Personal Characteristics

Ossorio: Let me go on to a related question. How do we gain or develop significance appreciation? And the related one, how are person characteristics developed in general?

Now, the systematic answer to how person characteristics are developed in general is given by the Developmental Schema. [See Appendix C, Volume III of The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio] There is a formula that says capacity plus history gives you Person Characteristics. [draws Schema on board]

Now as psychologists we are primarily interested in a certain kind of history, namely the history of behavior, the history of learning. Now this is recursive because if you ask, "What gives you this capacity at this time?" (This is a time line by the way.) "What gives you the capacity here to acquire this PC by virtue of the system?" The answer is that you have this capacity by virtue of the PC’s that you have. How come you have these? Because you had the prior capacity and the relevant intervening history. You just carry that back to original capacity. Now, that’s the systematic answer.

There is a more ‘folksy’ version of that, and it’s known as the Poker Player Principle. And it hinges on one of the images called "The Poker Player", and it goes like this. Think about poker and think about the many, many facts that one might learn about poker. Now imagine two guys who are going to learn facts about poker and just to keep it clean let us stipulate that they are going to learn exactly the same set of facts about poker so that whatever differences there are between them, it’s not because they learn something different. They learn exactly the same facts about poker.

Now the first guy is an experimental psychologist. He’s studying how people play poker, so he joins the local poker club and gets into poker games and loses his money and picks up these facts. And as he picks up these facts he makes use of them in the way he has for them, namely in doing his experiment. So that by the time he has gone through all of this and learned all of these facts, he’s gotten to be a better experimental psychologist.

Now, take the second guy. The second guy is somebody who just wants to play poker. He’s just beginning. He goes out there, joins the club, gets into the games, loses his money. As he loses his money he acquires knowledge and as he acquires this knowledge, he makes use of it in the ways that he has for it, namely in playing poker. So, by the time he has lost all of his money and acquired all of these facts, he has gotten to be a pretty good poker player.

The moral of the story is "If you want to be a better poker player, you’ve got to be a poker player." The change principle is you become more the way you are already being. Something brings it out in you and gives you the opportunity to be that way, and the more you be that way the more you become that way. Now, that’s what’s at work with change in psychotherapy. You have to bring it out and then nurture it. As the Skinnerians used to say, you’ve got to get the behavior to occur first before you can reinforce it. So the principle is you become more the way that you are already being.

Audience: We have original capacity. My inclination is to refer to PC’s at the point of original capacity as temperament. Can I get away with it?

Ossorio: Yeah, except that it depends on what you count as the point of origin. If you start with the fertilization of the egg it’s awfully hard to find temperament there. If you wait till after the kid is born yeah, you can find things.

Audience: I came recently to the notion that individual difference and original capacity are what people are referring to as temperament.

Ossorio: Well, there’s a gray area there. It’s hard to separate out what’s there from the beginning versus what gets there real quick.

Audience: Yeah, well, but I’m saying if it’s capacity... I mean part of it is the capacity to, and some of the capacity unfolds. You have the capacity but, nothing can happen until a certain developmental point, then it kicks in but you had the capacity originally.

Ossorio: There is an interesting logic there. If you push it to the limit and ask "What’s the absolute minimum that you have to have by way of original capacity?" it isn’t going to be things like temperament. The absolute minimum that you have to have is peculiar. It’s the absence of anything that will prevent the acquisition of PC’s. As long as you have the capacity to acquire PC’s you don’t have to have anything more than that at the beginning.

Audience: There are differences in deficits with that.

Ossorio: If you look at theories of development you find that they exploit that. For the behavior modifier you don’t need to have any responses. You just need to be able to be conditioned. If you look at it psychoanalytically, you don’t have to produce realistic images. You just have to have images that are displaceable.

Audience: Of course I don’t buy the story.

Ossorio: But it’s the logic that I’m pointing to.

Audience: But there are some different embodiments. There are radical differences in from that point of origin what can happen. Some of it is behavioral and dispositions, but it ends up putting some limits on our dispositions and powers.

Ossorio: Well, yes and no. It primarily opens up possibilities. The notion of capacity is primarily a notion of potential, of possibility, not limits. However, there are limits that go with it. It sets limits to how you can acquire. Remember you need the right kind of history. But, as I say, basically the logic is that all you need is a condition in which you can acquire characteristics and it’s not pure accident. That’s all you need to get the whole process started.

Now, there is also a sort of ancestral relation between original capacity and any later capacity. Any later capacity that you have, you have by virtue of your original capacity plus the intervening history. So you have the capacity to acquire the capacity, to acquire the capacity, to acquire the Person Characteristics. And what that means is that at no time in your life is original capacity guaranteed to be missing.

Audience: That is to come off with a new set of experiences.

Ossorio: You can make a difference at any time in your life because there is no way to exclude it. And guess what? That means that there is an in principle mystery about people because we don’t have any way of establishing what a person’s capacity is. We only know that you have the capacity for something after you have actually acquired it. Then we know that you must have had the capacity previously, but we don’t know what other capacities you have for PC’s that you didn’t acquire. There is no way to set limits to that.

Audience: No absolute way. There are some statistical probabilities kind of ways but no absolute.

Ossorio: Right. That’s one of the interesting things to look out for. In the Person concept there are points like that where there is an essential mystery, where there are facts that we have no way of establishing that we know we have no way of establishing. It’s not just that we don’t happen to know. There is no way. Are we significanced out?

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© 1999 Peter G. Ossorio