TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICAL

PERSPECTIVE OF
NARRATIVE THERAPY
Workshop on Narrative Therapy and Cultural Affordances
(25th November 2016)

Miguel Segundo-Ortin
Hypotheses
• (1) Narrative Therapy depends on our mastery over Folk
Psychology (FP).

• (2) We can understand FP as a special, linguistic, “Form of Life”.

• (3) As a “Form of life”, we can understand FP as offering a

special kind of affordances.

• (4) We can make sense of FP as a “Form of Life” in terms of

Brandom’s Inferentialism.

• (5) Narrative Therapy might focus on re-shaping the set of

possible inferences we can take advantage of.
General Schema
FP as a
“Form of Life”

Inferentialism

Ecological
Framework
What Narrative Therapy (NT) Is
Working Assumption of NT:

• The way we narrate ourselves affects the way we

understand our possibilities for acting:

Narrativity Agency
What Narrative Therapy (NT) Is

“The stories we tell about ourselves make a difference to the options

we see and can possibly pursue—our narrative choices therefore make
factual differences to possibilities for living our lives. We can alter the
possibilities for living a life by narrating that life differently—thus
changing fundamental facts of one’s existence” (Hutto & Gallagher, in
press, p. 10)

“Change the overarching narrative representation and deeper and

more extensive opportunities for engaging in novel behaviors can be
achieved” (Russell et al., 2004, p. 215)
Narrative Therapy and Science
• Key aspect: NT prescribes a crucial role of FP.
• Belief/Desire Psychology is essential to the way we narrate
ourselves.
• We make sense of our (and others’) intentional actions as motivated by
propositional attitudes in a rule-governed way: We act for reasons.

Beliefs

Plans
INPUT OUTPUT
Narrative Therapy and Cog Sci
• Challenge: Is it possible to make sense of NT in the context of
Cognitive Science?
• How to reconcile Belief/Desire Psychology and Cognitive Science?

• Classic Cognitive Science explains FP as:

• FP is characterized in terms of subpersonal cognitive mechanisms that connect

propositional attitudes and behavioral outcomes to explain:
• Individual’s practical reasoning.
• Complex intersubjective phenomena (Mind Reading).

• Problem(s):
• It does not explain how we get our mastery of FP.
• It does not explain the differences (both intra-cultural and inter-cultural) we find in
our FP narratives:
• Often, these differences are explained in terms of pathologies.
Narrative-Practice Hypothesis
• We get our mastery of FP through direct
encounters with stories about people who
act for reasons [Folk Psychological
Narratives]:

“The important thing is that stories of this kind provide a

crucial training set needed for understanding reasons—
and they do this by serving as exemplars
…
According to NPH these “principles” are revealed to
children not as series of rules but by showing them in
action, through narratives, in their normal context of
operation. … It is in this way and in this sense that
children acquire an understanding of the core
structure of folk psychology, its governing norms, and
guidance on its practical application.”
(Hutto, 2008, pp. 28-29)
Narrative-Practice Hypothesis
• Contentless intersubjectivity and normativity are prior to
contentful normativity and the mastery over explicit rules:
• It allows us to understand intersubjective interactions as prior to FP Contentless
Intentionality
reasoning.
• So, we don’t need to presuppose FP in explaining intersubjective
phenomena.
Shared
• Although FP can be described in terms of explicit rules, it is essentially a intentionality
practical enterprise:

“Successful application of folk psychology involves more than merely coming to Biologically
grips with its core structure, it requires skilful know-how” (2008, p. 32) Normative
Patters

“My claim is that our ability to make sense of intentional action in practice … rest
on our knowing, in general, which details might be relevant and knowing
how and when to make the appropriate adjustments in particular cases” Contentful
(2008, p. 35) and cultural
Normativity

“[O]ur early narrative encounters … are likely to be a major source for

stablishing what is culturally normal—what is to be expected” (2008, p. 37)
Explicit
• FP is not universal. On the contrary, FP is build of a set of culturally- Rules
related narrative and normative patterns.
Cultural Affordances?

• Can we apply the notion of “affordance” to our cultural

interactions? (see Gibson, 1979, Ch. 8; Costall, 1991; Reed,
1996; Heft, 2007; Kono, 2009; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014;
Ramstead et al., 2016)

• Can we understand Folk Psychology in terms of “Cultural

Affordances”?

• 2 ways to understand EP:

• Theory of Perception (Gibson 1979).
• Theoretical framework for cognitive science (Reed, 1996; Heft, 2001)
“Broad Ecological Psychology”.
(Broad) Ecological Framework
• Hypotheses of an Ecological Psychology:

• (1) Subjects are primarily agents: They act in order to adapt to the
environment.
• Psychology studies the way agents regulate their interactions with the
environment.

• (2) From the perspective of the agent, the environment is

understood as a niche: the set of possible behaviors the agent can
take advantage of (affordances).
• Principle of mutuality.
• “Ask not what's inside your head, but what your head's inside of” (Mace,
1977)
(Broad) Ecological Framework
• Ramstead et al. (2016, p. 5) propose to distinguish
between:
• Landscape of Affordances (Niche): “the total ensemble
of available affordances for a population in a given
environment. … at a given time”.
Landscape
• Field of Affordances: “relates to the dynamic coping
and intelligent adaptivity of autonomous, individual
organisms … refers to those affordances that actually
Field
engage the individual organism at a given time. … They
are experienced as ‘solicitations’”.

• The Field depends both on our attention and

intention at a given moment Ecological Direct
Learning (Jacobs and Michaels, 2007).
(Broad) Ecological Framework
• Affordances as relational elements of the O-E System:

“An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they
are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and
meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal,
and mental. (…) The behavior of observers depends on their perception
of the environment, surely enough, but this does not mean that their
behavior depends on a so-called private or subjective or conscious
environment.” (Gibson, 1979/2015, p. 121)

“Note that all these benefits and injuries, these safeties and dangers, these
positive and negative affordances are properties of things taken with
reference to an observer but not properties of the experiences of the
observer.” (Gibson, 1979/2015, p.129)
(Broad) Ecological Framework
• Problem: How can we make sense of the idea of cultural affordances?
• Wittgenstein’s “Form of life” as an essential concept (Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014):

“The form of life of a kind of animal consists of patterns and its behavior, i.e.,
relatively stable and regular ways of doing things. In the case of humans, these
regular patterns are manifest in the normative behaviors and customs of our
communities. What is common to human beings is not just the biology we share
but also our being embedded in sociocultural practices: our sharing steady ways of
living with others, our relatively stable ways of going on” (pp. 327-328)

• We are embedded in both a physical and cultural niche, and therefore,

our landscape of affordances depends both on:
• Bodily skills
• “Forms of life”
Language as a “Form of Life”
• Cultural affordances and know-how:

“The extension of affordances to the culturally-based meanings of the objects is justified if we

view affordances in relation to what an individual can do, or rather what an individual
know how to do” (Heft, 2007, p. 369)

• Language as normative repertoires of skills:

“I argue that human children do not, strictly speaking, learn something called language, but
instead develop a repertoire of skill—that enable them to become competent (junior)
partners in their community.
…
“The first phase of language development is thus largely within the confines of the family, and
therefore tends to be idiosyncratic with respect to established patterns of the language
community as a whole. … In order to produce speech acts that function smoothly and are
accepted as genuine by most members of the larger language community, children must
discover how to control the key patterns deployed by that community”. (Reed, 1996, p.
153)
Language as a “Form of Life”
• Forms of Life as Social Institutions:

“Social institutions … are related to affordances. Social institutions are cultural

constraints which limit the range of choices of an individual and reduce the
freedom or the randomness of people’s behaviors; simultaneously, they
construct a causal process of which an individual make use as one’s mean for
action.
…
Language is one of social institutions. … which regulates and enriches the
affordances which the participants of communication have. … Therefore, the
ecological approach to language must be a sort of speech act theory which
emphasizes on the pragmatic aspects of linguistic interactions”
(Kono, 2009, pp. 369-370)
Folk Psychology in the Ecological Framework

• FP is a special (linguistic) “Form of Life”:

• We are trained in the practice of making sense of our and

others’ actions in terms of normative relations between
propositional states.

• FP works as a repertoire of skills that opens up new

possibilities in our landscape of linguistic, communicative and
behavioral affordances.
Folk Psychology as a “Form of Life”

• To understand the special nature of FP

in terms of Brandom’s Inferentialism
(Brandom, 1994, 2000):

• Concepts as “functions” of a public, normative

pattern.
• The meaning of a concept is given by the
inferential commitments we implicitly assume
when use this concept as members of a
community.

• Semantics is based on pragmatics (know-how).

Folk Psychology as a “Form of Life”
“Grasping the concept … is mastering its inferential use: knowing (in the
practical sense of being able to distinguish, a kind of knowing how)
what else one would be committing oneself to by applying the concept,
what would entitle one to do so, and what would preclude such
entitlement”. (Brandom, 2000, p. 11)

“Understanding or grasping a propositional content is here presented not

as the turning on of a Cartesian light, but as practical mastery of a
certain kind of inferentially articulated doing: responding
differentially according to the circumstances of proper application of
a concept, and distinguishing the proper inferential consequences of
such application. This is not an all-or-none affair; the metallurgist
understands the concept tellurium better than I do, for training has made
her master of the inferential intricacies of its employment in a way that I
can only crudely approximate”. (2000, pp. 63-64)
Folk Psychology as a “Form of Life”
• FP is a web of inferentially connected functions.

• To use a FP concept is to follow a norm.

• However, to follow a norm is not the same as to enounce a rule
(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§185-202):
• Following a norm is primarily a matter of skillful know-how:

“Grasping a concept is mastering the use of a word” (Brandom, 2000, p. 6)

• We are trained of applying these concepts through our

exposition to Folk Psychological Narratives in practice
(NPH).
Inferentialism, Affordances and Narrative
Therapy

• When engaging with folk psychological narratives, we have a rich

landscape of possible inferences we can take advantage of
(affordances):
• Application conditions.
• Possible inferences.
• …

• Some of these inferences are experienced as “solicitations” (they are

part of our current “field”).

• The role of Narrative Therapy:

• By re-educating our intention and our attention, we might be able to re-shape the field
of inferences that are present for us at a given moment.
• In addition, by introducing new functions we might be able to add new inferences to
our landscape.
Thank you!