Personal Construct Theory as a Line of Inference

Lecture at Harvard University, May 6, 1960

By GEORGE A. KELLY

One could wish, at a time like this, that the English language were constructed differently. Take
the moods of our verbs, for example. If I use a verb in the indicative mood, I imply an identity
between what I say and what I am talking about. Right now I don't want to do this. And I don't
want to use my verbs in the imperative mood, either. Nor does the subjunctive mood quite fit the
spirit in which I would like to address you.

The Invitational Mood

For what I want to say there ought to be such a thing as an invitational mood into which verbs
could be cast. Thus each remark I made would not have to be taken as an effort to state the
indicative what is, or the imperative what ought to be, or the subjunctive what might be, but
would, instead, be an invitation to the listener to join me in imagining for the moment, that such
and such is so. It would be an invitation for you to come along on an excursion of thought,
without worrying too much about whether each statement along the way is true, or good, or
whether it is even possible : but solely for the purpose of discovering where the adventure leads
us. At the end of our journey we can both ask whether we want to be where we then find
ourselves.

So will you join me, for this hour, in pretending that English verbs do have an invitational mood,
and that all my predicates are cast in this grammatical form. In other words let's not worry too
much about whether my initial remarks have a sound realistic, moral, or practical base. Instead,
let us see where this winding passage of inference leads.

Epistemology

My topic this afternoon is personal construct theory. As a matter of fact, without having
mentioned it, I have already launched into my subject, for what I have been saying is not merely a
device for bringing an idea to your favorable attention, it is an example of the kind of
epistemology on which personal construct theory is based. Simply stated, this is an epistemology
that gauges the limits of knowledge by the points to which our lines of reasoning ultimately lead
us.

‘Ultimately' means a long ways off of course. But no matter. Even if such points of final
reckoning do happen to lie in the infinitely remote future, they nevertheless have something
important to do with the lines of inference we pursue here and now, just as the term infinity at the
end of certain mathematical equations, a something which no one can concretely put his finger on
or count up to, is essential to the immediate meaning of those equations.
Our ultimate test of truth, then, is not how many things we can account for all at once, nor the
closeness of correspondence between our thoughts and our senses, nor even the number of full
professors who agree with us, but it is, rather, the way our guesses turn out in the end. Our
IMMEDIATE test of truth is then, by the same token, how things turn out tomorrow.

So you see, it was natural enough for me to start out by inviting you to take the afternoon off,
leave behind any psychological certainties that might spoil the fun, and come along with me for
the ride. Now it happens that not only do I think this is a way of arriving at some interesting
places we might not otherwise come across, but I suspect this is how mankind generally
progresses-perhaps even a little in spite of himself.

A Line of Inference

At this point it should not be hard for you to see how I regard personal construct theory. It is a
continuing adventure and, like any adventure, needs to be judged, not so much by its points of
departure as by its points of arrival. Will you join me , then, in seeing personal construct theory
not no much as a set of fixed spatial dimensions in terms of which moving things, such as human
behavior, can be made to stand still long enough to be looked at. It is that, of course. But even
more may we regard it this afternoon as an ongoing train of inferences that could give us some
fascinating glimpses of what is going on in the mind of man.

Let me hasten to add that the historical beginnings of this train of inferences are quite lost to me.
I know others must have started out along these lines, probably centuries ago, and some must
have pursued the quest further than I have, but just where they left off or where I picked up from
them I am at a complete loss to say. This is something I don't intend to worry about, at least not
this afternoon. Moreover, I have no particular proprietary feelings about personal construct
theorizing. It is a road anyone can travel as he pleases, and there probably are as many short-cuts
as there are people who have set foot on the path.

Every line of thought involves the alternating play of induction and deduction. This is true of my
own theorizing ventures. For example, my daily calendar of appointments used to involve a
mixture of people who came in to talk about their research and people who came in to talk about
their intimate problems. still involves such a mixture, and it is the sort of mixture I recommend
highly for persons who want to have a close-up view of human experience. The first kind of
appointment is supposed to be concerned with scientific inquiry and the second with
psychotherapy.

Two Kinds of Referents

I must confess that I was a little slow in catching on, but it did finally dawn on me that both types
of interviews were basically concerned with the same issues. The social amenities and-the terms
of reference were somewhat different-usually. But the obstacles were much the same. For
example, at two o'clock we might be confronted with some elastic hypotheses about data that had
recently been collected. And at three o'clock we might have to cope with some elastic
interpretations of what had happened at the home the night before. At four o'clock I might find
myself confronted with a person who was reluctant to stake his prejudices on the outcome of a
systematic inquiry. And at five I might find myself facing a poor trembling soul who like wise
was reluctant to put his feelings in the form of questions.

The thing that struck me was that for one person I was trying to reduce human behavior to the
terms of science-prediction, control, systematic observation, hypothesis testing, experimentation,
and perhaps even a little creative thinking now and then. In the other case I was trying to reduce
human experience to the terms that psychologists reserve for describing behavior other than their
own-motives, needs, anxiety, the residue of childhood misfortunes, unconscious desires, and
perverse resistance to realistic insight.

I can't say that one set of referents was working out any better than the other, for by the time I
realized that I was dealing with the same basic problems all afternoon I realized also that my
methods had already began to fuse with each other. By and large, though, it seemed that my
interviewee and I were a little freer to try out something constructive when we were attempting to
think together like scientists than when we were trying to negotiate an agreement between patient
and therapist.

Not that there weren't advantages to the clinical way of thinking ; often when we were engaged in
what we regarded as psychotherapy we were more imaginative and better able to generate
hypotheses. But, too often these sensitive hypotheses were rejected out of hand as obvious
"defenses" or, accepted uncritically as "insights”. To be sure, in psychotherapy it seemed that we
were coming to grips with something way down deep, with those surges of human experience
that rarely reach the light of language. But our way of dealing with those surges was mostly by
speculative talk, punctuated with soulful silences, heavy sighs, a few tears, wistful glances,
moments of ecstasy, and the like. We did not very often reduce our clinical hypotheses to
operational terms in order to try them out experientially. So I doubt if we were making as much
use of our capacities for human experience as we pretended we were. What we did ended up
mostly in talk. And our reasoning tended to be Post hoc and safely speculative , rather than the ad
hoc risk-taking kind of intellectual venturesomeness that characterizes modern experimentally
oriented science.

What I am talking about here is the kind of inductive reasoning that has gone into personal
construct theorizing. There were many other inductive passages, of course, such as those which
ensued from our explorations of enactment, or from the whimsically fabricated interpretations we
tried out in psychotherapy, or from our experiences with the complaints of teachers about their
pupils-but perhaps this one line of inference is sufficient to illustrate our point. So let us follow
this particular line a little further in order to illustrate how the inductive phases of our theorizing
begin to link up with the deductive phases.

The Referents of Science

If science and therapy both find themselves confronted with the same day-to-day problems,
cannot we therefore cast those problems into the same terms ? And, furthermore, may this not be
a good thing to do ? Suppose we view the client as we do the scientist and see him, as he
struggles to accomplish whatever it is he is trying to accomplish, using the same basic
manipulative devices. If the scientist makes use of prediction as a way of life, does he do this
only because he is trained as a scientist, or because he is first of all, a man, using the instruments
that men universally employ to accomplish their ends ?

Such speculation points to another figure among the various images of man which have been
erected through the ages. of man the glutton, or man the tragedian, or man the victim of women
or man the mentally backward god, or man the precocious animal, we have here-man the
scientist, the anticipator of what is about to happen. This view puts human behavior squarely on a
time dimension, rather than regarding it first in spatial terms and then superimposing some kind
of dynamics to account for behavior as a process.

A Postulate with Corollaries

We can state this view of man as a postulate, and then proceed deductively to see how well our
inferences turn out. Put it this way, “a person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the
way he anticipates events." This is a start, and there are several ways we can go from here. One
corollary statement that occurs to me right off is that a person anticipates events by construing
replications Since time presumably never repeats itself it is up to nan, even when he is an infant,
to construe experience so that some events seem like what has happened before. Persons do this
differently; if this were not so it would be hard to tell one person from another. And each person
builds up his own system of constructions. Now you see right off we have stated three
corollaries, a "Construction Corollary," an *"Individual Corollary," and an "Organization
Corollary." You say you might have inferred others. You probably would. Of course! I agree.
Indeed, I have already conceded the point. I said- “each person builds up his own system of
constructions."

The Dichotomy Corollary

But let's go on. Now we come to one that may be more controversial. "A person's construction
system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs." It is probably at this point
that my own line of personal construct theorizing veers off from that which many others would
follow. Yet here we have the grounds for the kind of mathematics we can employ, as well as for
a number of the psychotherapeutic techniques that emerge from the system and which we have
found useful.

It is a popular notion that we should avoid making black and white judgments about anything.
But I am prepared to hold, both on. deductive and inductive grounds, that these are the only kinds
of judgments that any of us are psychologically prepared to make. Let us see how this works.

Suppose we start with the familiar logical form, A is either B or not B, and consider it from two
angles. In order to make this a little more wide awake on a late Friday afternoon let us substitute
some more vivid terms of reference. Let us put it this way, for the sake of our discussion: your
psychology professor is either interested in you or he is not interested in you. Now let us consider
this statement from our two angles.
Some psychologists say that one must first determine whether this is a nonsensical statement. If
the idea that one person is interested in another inconceivable, then there is no way of proceeding
with the argument. But suppose this is a statement that is conceivable to you. You have been able
to set up a construct of one person being interested in another or not, and have been able to
employ it in a variety of situations and to a variety of people, but I haven't the faintest glimmer as
to how such an abstraction works. From the standpoint of personal construct theory, then, the
question is not whether the proposition makes sense itself or not, but whether it expresses the
kind of sense that you or I make out of our interpersonal relations. This is a way of saying that,
from the standpoint of the theory, constructs are personal.

Now it may occur that even you find the proposition inconceivable in certain realms of events.
For example, you may be able to think of a parent being interested in a child, or a student being
interested in another student, or even of a student being interested in a professor, but the notion
of a professor being interested in a student may seem about as sensible as the idea that Plymouth
Rock might have been interested in a pilgrim. Here is an instance of where you have the
construct all right, but its range of convenience does not extend to such things as professors. Here
again the question is not so much whether the construct makes sense or not but where it make
sense as well as to whom. The notion, then, of the range of convenience of the personal construct
is an important one in the scheme of things that personal construct theorizing brews.

Now suppose we take the second angle from which this statement about your professors can be
viewed, the either..or in the sentence. Your psychology professor is either interested in you or he
is not interested in you. It's got to be one or the other. Now it is possible that you can imagine his
being interested in you on some occasions and not on others. He can also be interested in some of
the things you do and not in others. In fact he may show interest in you in preference to certain
students but not in preference to others. Depending upon the number of occasions, the variety of
settings, and the contexts in which he displays interest rather than no interest you may make
some judgement of the AMOUNT of interest he shows.

Now I have no quarrel with the notion of amount or of shadings of gray used in this sense. But
the notion of amount is another construct, also dichotomous with poles of much or little, which is
here combined with the construct of interest. You may say of your professor, then, that he shows
a considerable amount of interest in you. By combining constructs you can plot the professor on a
scale developed out of the two dichotomous constructs of interest versus no interest, and much
versus little. But as for your primary working construct of interest, as distinguished from the final
plot of your professor, there is only one distinction implied, the distinction between interest and
not interest. And there is only one similarity implied too, tho one that lumps interested people
together and, by the same token, lumps uninterested people together.

Two Poles but only One Similarity

In making this last statement we have gotten a little ahead of our selves. The structure of our
language and our Western standards of logic will permit us to agree readily enough that there is a
similarity between people implied when it is said that they are interested in us. But is there a
similarity between the people of whom it is said that they are not interested in us ? The line of
theorizing we are following this afternoon leads us to say that there is such a similarity.
Moreover, it leads us to regard it as essentially the same abstraction that links the interested
persons with each other.

Suppose we go back to Plymouth Rock, as I understand it is quite appropriate io do when in these

parts. Suppose I said that after considering the matter quite carefully I had concluded that
Plymouth Rock was never actually interested in a pilgrim. Such a remark would imply that
Plymouth Rock was within the range of convenience of my construct of interest all right enough,
and that it therefore made some particular sense to me to conclude that Plymouth Rock was not
interested. Here I am construing the behavior of the Rock and I am affirming something about
that behavior. Perhaps I am drawing my inference from the fact that it is willing just to lie there
and be looked at, without in the slightest ever inching over to the iron fence through which
people peer at it, or without ever responding to any of the rude remarks made in its presence. I
may even speculate that this monumental lack of interest stems from the Rock's inner conviction
that it will outlast both its critics and idolizers, so why should it bother with either. But I have
accepted the Rock within the range of convenience of the construct and I have likened it to other
objects, including possibly some psychology professors, which have bravely withstood the
temptation to become interested in people.

During this passage in our line of inference I am supposed to be theorizing deductively. But
theory building is not simply one big wave of induction followed by one big trough of deduction.
a lot of ripples too in the pattern of thought, and 1 still have some thing important to say about
the dichotomy corollary. I think we can say it best by following an inductive line of inference.

The Implicit Pole of a Construct

Take the child who repeats, during clinical interviews, such expressions as "He gets mad,'" or
"They had fits," or "Somebody was looking for a fight," or "She blows up," etc. Are these terms
which merely distinguish some sense of turbulence from everything else in the world, from a
rooster's tail, from a slip of the tongue. from the time of day, from a big bass drum ? Or is he
saying that there is another pole to his dimension, perhaps a pole of tranquility that he longs for
or has once caught a glimpse of. Or is he saying that there is a gay and carefree way for people to
get along with each other, if they would only hit on it. Then again may he not be saying that the
persons he knows do angry things but that. as persons, this is not wholly the way he sees them ?
Or is this it: "I am not an angry person, it is only that I am surrounded by anger ? Perhaps it
means that only after an explosion has taken place can one be sure that he is no longer on the
verge of catastrophe. Is he reminding his gentle mannered interviewer that this is not the way
people in his world interact with each other? Actually, our clinical experience teaches us that we
know comparatively little about what he means until the construct he is using is fully explicated
in its dichotomous form, until the implicit contrast becomes clear.

Or take the student who keeps saying, 1 believe people should be accepted as they are. I believe
students should be encouraged to choose their own intellectual pursuits. On examinations they
should be allowed to say what they really think. We need more faith in our fellow man." As
clinicians we ask ourselves, what is the student saying?
What is the complete construct?

Every construct seems to involve two assertions. In this case the assertion that people should be
"accepted" is only one of them. The student is also asserting something else. In fact, the
something else is likely to be what he is primarily addressing himself to. If he looks you straight
in the eye while making these remarks you may suspect that he is drawing some kind of contrast
which puts you on one side of the fence and himself on the other. He may be implying that some
people control others, or perhaps that he feels himself controlled by outside forces, or that there
is a helplessness, a sense of utter dependency, for which he sees social permissiveness as the only
remedy.

But experience in psychotherapy will lead us to suspect that there may be even more here. Not
only is there an attitude being expressed which needs to be understood both in terms of its thesis
AND its antithesis, but the student is cutting out for himself a conceptual slot along which he can
move himself. Such a mental slot gives direction to his own behavior. If his social posture proves
impossible to maintain, this construct dimension that he has just expressed makes it clear what he
can do about it. He can move from one end to the other. He can stop putting up with people as
they are and start making them into what they ought to be. .He can demand that his professors
provide more positive leadership, that they stand for something! He can insist that examinations
measure what students really know. And he can become alert to the hidden motivations of his
fellow man-these in contrast to what he said ACCEPTING people as they are, encouraging
students to choose, letting them speak their minds on examinations, and having faith in fellow
man.

This is perhaps enough to say about the dichotomy corollary in general and about the kind of
inductive inferences in particular that go into it. We can return to deduction for awhile. I might
talk about the badly disturbed patient who for months had puzzled his therapist with his
complaints that he was sick. sick. sick. The therapist, after elaborating with him the idea of
sickness, as well as trying a number of other things. decided to examine the construct from the
point of view of the dichotomy corollary and asked him what it would mean not to be sick. The
patient, surprised to be asked such an obvious question, looked up and said immediately, "Why,
to be free !" After that the two of them began to make some progress.

A Cognitive Theory or an Affective Theory

You will recognize that I have formulated human behavior in terms of dichotomous units-units
called "constructs"" because they are erected to cope with circumstances and "personal
constructs*" because they are erected by the persons who use them. You have perhaps noted that
these are abstracted units of behavior which may or may not carry word labels in the mind of the
user. Perhaps it is clear. too, that this is not a cognitive theory any more than it is an affective
theory. The only reason I can think of for anyone's calling it a cognitive theory is that he was
accustomed to think of anything that he could structure verbally as being itself verbal, or to think
of anything that can be understood dispassionately by a psychologist as inherently lacking in
passion. This background of belief in a necessary and immediate homology of construct and
object sometimes causes con- fusion in understanding personal construct theory. properly one
needs to approach the theory from the epistemological position of constructive alternativism, a
position which most s:ientists half believe in, but find hard to apply because neither our culture
nor our language permits us to talk that way.

Abstraction

There is something more that needs to be said about the

"Dichotomy Corollary" that may Help one to understand bow he can regard a construct as
essentially a black versus white affair, yet use that construct to plot Objects concretely along a
scale. The construct is an abstraction. it is portable, like a measuring stick that can be picked up
and laid down to compare a great variety of lengths, or like a compass that always points either
north or south-never a little north or a little south- but which can be moved about to tell which is
north of which or what is south of what. And, like the compass, the construct tells us speci-
fically that what is north is not south, not merely the one-ended fact that what is north is different
from up or down, east or west, rooster tails, slips of the tongue, times of the day, big bass drums.
The psycho-logic, if we may pull a word apart in order to cram some meaning into it, is of the
form, A is either B or C, rather than of the classical form, A is either B or not B.
You professor is either interested in you or he is a stinker. This may not b: logics but it is
psychological! It seems to us that live human beings do not com- pare a something with a
nothing not even a professor. I doubt if they even can. They think by comparing a something
with something-an interested professor or a stinker.

I said that this corollary had something to do with the mathematics of personal construct theory.
Without trying to elaborate the point this late in our discussion, perhaps you will simply agree
with me that the construct, viewed as we view it-as an abstraction, and as dichotomous, and as
having two affirmative poles-is a kind of binary mathematical unit. We will not go into the
further implications of this, except to say that it permits one to predict such things as a Gaussian
distribution of responses on an attitude scale whose constructs do not match the constructs of the
respondent, and a U-shaped curve in certain instances where they do : and to say that it permits
the use of binary factorial analyses of personal construct systems that have been explicated in
certain ways.

Well, we have been hung up for the major portion of this paper on the dichotomy corollary.
Perhaps that was to expected, for dichotomous constructs ARE forms of self-prepared dilemmas,
and people DO hang themselves up on the horns of them, and tender minded clinical
psychologists often try to haul people off these painful perches; sometimes by generously
offering the use of their own dilemmas.

Other Corollaries

There are other corollaries along the path of inference we have chosen. Having set up his
dichotomy we suspect a person chooses for himself the alternative which appears either to
stabilize the core of his system or to extend its perimeter. Call that one a “Choice Corollary."
And constructs have limited ranges of convenience, at least the ones we have seen seem to have.
Call that the “Range Corollary." We have already mentioned it. And construct systems change
with the rolling succession of predictions and outcomes that characterize life's experience. Call
that the Experience Corollary." But there are limits to one's flexibility in revising his system,
limits that are pretty much set by how well one can use his existing constructs to embrace new
things. That one we can call the "Modulation Corollary." Of course, a construction system is not
altogether internally consistent. That is the “Fragmentation Corollary." And if we look at human
goings-on in this personal construct way we are led to say that to the extent that one person
employs a construction of experience which is similar to that of another, his psychological
processes are similar. That we can call a "Commonality Corollary." Finally, we can say that to
the extent that one person construes in some way or other the construction processes of another,
he may play a role in a social process involving the other person. That is the "Sociality
Corollary." From it stems lot of things that have to do with the way people deal with each other,
as well as right useful theories of guilt, hostility, and psychotherapeutic relationships. we won't
worry about these this afternoon.

And Now, the View

But what I wanted to talk about was personal construct theory not so much as a fixed point of
view, but as a line of successive inferences, a line which each of you, I am sure, would have
traced out along a somewhat different route. But you have been kind enough to let me drive
during this outing. As you see, I’ve placed as much emphasis upon human experience as I have
upon human behavior, both for man in general as well as for you who accepted the invitational
mood of my verbs and came along on this ride. You have been patient with my driving, which
you must have found pretty bumpy in spots. But at last we've parked the car at what I consider a
vantage point. Now you can look around, see what there is to be seen, and ask yourself if you like
the view.