Progress in Self Psychology, V. 12

Chapter 6
On the Existential/Subjectivism–Scientific/Objectivism Dialectic in Self Psychology: A View from Evolutionary Biology
Daniel Kriegman

 

From the very beginning of the history of human ideas, there has been an ongoing debate about the validity of perception and communication. Does what we see—and what we say we see—bear any resemblance to the way the world actually is? If so, how much? In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon (1620) began a line of thinking that ultimately led to modem science with its objectivist epistemology. His suspicions about humans as accurate observers were pronounced: “Man's sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things: on the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and ...