Preparation for Descriptive Psychology:Conversations with Ossorio on Reading Wittgenstein

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Presenter	Wynn Schwartz, Ph.D.
Date	September 30, 2023
Abstract:	In an early meeting with Ossorio, I asked what might assist my understanding Descriptive Psychology. He suggested Wittgenstein. During Wittgenstein’s life, he published one book, the 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, dying before the 1953 publication of his second, the Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus starts with “The world is all that is the case.” The Tractatus asserts “The world is the totality of acts, not of things,” and “What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.” In my reading, a prime mission of the Investigations was amending and expanding the concept of World. So, I read, and we discussed what was at stake for Wittgenstein as he assembled a methodology of reminders and maxims in the service of describing the fully connected but irregular terrain of language and world; that “there is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.”. This reading and discussing prepared my encounter with The Person Concept. Some of this I’d like to share.
References	1. Wittgenstein, L. (1999). Tractatuslogico-philosophicus (C.K.Ogden,Trans.). Dover Publications. 2. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Philosophische Untersuchungen. New York: Macmillan. 3. Ossorio, P.G. (2006/2013). The Behavior of Persons. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. 4. Ossorio, P. G. (1975). “What actually happens”: The representation of real world phenomena. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. 5. Ossorio, P. G. (1998). Place. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. 6. Schwartz, W. (2019). Descriptive psychology and the person concept: Essential attributes of persons and behavior. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press.