Carol,
I understand what you say about not being able to separate perceptions of "facts" from mental understanding. However, I think it's important to try to do so. In general semantics, we speak of this in terms of "orders of abstraction". The first order of abstraction is what the person experiences on the silent level, that is the actual experience before it becomes interpreted into the symbols of language. The second order would be a simple description of whatever the person is feeling or experiencing. From there, interpretation and analysis can ensue as we climb to higher and higher orders. Here is an example taken from my textbook:
Quote:
Suppose you want to tell someone the following incident. You were walking through an office and you saw a girl sitting at the stenographer's desk just outside Mr. Brown's office. Her face was unfamiliar; she was holding a magazine open in her hands; and there was a pile of papers on both corners of her desk.
A [low order descriptive] statement about this situation could run like this: "There was a girl sitting at the stenographer's desk outside of Mr. Brown's office, holding a magazine open in her hands." This statement contains no guessing; it describes without comments; it could easily be checked; and it leaves very little room for disagreement. It is couched in low-abstraction report language.
This statement may sound just as factual. "Mr. Brown's new stenographer was reading a magazine as I passed by her desk." This may appear to be a description, but it is not; it contains some guesses. First of all, you guessed that the girl is "Mr. Brown's new stenographer"; she could just be waiting to see Brown, or she could be a friend of Brown's stenographer, and so forth; and second, you guessed that she was "reading" the magazine. Both of these guesses might be correct, but we are not at this point concerned with the truth or falsity of the statements, we are concerned with their guess content. Generally speaking, the more guess content, the greater the likelihood that one is in error. If we happen to be right, it is a matter of coincidence... J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness: A Textbook on General Semantics and Epistemics
|
The author goes on to give higher and higher orders of abstraction with this example, including statements such as, "Brown's stenographer is letting her work pile up on her." In response to this he says,
"This is an inferential statement: it draws much more from our accumulated stock of memories, interpretations, and prejudices than from a reliable abstracting of what we see."
I know this is probably tedious to those who are not familiar with general semantics but I think it's extremely important, and has profound implications for the practice of homeopathy. When working with someone, I purposely stay on a low order of abstraction and use MM's that do this also, such as Hahnemann, Clarke, T.F. Allen, and Phatak. This approach is usually adequate and allows me to work successfully with the most difficult chronic miasms. I think it would be good for all students to start out learning this way and then perhaps move on later to the more abstract thinkers such as Vithoulkas and Sankaran. I think that Vithoulkas is successful because he has a foundation in the basics and is drawing on that information as well. I personally don't care for his view of MM because it involves too much psychoanalysis, interpretation and generalization, but I
have found insight in a few cases from his descriptions of remedies. Although, I would NEVER view the person as a "remedy type" as that approach is too fixed and static. (Even Vithoulkas admits that the "constitutional" approach isn't appropriate for chronic cases or those involving damage from treatment.)
When we unconsciously use inference, speculation and interpretation to perceive the symptom picture, we are diminishing our ability to discern the disease indicators clearly, thus rendering ourselves less effective as practitioners. As a result, we are not fulfilling our highest mission to end the suffering of humanity.
[ 25. September 2002, 02:21: Message edited by: Tomi Conner ]