Notes on the Psychology of 'As If' | Dr. William E. Smythe | PS9 Meaning Conference 2002

5 p.m. – 5:50 p.m. Paper Presentation

PS9 William E. Smythe, Ph.D., Department of Psychology,
University of Regina

Chair - George Kunz, Ph.D., Psychology Department, Seattle University

'Notes on the Psychology of 'As If'

The empirical validation of different aspects and measures of personal meaning has emerged as a significant issue in recent research in this area. The underlying aim to establish a comprehensive factual basis for theory and practice in personal meaning is certainly a laudable goal in itself. However, I argue in this paper that, in the domain of personal meaning and of human psychology more broadly, facts themselves are not sufficient, for the meanings by which we live our lives depend as much on fictions as on facts. Using Hans Vaihinger's Philosophy of 'As if' as a point of departure, I attempt to show that our constructions of personal meaning are based in fundamental ways on useful fictions, that is, on notions that we know do not correspond to reality but that we nonetheless embrace as if they did. I identify and give examples of four main types of fictions that seem especially to inform the construction of personal meaning. Explanatory fictions include generally untenable postulates about human nature that nonetheless play a role in explanatory theories of behaviour; metaphorical fictions are attempts to understand something unknown in our experience in terms of something more concrete and familiar; mythological fictions appeal to archetypal and supernatural factors underlying our experience; and narrative fictions include the various ways in which we attempt to cast our experience in storied form. In each case, the revelatory and emancipatory potential of the fiction is in no way diminished by treating it as a fiction. Some implications of this for theories of personal meaning are discussed.

Educational Objectives:
1) To explore the notion of heuristic (or "as if") fiction in the construction of personal meaning.
2) To examine four different kinds of heuristic fictions and the different roles they might play in personal meaning.

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