Two recent articles (Dell, 1985; Held & Pols, 1985a) have explored the problems created for the field of family therapy by a failure to use the term “epistemology” correctly – a failure that has produced a confusion between epistemology and ontology. The major problem is the contradiction of insisting, on the one hand, on the epistemological doctrine that there is no independent reality available to the knower and making, on the other hand, (ontological) claims about how the world really is (e.g., that the world operates by way of circular causality). This article examines Dell’s (1985) attempt, by appealing to Maturana’s doctrine of structure determinism, to resolve a version of this contradiction.
