Thanks to Waldemar and Nancy for raising these important issues. The way we “talk” about these issues are crucial, so I very much appreciate this exchange.

 

I am in general agreement with what you write below, Nancy. What I am offering the field can legitimately be characterized as a framework. My caveat is that I would add the word “meta-theoretical” in front of that word. BIT, the JH, and the Matrix are all meta-theoretical frameworks. I believe this is an important addition because it emphasizes that the framework is not offered willy-nilly, but instead is a tapestry of established ideas. But as long as we are clear about that, I will say that I am ok with framework. Indeed, I have tentatively titled the book I am working on The UTUA Framework: A New Vision for Psychology and Psychotherapy.

 

My hope is that we could all be clear about what exactly this means. For me, I prefer to think about these issues in terms of a continuum along a level of analysis that stretches from “zooming in” on a particular phenomena or event, to zooming out, ultimately ending at the concepts and categories one is using to map reality. Something along the lines of the following:

 

 

Mainstream psychology emphasizes the right side of this continuum:

 

 

Consider, for example, prior to my forays into meta theory, I did my masters research on ethnic and gender differences in body image. The paradigm I used in that research (which really was implicit) was the mainstream social cognitive and methodological behavioral paradigm (i.e., Albert Bandura’s version of reality). I used principles of learning, social influence and attribution to make predictions about the way men and women and individuals of diverse ethnic backgrounds would feel and think about their bodies.

 

However, as we are all well aware by now, I found myself returning again and again to the issue of the paradigms. Why did we have to start there? And why were they different? How did they relate to each other? Was there a way to get them to be harmonized? This was particularly a prominent issue in the clinic room, when one had psychodynamic, experiential, family systems, and CBT “voices” in one’s head (among others) each of which was offering different emphases, languages, ideas for intervention, and desired outcomes/valued states of being, which I experienced as chaotic.

 

And so I started my adventures in constructing the unified “theory,” where I was focused more and more on the left side of the continuum. When I wrote the book, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, I was definitely oriented toward thinking of that as an exercise in “meta-theory.” That is, the system allowed us a framework to organize the paradigms and other big ideas into a coherent system. BIT, JH, and the Matrix are meta-theoretical frameworks.

 

Over the past three or four years, I have become convinced that there is the final, most abstract layer, that of concepts and categories that carve up reality. Although I only rarely used the term five years ago, several years ago, I came to see this concept and category dimension as “metaphysics” and realized that the ToK is a new metaphysical system. This popped for me when I was reading Koons and Pickavance (2014) instruction to metaphysics, which they stated that metaphysics is about understanding:

the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. How do things fit together in the world? Plato describes this task of philosophy as “carving nature at the joints,” comparing metaphysics to a skillful and knowledgeable act of dissection. Here are four relations that seem to be among the fundamental relations of this worldly structure: the relation between things and their properties, between wholes and parts, between causes and effects, and things related to each other in space and in time.

 

This is very much what the ToK System is about. And I realized that I was very focused on the problem of psychology because I was very focused on developing a framework/meta-theoretical system that had the correct definitional structure. It is crucial that we have shared meanings of the terms psychology, behavior, mind, and persons (relative to animals).

 

Bottom line, I see the unified theory as a metaphysical (ToK), meta-theoretical (BIT/Matrix/JH) framework (that connects to empirical observations, which is, of course, crucial). It should be taken seriously because it is the only system that solves the (metaphysical) problem of psychology. And it is up to the task of providing us a language game/system/framework that can describe, explain, and predict human behavior (see Joe’s most recent post on the science of talking).  

 

Best,
Gregg

 

 

 

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