Ossorio: "Do you have any objections to formulations that emphasize physiological underpinnings to temperament?"

I have objections to talking about physiological underpinnings of anything. [laughter] If you want to talk about physiological concomitants, that’s a different question. Now one of the set of possibilities... You know I talked about systematic possibilities being the basis for moving from the non-empirical to the empirical. Once you have the possibilities, then you look to see which of them are true.

Well, the Person Concept formulation, even from an early stage, did that for physiology. When we talk about embodiment, that provides a place and a wide open set of possibilities for what’s the relationship between things that go on in your body and anything else that’s of interest, like temperament, like behavior, like pathology, etc. And all you gotta do is then empirically go find out what some of those connections are.

What’s this talk about underpinnings? That’s pure polemics. That’s ideology.

Audience: Could you elaborate on that a bit? Think of brain damage and problems of behavior, judgment, cognition, etc.

Ossorio: What about it?

Audience: Underpinnings or concomitant?

Ossorio: Neither.

Audience: Predisposition?

Ossorio: Neither. Its fits a different pattern altogether. You’re talking about pathology now.

Let me give you a model. As an ordinary human being, I can reach and pick up things, and I can pick up something and throw it, and that’s part of my natural human existence. If you cut off my arms, I can’t do that anymore. Why? Because using my arms is the only way I have of doing that. If you take that away, then I can’t do it. If you do less than that, for example, if you chop me up a little, then maybe I can do it but I do it badly.

Now anything that goes on in your brain fits that pattern. The things that go on in our brains are the only ways that we have of doing certain things. They’re the performance aspect of it.

Audience: They’re the performance aspect of it?

Ossorio: Yeah. And if you prevent me from doing something in the only way that I have, you prevent me from doing it. But now turn science fictionist and say, "Let’s imagine that engineering has improved and anything that you can take away from me by way of brain injury, one of my engineering friends can give me a substitute and I can then do just as well." What then? Are you going to say that the neurology was essential? That it was an underpinning? No. It’s simply the way I do it.

Audience: Aliens do it different.

Ossorio: Yeah. If you had a robot, you’d know you’d do it in a different way.

Audience: I’m sorry. Again, a robot what?

Ossorio: Would do it in a different way. Even if he had a brain, his brain wouldn’t work the way ours do.

Audience: Interestingly you would never be talking about underpinnings.

Ossorio: No, no. That’s why I say that’s pure ideology. Keep your eye on the facts.