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Feldenkrais Research Journal • volume 3 (2007)

Article

Epistemology and the Feldenkrais Method

Ralph Strauch
PhD, CFT, Somatic Options, Los Angeles

Abstract
Research takes place within a paradigm, which rests, in turn, on an epistemology, or theory of knowledge.
Good research paradigms for the Feldenkrais Method do not exist, in part because conventional scientific
epistemology does not adequately represent forms of knowledge important to the Method. This article
discusses this inadequacy and explores one possible approach to developing a non-conventional
epistemology to address it.

Keywords
Feldenkrais Method, epistemology, research design, research paradigms, knowledge

Copyright ©: The copyright for this paper remains with the author(s).

Please cite: (First published in the) Feldenkrais Research Journal, volume 3; 2007.

Service marks: The terms Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, ATM®,
Functional Integration®, and FI® are service marked terms of the International Feldenkrais® Federation
(IFF) and Feldenkrais professional guilds and associations in many countries. In keeping with academic
conventions, they will not be service marked in the entire text as may be required in nonacademic use,
but only for the first and most prominent use of the terms. In recognition that these phrases are formal
terms referring to specific practices within the Method, and to the Method as a whole, capitalization of all
the words in each term has been retained.

Published by the International Feldenkrais® Federation (IFF) https://feldenkrais-method.org
Available online at https://feldenkraisresearchjournal.org

https://feldenkrais-method.org/
https://feldenkraisresearchjournal.org


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Epistemology and the Feldenkrais Method 
 
Ralph Strauch PhD, CFT 
Somatic Options 
Pacific Palisades, CA  

 

Abstract — Research takes place within a paradigm, which rests, in turn, on an 
epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Good research paradigms for the Feldenkrais 
Method do not exist, in part because conventional scientific epistemology does not 
adequately represent forms of knowledge important to the Method. This article 
discusses this inadequacy and explores one possible approach to developing a non-
conventional epistemology to address it. 

 

Introduction 
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutioni, Thomas Kuhn describes science as a process 
organized around paradigms which he defines as consensual frameworks for deciding what 
questions are legitimate and what means are legitimate for answering those questions, agreed 
on by the community of researchers within which the research occurs.  Most research takes 
place as part of what he calls normal science, guided by well established paradigms that 
define and provide a framework for exploring the questions that the discipline involved finds 
relevant. Examples of paradigms would include Newtonian mechanics, Copernican 
astronomy, wave optics, and organic chemistry. 
 
In any field there are anomalies - questions that the existing paradigm is unable to answer and 
data that it is unable to explain.  As long as there are not too many anomalies they can be 
pushed off to the side and ignored, and the process of normal science can go on unimpeded.  
Eventually, though, the anomalies build up to the point that they can no longer be ignored.  
The existing paradigm breaks down, and after a somewhat chaotic period of transition, the 
discipline adopts a new dominant paradigm.  Kuhn calls this period of transition scientific 
revolution.  The transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics would be an example.  
He notes that process by which a new paradigm emerges can be as much a political process as 
a scientific one, where personalities and persuasive abilities play more of a role than do purely 
scientific considerations.  
 
In the Feldenkrais community, we don’t yet have good paradigms within which to do normal 
science.  One way around this dilemma is to work within existing paradigms from other 
fields, such as medical research paradigms for assessing the effectiveness of drug therapies or 
other treatment interventionsii.  There is some value in research that fits the Feldenkrais 
Method into such conventional research paradigms, particularly when it comes to marketing 
and to gaining legitimacy with the medical community.  But such research often requires 
treating the Method as a simpler and more routinized process than it really is.  Statistical 
assessments of the effects of the Method for some specific medical condition, in particular, 

IFF Academy 
Feldenkrais Research Journal 3 (2007) 

® 2007 by the author 
ISSN 1817-4000 



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are likely to view any Awareness Through Movement (ATM) or Functional Integration (FI) 
used in the research as routinized procedures following fixed protocols that can be replicated 
with other subjects to produce the same effects on the targeted condition.  Such research may 
certainly be used to argue that the Feldenkrais Method is effective in whatever situations that 
effectiveness was demonstrated, but it is unclear that it will provide information of value to 
the continued development of the Method.  Carl Ginsburg has written about some of the 
issues involvediii. 
 
If we really want research that can significantly add to our deeper understanding of what we 
do and how we do it, we need to develop paradigms to guide that research that capture the 
richness and complexity of the Method.  This, in turn, may require even more fundamental 
thinking about the epistemology — the theory of knowledge, the deeper agreement on the 
nature of knowledge and the means for determining its validity — upon which those 
paradigms rest. Our work is best understood through ways of knowing and validating 
knowledge not recognized by the conventional epistemology that underlies contemporary 
science, so we may need to develop our own broader epistemology as well. 
 

The nature of conventional scientific epistemology 
Conventional scientific epistemology requires knowledge to be objective, codified, 
unambiguous, and reproducible, in the following senses: 
 
• Objective means that the knowledge adheres to the world “out there.” It describes 

objective characteristics of the phenomenon being described, independent of who is 
observing that phenomenon. 

• Codified means that the knowledge is completely encoded in external symbolic (verbal or 
mathematical) form, separate from the knower. If you understand the words, you should 
understand the knowledge. Conversely, if you can’t put what you know into words such 
that other people can understand and reproduce it from those words, it isn’t knowledge.  

• Unambiguous means that there is one right answer. Given two competing explanations for 
the same phenomenon, only one can be right.  

• Reproducible means the phenomenon being described will look the same to every 
observer, and each time it is looked at. 
 

I’ll refer to knowledge that meets these criteria as conventional knowledge — that is, 
knowledge that has been encoded in language or other symbolic form and can be duplicated 
by others.  Scientific epistemology does not value non-verbal ways of knowing or non-verbal 
knowledge that may be difficult to transmit unambiguously from one person to another. 
 
Individual scientists often step outside these boundaries in discovering and creating new 
knowledge.  Subjective non-verbal understanding and intuition can be invaluable parts of the 
individual creative process, but the collective process discounts and obscures this. Well 
known examples include Einstein’s image of riding on a light beam and Kekule's dream of a 
snake swallowing its tail, which led to the understanding of the chemical structure of the 
benzene ring. But these intuitive discoveries became acceptable knowledge only after they 
were codified and logically validated.  
 
One of the most important personal lessons I learned in graduate school, from the world-class 
mathematician who was my mentor, was to approach mathematical research as an intuitive 
rather than a logical activity.  New mathematical knowledge flows from the mathematician's 
intuitive gestalt for the abstract structure he works with.  The codified logical form that 
knowledge eventually takes on comes later — a means of recording and transmitting the 



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knowledge, but not of discovering it.  The formal system does its best to obscure the 
underlying process on which it depends for its existence. 
 

Knowledge in a Feldenkrais context 
Much of the knowledge on which the Feldenkrais Method depends is conventional 
knowledge. It can be and is codified within conventional epistemology.  This includes, for 
example, knowledge about anatomy, neurology, some understanding of functional connection, 
etc.  But there is also much that can’t be so codified — much which is non-verbal and perhaps 
ultimately impossible to put into words.  As practitioners we depend on our ability to sense, 
connect, and communicate at deep intuitive levels. I’ll refer to these ways of knowing as non-
conventional knowing or non-conventional knowledge.  Different practitioners use non-
conventional knowing in different ways and to different degrees; no single way of doing it is 
“right.”  Different practitioners have different images of what we do and how we do it.  We 
don’t all share the same descriptions of our knowledge, even when we share a deeper gestalt 
for what we know. 
 
Non-conventional knowing does not fit within conventional scientific epistemology. It could 
even be argued, in fact, that this epistemology evolved specifically to reject and exclude non-
conventional knowing, because it was seen as tantamount to mysticism and superstition. 
Scientists who draw on non-conventional knowing as a source of insight must translate what 
they discover into conventional codified form in order to get their work recognized; they must 
move beyond and obscure the non-conventional source.  As Feldenkrais practitioners, we 
don’t have the option of obscuring our non-conventional sources and pretending that our work 
is independent of them.  We must stay in touch with these realms, using intuitive information 
and communications throughout our work.   
 

Elements of non-conventional knowing 
Conventional scientific epistemology requires that knowledge be objective, codified, 
unambiguous, and reproducible.  Let’s look at how the non-conventional knowledge 
important to a Feldenkrais practitioner might fail to meet those criteria, and why we might 
need a non-conventional epistemology to encompass them.  Let’s consider the process a 
physician might go through in diagnosing and treating a patient and compare it with how a 
Feldenkrais practitioner might interact with a Functional Integration student. 
 
The physician works within a paradigm organized around the diagnosis and treatment of 
pathology.  He begins by identifying and collecting measurable objective data about the 
patient. When enough data has been collected the physician makes a diagnosis — identifying 
the patient as belonging to the class of people who exhibit a particular pathology.  The data 
that the physician uses to reach his diagnosis are conventional facts, described by objective, 
codified diagnostic criteria.  The diagnosis is also an objective, codified description 
identifying the diagnostic category to which the patient is assigned.  Diagnosis is followed by 
treatment, which consists of applying an objective, codified protocol that has been accepted as 
appropriate for that diagnosis.  
 
Throughout this process, the physician is applying and is guided by conventional knowledge 
— objective, codified facts that should look the same to any trained observer, and lead to the 
same unambiguous conclusions (diagnosis) and actions (treatment), no matter who does them. 
Faced with the same patient, in other words, competent physicians should come to the same 
diagnosis and apply the same treatment.  It may not always work out that way in practice, but 
that’s what the system sees as the ideal.  
 



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Now consider a Feldenkrais practitioner engaged in a Functional Integration session.  She also 
makes an assessment of her student’s situation, but in a far more subjective manner than the 
physician.  She is looking less for specific indicators of specific conditions than for things that 
may appear out of balance somehow.  She may look for a particular set of indicators, or she 
may simply respond to “what pops up.”  She takes in information through a variety of sources 
and uses that information to guide her interactions with her client.  Some of what she responds 
to may be readily describable in conventional terms — “his breathing was restricted,” for 
example, or “he couldn’t properly bear weight on his right leg.”  But she may also sense 
larger and more diffuse patterns of connection or activity that have no conventional 
description, responding to them and integrating them into her interaction to the client without 
ever verbalizing them, even to herself, or bringing them fully to consciousness.  
 
There are no standards of treatment for the Feldenkrais Method, tying specific diagnoses to 
specific treatment protocols, as there are in medicine.  Different practitioners might approach 
the same student very differently.  Some might address the student’s presenting problem very 
directly, some less directly, and some not at all — preferring to work with the student more 
globally and see what emerges. This individualized approach and lack of reproducibility is an 
important aspect of the Method. 
 
A two-phase process of first collecting information and then deciding what to do about it, akin 
to but somewhat looser than medical diagnosis and treatment, may sometimes be present in 
Functional Integration, or it may be completely absent.  Sometimes the practitioner only 
collects information — continually asking, in effect, “What’s happening here now?” but 
without acting on the answer, as a physician might.  Instead, she simply notices and moves 
on.  Bringing information to awareness produces change, so the next time she comes back to 
the same place to ask the same question, the answer will be different.  The practitioner’s skill 
in this process lies not in action she takes as a result of what she finds, but in her ability to 
select a trajectory along which to move while asking ”What’s happening here now?” that will 
produce beneficial change for the client.  
 
The reproducibility and lack of ambiguity so important to conventional knowledge are not 
present here.  The same practitioner, asking the same somatic question, may find a different 
answer every time she asks.  Different practitioners will not only find different answers to the 
same question, they are likely not even to ask the same question, or even to be in agreement 
about what kinds of questions to explore.  And yet all may produce good results, and the 
results may have more in common than the different approaches which produce them. 
 

The beginnings of a non-conventional epistemology 
So what might a non-conventional epistemology that would allow some of these non-
conventional ways of knowing to be taken into account look like?  How would it differ from 
the conventional epistemology used in contemporary science?  I don’t have complete answers 
to those questions, but research that I did in the 1970s concerning the application of subjective 
judgment in combination with formal analysis to “squishy” public policy and planning 
problems suggests one way of conceptualizing the issueiv.  
 
Think about the problem of a human actor faced with some substantive situation in the real 
world that he needs to address, and the relationships between the actor, the situation, and 
whatever models of the issue he uses in his decisionmaking.  (I’m using the word model here 
to include all kinds of representations — physical or mathematical models, verbal 
descriptions, visual or other imagery, etc. — which the actor might use to encapsulate his 
knowledge and understanding of the situation.) 



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Conventional epistemology, in effect, restricts the actor to a single codified 
model — the externally agreed-upon “truth” describing the situation.  It 
tells him to equate the situation with that model in his decisionmaking 
process.  He should substitute the model for the actual situation and act in 
the manner specified by the model.  He is, in effect, treating the model as a 
surrogate for the situation, within the meaning discussed below. And since 
there is a single agreed-upon truth that describes the situation, any other 
actor should understand the situation in the same way and choose the same 
action. 
 
In the medical diagnosis and treatment paradigm discussed earlier, the codified model would 
include diagnostic criteria and approved treatment protocols for relevant medical pathologies. 
The physician’s job can be seen as one of matching diagnostic criteria with the patient's 
symptoms to reach a diagnosis, then applying a relevant treatment protocol.  There may be 
additional complications in practice, but in principle, this is what’s involved.  
 

Non-conventional epistemology, on the other hand, must allow the 
possibility that the actor may understand or describe the situation in 
more than one way.  These might include codified models like those 
used by conventional epistemology, visual or kinesthetic imagery, 
gut feelings and other intuitive feelings, and other non-conventional 
forms.  These are shown as a stack of varied models in the figure.  
None will necessarily be surrogates in the sense that the single 
model does in conventional epistemology.  Rather, they may all 
serve as perspectives, feeding and enriching the internal gestalt 
through which the actor interacts with them and ultimately makes 
decisions about the situation.  Different actors may use different 
models and different internal gestalts, leading to different ways of 
acting in the same situation 
 

To better understand the distinction I’m making here  
between a model as a perspective rather than a surrogate, 
think about two-dimensional images of three-dimensional 
objects, such as the picture of the cars shown here. The object 
being represented — the car in this case — has a greater 
dimensionality than the representation being made of it, the 
two dimensional picture.  It’s not possible to create a two-
dimensional image that unambiguously captures the object, 
because two dimension images simply aren’t rich enough to 
serve as three dimensional surrogates.  
 
Yet two dimensional representations can still provide very useful models of three dimensional 
objects.  This is because we know there’s more to the object than what the picture shows.  We 
use the picture to inform and enhance a richer internal understanding of the object being 
depicted.  This internal understanding is what I referred to above as the actor’s internal 
gestalt.  We can use a number of different views, from different perspectives, to give us a 
richer gestalt than we could obtain from any one viewv.  That internal gestalt can be further 
enriched by additional models of other kinds — audio recording of engine noise, descriptions 
of performance and the driving experience, for example, for the car depicted here.  

Issue

Codified
Model

Actor

Conventional
Epistemology

Issue

Internal
Gestalt

Varied
Models

Actor

Unconventional
Epistemology



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Objective codified descriptions of the kind required by conventional epistemology are no 
more capable of fully describing the rich and complex interactions that occur between 
Feldenkrais practitioners and our clients than two dimensional images are capable of fully 
capturing three dimensional objects, though they may usefully serve as perspectives on those 
interactions. A non-conventional epistemology along the lines described above might offer a 
useful way thinking about and modeling those interactions, and a base upon which paradigms 
for describing the Feldenkrais Method might be developed. I haven’t fully articulated such an 
epistemology here, certainly. But I hope this article at least illuminates the possibilities and 
suggests directions for further research. 
 
                                            
i
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. I 
recapitulate Kuhn’s main arguments in my chapter on “Science as a perceptual process” in The Reality Illusion: 
How you make the world you experience. Los Angeles: Somatic Options, 2000. 
http://www.somatic.com/real_illus.html 
iiStephens, Jim, “Evaluating Research on the Feldenkrais Method from the Outside. Some Observations and 
Suggestions,” IFF Academy Feldenkrais Research Journal 2004 Vol 1,  
http://www.iffresearchjournal.org/stephenseng.htm  
iiiGinsburg, Carl, “Reply to Jim Stephen’s First Version of this Article From 1999,” IFF Academy Feldenkrais 
Research Journal 2004 Vol 1. http://www.iffresearchjournal.org/ginsburgeng.htm 
ivTwo examples of this research can be found on my website at http://www.somatic.com/articles.html#rand: 
Strauch, Ralph. Risk Assessment as a Subjective Process, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA P-6460, 
March 1980, and Strauch, Ralph. ‘Squishy’ Problems and Quantitative Methods. Policy Sciences Vol. 6 (1975): 
175-184. 
v
Some of these ideas are also discussed in more depth in The Reality Illusion, op. cit. 

 


