Impact of Locke

We have mentioned the objection of reasonableness to a pure coherence viewpoint: this objection is the echo of empiricism. The empiricist theory of truth suggests that there should be some correspondence with the external environment; translated into practice this means strategies to test hypotheses. The empiricist influence on humanism builds on, but is different from, that of Descartes.

As coaches, what strikes us first and foremost about Locke’s epistemology is his pragmatic separation of things in themselves and the human sense experience of those things. We cannot entirely know the mechanism of how the external world triggers our sense experience, but we can know that sense experience. Locke thus accepts Descartes’ separation of the self, but sees it as moving in a necessarily real world. From this point on, this idea runs like a thread through centuries of western thought, disputed and developed by Kant and later Husserl who couched phenomenology as a specific branch of philosophy. But our use of it in coaching is probably most obviously derived via the humanistic psychology of Maslow and Rogers. We would argue that three key coaching concepts arise from this with which many practitioners will be familiar:

Firstly that the client’s view of the world is not the same as the world itself;

Secondly, that it is the client’s view of the world that will determine his/her behaviours;

Thirdly, that our own opinions on, and responses to, the client’s situation are necessarily provisional.

From these three flow a number of significant coaching practices: adherence to the client’s agenda (in the sense that it is all that can be known rather than that it is correct); reflecting back; proposing opinion only as hypothesis. While empiricism balances rationalism to some extent, there is still a shadow side in that too little faith in the client’s ability can be self-fulfilling. In doing so, coaches may set themselves up as arbiters of what is right or true and thereby risk fostering compliant servants instead of accountable adults and clients who come to feel swamped in data and unable to progress.

We may deal with the separation of objective and subjective worlds simply by accepting it, but there are also approaches which may seek rather to challenge or deal with that separation. The much quoted, “a map is not the territory” originates from Alfred Korzybski’s (1933) explicit exploration of precisely this problem in relation to how the language we use affects the limits of our thought The goal of Korzybski’s General Semantics is to align language to purpose, Here we are reminded of the use of metaphor and in particular how we can encourage the client to adapt their own metaphors better to deal with the issue at hand. Dunbar (2005) gives a nice example; we imagine a client feeling stuck in a tunnel: “Maybe the ground is wet and the feet can loosen. Maybe they are stuck with glue and the glue is so cold that is has become brittle”. Similarly we may challenge the subjective view and suggest a reframe of the problem; e.g., from a negative to an appreciative view of their objectives, performance or ability.

The nature of what we know is, as we have said, at the heart of coaching; Locke’s empiricism enables evaluation to be critical without descending into scepticism. He steers a course between what can be reliably inferred from existing knowledge and the uncertainty of experience. We might look upon this as too tentative: the gap between the two seems wide in Locke’s thought. Yet in coaching practice we are often faced with clients holding firm to unfounded or simply unhelpful beliefs. In addition, part of Locke’s historical significance was to start the separation of knowledge from dogma; this more democratic attitude to the nature of knowledge perhaps presages something that would later be picked up by twentieth century humanism. These ideas became more explicit in Hume’s thought.