Phenomenology and “hyper-reflection”

Dangerous “Spin”: the Probability Myth of Evidence-Based Prescribing – a Merleau-Pontyian Approach

“…Merleau-Ponty rejects dualities, such as subjective/objective, interior/exterior, but agrees with logical positivism that truth is located in “objective” experience as long as “that objectivity is not confused with what is measurable” 27 and that perception is taken to include the whole of experience without any arbitrary divisions between external and internal – hence “phenomenological positivism”. “Evidence-based” prescribing believes a few psychometric measures can quickly lead to a true understanding of Mrs P's depression, but Merleau-Ponty argues that the idea of going “straight to the essence of things is an inconsistent idea if one thinks about it.…”

“…The reductionist assumptions of logical positivism have long been challenged by the works of such notables as Willard Van Orman Quine 19 , Alfred North Whitehead 20 , John Dewey 21 , Henri Bergson 22 , Edmund Husserl 23 , Ludwig Wittgenstein (in his later writings) 24 , Martin Heidegger 25 , Joseph Fletcher 26 , Maurice Merleau-Ponty 27 and many other pragmatists, existentialists, phenomenologists and post-modernists. Until the recent calls for their abandonment on the catchcry of “lack of (statistical) evidence”, these different perspectives of human existence have historically informed both clinical understanding and treatment.…”

“…To establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and at the same time give us the principle of an ethics . (Maurice Merleau-Ponty 27 )…”

“…He argues that all abstract claims to truth, whether presented as scientific or spiritual, ultimately find their foundation on this lived sense of truth. Citing Brunschvicg, Merleau-Ponty reproaches “positivism for its dogmatic illusion that the law is truer than the fact” 27 . No psychometric reconstruction of Mrs P's depression can be more truthful than the primacy of her own experiences.…”

The Quarry as Sculpture: The Place of Making

“…A distinct positionality threads through the disciplinary and theoretical tracts mentioned so far, namely geography's concern for the complex and mutable synergy of human beings and the land, new materialism's emergence as a reaction to the fixed determinants of material agencies and Merleau-Ponty's sensual comprehension of bodies in motion. Matter is universally present, and the process of seeing is in and of itself a tacit engagement that moves though the world (Toadvine and Lawlor 2007).…”