CONCEPTUAL THERAPY

An Introduction to

Framework-relative Epistemology

Steven James Bartlett

Readers who are unfamiliar with the method of “conceptual therapy” may want first to read a short introduction to be found here.

Conceptual Therapy: An Introduction to Framework-relative Epistemology is, as the title says, primarily an introduction. The book is a simply stated, basic description of a complex and technical approach to epistemology developed in several other places, including my doctoral dissertation; a research monograph, Metalogic of Reference: A Study in the Foundations of Possibility; and partially summarized for professional philosophers in a number of papers (for one of these, click here); while the methodology is applied in two of my books, The Pathology of Man and Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health.

Philosophers and other readers who may wish for a systematic, step-by-step justification of the approach used in Conceptual Therapy: An Introduction to Framework-relative Epistemology will not find it in this book (for this, see references above). Rather, the purpose of Conceptual Therapy is to give beginning students in epistemology a skill-based classroom experience in systematic epistemological analysis of a variety of concepts that are both philosophically fundamental as well as forming a central part of our everyday, unquestioningly accepted vocabulary of ideas.

As a result of its classroom, exercise-based approach, it is probably unlikely that an interested, intelligent reader will be able to sit down with Conceptual Therapy and develop to the same degree those skills in epistemological analysis that an intensive, systematic, guided classroom experience can facilitate. However, although this is almost certainly true, readers vary widely in the degree to which they are able to serve as their own teachers.

Unfortunately for most of education today, learning on one’s own is not an ability and a habit that is promoted and cultivated to an appreciable extent; instead, the amount a student learns is believed to be dependent upon the teacher’s skill in interesting the student, instilling motivation in him or her, and successfully imparting what is taught. This is what I call the Injection Model of Education. Education so conceived may be likened to injecting learning into the passive student. The quality and effectiveness of a given teacher is then measured by how many cc’s of learning he or she has been successful in getting into the students.

This teacher-accountable/student-recipient model of education which discounts the primary role of the learner is one I have long resisted. In making this eBook edition available I hope for those relatively few readers who are not intimidated by a goal that requires teaching a subject to oneself. I have decided to make Conceptual Therapy: An Introduction to Framework-relative Epistemology freely available as an open access publication for their benefit. The book may also be of interest to those philosophy professors who wish their teaching to serve the interests of conceptual skill development in their students, and who are sufficiently open-minded to consider the counterintuitive plausibility that many of our concepts—philosophical and otherwise—do genuinely stand in need of therapy.

For a copy of Conceptual Therapy: An Introduction to Framework-relative Epistemology, click here.