The argument of this paper is that current structuralist and quasi-organismic models of family organization are descriptions masquerading as explanations. They correctly assert, but do not account for, the fact that the behavior of each member of a family is related to that of every other member. An adequate account must begin by assuming that people behave according to how they define the situations in which they are actors, and that such definitions of the situation are generalizations learned through repeated interaction with others. Family organization is regarded within this framework as the outcome of an evolutionary process by which some ideas are encouraged or confirmed and others suffer a kind of death or extinction, so that the ideas of each family member lead him or her to behave in ways that confirm or support the ideas of every other family member. That is what is meant by the slogan "family organization as an ecology of ideas." This view of family organization requires a demystified account of resistance in psychotherapy, a bare outline of which is provided in the previous section. The overall conception of the psychotherapeutic process presented here is closest to that of the Palo Alto Brief Therapy Project, though I offer as a conjecture that the effective operations of all the psychotherapies can be explained within this framework.

This paper is concerned with the strategic uses of paradoxical communication in therapy. Eight more or less distinct uses of paradoxical communication are described, and the proposition is put forward that the paradoxical interventions associated with the Milan group differ from those described by Haley and the Palo Alto group only in that they appear to be designed to influence simultaneously the behavior of several family members. The currently popular idea that such interventions should, or even can, be based on a systemic hypothesis, if "hypothesis" is understood in its usual sense as a statement amenable to empirical testing, is explicitly questioned.

Some family therapists, following Bateson, use “epistemology” in a peculiar, non‐traditional way. Nothing is gained, and much appears to be lost, by this practice. Its main effect is to promote the idea that systemic and psychological modes of explanation are incompatible. In fact, a kind of cognitive psychology is implicit in what family therapists say about reframing. By appropriating the territory of psychology and calling it epistemology instead, family therapists merely pollute the semantic environment,1 muddying the very things that theoretical terms are supposed to clear up.

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REFERENCES Cottone, R. (1989). Defining the psychomedical and systemic paradigms in marital and family Cottone, R. (1989). On ethical and contextual research in marital and family therapy: A reply to Taggart, M. (1989). Paradigmatic play-offs and the search for market share. Journal of Marital therapy. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 15,225-235. Taggart. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 15,243-248. and Family Thempy, 15,237-242.