Person Centred Counselling

We are, fundamentally, language users.  Language users share certain heuristics, certain 'internal models' that express themselves in ways of talking.  I imagine these in terms of (a) what people say about them (b) how they feel to them and (c) what 'mechanism' undelies them (which the speaker may only be partly aware of).  This is not a technical description - it's meant to reflect something like our explanations, our phenomenological condition, and something else - our neurology or subconscious or something similar.


Changing the models and changing the way we talk happen together.  While there may be causal interactions these can in either direction, and sometimes trying to impose a causal account is just misleading.

What is clear is that exploring new ways of talking feels like discovering new models, and discovering new models leads to different ways of talking.  We also learn by talking - to others, and, derivatively, to ourselves.  Our language provides us with 'internal' computational tools as well as with a medium of communication.

But talking is not free - it is action as well as expression;  we do, as well as say, when we talk.  This is most obvious in commercial exchanges, but can be seen in interpersonal interactions as well.  We can't discuss relationship problems with a partner without changing the relationship, and the problems.  And talking to ourselves - setting aside the very limited case of linguistic computation, or 'mental arithmetic' - has severe limitations.  It raises private language issues, for one thing.  But it also just doesn't work - we need an interlocutors perspective to get us out of rat-runs, to see the things we cannot see.

A counselling context should allow experiments with new models and ways of talking in a safe environment.  We can think of the Rogerian core conditions - positive regard, empathy, and congruence - in conversational terms:  I want to talk to you; I am going to understand you; I am going to make sense.  (Or at least I'm going to try very hard, and it's not going to be your fault if I fail.)

Language and The World

The ontology of our world is a reflection of our 'grammar', in the sense that grammatical rules are taken to include mathematics.  This is why we are tempted to 'explain' one in terms of the other, but our sense of 'explanation' breaks down here.  We explain by talking, and we cannot somehow drag the unarticulated world into our discourse.  Similarly, whatever our visceral phenomenological convictions, we cannot show each other how they make our conversatoin intelligible - we can only do this by engaging in the conversation.

And we cannot 'explain' both at once - either in terms of some other 'substrate' (which would be a silly mistake, simply deferring the confusion), or by playing with what we mean by 'explanation'.  We cannot explain the grounds of our explanations, however we conceive these;  and if we remove the open question difficulty from the concept of explanation, it is no longer explanation - it no longer has the appropriate normative scope.

This  is, again, reminiscent of what happens with all these normative meta-hierarchies - they leave no place for a language which we can use to describe the hierarchy.  This language must either be at the 'top' of the hierarchy - so rendering the hierarchy redundant - or it must be incoherent, and so not a language.  This is just Russell's paradox and the incompleteness/inconsistency proofs in another guise.

But it is only within this world that we can intelligibly raise sceptical questions, and so questions of this kind about the existence of the world are unintelligible.  We can bootstrap from the incoherence of certain scepticisms - e.g. about the existence of the world which enables the asking of sceptical questions.

This is not comforting either for traditional epistemology or for the naive realism of some practising scientists.  Private phenomenological anxieties come out as a kind of inarticulable madness, and the practical success of naive realism only shows that it is a successful heuristic.