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Record W4412898672 · doi:10.1080/09515089.2025.2541030

Psychotherapeutic fictionalism: what’s truth got to do with it?

2025· article· en· W4412898672 on OpenAlexaff
Spencer Knafelc

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophical Psychology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicPsychotherapy Techniques and Applications
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPsychologyEpistemologyPhilosophyCognitive sciencePsychoanalysis

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Common Factors (CF) hypothesis in psychotherapy entails that the specific content of the therapeutic encounter is not directly relevant to the efficacy of therapy. Instead, with respect to the rationale underlying treatment, what matters is that the patient accepts it. This generates an issue regarding truth and honesty. How can therapists navigate the issue of not necessarily believing in the ideas underlying their approach without deceiving patients? I suggest that therapists and patients adopt ways of thinking and speaking that are amenable to a fictionalist interpretation. Therapist and patient attitudes toward the relevant therapeutic propositions need not involve belief. Instead, their engagement with these ideas can (and should) be akin to how we engage with literary fiction. In this paper, I propose psychotherapeutic fictionalism as a solution to the ostensible issue regarding truth in honesty posed by the CF hypothesis.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.863
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.055
GPT teacher head0.432
Teacher spread0.377 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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