Ossorio: "Please identify the most important problems from any field that are amenable to being cracked by Descriptive Psychology." You tell me.

Audience: It would be nice to have the answer.

Ossorio: The answer is not foreordained. If people address a problem and solve it, then that was an important problem that got cracked by DP. Before who’s to say it would have been.

Audience: Kind of like this original capacity.

Audience: The question is amongst the kinds of problems that we are aware of, that people are stuck with, and given the nature of Descriptive, which ones do we have something special to offer? Where might we be able to make some money in order to go forward with our activities by solving?

Audience: Search engines.

Ossorio: I really don’t have a feel for this. I can sort of imagine a number of different sorts of applications but nothing stands out. What I think of is "What’s the nature of the resource that we are bringing to bear? What it is is a system and our experience, confidence.

Audience: There is so much conceptual confusion in psychology yet there’s clearly a subject matter that warrants clarifying and creating the grammar for. Wherever you see something important where you damn well know there’s conceptual confusion, or as one of my friends would say, there must be a pony in there somewhere, there is so much horse shit around. [Laughter] There is your target.

Ossorio: Yeah, but that’s where I say that nothing stands out. If you have a system and it’s a good system, then yes, it will bring order to a field that has been missing it and there are lots of them around. But it’s not directed at a special topic where you can say "Search engines".

My original version of this was therapeutic. The thrust of Descriptive is to keep you from doing it wrong, whatever it is you are doing. By keeping things straight, by having a good bookkeeping system, by allowing the world to be as complicated as it really is or might be, you’re not handicapping yourself. You can face actual problems eyeball to eyeball and not create extra problems by how you approach it. That’s simply a therapeutic approach. So it doesn’t select out any field of application, as you’ll succeed more here.

Audience: This is creating social practice, which is different.

Ossorio: No, there’s more to it. Like I said, this was my general attitude that what we needed was something to keep us from going wrong.

Audience: But, the alternative, what you can do is create social practices that have nothing to do with solving a problem so to speak.

Ossorio: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. If I think of the work of CJ and Richard, it’s not just problem solving. It’s creating something of value. As I said before, the sky’s the limit when you are on that side of it. I wouldn’t restrict myself to solving problems. See, back then I was thinking in those terms but these days, no. These days it’s more "What can we accomplish, what can we invent, what can we create?" And even way back in ’67 I was arguing that the essential thing about science was not the discovery of truth but the invention of new forms of behavior. And I would still say the same thing for the same reason.

Audience: Sometimes you do both. If Descriptive Psychology could turn all of the approaches theoretically in psychology and redescribe the relatively common language of terms such that one could show the connections of all of them, and could talk about all of them and everyone of them could talk with every other one of them in the same language. That would solve at some levels but it would really create a different world, more than problem solving.

Ossorio: I started to do that in Persons. Most of you never saw Volume II of Persons. You only saw Volume I. I never got beyond Volume I when I was teaching undergraduate courses. In the last chapter I argued pretty much as you did that the Person concept as I had formulated it then had all of the features of all of the different schools and theories of psychology and pointed out one by one. That was an interesting exercise but like I say very few people have ever seen that. I also developed a slightly different way of talking about research and doing it. There just was not enough time to do everything that could have been done.

Audience: Is there something that we could all take some part in?

Ossorio: Yeah, I don’t think you could make money at it.

Audience: I would vote for C Space for money. But for possibilities, for opening up real possibilities.

Ossorio: I don’t know how we would play in academia these days. It might fair even worse than it did originally. For applications what we’re doing is Judgment Space stuff and Process Representation stuff and State of Affairs stuff, in that order, in that the Judgment Space is ready to go. We’ve all had experience with it. It’s just a matter of doing it. Some of the Process Representation stuff is almost to that point and with a little work, you could turn out things like schedulers, simulations and so forth. Pat [Aucoin] here has done a lot of work on simulations as a planning tool. So there are some clear applications of Process Representations. State of Affairs stuff is the most speculative, most difficult and the least saleable, you might say. But, if it could be done right, it would be the most powerful, and that’s what I am working on now.

Audience: Is there enough money coming in from those things to support off-shoots?

Ossorio: No. We’re living on the profits of showing businessmen how to make more money. None of our products has reached market yet, so we’re not self supporting.

Audience: So have you rescinded the second part of the comment that "Descriptive Psychology is neither true nor useful"? [Laughter]

Ossorio: No. That’s true.

Audience: So you’re still hanging with that.

Ossorio: It’s nothing exceptional. Number one, it’s a concept and concepts can’t be true or false.

Audience: It’s the useful that I am having trouble with.

Ossorio: The concept is so fundamental that you need to presuppose it in order to make sense of the notion of useful. Only for instrumental agents is anything useful.

Audience: Like saying is a grammar useful? That’s a nonsensical question almost.

Ossorio: Right. Asking if a grammar is useful for saying something.

Audience: Say you have a person, a professor, who’s into theories who very well understands what the idea of useful means and what it’s all about. And he’s doing this theory, in which the concept of useful is omitted and he’s using theories to understand people and you introduce the Person concept with this concept of useful. And you say hey, if he uses the Person concept to further understand these people, it is useful.

Ossorio: The way I finessed it, and I deliberately finessed it, was that the concept can’t be either true or useful but the formulation of the concept can be useful. It still can’t be true, but it can be useful. That’s a pretty good finesse and it’s correct.

Audience: What’s the point in making that distinction?

Ossorio: What?

Audience: That the formulation of the concept can be useful.

Ossorio: Well the formulation is primarily what I’ve written down about it. Anybody else could have written their own formulation. It’s the same concept. So there is a big difference between the concept and the formulation.

Audience: Until you have a formulation you have nothing to use.

Ossorio: The concept is there. We all use it.

Audience: It’s the shared concept about which different people have formulations.

Ossorio: Yeah, or could have. Again it’s like the grammar. Different people could write different grammars. But it’s the same language and the language is already there and it already has the grammar it does. So there’s no question there is a difference between the thing that you are formulating and the formulation.

Audience: So it’s really the concept about which Descriptive Psychology is the formulation?

Ossorio: Yeah.

Audience: So what’s...

Ossorio: Remember the two pieces. One is the formulation of the Person concept. The other is application. And the application is because the formulation can be useful.

Audience: So it’s not the concept of DP. It’s the concept of persons, the concept of behavior about which the Descriptive Psychology formulates?

Ossorio: Say that again.

Audience: In other words, the concepts that are shared are about persons, behavior, and so forth. That’s what is neither true nor useful. But Descriptive Psychology is the formulation of those which can be at least useful.

Ossorio: Right.

Audience: Another take on useful. Say the canonical stuff is not useful, but what is useful in my experience is when you translate that and make that part of some other communities’ world. Like the adaptation of the community concept to work in an organization such that it becomes their concept. That’s really useful, but the canonical thing itself is not doing anything until it’s out there doing something.

Ossorio: But remember they already have the concept. What you are carrying over is the formulation. If you recall the actual text in Persons, why I said that. I said what you are about to encounter is neither true nor useful and couldn’t be possibly be either one, and this fact should serve as a warning to you, as a measure of how different this stuff is from whatever you’ve encountered before.

Audience: We got the formula; we just didn’t get it.

Ossorio: Nobody believes it. [Laughter]

Audience: I don’t try to make that distinction with the people outside of this community. Because we wouldn’t get very far and they wouldn’t want to hear of it and they would say we are quibbling, that we’re messing around with words.

Audience: I prefer people to think it’s useful.

Ossorio: See I’m not trying to sell this to them.

Audience: Well we are. [Laughter]

Ossorio: I am just trying to lay it out the way it is. I agree that selling it to them is a different problem entirely.

Audience: But you don’t have to sell it to them.

Ossorio: Generating products is a way of selling it to them.

Audience: If someone has gone far enough to want to be a member beyond wanting to make use of certain things, then they’re ready for that distinction.

Ossorio: Oh, let me say something here. Let me make a polemic comment here. There are no subtleties in the Descriptive formulation. All of these distinctions are clear and obvious.

Audience: Easy for you to say. [Laughter]

Ossorio: Treat them accordingly. There are no subtleties.

Audience: When you get it, it’s clear, as is E=MC².

Ossorio: No, it’s more than that.

Audience: No, it goes back to the grammar and that really helps to get what you are saying. Because everybody’s got it at age two or three and that’s all there is to it or we wouldn’t be the people that we are. It’s the formulation that perhaps that’s not obvious to everybody or why it’s useful or why you do that. The fundamental distinctions everybody has, or they’re not persons.

Ossorio: Right.

Audience: There are levels of acquisition of concept. I mean you can be at a beginner level and therefore you have a certain degree of confidence. And the confidence rose with the right experience. When you have a formulation of a concept it appears to me that it really accelerates your competence with the concept. That’s one of the things about having a formulation.

Ossorio: See one of the reasons why I react to this notion of subtlety is that that makes it hard. And if you think it’s hard, you’re going to have a hard time. If you think it’s easy you may make mistakes, but you’ll have a far easier time and I think you’ll learn more. The mark of success is finding it easy. By the way, back in the good ol’ days, I used to have a very yearly and foolproof test of when somebody had learned the stuff I had been teaching. Namely they’d walk into my office and say, "You know it’s all very simple," and lay it out. [Laughter]

Audience: I am still stuck on this it’s not useful and maybe try another angle on it. If you think of grammar as useful, I would suppose, and the concept of persons somewhere in that like a grammar; because then if you look back and make some speculation about the evolution of the history of the human race, so there is a certain point far enough back and Jared Diamond puts it back a hundred-thousand years, where mankind has language but not grammar. And lower forms of animals have language but they don’t have grammar. Because the word, it can’t be used in these complex multiple ways that mean changing according to positions.

Ossorio: I would simply say you’re welcome to your ideas. But, anything that doesn’t have a grammar I would not call a language, period.

Audience: If they don't have language then in the sense of a grammar.

Ossorio: No, they don’t have a language.

Audience: But they have signals.

Ossorio: Signal use is not language.

Audience: Ok, so go with that then. I’m making the case that greatly before in our history around a hundred or 80,000 years was because of the acquisition of language with grammar and that probably before that wasn’t there. Now, when it was acquired it gained advantage to human communities and therefore it was useful.

Ossorio: No. When it was acquired it changed humanity forever. It wasn’t useful. It changed them. It didn’t satisfy some end that humanity already had. It wasn’t useful that way. It changed humanity in such a way that now everything was different, including being able to talk about things being useful. [Laughter] It is that fundamental.

All right! Thank you! [Clapping]