HYPOTHESES AND FURTHER DESCRIPTIONS

The instruments of self-clarification are ‘further descriptions’. Wittgenstein's examples are varied but the contrast with that which we can only know through investigation is maintained. All these are dubbed hypotheses. The notion of identifying, elaborating, correcting, refining on an earlier mindstate is familiar. William James has several felicitous evocations of the incitements to this activity. He speaks of‘ … relations and objects but dimly perceived’ of the ‘halo or penumbra that surrounds’ an image; of ‘being aware in a penumbral nascent way of a fringe of unarticulated affinities’; of ‘Vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relations between terms’ of a ‘halo of felt relations’; of ‘the vague sense of a plus ultra’ etc. (William James, The Principles of Psychology, New York: Dover, 1950, 254–9).

A psychotherapist calls the statements in which we attempt to articulate the ‘unarticulated affinities’, of which James speaks, ‘focusing utterances’, ‘the putting into unambiguous words of something (which) is just outside the ‘focus range’ of consciousness'. He illustrates: ‘let us suppose that a disinterested friend say to a man who has for a long time been suffering from a vague malaise,