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06576_Field_TCUM T141.txt
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1996-04-10
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910b
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It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great
discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the
suspended judgment. A. N. Whitehead, on the other hand,
explained how the great discovery of the nineteenth century
was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Namely, the
technique of starting with the thing to be discovered and
working back, step by step, as on an assembly line, to the point
at which it is necessary to start in order to reach the desired
object. In the arts this meant starting with the effect and then
inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just
that effect and no other.
But the “technique of the suspended judgment” goes
further. It anticipates the effect of, say, an unhappy childhood
on an adult, and offsets the effect before it happens. In
psychiatry, it is the technique of total permissiveness extended