Peter G. Ossorio was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

-born psychologist

Psychologist

Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...

 best known for his development of Descriptive psychology

Descriptive psychology

Descriptive Psychology is primarily a conceptual framework for the science of psychology. Created in its original form by Peter G. Ossorio at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the mid-1960s, it has subsequently been the subject of hundreds of books and papers that have updated, refined, and...

, a pragmatic and theory neutral pre-empirial approach to the study of behavior. Ossorio in his 2006 volume, The Behavior of Persons, explicated the concept of "Persons" by creating a conceptual map of the interdependent concepts of "Individual Person", "Language", "Action", and "Reality". He described persons as individuals whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action in a dramaturgical pattern.

Background

Peter G. Ossorio served as the professor of psychology at the University of Colorado

University of Colorado at Boulder

The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...

 in Boulder. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA in 1961 and then joined the clinical psychology faculty in Boulder where he taught, supervised, mentored, wrote and conducted research for his entire academic career, and where he founded a discipline that came to be known as Descriptive psychology

Descriptive psychology

Descriptive Psychology is primarily a conceptual framework for the science of psychology. Created in its original form by Peter G. Ossorio at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the mid-1960s, it has subsequently been the subject of hundreds of books and papers that have updated, refined, and...

.

Persons, 1966

Ossorio, in his book Persons (1966) addressed a prevailing idea in psychology at the time: that anything anyone says about persons or behavior must arise from or consist of theoretical assertions. Ossorio contended that this is not a way which language operates and in order to theoretically assert anything a person must first have a description of it that reliably discriminates it from other things it has the possibility of being but is not. The task of describing accurately is necessary prior to creating theories – and “behavioral science” of the time had no place or method for describing behavior. Ossorio proceeded to articulate the conceptual structure within which descriptions of persons and behavior could be given, and in doing so demonstrated, in a vein similar to Wittgenstein that the clear description of something leaves little more explanation needed.

Selected Sole-Authored

• Ossorio, P. G. (1966/1995). Persons. The collected works of Peter G. Ossorio, Vol. I. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. (Original work published 1966 as LRI Report No. 3. Los Angeles, CA & Boulder, CO: Linguistic Research Institute.)
• Ossorio, P. G. (1971/1975/1978/2005). “What actually happens”: The representation of real world phenomena. The collected works of Peter G. Ossorio, Vol. IV. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. Also published Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1975, 1978. (Original work published 1971 as LRI Report No. 10a. Whittier, CA & Boulder, CO: Linguistic Research Institute.
• Ossorio, P. G. (1986/1997). Three minute lectures on emotion. In Essays on clinical topics. The collected works of Peter G. Ossorio, Vol. II (pp. 99-128). Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. (Original work published 1986 as LRI Report No. 36a. Boulder, CO: Linguistic Research Institute.)
• Ossorio, P. G. (1986/1997). More three minute lectures on emotion. In Essays on clinical topics. The collected works of Peter G. Ossorio, Vol. II (pp. 131–161). Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. (Original work published 1986 as LRI Report No. 36b. Boulder, CO: Linguistic Research Institute.)
• Ossorio, P. G. (1997). Essays on clinical topics. The collected works of Peter G. Ossorio, Vol. II. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.
• Ossorio, P. G. (2006). The behavior of persons. The collected works of Peter G. Ossorio, Vol. V. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press.