metonymy4u

if we take kant’s suggestion seriously: to drop our age old metaphors of cause and effect and instead search merely for our experience in an unstructured world, then it seems to me this can be applied to our own endeavors within clinical psychology. what would it be like to drop even the radical behaviorist notion of a controlling variable and instead focus merely on a description of our experience within whatever “system” we appear to be a part of in the moment? in such a model, “tacts” are no more than features of a relatively heterogeneous system of verbal operants and “mands” are no more than features of a relatively homogenous system. they are not “controlled” or “caused” by anything in particular, being merely events that we notice and may want to change in some way, relative to other events. “radical genuineness” then describes one way of participating in a system without judging it, without tossing in a huge boulder, mindfully slipping into the water and knowing with certainty whither we would swim.