs can be found by inspecting the six layers or belief classes I call SAMMSA (Surface, Attitude, Model, Mirror, Shadow, and Assumptions).
EPIC and SAMMSA are the result of spending a lot of time mapping my own and others’ beliefs and looking for common structural patterns, and mostly noticing that even among people with experience at RMI or Gendlin’s Focusing, it’s hard to keep the mapping exercise tied to concrete emotional beliefs without wandering off into all sorts of random distractions.
Based on my own experience, I would suggest that EPIC is a more basic or fundamental model than IG’s are, and that IGs are simply things people believe are necessary conditions for themselves or the world to be EPIC—i.e., basically good, fair, predictable/masterable, with a place for them to participate in a meaningful “higher” purpose than just existing, by their own free choice.
I also don’t think that “elegant updating” is or should be a premise in CT: compare with PCT’s model of “reorganization”, and you’ll see that their model is more basic: stuff gets rewired until the conflict goes away, and “elegant” is defined evolutionarily, i.e., what you get is what’s easiest for your brain to rewire to, not what necessarily involves the most human-level elegance of belief update.
By the way, when I was first referred to the CT website, my first reaction to the “evidence” put forth on the site amounted to, “ugh… these guys don’t understand what ‘evidence’ means”. It was very off-putting. Nonetheless, as I said, I did manage to take away the idea of IG-as-belief-mediator; I just didn’t find your approach to be radically different from what’s already in PCT and the Method of Levels, which also assume we have a hierarchy of goods determining our behavior, and suggest mapping some portion of that hierarchy in order to change behavior. I’d strongly suggest, before embarking on new research in that area, that you check out what already exists for PCT theory and its clinical spin-off, the Method of Levels.
PCT looks very interesting and your EPIC goal framework strikes me as intuitively plausible. The current list of IGs that we reference is not so much part of CT as an empirical finding from our limited experience building CT charts. Neither Geoff nor I believe that all of them are actually intrinsic. It is entirely possible that we and our subjects are simply insufficiently experienced to penetrate below them. It looks like I’ve got a lot reading to do :-)
I’m being charted by Jasen, and I may be wrong about this, but it seems that it is comparatively harder to find my Intrinsic Goods than it was to find the intrinsic goods of most people who were CT-charted, even though Jasen called my chart very straightforward to do.
For one thing, I know that CT can’t literally be true because evolution is true and CT is not evolutionary.
the comment above on nomothetic vs. idiographic partly explains that.
But maybe CT can help people think about themselves by creating a model of them more complete. Maybe it works for some kinds of people, like super-goal-oriented-rationalists, but not for the average joe (or me).
If the update system of CT encompassed evolutionarily easy mind-paths for change, and saw genetic goals besides intrinsic goods, I think it could become an outstanding idographic theory of mind, and that is why I’m being charted!
FWIW, the idea of a person’s belief system having some fundamental criteria has been influential on my work with what I call EPIC beliefs (beliefs that are necessary for a person to see themselves and the world as having Esteem, Predict/ability, and being an Independent Collaborator).
However, I have not found intermediate mapping of beliefs to be all that helpful, since the kinds of things I help people with tend to center on concrete childhood experiences (or patterns thereof), and most all of the relevant beliefs can be found by inspecting the six layers or belief classes I call SAMMSA (Surface, Attitude, Model, Mirror, Shadow, and Assumptions).
EPIC and SAMMSA are the result of spending a lot of time mapping my own and others’ beliefs and looking for common structural patterns, and mostly noticing that even among people with experience at RMI or Gendlin’s Focusing, it’s hard to keep the mapping exercise tied to concrete emotional beliefs without wandering off into all sorts of random distractions.
Based on my own experience, I would suggest that EPIC is a more basic or fundamental model than IG’s are, and that IGs are simply things people believe are necessary conditions for themselves or the world to be EPIC—i.e., basically good, fair, predictable/masterable, with a place for them to participate in a meaningful “higher” purpose than just existing, by their own free choice.
I also don’t think that “elegant updating” is or should be a premise in CT: compare with PCT’s model of “reorganization”, and you’ll see that their model is more basic: stuff gets rewired until the conflict goes away, and “elegant” is defined evolutionarily, i.e., what you get is what’s easiest for your brain to rewire to, not what necessarily involves the most human-level elegance of belief update.
By the way, when I was first referred to the CT website, my first reaction to the “evidence” put forth on the site amounted to, “ugh… these guys don’t understand what ‘evidence’ means”. It was very off-putting. Nonetheless, as I said, I did manage to take away the idea of IG-as-belief-mediator; I just didn’t find your approach to be radically different from what’s already in PCT and the Method of Levels, which also assume we have a hierarchy of goods determining our behavior, and suggest mapping some portion of that hierarchy in order to change behavior. I’d strongly suggest, before embarking on new research in that area, that you check out what already exists for PCT theory and its clinical spin-off, the Method of Levels.
Link for the confused: PCT is Perceptual Control Theory.
Thanks for the info PJ!
PCT looks very interesting and your EPIC goal framework strikes me as intuitively plausible. The current list of IGs that we reference is not so much part of CT as an empirical finding from our limited experience building CT charts. Neither Geoff nor I believe that all of them are actually intrinsic. It is entirely possible that we and our subjects are simply insufficiently experienced to penetrate below them. It looks like I’ve got a lot reading to do :-)
I’m being charted by Jasen, and I may be wrong about this, but it seems that it is comparatively harder to find my Intrinsic Goods than it was to find the intrinsic goods of most people who were CT-charted, even though Jasen called my chart very straightforward to do.
For one thing, I know that CT can’t literally be true because evolution is true and CT is not evolutionary. the comment above on nomothetic vs. idiographic partly explains that.
But maybe CT can help people think about themselves by creating a model of them more complete. Maybe it works for some kinds of people, like super-goal-oriented-rationalists, but not for the average joe (or me).
If the update system of CT encompassed evolutionarily easy mind-paths for change, and saw genetic goals besides intrinsic goods, I think it could become an outstanding idographic theory of mind, and that is why I’m being charted!