ABSTRACT
At the threshold to the twentieth century, these themes were elaborated by the German analytic philosopher, Hans Vaihinger (1852±1933), whose Philosophy of ``As If '' asserted that people develop ``workable ®ctions'' (e.g., of mathematical in®nity or God) to order and transcend the hard data of experience, and establish distinctively human goals (Vaihinger, 1924). A similar emphasis on the distinction between our linguistic ``map'' of experience and the ``territory'' of the world was made by the Polish intellectual Alfred Korzybski (1879± 1950), whose system of general semantics focused on the role of the speaker in assigning meanings to events. From these thinkers, constructivists drew the implication that human beings operate on the basis of symbolic linguistic constructs that help them navigate in the world without contacting it in any simple, direct way. Stated differently, proponents of postmodernism argue that people live in an interpreted world, one organized as much by their individual and collective categories of meaning as by the structure of an ``objective'' world of external stimuli. In clinical practice, this carries the implication that therapy is more a matter of intervening in meaning than it is a procedure for ameliorating unwanted symptoms or training people in more adequate coping skills, as illustrated in the vignette of Joanne with which this book opened.
