In order to show precisely why and how dialogue possesses this plausible but ultimately un- verifiable ... This intention does not (necessarily) correspond to the specific intention the speaker ..... the one hand, this excludes a purely cognitivistic vein that conceives of men- tal states as ..... for their hospitality and support.
Wendelin Reich
Dialogue and Shared Knowledge: How Verbal Interaction Renders Mental States Socially Observable
Doktorsavhandling för avläggande av filosofie doktorsexamen i sociologi framlagd vid Uppsala universitet 2003 Abstract Reich, Wendelin, 2003. Dialogue and Shared Knowledge: How Verbal Interaction Renders Mental States Socially Observable. 176pp. Uppsala. ISBN 91-506-1682-X This dissertation presents a new theoretical solution to the sociological question of the extent to which and by what means individuals "observe" or infer mental states of other individuals, thereby sharing knowledge with them. This is the problem of observability. The answer offered here follows from situating the problem in social interaction. Most fundamentally, the social situation of dialogue permits a speaker to use observable events (in particular, utterances) to compel a hearer to generate specific and expectable assumptions about some of the speaker's intentions and beliefs (among other mental states). In order to show precisely why and how dialogue possesses this plausible but ultimately unverifiable capacity, the dissertation proceeds deductively. In a first step, dialogue is defined by way of three social constraints on interlocutors' cognitions. Dialogue is a situation where interlocutors (1) are compelled to overhear what the respective other is saying (and they mutually anticipate that they will hear it), (2) apply socially shared semantic rules to decode utterances into private cognitive representations (and they mutually anticipate that they do so), and (3) act as if they expect that any utterance they make will be met with a reply of acceptance rather than a reply of rejection (and they mutually anticipate that they act in this way). In a second step, it is demonstrated that the bilateral operation of these constraints allows the hearer of an utterance to make a systematic guess at the intentions and beliefs that led its speaker to produce it. Furthermore, this bilateral operation allows the speaker to anticipate the hearer's guess-work and, therefore, to plan beforehand what assumptions about his mental states he wants the hearer to make. Drawing on the works of H. Paul Grice, the dissertation shows that the hearer's search for ascribable mental states is organized around the central task of imputing an underlying informative intention. This intention does not (necessarily) correspond to the specific intention the speaker "really had" when he made his utterance, but it corresponds to the intention the speaker could anticipate the hearer would ascribe him. By means of this expectable imputation, the hearer arrives at an adequate explanation of what social goal the speaker meant to achieve by means of his utterance. The hearer can ascribe additional mental states, such as beliefs, emotions or expectations in order to rationalize this intention, but only to the extent that they are actually relevant to doing so. In many dialogues, the hearer can respond to the original utterance with a second turn, the original speaker can then make a third turn, and so forth. The treatise concludes by analyzing the specific conditions under which a minimum sequence of three turns leads to mutually ratified shared knowledge. Whereas the status of merely shared knowledge is fundamentally precarious, mutually ratified shared knowledge is mutually recognized to be mutually known and can usually be treated as a "fact". In sum, sequences of at least three utterances constitute a societal solution to the problem of observability. Keywords: cognitive sociology, microsociology, social theory, social interaction, dialogue, shared knowledge, observability, inference, constraint, expectability, Grice Wendelin Reich, Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Box 821, S-751 08 Uppsala, Sweden © Wendelin Reich 2003 ISBN 91-506-1682-X Printed in Sweden by Universitetstryckeriet, Uppsala, May 2003 Distributor: Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden
Contents
Introduction.....................................................................................................5 1.
The theoretical discourse on observability...........................................19 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4
2.
Observational constructivism...............................................................51 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4
3.
Observability and contingency ............................................................. 53 A constructivist definition of social observation .................................. 60 The external embeddedness of observed observers.............................. 67 The internal organization of observed observers.................................. 73
Utterances.............................................................................................83 3.1 3.2 3.2.1 3.2.2 3.2.3 3.3 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.3.3 3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2
4.
The problem of other minds ................................................................. 22 The problem of intersubjectivity .......................................................... 26 The problem of double contingency..................................................... 35 A solution to the problem of observability........................................... 44
A definition of dialogue ....................................................................... 87 Understanding utterances ..................................................................... 91 First-order observation: turning utterances into information ......... 92 Interlude 1 – Grice on intentions ................................................... 96 Second-order observation: understanding intentions................... 103 Understanding and background knowledge ....................................... 106 Interlude 2 – Grice on implicatures ............................................. 107 Inferential normalization ............................................................. 114 Attributing mental states beyond intentions and beliefs .............. 116 Producing utterances .......................................................................... 122 Sharing knowledge through utterances........................................ 123 Uttering exerts "control through observability"........................... 125
Sequences of utterances .....................................................................129 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4
Rejection and acceptance ................................................................... 130 Reflexive application of rejection and acceptance ............................. 136 Argumentation and the management of observability........................ 141 An application of the completed framework ...................................... 148
Summary and conclusion............................................................................151 References...................................................................................................159
3
Introduction
This treatise attempts to throw new light on a problem that has received a great deal of attention in sociology, philosophy and psychology: To what extent and by what means may individuals share knowledge with each other? The central thesis of this treatise is that this seemingly philosophical problem has a genuinely sociological answer. The social situation of dialogue allows interlocutors to share well-defined items of knowledge with each other, and it does so by way of a surprisingly complex yet precisely analyzable coordination of their cognitions. Because the idea that dialogue leads to shared knowledge may appear trivial at first sight, I will provide a brief theoretical and empirical motivation for the problem dialogue faces and solves. From a theoretical perspective, the notion of shared knowledge gives rise to two plausible but incompatible intuitions. On the one hand, individuals who deal with each other (i.e., interact) appear to know to some extent what is going on in each other's minds; on the other, mental states are never directly observable from the outside. The first, non-skeptical intuition can certainly claim plausibility. It is evident that individuals' interpretations of others' behavior (utterances, gestures, facial expressions, etc.) depend crucially on assumptions about what happens in others' minds. For instance, we expect someone who makes a promise to mean it sincerely and to feel committed, we are sure that a pedestrian standing at a zebra crossing intends to cross, and we think that someone who defends the dogma of the Virgin Mary believes in God. If any of these presumed mental states turns out to be absent, we are forced to reinterpret the observed behavior – the promise becomes "insincere", the pedestrian perhaps "thoughtless", and the believer "hypocritical". However, the second, skeptical intuition is not less plausible. Carefully considered, it seems evident that the mental states to which the aforementioned assumptions refer can never be directly observed from the outside. Today, few would doubt that what an individual "feels", "intends" etc. depends essentially on the higher organization of his or her central nervous system. Although thoughts and emotions are not (or, more cautiously: may not be) situated on the same "level of reality" (to invoke an unfortunate term) as neural events, it is clear that they cannot do without the latter. This means that mental states and events depend crucially on physiological states and events that we know cannot be observed without modern technical equipment (like electroencephalographs). To be sure, there are
5
forms of behavior that routinely allow us to distinguish between sincere and insincere promises, present or absent intentions, or deep and superficial piety – blushing, overt absent-mindedness or lack of involvement sometimes help us adjust our observations. But such cues, if present, are never more than just that – fallible cues or hints at the current state of an unobservable mind, a mind that is too self-determined and too complex to be fully represented by observable behavior. Moreover, only some forms of mental states are generally expected to be accompanied by such cues. While most emotions belong to this category, beliefs certainly do not. For instance, no teacher can find out whether his or her students "really" believe that 2+2 = 4 – or just pretend to believe it. Throughout this treatise, I will refer to the conflict between these two intuitions as the problem of observability. In order to motivate it empirically as well, it will be instructive to consider a small analytical example. A: B: A:
"I just don't think I wanna let him go" "So you still love him?" "Yeah"
Every more or less interaction-competent, English-speaking individual will probably identify these lines as the transcript of a dialogue that might have taken place between two human beings. Moreover, she or he may feel confident that the dialogue transformed the stocks of knowledge of both interlocutors in a systematic way. After these three turns, it can be expected that both A and B know something about each other that they did not know before, and that both know that they know this. Specifically, both A and B know that A has confirmed through her last turn that she loves a certain third person, that she intends B to believe that this is so, that she believes that B intended to ask her in his turn whether she loves this person, that she believes that B did not know that she does before he asked her, and possibly more (depending on the context). Furthermore, the reader of the small transcript can be said to share this knowledge with A and B. Of course, an endless array of situations can be conceived in which the same exchange occurred but did not lead to shared knowledge (e.g., A and B are actually rehearsing a play; B is actually a computer; etc.). However, few would disagree that the suggested interpretation, given no additional information, is the most likely. For determining this interpretation, it is remarkably irrelevant whether the excerpt is a real or an invented transcript of a dialogue. This small example should suffice to illustrate that interlocutors – and even their scientific observers! – are continuously able to share knowledge with each other although they are unable to look into each other's heads. Sociology, among other disciplines, has long noticed the improbability, even the strangeness of this achievement. As early as in Georg Simmel's essay,
6
"How is Society Possible?",1 a sociologist tried to reconcile the "fact of the You" with the suspicion that this "You" never exhausts itself in our observation of it and can, therefore, only be seen in a "generalized" and "fragmentary" manner.2 More elaborate attempts at solving the problem can be found in the works of theorists as diverse as Erving Goffman and Niklas Luhmann, among others.3 Although their efforts have not led to a unified, generally accepted solution, it has become clear that the form in which sociology solves – or overcomes – the problem of observability will have serious repercussions on its fundamental conception of social order. In the extreme case that it can be proved that directly observing others' mental states can be – and is – done constantly, social reality will turn out to be derivative of psychical phenomena. On the other hand, in the equally extreme case that it can be shown that mental states are never observable, not even "fragmentarily" or hypothetically, theories that are built around the assumption that some form of observability is possible – examples would include theories of intersubjectivity, communicative action or symbolic interaction as well as methodologies aiming at correlating observable behavior with inner states (e.g., political attitudes) – are going to have a tough stand. Finally, if the two contradicting intuitions (people know what others are thinking and feeling etc.; mental operations are unobservable from the outside) can be reconciled by reduction to a single set of consistent assumptions, such a set may become a promising germ for a new, truly universal theory of social order. I hope that these reasons are sufficient to classify the problem of observability as relevant and to justify an entire sociological treatise on this subject. Not only sociology has shown interest in the problem of observability. Philosophy's discourse on this issue can be traced back to antiquity4 and reappears with new thrust toward the beginning of the 20th century in the writings of thinkers like Edmund Husserl or Bertrand Russell.5 A few decades later, the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein mark an important attempt at abolishing questions like, "How can we justify our knowledge of other
1
Georg Simmel, 1992 [1908], "Exkurs über das Problem: Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?" pp. 42-61 in Georg Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 2 Ibid, p. 45-49. 3 See Erving Goffman, 1990 [1963], Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, London: Penguin, Chapter 4, Niklas Luhmann, 1984, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Chapter 3. 4 Anita Avramides, 2001, Other Minds, London: Routledge. 5 Edmund Husserl, 1976 [1922], Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, 1. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Husserliana III/1), 2 ed., Den Haag: Nijhoff, Bertrand Russell, 1993 [1914], Our Knowledge of the External World, London: Routledge.
7
minds?"6 However, it turns out that they have only intensified the debate on the "other-minds problem" as well as the "problem of intersubjectivity" – philosophy's two variations on the problem of observability. For philosophy, it would seem equally desirable as for sociology to have a solution to this riddle. Fields such as ethics, legal philosophy or philosophy of action – to name but three – depend to some extent on assumptions and inferences about others' mental states. For example, many theories in these three fields distinguish between intentional and unintentional action. If it turned out that the question of whether a given act was carried out intentionally or unintentionally is empirically never decidable, some theories may have to be modified or even replaced. Three more disciplines need mentioning – psychology, economics and computer science. In a sense, psychological behaviorism constituted a total surrender to the problem of observability.7 The fact that behaviorism has largely been handed over to scientific oblivion provides us with an ample warning against overestimating the practical seriousness of the problem. Whether or not psychological or other theories can solve the puzzle, it remains noteworthy that humans themselves seem to cope with it without being forced to treat each other as opaque links between stimuli and responses. Quite logically, contemporary research in behavioral psychology or developmental psychology tends to regard people's attempts at observing each other as a fact that can be analyzed like any other.8 In fields such as game theory, economics has also shown some interest in the problem of observability, partly because it affects the chances of success of interest-driven, utility-maximizing behavior in a world populated by other interest-driven actors.9 Of course, theorizing in economics usually depends on committing oneself to axioms that cannot be replaced later on, even if they happen to be sociologically implausible. However, approaches like game theory start with axioms (here: actors' intentions are unobservable whereas their interests are reliably predictable) that may turn out to be compatible with at least some future solutions to the problem of observability (this is not up to me to decide). A young but quickly growing body of work in computer science and computational linguistics addresses the problem of observability and the
6
Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell. 7 B. F. Skinner, 1953, Science and Human Behavior, New York: Macmillan. 8 E.g., see the contributions to Peter Carruthers and Peter K. Smith, eds., 1996, Theories of Theories of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, as well as Anna Papafragou, 2002, "Mindreading and Verbal Communication", Mind and Language 17: 55-67. 9 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, 1944, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
8
achievability of shared knowledge explicitly.10 The main question here is how user-input (be it a standardized command, a "mouse click-stream" or an English sentence) has to be interpreted if the computer takes into account that the input can be presumed to be grounded in mental states like intentions (the user has a plan and the computer may aid in achieving it), beliefs (the user is knowledgeable and the computer must take this into account) or desires (the user wants to complete a vaguely defined task although she or he may not know how to go about it). Computer science may well be the field in which a good, general solution to the problem of observability would have the most profound practical impact. At present, research in user modeling, human-computer interaction, computational semantics or intelligent agents seems to be forced to work with rules of thumb and ad hoc solutions in order to produce viable assumptions about users or other autonomous agents – a situation that is certainly not the most desirable. The following chapters attempt to answer the question that introduced this treatise, although in an adapted form: How does (verbal) social interaction render a participant's mental states observable to co-participants as well as to uninvolved third persons (e.g., scientific observers)? This focus on interaction places the present approach firmly into the sociological tradition of grappling with the problem of observability. Instead of considering social interaction, a philosophical approach may ask how the ontological structure of the world aids in solving the problem. A psychological approach may wonder how the organization of individual minds contributes to overcoming it. An economic approach may perhaps be interested in comparing different axiomatic definitions of a social setting (e.g., a "game" or a market encounter) in order to find one definition in which any actor can make reliable assumptions about other actors' mental states. It thereby becomes clear that a sociological way of stating the problem invites certain answers and excludes others. In fact, it implies a conception of what constitutes a valid solution, and thus reveals that it was formulated only after its author believed himself in the possession of a solution. Therefore, I will briefly outline the solution that I develop below and justify its focus on social interaction. There are two different and incompatible models for the achievement of social observability and its distributive result, shared knowledge. The first model, which has dominated sociological and philosophical discussions of shared knowledge until now, sees it as the result of transmitting knowledge from one mind to another. This model tends to lead into problems and paradoxes, as it violates the fundamental idea that minds are (at least in part) operationally autonomous as well as the notion that abstractions like beliefs or intentions cannot be physically "transmitted". The second model, endorsed 10
For references, see the overview on BDI-models (belief/desire/intention) provided by Michael Wooldridge, 2000, Reasoning About Rational Agents, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
9
by this treatise and discussed in Chapter 2, states that shared knowledge is not the result of transmission but of externally triggered synchronization. For instance, two individuals watching a sunset can be said to share knowledge of this event. Here, knowledge sharing is a one-way street, as nothing ever "leaves" the involved minds. To be sure, this model implies that whether knowledge is or is not shared is fundamentally unverifiable. Since transmission is not possible, there can never be (practical or scientific) certainty about the actual sharedness of any mental state. What remains possible for the individuals concerned is simply to assume that knowledge is shared and to act on this assumption in an anticipatable way. In the example, one of the individuals may say to the other, "Isn't this beautiful!", and expect the other to know what he or she is talking about. By the same token, what remains possible for the observing scientist is to develop a plausible descriptive framework that theorizes (1) how individuals generally process and respond to certain classes of external events (e.g., utterances), as well as (2) how situated observers who interact with such individuals use their own knowledge of (1) in order to form situated assumptions about the knowledge these individuals acquire through concrete instances of such events. Equipped with such a descriptive framework, the scientist can observe real or recorded encounters between individuals and form hypotheses about the knowledge participants are likely to have gained about each other by means of forming anticipatable hypotheses about each other's reactions to external events, like utterances or gestures (or even sunsets). Although such hypotheses are just as unverifiable as participants' hypotheses about each other's inner workings, both the participants and their sociological observers make use of a mechanism that allows them to test their assumptions and, thereby, to gain confidence in them. This mechanism is the sequential organization of (verbal) social interaction. The fact that gestures or utterances frequently occur in turns permits participants to produce anticipatable assumptions about their relationships and dependencies. For instance, it seems to be part of the stock of knowledge all participants can presuppose that utterances following questions "normally" constitute responses. Therefore, someone who makes a turn directly after a question has been addressed to her or him can be expected to intend to give a response, to believe that her or his response will be relevant to answering the question, and so on. Because this someone can anticipate that her or his turn is expected to be a response, she or he will be under the obligation to employ special means if she or he does not intend to give a response (e.g., by using the expression "By the way, …"). More generally, participants in interaction find themselves forced to exploit its sequential structure and to make themselves observable to each other. Because this condition is universal and, therefore, itself anticipatable, participants can use their own turns in order to
10
force others to make themselves observable in relevant ways. For instance, by asking "Could we meet tomorrow morning?", interlocutor Melinda can reveal that she wants interlocutor Bill to make observable whether he believes they could meet, whether he wants to meet her, whether he intends to meet her, and so on. Whatever Bill's answer may be, Melinda will have learnt something about him and shared knowledge will have emerged. Of course, many real-world instances of interaction consist of more than one or two turns, and it is an important advantage of the framework to be laid out in this treatise that it can explain why the degree of observability achieved through any given interaction depends on the total number of turns made by the participants. In verbal interactions with two participants (let us call them A and B), there is a qualitative difference between one-or-two turn sequences, on the one hand, and three-or-more turn sequences, on the other. If no participant gets the chance to make more than one turn, shared knowledge emerges, but the status of this knowledge is relatively precarious. Since post-turn imputations of mental states depend on B's (the hearer's) specific background knowledge, A's and B's assumptions about what mental states A's turn reveals may tacitly mismatch. For instance, by saying "Do you know Linux?", A may intend to evaluate B's computer skills, whereas B may think that A intends to ask for help regarding a computer problem. However, if B gets the chance to respond to A's first turn in a second turn, and if A gets the chance to respond to this response in a third turn, A will be expected to confirm or reject the understanding of A's first turn that B revealed in turn two. Therefore, under conditions that I will specify in detail, three-turn sequences can lead to observably shared knowledge, that is, knowledge wherein sharedness constitutes shared knowledge as well. It goes without saying that this form of knowledge is substantially more reliable than knowledge that is simply shared. It constitutes a ratified, quasi-objective "fact" that the interlocutors can refer to later on in their talk. To give an example, in the small transcript I produced above, the claim that "A is still in love with a certain third person" constitutes such a ratified fact. It is worth mentioning that the emergence of ratified facts can take more than three turns if there are more than two interlocutors. In the course of the following four chapters, this treatise will derive and justify a small set of propositions that state more formally what the preceding paragraphs had to defend through recourse to intuitions; these propositions are summarized in the concluding chapter. Taken together, they form a self-contained and, I believe, empirically useful theory of how interlocutors acquire and coordinate assumptions about each other – in short, how they produce observably shared knowledge. Since this theoretical approach will be confined to observations and inferences carried out in a social setting and
11
in response to social stimuli, I have chosen to label it as socio-cognitive.11 On the one hand, this excludes a purely cognitivistic vein that conceives of mental states as something individuals simply hold or do not hold, instead of conceiving of them as something individuals may be expected to hold by those they interact with. On the other hand, this also excludes purely sociologistic approaches that subsume the inner organization of interlocutors under vague generalizations such as "culture" or "agency". In Chapter 2, I will provide a precise, epistemologically grounded definition of the sociocognitive orientation of this treatise. Several limitations of the present approach must be pointed out. First, the ambition of this work is to develop a – universal – theory of interactive knowledge acquisition and coordination. It is likely that there exists a large number of social settings or phenomena other than interaction to which the problem of observability applies and where it must be solved. For the purpose of illustration, I mention two of them – macrosocial order and social semantics. On the macrosocial side of the scales, structures and institutions exist that define fixed relationships between observable objects, states or events and the intransparent organization of minds. For instance, legal regulations determine in advance and highly schematically whether certain acts were carried out fraudulently; institutionalized ceremonies like marriages or funerals define that their participants can be expected to feel happy or sad; seating plans in parliaments establish connections between seats and conservative/progressive attitudes; and identity documents enforce that social attributions of mental states refer to the same person over periods of time. Regarding semantics, it is evident that natural languages acknowledge, and help in solving, the problem of observability by means of providing specialized concepts. For example, notions like "truthfulness", "loyalty" or "integrity" draw our attention to the gap that they depict as bridged, whereas words like "perfidy", "irrationality" or "capriciousness" imply that it is sometimes too wide to be crossed. If people realize that an individual who has been described with a concept from the first group needs to be redescribed with one from the second group, they frequently allow themselves to say that the individual's "personality" has changed. The second limitation involves confinement to language-based interaction. There are doubtless situations in which a glance or a gesture says more than a thousand words, but use of language still seems to account for the better part of the messages we try to get across in our daily encounters. In the scope of the theory to be developed here, the distinction between nonverbal and language-based interaction will turn out to be generalized by the distinc11
This compound term goes back to Ludwik Fleck, 1979, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, p. 21, 118. I am grateful to Eviatar Zerubavel for drawing my attention to Fleck.
12
tion between uncoded and coded events, where the latter may include gestures, facial expression, and more.12 Furthermore, although there are some important differences between verbal and turn-based written communication (e.g., Internet-chatting), they are largely irrelevant to the purposes pursued here. Therefore, the prototypical social situation I consider involves verbal, turn-based, face-to-face interaction. Third, this treatise is forced to ignore interactions that involve more than two participants. There is no justification for this restriction other than the sheer complexity of interaction beyond the dyadic case. Already in triads, the turn-structure begins to depend on individual turn-initiations13 and the number of potential alliances or constellations between participants is substantial.14 With each additional participant, the combinatorial possibilities grow rapidly. I believe that the framework laid out here would be useful for analyzing triads as well as larger encounters, but I cannot offer thorough support for my optimism. The following chapters will use the term dialogue in order to abbreviate the concept of verbal, turn-based, dyadic face-to-face interaction. As a fourth limitation, this treatise collects mostly theoretical rather than empirical evidence for the hypothesis that the interactive solution to the problem of observability it describes is adequate. Because sociological studies of verbal interaction frequently stress that theory must only "emerge" in close contact with the data,15 it seems wise to justify this confinement with a few remarks. Most importantly, large amounts of data have been transcribed and analyzed, but these efforts have not led to a unified, precise and complete theory of verbal interaction. Sociological theorizing is a relatively inexpensive and harmless scientific enterprise, and it cannot be doubted that at least some existing theories have opened up new and fruitful research areas, so there is no reason to doubt beforehand that a new theory may contribute to further advancement in the sociology of verbal interaction. However, there is another, less pragmatic reason for the necessity of theory. The most obvious 12
This generalization can already be found in George Herbert Mead, 1934, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 13 Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, 1974, "A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation", Language 50: 696-735. 14 For two "formal" analyses of triads in the spirit of Simmel, see Theodore Caplow, 1968, Two Against One: Coalitions in Triads, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Wolfgang Sofsky and Rainer Paris, 1994, Figurationen sozialer Macht: Autorität, Stellvertretung, Koalition, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 15 For statements from the field of Conversation Analysis, see Harvey Sacks, 1992 [1971], "On hypothetical data; Puns; Proverbial expressions (Lecture Fall 1971)", pp. 419-424 in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation II, Oxford: Blackwell, Michael Moerman and Harvey Sacks, 1988 [1971], "On 'Understanding' in the Analysis of Natural Conversation", pp. 180-186 in Michael Moerman, Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis, Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, p. 180 (this latter reference is from Moerman's new [1987] introduction to this article).
13
epistemological consequence of the practical problem of observability is also the most frequently overlooked one: Social observation is a fundamentally contingent enterprise. Since there is no direct and exhaustive causal linkage between mental states and observable behavior, attempts at inferring the former from the latter are always precarious and fallible. In turn, the order of social interaction, insofar as it depends on participants' attempts at making sense of each other's behavior, is fundamentally contingent as well. The nature of the problem of observability precludes hasty empiricist analyses of interaction (to which I do not count those many contributions to the field of Conversation Analysis that are, in fact, quite deductively oriented). Under these premises, theory does not (or not in any simple sense) require empirical analyses, but empirical analyses require theory in order to make sense of the thin layer of data that lends itself to transcription and methodical investigation. Theorizing, on the other hand, is admonished to modesty. The ambition of an interactive solution to the problem of observability cannot be to predict specific sequences of behavior. In fact, the scope of the theory presented in this treatise is relatively narrow: To provide a framework that permits retrospective reconstruction of the unobservable cognitions that can be expected to have underlain a given sequence of interactive moves. The argument proceeds as follows. Chapter 1 surveys the philosophical and sociological discourse on the problem(s) of observability for insights that may be of use to a socio-cognitive, interactive approach to the problem. To allow us to learn from an extremely heterogeneous array of contributions, my reconstruction will be discriminatory and cannot claim to do full justice to any of the theories considered. These include contributions to the (analytical) philosophy of other minds (Section 1.1), the phenomenology of intersubjectivity (Section 1.2), the sociological discourse on double contingency (Section 1.3) as well as Harvey Sacks' outstanding sociological discussion of interactive observability (Section 1.4). I will try to show that many ideas from these theories are surprisingly complementary, although they have to be transposed into a context that their authors would probably not endorse. Chapter 2 takes the first two steps toward a new interactive solution to the problem of observability. In a first step, Sections 2.1 and 2.2 acknowledge that any solution depends on a good conception of the problem and develop a constructivist epistemology of observation that accounts for the nonobservability of other minds. Drawing on suggestions from cybernetics, observation will be equated with autonomous selection and juxtaposed to causation. Observation constitutes a disruption of the cause-effect structure of the world and is, therefore, unobservable and unpredictable. The key advantage of this radical acknowledgement of the problem of observability is a conception of observers as entities that are free to constrain themselves to react to external causes in definite ways as well as to become causes of ex-
14
ternal effects. In a second step, Sections 2.3 and 2.4 develop an externalistic psychology that mirrors the ways in which observers of an observer capable of self-constrainment can try to reconstruct this observer's causal relationships to the world. Mental states and events like perceptions (external-tointernal), thoughts and emotions (internal-to-internal) or intentions (internalto-external) will be shown to be reconstructible as self-selected respecifications of the causal interconnectedness of an observer with her or his environment. As opposed to the unobservable mental states and events minds actually have, these respecifications are socially attributable and play, therefore, a key role in interlocutors' (successful or unsuccessful) attempts at observing each other. Chapter 3 begins with the assumption that the universal scope of the externalistic psychology described in Chapter 2 warrants the assumption that real observers often enough do try to observe each other according to it. In social encounters such as dialogues (Section 3.1), participants are likely to observe each other as self-constraining observers – in other words, participants are likely to carry out second-order observations. Since second-order observation based on an externalistic psychology is likely to occur, it is also socially anticipatable. For this reason, external (e.g., physical) events that are mutually known to causally influence observers (e.g., by inducing perceptions) lead immediately to shared knowledge. The class of events Chapter 3 focuses on comprises utterances, that is, intentionally caused and conventionally decodable acoustic events. I will try to show that H. Paul Grice's well-known theory of meaning can be read as a precise and useful description of a hearer's anticipatable processing of utterances (Section 3.2). Another line of work pursued by Grice, his research on implicatures, will be shown to constitute the logical extension of this train of thought. It explains how the hearer can apply background knowledge in order to render seemingly surprising utterances meaningful, thereby permitting the speaker to generate highly complex messages on the basis of a relatively more limited amount of possible utterances (Section 3.3). The chapter closes with a discussion of the anticipations the speaker is forced to make if she or he wishes to share knowledge with a hearer who operates along these lines (Section 3.4). Finally, Chapter 4 attempts to keep the promise made above and looks at sequences of up to three utterances. I will argue that temporally adjacent occurrences of utterances make the distinction of rejection vs. acceptance generally relevant (Section 4.1). Every utterance that does not (explicitly or implicitly) reject claims conveyed in a preceding utterance is likely to be understood as a ratification of such claims. The general relevance of the distinction of rejection and acceptance has an important socio-cognitive consequence. In dyadic encounters, three turns are the minimum for producing
15
observably shared knowledge, that is, knowledge wherein sharedness constitutes shared knowledge as well. Since such knowledge has been ratified observably by both participants, it marks a point at which agreement about some aspect has been reached and the dialogue may move on (Section 4.2). Of course, an interlocutor will sometimes want to avoid the mutual ratification of knowledge, since it may lead the co-participant to claims that the interlocutor deems undesirable but that could be framed as mere logical consequences of the ratified item. In such cases, argumentation occurs as a conflictual form of negotiating the mutual ratification of certain pieces of knowledge (Section 4.3). Section 4.4 applies the completed theoretical framework to the analysis of a small transcript of a dialogue. I am aware that this treatise pursues a rather dry approach to dialogue, and if I do not want to pretend that this contributes to its accessibility and dissemination, I do believe it is a necessity that owes to the subject matter. In addition, if the argument of this treatise seems complex, it does so because it tries to be precise and coherent, yet also general and complete. The steps of the argument and the concepts it uses are, for the most part, extremely simple. The most basic concept – observation – is also the simplest one: observation is selection. Other concepts (from irritability via normal expectation to ratified interactive fact) are simple as well, but I have tried to let each depend on more primitive concepts, thus maximizing the interconnectedness of the argument. The overall construction is, perhaps, my own, but nearly all of the joined pieces are secondhand. Feeling like a goldsmith who has been licensed to assemble other people's jewels into a (hopefully) self-contained necklace, I think that this procedure renders them not less valuable. For this reason, I have decided to keep the endnotes as extensive as possible. As far as my skills and library conditions permitted, I have preferred original publications to translations. All tacit translations of non-English sources are mine. Unless otherwise mentioned, italics in quotations are original. Over the past four years, a number of people have helped me extensively – in fact, so extensively that it seemed almost unfair to write this treatise in the first person singular. First and foremost, Tom R. Burns, my advisor, was a continuous source of suggestions, helpful criticism and inspiration – I thank him for always having kept faith in my work. Carola Dietze, Jens Rydgren and Wolfgang Ludwig Schneider provided me with highly detailed comments on earlier drafts of this work, allowing me to carry out substantial revisions. Helpful feedback was also provided by Mats Franzén, Alain Imboden, Jim Kemeny, Henning Trüper and Sverre Wide; I am grateful for their efforts. Karen Williams did a thorough and speedy job proofreading the manuscript – with a light heart I take sole responsibility for all remaining errors. Throughout the past years, discussions with many people helped to
16
shape the views that underlie this treatise; they include Jörg R. Bergmann, Paul DiMaggio, Kaj Håkanson, Peter Hedström, Tomas Kumlin, Natasha Nemova, Richard Swedberg, Olav Velthuis, Viviana Zelizer and Eviatar Zerubavel. The Swedish State has funded my research at Uppsala University with a doctoral fellowship that was, even in international comparison, incredibly generous. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Swedish Institute co-sponsored the initial preparations for this treatise. A fellowship from Rutgers University funded an inspiring stay at this wonderful place; I will always be indebted to Eviatar Zerubavel for his support and understanding. The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) financed a productive one-term visit to the European University Institute in Florence. Finally, I want to thank the sociological departments of Stockholm University, Rutgers University, Princeton University as well as the European University Institute for their hospitality and support.
17
1. The theoretical discourse on observability
"By what evidence do I know, or by what considerations am I led to believe, that there exist other sentient creatures; that the walking and speaking figures which I see and hear, have sensations and thoughts, or in other words, possess Minds?'" John Stuart Mill16 In everyday life, people's attempts at figuring out what other persons are intending, thinking or feeling tend to involve an observational optimism. They believe they know more about each other than they can possibly know. Taken by themselves, events that are expected to carry information about mental states can hardly live up to their promises. For instance, a "sour face" can be dissimulated, a trembling voice can be caused by fatigue rather than fear, and a compliment can be meant ironically. If such cues may routinely be used nonetheless, it can be suspected that some underlying mechanism is at work here, a mechanism that usually remains unobserved but that continuously supports people's attempts at observing each other. This chapter discusses several existing searches for such a mechanism and proposes a new one: the universal socio-cognitive order of social interaction. Inside social science (including social philosophy), attempts at problematizing observational optimism have been, and continue to be, projects of outsiders. To the social scientific mainstream, it rarely seems fundamentally problematic (and not just statistically fallible) to suppose that political participation provides data about people's commitments or that answers to survey questions allow inferences about people's attitudes. However, a growing body of social psychological research suggests that observability is not so much a feature but a necessary fiction of everyday life.17 Furthermore, no scientific investigation has ever shown just how facial expressions, uttered sounds, party membership cards, bank statements or questionnaires can 16
John Stuart Mill, 1872, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings, 4 ed., London: Longmans, Green and Co., p. 243; quoted in Carol A. van Kirk, 1986, "Kant and the Problem of Other Minds", Kant-Studien 77: 41-58, p. 41. 17 Suffice it to refer to a pertinent recent contribution: Papafragou, "Mindreading and Verbal Communication".
19
transport information about states or events in another person's mind. If these (and further, see Section 2.1) reservations are valid, a substantial amount of sociological research risks confining itself to analyses of secondary social phenomena – forms of order that presuppose other, unanalyzed social orders.18 To be sure, stable and statistically significant relationships can be (and are) found despite this self-restriction. However, the method is like studying soils without a shovel or currents without a plumb line. A good deal of order can be found at the surface, but it is a derivative order, a reflection of something deeper, more basic and certainly very interesting.19 As always, research has produced rules as well as exceptions. A small yet shrewd discourse on observability thrives in the borderland between sociology and social philosophy. Deep and insightful contributions have been made under headings like "intersubjectivity", "double contingency" or "other-minds problem" and will be considered in this chapter. The upshot of these accounts is that observability and its alleged distributive result, shared knowledge, become problematic. No mental/emotional state or event is directly observable from the outside (i.e., anything but the own mind). Therefore, unshared knowledge has to be seen as a rule and shared knowledge, if present, as an a priori improbable achievement. Only in virtue of social interaction is it possible to share knowledge of some mental states or events indirectly. Contrary to the observational optimism that holds that mental states can be shared,20 or could be if social structure were not in their path,21 social observability cannot be tacitly presupposed by sociological explanations. The obvious alternative, to be pursued in this chapter, is to make observability subject to such explanations. Before we proceed, it will be instructive to consider briefly an example of observational optimism inside 18
This line of criticism has been advanced emphatically by ethnomethodology, but only in broad outline and with rather muddled explanations; see esp. Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks, 1970, "On Formal Structures of Practical Actions", pp. 338-366 in John C. McKinney and Edward A. Tiryakian, Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments, New York: Appleton-Century. 19 My poor metaphor is, of course, itself just a reflection of Plato's cage parable, but I hope it is clear that the "deeper forces" I have in mind are concrete interactive problems and not "ideas". 20 For three prominent defenses of observational optimism, see Max Scheler, 1973 [1922], Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Gesammelte Werke Bd. 7), 6 ed., Bern: A. Francke, p. 238ff, F. J. J. Buytendijk and Helmuth Plessner, 1982 [1925], "Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom Bewußtsein des anderen Ichs", pp. 67-129 in Helmuth Plessner, Ausdruck und menschliche Natur (Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 7), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 75ff, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, p. 405. The argumentative strategies of these authors are similar – they defend people's everyday observational optimism against philosophical skepticism by pointing out its pragmatic utility and intuitive plausibility. 21 This assumption underlies Habermas' distinction between "life-world" and "system"; see Jürgen Habermas, 1981, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 2, Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
20
sociological theory. The following statement comes from one of sociology's institutional founding fathers, Albion W. Small: "One does not observe any type of man long without beginning to suspect that one may find in it every other type of man more or less disguised. One gets hold of the idea that all of these men are alike; that the one is doing what all are doing, and that all are doing what the one is doing. We get the notion that, if we could look below the surface of these lives in turn, we should find that the conduct which on the surface seems so unlike and unrelated is really the same essential activity, with the variations to be accounted for after slight [sic] attention to the surroundings in which they occur."22
This aged quotation still exemplifies mainstream sociology's ignorance of the problem of observability. Small's broader theoretical framework (of which the quoted paragraph is a part) pursues a strategy of denying the problematic observability of minds. Small describes minds with the help of concepts that simply postulate observability in terms of certain objective variables. Specifically, he observes human beings by referring to their "six elementary interests. I name these, for convenience, health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness."23 Since all of these "interests" have to be satisfied by means of entering some kind of relationship with the nonsocial or social environment, any behavior of a human organism can be defined as a function of the universal tendency to pursue one of them. Naïve observational optimism is rarely as explicit as in Small. Most frequently, it is wrapped up in daring assumptions about correlations between non-mental (e.g., socio-structural) data, on the one hand' and intentions, values, interests, attitudes, "emotional energies" etc., on the other. Even studies that address social consequences of imperfect observability explicitly tend to omit a discussion of the epistemological side of the problem – an example being research on social status characteristics.24 The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to a discussion of several much more thorough, cautious, and even in their failure often instructive attempts at exploring the genesis, the possibilities and the limitations of social observability. Although few of them arrive at truly "pessimistic" conclusions, almost all of them have an eye for the problematic nature of observability. They organize themselves into 22
Albion W. Small, 1905, General Sociology: An Exposition of the Main Development in Sociological Theory from Spencer to Ratzenhofer, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, p. 178179. 23 Ibid, p. 197-198. Small's use of the notion of "interest" and his specific list of "elementary interests" was influential in American sociology at least until the 1920s; see Floyd N. House, 1926, "The Concept 'Social Forces' in American Sociology. Section V. The 'Interest' Concept", American Journal of Sociology 31: 507-512. 24 For instance, see Joseph Berger, Susan J. Rosenholtz, and Morris Zelditch, 1980, "Status Organizing Processes", Annual Review of Sociology 6: 479-508.
21
four philosophical and sociological discourses. The first three are the epistemology of "other minds" (Section 1.1), the phenomenology of "intersubjectivity" (Section 1.2) and the theory of social systems (Section 1.3). I have chosen to include the two former, philosophical discourses in this sociological discussion because both of them have been highly influential in sociology (via names like Husserl, Schütz and Wittgenstein). I will conclude this chapter with an account of a fourth approach – in fact, the only one that I deem viable. Quite surprisingly, it is the early Harvey Sacks (obviously influenced by his teacher, Erving Goffman) who can provide us with a template of a tenable theory of observability (Section 1.4), and the remainder of this treatise may well be seen as an attempt at defending this template and to fill out its free fields with cloudy theoretical ink.
1.1 The problem of other minds In view of the fact that many "problems" contemporary philosophers deal with can be traced back to medieval or even classical authors, it is interesting to note that the problem of observing or understanding other people entered the stage comparatively late. Before Descartes' radicalized subjectivism, it rarely ever seemed relevant or even sensible to assume that access to other people's thoughts or emotions could be principally barred.25 To be sure, anthropological conceptions portraying man as witty, strategic and consequently inscrutable are much older. With antique predecessors, they reemerge toward the dawn of Renaissance in the stories of Boccaccio, and they enter the early European literature of political consultation in the writings of Guicciardini, Machiavelli and Botero.26 However, all these theories are from the outset supplemented by hierarchies of impulses and needs that serve to make man re-interpretable. In Boccaccio, sexual desire, greed or overt malevolence allow the observer to bridge the gap between false appearance and true intentions. The political advisors, on the other hand, refer to financial or territorial interests when asking what forces underlie the er-
25 As one would expect, it is virtually always possible to trace a philosophical problem back to a statement of a classical Greek philosopher; for the case of the other-minds problem, see the overview provided by Avramides, Other Minds. Nonetheless, the problem did not provoke extensive philosophical debates until the days of Husserl and Russell. 26 Giovanni Boccaccio, 1997 [1353], Decameron, 6 ed., Torino: Einaudi, Francesco Guicciardini, 1994 [1524], Dialogue on the Government of Florence, trans. Alison Brown, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, Niccolò Machiavelli, 1997 [1532], Il principe, 6 ed., Milano: Feltrinelli, Giovanni Botero, 1997 [1589], La Ragion di Stato, Roma: Donzelli.
22
ratic behavior of princes.27 Thus, the contingency introduced by an interpretation of behavior as strategically motivated is domesticated from the outset. Descartes' "Discours de la méthode" drastically bans all assumptions about the outer world, including assumptions about other people's minds, to the realm of doubt. The ordinary idea that people behave according to a universal, hence, expectable common sense is unmasked as an invention of this very common sense.28 Although Descartes states his axiom of radical uncertainty in the middle of a treatise on rules "for directing one's mind well and finding the truth" despite this uncertainty, he becomes the reference point of a long series of philosophical refutations of other-minds skepticism. In the systems of Kant as well as the German idealists, this skepticism is still easily brushed off by means of a transcendental conception of "reason" or a metaphysical notion of "spirit".29 However, in the 19th century, the growing uneasiness of Anglo-Saxon philosophers with transcendentalism and metaphysics leads to a more detailed inspection of the problem. John Stuart Mill seems to be one of the first to put this uneasiness into words – see the interrogative quote that introduces this chapter. Mill's question is open to both epistemological ("do I know") and psychological/sociological ("am I led to believe") answers. Yet it seems to have triggered an almost exclusively epistemological discourse. With the important exception of phenomenology (to be considered in detail in the next section), the problem that seems to haunt a remarkable amount of 20th century philosophers is how to justify a belief in other minds. For the purposes of this treatise, it is not necessary to consider their discussions in any detail.30 In27 The historical consequences of this conceptual revolution are investigated by Albert O. Hirschman, 1977, The Passions and the Interests, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. For a systems-theoretical interpretation of Botero and later thinkers, see Niklas Luhmann, 1989, "Staat und Staatsräson im Übergang von traditionaler Herrschaft zu moderner Politik", pp. 65148 in Niklas Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Band 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 28 "Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée: car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose, n'ont point coutume d'en désirer plus qu'ils en ont." René Descartes, 1926 [1637], Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, 2 ed., Paris: J. Vrin, p. 1f. 29 Immanuel Kant, 1974 [1787], Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2 ed., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Georg W. F. Hegel, 1970 [1807], Phänomenologie des Geistes (Werke Bd. 3), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kant certainly did not hold any naïve beliefs about the observability of other minds, but his works do not pursue the problem in detail. For two elaborate reconstructions of Kant's presumable views on the observability of others, see Kirk, "Kant and the Problem of Other Minds", Josef Simon, 2001, "Intersubjektivität: Ein philosophisch problematischer Begriff", Archivio di filosofia 69: 41-50. 30 For some highlights, chiefly from the post-Wittgensteinian climax of the debate on analogical inference to other minds, see Norman Malcolm, 1958, "Knowledge of Other Minds", Journal of Philosophy 55: 969-978, Peter F. Strawson, 1959, Individuals, London: Methuen, Bruce Aune, 1961, "The Problem of Other Minds", Philosophical Review 70: 320-339, Paul Ziff, 1965, "The Simplicity of Other Minds", Journal of Philosophy 62: 575-584, Sydney
23
stead, I would like to single out four contributors to this discourse whose ideas are relevant to the argument of the later chapters: Russell, Wittgenstein, Hollis and Levin. Bertrand Russell, like many of his successors in analytical philosophy, avows an inclination to justify the "existence of other people's minds" by means of analogy from self to others.31 Nonetheless, he states that this justification can never be more than a philosophical blessing to psychologically necessary convictions. There is simply no conclusive inference from other people's bodies to other people's minds – although this inference seems to do well as a "working hypothesis"32 in everyday life. Russell notes that this "somewhat meager conclusion"33 can only be the starting point of a more thorough analysis of the practical role of such convictions. Ludwig Wittgenstein's views on the problem of other minds (as laid out in his Philosophical Investigations) allow, as usual, more than one interpretation. In a sequence of paragraphs he asks how we can judge that someone is "reading a book" when we see him holding it in front of his face and producing sounds that correspond to the words on the current page.34 How can we be sure that this person does not just recite a text he learned by heart? In my understanding, Wittgenstein's answer is both radical and fruitful. Although reading vs. reciting seems to be a distinction between mental operations, the predicate "X is reading" must refer to a difference in observable behavior. For instance, if the test person has to read a text in an alphabet likely to be unknown to him, and he appears to look up characters in a table before he pronounces them, we would certainly say that he is reading and not reciting. Such external differences are all we have in order to make sense of his behavior. As Wittgenstein beautifully writes, trying to observe his inner experiences directly is similar to mistreating an artichoke: "In order to find the real artichoke, we divested it of its leaves."35 When it comes to observing other minds, the core, if existing, must be found at the surface. Shoemaker, 1965, "Ziff's Other Minds", Journal of Philosophy 62: 587-589, Fred I. Dretske, 1973, "Perception and Other Minds", Noûs 7: 34-44, Hilary Putnam, 1975, "Other Minds", pp. 342-361 in Hilary Putnam, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, Alec Hyslop, 1995, Other Minds, Dordrecht/London: Kluwer, Simon Glendinning, 1998, On Being With Others: Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein, London: Routledge, Elliott Sober, 2000, "Evolution and the Problem of Other Minds", Journal of Philosophy 97: 365-386. 31 Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 101-105. 32 Ibid, p. 103. 33 Ibid, p. 104. 34 Wittgenstein, PU/PI, §§156-171. 35 Ibid, §164. This interpretation is in accordance with the standard commentary by Eike von Savigny, 1988, Wittgensteins Philosophische Untersuchungen: Ein Kommentar für Leser, Bd. I: §§ 1-315, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, p. 201-204. A long-winded argument about the possibility of "feeling someone else's pain" that appears later in the Philosophical Investigations (cf. §302) has also caused heated philosophical debates. However, Hyslop nicely dem-
24
Martin Hollis makes the important suggestion that knowledge of another mind depends not on the capacities of the observer, but on the presumed internal organization of the observee.36 The other can only become transparent when he keeps his mental operations consistent. He does not have to follow any specific (e.g., western, scientific, "masculine" etc.) "logic", but he has to follow some logic and maintain some internal consistency. The only problem with this precondition, Hollis explains, is that it is itself not observable. If consistency is a precondition of observation, it cannot be contingent on observation. Hollis draws the conclusion that we can only observe the other mind as another mind in virtue of a prior attribution of consistency.37 What the other mind "actually" does, whether he thinks consistently or erratically, and whether he "really" is a mind – and not a totem, a teddy bear or a hallucination – must remain completely irrelevant to this imputation. The upshot of Hollis' attributive turn is that the other-minds problem is radically subjectified. Observing the other mind becomes a matter of adjusting one's own belief system. Finally, Michael Levin, drawing on Darwinian evolution theory, carries Russell's vision of a more naturalistic conception of the other-minds problem some important steps further.38 Taking Hollis' attributive turn as given, he asks what evolutionary advantages an observation of others as other minds could entail. The key benefit seems to be that the behavior of some rather erratically moving (and potentially dangerous, as Darwinians never fail to mention) objects in an organism's environment becomes more interpretable and predictable. Such an advantage would not apply for Homo sapiens only; all mammals, reptiles and possibly even insects appear to organize their behavior around a (neurologically or chemoreceptively hardwired) "belief" in other minds. Of course, actually attributing specific beliefs to a bumblebee would be nonsense, and even in the case of Homo sapiens, it is more plausible to assume that evolution selected a tendency to begin all observation of, and belief-formation about, certain objects with an ascription of self-
onstrates that it is actually irrelevant to the problem of justifying beliefs about other minds: not identity of one's own state and the other's state, but only perception of the other's state needs to be shown to be possible; see Hyslop, Other Minds, p. 9. 36 Martin Hollis, 1977, Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, p. 149ff. 37 His emphasis on categorical attributions as a precondition of cognition places Hollis' statement firmly into the context of Kantian epistemology. The idea that a "radical translation" between two unrelated languages requires reconstruction of internal consistencies goes back to Willard Van Orman Quine, 1960, Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 29ff. Similar conclusions are arrived at by Donald Davidson, 1980, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon, p. 237. 38 Michael E. Levin, 1984, "Why We Believe in Other Minds", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44: 343-359.
25
reference. In Levin's words, the ascription becomes "predictively fruitful"39 by enabling the organism to generate further, more specific assumptions about the inner organization of this self-referential other. One may add that making such assumptions would presuppose a prior imputation of consistency. These contributions anticipate certain aspects of the theory of observability laid out in this treatise. They turn observation of other minds from a justificational into a practical problem. The observer's task is to generate transparency in the face of opacity. At no point in time is she able to draw on information about the other's mental state. Thus, her only chance is to relate behavioral events directly by assuming (counterfactually) that the other mind connects them in fully consistent ways. However, neither of these theories separately, nor all of them puzzled together provide an idea of the full picture. How can an ascription of selfreference and consistency make another mind more predictable? If the essence of observation of other minds is that it works independent of the existence and the internal organization of other minds, how can it produce information that is not independent of their existence and their internal organization? In case the observee is an animal, schematic supplementary hypotheses about the meaning of the other's gestures, facial expressions or body postures may provide sufficiently reliable information about inner states and expectable conduct. In the case of humans, however, the individual's ability to dissimulate intentions on the basis of inferences about her alter ego's beliefs and intentions can be expected to be matched by her observee's ability to do just the same. Theories of social systems, which I will discuss in Section 1.3, have baptized this predicament a "situation of double contingency" and have argued forcefully that its solution requires support by some form of social order. Thus, the subjective turn made possible by philosophical insights needs to be complemented by findings about some form of objective social organization that renders self-determined observations adequate. A path toward such genuinely sociological findings will be mapped out in Section 1.4 below. Before that, it will be useful to collect ideas from a very different tradition of philosophical struggling with the problem of observability.
1.2 The problem of intersubjectivity The discourse on the other-minds problem is as thoroughly Anglo-Saxon as that on intersubjectivity is Continental. Edmund Husserl is the first to make 39
Ibid, p. 350.
26
intersubjectivity a core notion of a complex philosophical edifice – his phenomenology. It is chiefly due to his and his students' contributions that this concept made an extraordinary philosophical and sociological career. Naturally, it would be neither possible nor relevant to reconstruct the entire discourse on intersubjectivity and its various conceptions of observability in this section. Alternatively, I will focus on a selection of the most relevant classics – Husserl, Schütz, Sartre and Habermas, with a gradually diminishing level of detail. After sketching the role of intersubjectivity in each author's philosophical approach, I will extract specific and decontextualized insights that I see as fruitful contributions to a sociological theory of observability. Special attention will be given to each author's attempts and failures to overcome the fundamentally paradoxical structure of intersubjectivity. The common denominator of these authors is a conception of intersubjectivity as shared understanding (which Habermas interprets more normatively than do his predecessors). Husserl, to begin with, does not believe that sharing knowledge, understanding each other or even achieving consensus is a "problem" for everyday men. He realizes that intersubjectivity is mainly a self-constructed puzzle of the philosophy of the subject. This contrast follows Husserl's general distinction between a phenomenology of the "lifeworld" and a phenomenology of the transcendental ego. The former, thought less highly of by Husserl than by Schütz, is an essentially descriptive reconstruction of the "natural attitude" with which everyday man faces the world. According to Husserl, the idealized belief that other people are observable is part of this stance and paraphrased by him as a "general thesis of the natural attitude".40 Since rigid, scientifically satisfying explanations are not possible within a phenomenology of the "life-world", it is one of Husserl's central aims from the early 1910's until his death in 1938 to incorporate the notion of intersubjectivity into his transcendental phenomenology. However, tensions between the two modes of analysis are present all along, as many of Husserl's critics have noted.41 In Husserl, transcendentalism does not refer to a certain type of knowledge, but to a "motive to ask for the ultimate sources of all cognitions [Erkenntnisbildungen], to let the ap40 Husserl, Ideen 1, p. 51f/§§28-30, Edmund Husserl, 1956 [1938], Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (Husserliana VI), 2 ed., Den Haag: Nijhoff, p. 166/§47. 41 Most stringently: Alfred Schütz, 1966 [1957], "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl", pp. 51-84 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, Den Haag: Nijhoff. See also Ilja Srubar, 1983, "Abkehr von der transzendentalen Phänomenologie: Zur philosophischen Position des späten Schütz", pp. 6884 in Richard Grathoff and Bernhard Waldenfels, Sozialität und Intersubjektivität: Phänomenologische Perspektiven der Sozialwissenschaften im Umkreis von Aron Gurwitsch und Alfred Schütz, München: Fink.
27
prehending person reflect over her apprehensions and her apprehending life".42 This desire to find the ultimate – that is, unquestionable – sources of one's knowledge is to be satisfied by means of the key "method" of Husserl's phenomenology, the transcendental reduction or epoché. It is supposed to result in liberation from all philosophical or unphilosophical prejudice and to reveal the essential characteristics of the thereby divested "things themselves".43 However, it does not consist of a procedure of steps one could simply follow; rather, it is meant to be a single act of suspending the world's "network of facts and values [Geflecht der Geltungen]".44 From the countless publications and unpublications in which Husserl attempts to explicate this "method", no picture of a repeatable procedure or act that would satisfy methodologists emerges. On balance, the transcendental reduction comprises all of Husserl's attempts at distinguishing unessential from essential (unquestionable, transcendental) characteristics. Among these, Husserl seems to have held Descartes' priorization of subjectivity to be the least dubitable. In consequence, the search for intersubjectivity within the jurisdiction of transcendental phenomenology violates the latter's own premises from the outset.45 Immanent reconstructions of Husserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity are prone to the same fundamental flaw.46 It requires a more selective, sociologically motivated reading to extract insights useful for the purposes pursued here. The by far most systematic account of intersubjectivity can be found in Husserl's fifth Cartesian Meditation,47 especially if supplemented with clarifications from his research manuscripts. Critics often argue that the solution put forward in the fifth 42
Husserl, Krisis, p. 100f/§26. I.e., Husserl's "Sachen selbst", not Kant's "Ding an sich". 44 Husserl, Krisis, p. 153/§40. 45 Husserl's search for an adequate conception of intersubjectivity is documented in the almost 2000 pages of "research manuscripts" published posthumously; see Edmund Husserl, 1973, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 1. Teil: 1905-1920, Den Haag: Nijhoff, Edmund Husserl, 1973, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 2. Teil: 1921-1928, Den Haag: Nijhoff, Edmund Husserl, 1973, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 3. Teil: 1929-1935, Den Haag: Nijhoff. 46 For rather orthodox and immanent reconstructions and defenses, see Richard Kozlowski, 1991, Die Aporien der Intersubjektivität: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Edmund Husserls Intersubjektivitätstheorie, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, Georg Römpp, 1992, Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität und ihre Bedeutung für eine Theorie intersubjektiver Objektivität und die Konzeption einer phänomenologischen Philosophie, Dordrecht/London: Kluwer, Dan Zahavi, 1996, Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik, Dordrecht/London: Kluwer. All of these authors remain fascinated and dazzled by the complexity and the paradoxes of Husserl's theory; none attempts anything like a clear and consistent summary of his conception of intersubjectivity. 47 Edmund Husserl, 1992 [1929], Cartesianische Meditationen: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie, Hamburg: Meiner. 43
28
meditation suffers from a confusion of the transcendental sphere with that of the "life-world".48 Instead of seeing it as a defect, I suggest taking this confusion as a sociological pro.49 Here, Husserl faces intersubjectivity as a practical problem that members of any given society need to solve. He emphasizes with all due clarity that the "general thesis of the natural attitude" is not sufficient to make another mind observable – real psychical events are not available to another person's experience.50 Accordingly, a person's attempt at observing another mind needs to begin with empathy (Einfühlung), that is, with imaginary observation of the other mind in her own mind. Since this made up observation is a psychical operation of a real individual, this individual as well as third parties may assume that the observed mind carries out the same operation as the observing mind. The result is a socio-cognitive symmetry between the individual's and her alter ego's attempts at observing each other.51 Of course, the only data available to each of them concern the outer world, including data about each other's bodies. Thus, neither of them can be sure that the other is actually attempting to observe his or her respective other. However, this form of security is by no means necessary to establish the viable assumption that another mind is present and observing in just the same way as oneself. The assumption can be made valid by some other force Husserl neither mentions nor excludes – for instance, a naturally selected, universal tendency to observe other bodies and faces as minds, in the same way as suggested by Levin (see Section 1.1). If this form of observation is carried out by all participants in an encounter, another body will "indicate"52 another mind and external events observed by one mind can be assumed equally observable by the other mind. Thus, the individual and her alter ego are able to share both knowledge about the world and knowledge about the fact that they both do so. This type of knowledge is not shared because it is transmitted from one mind to another (which is not possible), but because each individual produces such assump48 See again Schütz, "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity", but also Chauncey Downes, 1965, "Husserl and the Coherence of the Other Minds Problem", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26: 253-259, Martina Scherbel, 1994, "Deskription oder Postulat? Zur Intersubjektivitätstheorie in der V. Cartesianischen Meditation Edmund Husserls", Perspektiven der Philosophie 20: 275-288, Peter Reynaert, 2001, "Intersubjectivity and Naturalism - Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation Revisited", Husserl Studies 17: 207-216. 49 The price of this selective reconstruction is that it will be necessary to ignore Husserl's (in any case paradoxical) idea of a "double phenomenological reduction"; see Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 118/§52. For a more favorable interpretation, see Scherbel, "Deskription oder Postulat?" p. 278f. 50 Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Teil 1, p. 1-4, 189, 371-373. For an earlier but similar statement, see Edmund Husserl, 1901, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Theil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Tübingen: Niemeyer, p. 34. 51 Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Teil 2, p. 9. 52 Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 120/§53.
29
tions independently and with high likelihood. Although this idea of Husserl is another important step toward a sociological theory of observability, I will argue in the course of this treatise that the essential component missing in this solution is sequentiality. Due to the influence of Bergson, Husserl and many of his followers (e.g., Schütz, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) see simultaneity as a sufficient condition for intersubjectivity.53 However, if coobservation of indexical events is crucial, more complex forms of shared knowledge can only be generated if it is up to the observer and her observee to willingly generate such events. This means that the theory has to account for the possibility of time-consuming, sequential interaction. With Husserl's achievement in mind, it will be instructive to turn to one of his students to whom the "enigma of how man can understand his fellowman"54 seemed most pressing. The main concern of Alfred Schütz' social phenomenology is to detranscendentalize the problem of intersubjectivity and to situate it in the "life-world" of everyday man.55 I would like to suggest that Schütz carries out this task in two different and incompatible directions. The first and certainly more prominent direction only adds confusion to Husserl's already naturalized solution. Within the "life-world", Schütz conceptualizes intersubjectivity as a gradual problem. Although "intended meanings" (Max Weber's gemeinter Sinn) are inaccessible to another person, the "intelligibility of the other's psychical states" is not "denied in general".56 Schütz goes on to ensure us that "fragments"57 of another person's stream of experiences are available to an observer, but he neither explains exactly what parts are available, nor how such fragments are made available to the outside world, nor if and how an observer can distinguish beforehand between expectably available and unavailable bits of experience. He does emphasize that simultaneity of experience is necessary to "catch the Other's thought in its vivid presence".58 However, all his attempts at explaining how simultaneous thoughts become shared thoughts drive him into highly questionable, pseudo-topological classifications of different degrees (e.g., typical vs. idio-
53
A temporal perspective is alluded to, however, when Husserl speaks of a "testable accessibility of the originally inaccessible [bewährbarer Zugänglichkeit des original Unzugänglichen]", Ibid, p. 117/§52. 54 Alfred Schütz, 1962 [1942], "Scheler's Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis of the Alter Ego", pp. 150-179 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, Den Haag: Nijhoff, p. 179. 55 Alfred Schütz, 1974 [1932], Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 56 ["Annotation" following §6]. 56 Ibid, p. 139f/§19. For a more radical choice of words, see Schütz, "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity", p. 72. 57 Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau, p. 147/§20. 58 Schütz, "Scheler's Theory of Intersubjectivity", p. 173, almost identically explained in Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau, p. 144f/§20.
30
syncratic, knowledge of vs. knowledge about) of shared knowledge.59 Unfortunately, it was primarily this rhetorical and ultimately paradoxical explanation of observability that was popularized in sociology by Berger and Luckmann.60 However, in a set of paragraphs from his early monograph as well as some of its later summaries, Schütz takes a second, more adequate direction toward such an explanation. There, "understanding the other [Fremdverstehen]" is not conceived of as a problem of asymptotic approximation, but as an interactant's hypothetical reconstruction of the observee's motives.61 In this and only this version, the problem of intersubjectivity is from the outset simplified – not the other's inner infinity, but only her motives to carry out certain observable acts have to be made transparent. Since "real" motives, if at all present, are not observable from the outside, the observer has to presume that a rational "in-order-to motive" was underlying a certain act. This presumed motive does not correspond to any reason the observee can have had to carry out her act. It is a purely observational rationalization that serves to attribute mental states to the observee.62 In the extreme case, where the only observationally available datum is a certain external effect (e.g., a smashed window), the observer can rationalize the act by attributing an intention to bring about this effect.63 Quite interestingly, Schütz takes such attributions to be necessary for communicative interaction. To discover 59 For several examples of such classifications and their condensation into spatial metaphors, see Alfred Schütz, 1964, "The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology", pp. 91-105 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, Den Haag: Nijhoff, p. 98ff, Alfred Schütz, 1964, "The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge", pp. 120-134 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, Den Haag: Nijhoff, p. 124f, as well as Alfred Schütz, 1962, "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action", pp. 3-47 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, Den Haag: Nijhoff, Alfred Schütz, 1962, "On Multiple Realities", pp. 207-259 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, Den Haag: Nijhoff. Interestingly, the early Schütz is explicitly critical of the usage of spatial metaphors in philosophy; see Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau, p. 143/§20. One might wonder whether Schütz' immigration (after 1940) and the ensuing need to explain phenomenology to a critical AngloSaxon audience forced him to turn his philosophy into a chiefly metaphorical exercise. 60 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, 1966, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Penguin. Related, more philosophical interpretations of Schütz can be found in Richard Grathoff and Bernhard Waldenfels, eds., 1983, Sozialität und Intersubjektivität: Phänomenologische Perspektiven der Sozialwissenschaften im Umkreis von Aron Gurwitsch und Alfred Schütz, München: Fink. 61 Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau, p. 155f/§21. 62 This is true even in the case of self-observation. According to Schütz, actions are carried out due to "because motives"; "in-order-to motives" have the sole purpose of making actions meaningful and turning them ex post facto ("I did X in order to…") or modo futuri exacti ("You will have done Y in order to…") into acts. See Alfred Schütz, 1962, "Choosing Among Projects of Action", pp. 67-96 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, Den Haag: Nijhoff, p. 71. 63 Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau, p. 243/§35.
31
"expressive acts" behind "expressive movements", the hearer needs to observe the speaker by means of an attributed in-order-to motive.64 Just like Hollis (as sketched in Section 1.1), Schütz suggests an unequivocally attributive approach to social observation. Thus, the two authors can be seen as complementary. To observe another mind at least hypothetically, an individual needs to assume that this other relates behavior and inner states consistently and redundantly. Each act is consistently grounded in an in-order-to motive to bring about this act, which means that observable information becomes a predictor of unobservable information. The role of motives or intentions in this observation is a purely constructive one; they serve as virtual anchor points of real-world data. This approach does not compensate for the lack of a truly interactive perspective, a deficit that was already reproved in Husserl, but it paves the way to make H. Paul Grice's much more sophisticated theory of intentions in communication sociologically useful, as I will try to show in Chapter 3. Jean-Paul Sartre, like Schütz an indirect student of Husserl, is equally critical of Husserl's transcendental conception of intersubjectivity.65 He demonstrates in detail that neither the universality of human nature nor the universality of time is sufficient to render concrete contents of different minds communicable.66 Similar to Schütz he wants to situate intersubjectivity in the concrete reality of everyday life, although his argument is more sensitive to the logical intricacies of observability. Not unlike Mead,67 Sartre's concern for observability derives from his interest in the role of the anticipated other in the development of reflexivity. If an individual cannot register the presence of other individuals in her world, this world will have the shape of a series of plain and unproblematic experiences revolving around the self like planets around a central star. The individual exists in this world, but she is not stimulated to reflect on it.68 As soon as another self enters, this world becomes "decentered". All the appearances she perceives can now be interpreted as organized around a different hub. Furthermore, in meeting the other's eyes, the individual realizes that she too can become the object of 64
Ibid, p. 162f/§23. I will not consider Sartre's early views as laid out in his La transcendence de l'ego, since his major philosophical work, L'être et le néant, claims to invalidate them. See Jean-Paul Sartre, 1976 [1943], L'être et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard, p. 274, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1988 [1937], La transcendence de l'ego, Paris: J. Vrin. 66 Sartre, L'être et le néant, p. 265. 67 Mead, Mind, Self, and Society. However, Sartre's reader should keep in mind that his existentialism turns the genesis of the self into an ontological problem, thereby abstracting from fundamental social-psychological processes (e.g., socialization and language acquisition). 68 In Sartre's beautiful prose, the ego would live in a "pure manière de me perdre dans le monde, de me faire boire par les choses comme l'encre par un buvard", Sartre, L'être et le néant, p. 298. 65
32
someone else's experience. According to Sartre, the individual responds to this archetypal social situation by controlling and adjusting her own appearances, a mechanism which he interprets emphatically as a fundamental yet necessary restriction of an individual's freedom.69 As mentioned, Sartre's existentialism is mainly interested in the consequences of this situation for the individual, not for the social situation or society in general. From a sociological perspective, Sartre's analysis of the relationship between causality and observability seems to be his most original contribution to the discourse on intersubjectivity, since it clarifies one of the key logical conditions under which attempts at observing observers operate. Like several of the authors discussed above, Sartre sees the existence of the other as a purely observational construction. This construction should not be assessed with respect to its epistemological adequacy but merely its practical utility: "The other […] is an a priori hypothesis which has no other justification than the unity which it allows to operate in our experience".70 However, by transforming an observational object into an observing subject, the individual burdens herself with self-generated contingency. This means that the laws of causality are observationally inapplicable as long as the hypothesis is operative.71 Causal explanations about the behavior of the other can be reintroduced at any time, but only at the price of suspending the hypothesis that the other is an observer.72 In Chapter 2, the difference between being observed as a (causally determined) object and a (causally underdetermined) subject will be shown to correspond to the distinction between first-order observation (i.e., observation of mere objects) and second-order observation (i.e., observation of observers/subjects). Unfortunately, the crucial question of how second-order observation can proceed without using causal explanations is already outside Sartre's scope. I will also argue that an attribution of consistency (as suggested by Hollis and, less explicitly, by Schütz), or more precisely: of rationality is necessary to overcome the contingency generated by second-order observation. Even Jürgen Habermas assigns the notion of intersubjectivity an outstanding position in his theory of communicative action. However, the prob69
Ibid, p. 304. Ibid, p. 265. 71 Philosophers of subjectivity who are critical of the now fashionable turn to intersubjectivity are right in pointing out that the indeterminacy of the subject is not so much a condition for, but an obstacle to, an emphatic conception of intersubjectivity. "There is a relationship between the irreducibility [of subjectivity, WR] and its resistance against analysis, a relationship that confirms the inner consistency of [the philosophy of subjectivity, WR]". Dieter Henrich, 2000, "Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität (22 Thesen und Begründungsskizzen)", unpub. manuscript, University of Munich, 5 pages, here: thesis 20. Compare also Frank's thesis of an "irreducibility of subjectivity", Manfred Frank, 1995, "Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität", Revue Internationale de Philosophie 194: 521-550. 72 Sartre, L'être et le néant, p. 264f, 341. 70
33
lem of observability is poorly considered,73 and despite Habermas' sociological prominence, I do not see insights to which a constructivist theory of observability can relate. His own project focuses on the communicative achievement of consensus and the ethical justification of a procedure (i.e., "discourse") that, he thinks, methodically guarantees this achievement. Intersubjectivity, in the more fundamental form of shared knowledge, is seen as a requirement for, and not a result of, communicative action. Although Habermas claims not to heed any illusions about the "fragmentary" reality of everyday communication,74 he takes the works of Mead and Chomsky as evidence for the soundness of his supposition that subjects with a normally developed "interaction competence" (Mead), "linguistic competence" (Chomsky) and a willingness to acknowledge the "intersubjective validity of rules" are able to share "identical meanings".75 Based on these premises, and due to Habermas' faithful application of the speech-act-theoretical model of communication,76 he never considers it necessary to deliberate on the problematic observability of other minds. It will be useful to sum up the selectively extracted contributions of Husserl, Schütz and Sartre in their logical rather than historical order. The first explanatory step is provided by Sartre, whose distinction between causality and selectivity reveals that second-order observation creates a problem of self-imposed contingency. If other minds are difficult to observe, this is not due to their "intrinsic" capriciousness, but due to the observer's own decision to observe them as causally indeterminate observers. In the next logical step, Husserl and Schütz provide us with complementary explanations of how this informational gap can be refilled without falling back into firstorder observation. In his fifth Cartesian meditation, Husserl refers to worldly events and objects as indexes that may be used for acquiring first-order knowledge (i.e., knowledge of events) and second-order knowledge (i.e., knowledge of co-interactant's knowledge of events). Each individual's per73 Jürgen Habermas, 1981, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 1, Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 2. 74 Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 1, p. 150, Jürgen Habermas, 1988, Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 180. 75 Jürgen Habermas, 1982, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, 5 ed., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 411f. All of these and several other flaws in Habermas' theory are systematically uncovered by Wolfgang Ludwig Schneider, 1994, "Intersubjektivität als kommunikative Konstruktion", pp. 189-238 in Peter Fuchs and Andreas Göbel, Der Mensch - das Medium der Gesellschaft?, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 195-210. 76 Schegloff criticizes this recourse to Speech Act Theory when he mentions that Habermas "has contributed to the subversion of his own goals by relying on an analytic resource that in effect casts action as atomistic, individualistic, atemporal, asequential, and asocial." Emanuel Schegloff, 1992, "Repair after Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation", American Journal of Sociology 97: 1295-1345, p. 1339.
34
ceptual and psychical organization makes the generation of such knowledge likely. In consequence, first-order knowledge becomes expectably distributed over all participants in a social encounter. Schütz' theory of in-order-to motives explains how interactants can transform some indexical events (especially "expressive movements" and, I would like to add, expressive sounds) into acts of co-interactants. They bluntly construct a direct correspondence between an act and their alter ego's intention to bring about this act, thereby refilling the aforementioned informational gap attributively. Together with the contributions from analytical philosophy discussed above, something like a "big picture" of observability in interaction begins to emerge. The next section will move from philosophy to sociology and inspect systems theorists' thoughts on social observability.
1.3 The problem of double contingency Some preeminent sociological thinkers (Goffman, Garfinkel, Schegloff, and others) have pondered on the problem of observability at rather isolated locations in their works and arrived at pertinent conclusions – these will be considered at appropriate positions here and in later chapters. Nevertheless, there is an entire tradition of sociological theorizing that assigns foundational relevance to the problem of observability. According to the theories of social systems by Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, the imperfect observability of co-interactants and the ensuing unpredictability of each other's behavior lead to a mutually indeterminate situation that gives room to the autonomous emergence of a third force – social systems. However, important differences between these two theorists can already be found in their respective suggestions of social solutions to this situation of "double contingency". Since both authors use the theorem of double contingency exclusively to justify their theoretical starting points and hardly ever return to it at more advanced or more applied points in their complex theoretical constructions,77 some brief remarks on these theories will be sufficient to characterize the role Parsons' and Luhmann's respective solutions to the problem of double contingency play in them. In Parsons' work, social systems emerge as normative solutions to the "'Hobbesian problem of order",78 the war of "every man against every man".79 This unbearable situation is brought about by the double contingency 77 Luhmann notes this about Parsons; see Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 149, 174f. However, the same must be said of Luhmann's own theory, since Chapter 3 of the cited monograph, titled Double Contingency, features his only detailed analysis of the concept. 78 Talcott Parsons, 1951, The Social System, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, p. 36. 79 The full quote is: "Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war
35
of interaction. Since there may never have been a human population without some form of normative order, Parsons introduces double contingency as an analytical problem – a problem that does not exist in the ideal typical shape given to it by sociological theory. It is merely an implicit reference problem of social systems. In its ideal typical form, double contingency is induced by "ego's"80 ability to select meaningfully motivated and goal-directed behavior, in other words, to act.81 Since all of her acts, therefore, are tied to prior expectations, they are from the outset susceptible to the "polarity of gratification and deprivation".82 Any motivated and goal-directed act can result in a future state that satisfies or disappoints her, but only because it is (by definition) a constituent of action to seek satisfaction and to try to avoid disappointment. In interaction, the fulfillment of ego's expectations depends not only on her own action (plus the contingent structure of the world), but also on the actions of other "social objects or alters".83 Since these actions are tied to their respective actor's expectations, ego's capacity to carry out a successful act will depend on her ability to produce expectations about alter's expectations.84 Relative to such second-order expectations, the fundamental distinction between gratification and deprivation is instantiated by the more specific distinction between conformity and nonconformity. Everything alter does will automatically be either conforming or not conforming to ego's expectations, which means that, according to Parsons, interaction is always a normative enterprise.85 The same is true of alter's expectations, which entails that ego's and alter's actions become mutually dependent on each other's expectations. This leads to a dilemma. In order to observe each other adequately, ego and alter would have to produce third-order expectations, fourth-order expectations, and so on ad infinitum. Interaction does not come with an inbuilt rule that specifies where to stop this proliferation of expectations. The psychological truism that neither ego nor alter is capable of developing infinitely complex expectations does not take the edge off this problem, since neither of them can be sure that the other will stop this process at any speas is of every man against every man." Thomas Hobbes, 1651, Leviathan, London, Chapter XIII. 80 Parsons uses "ego" and "alter" as purely formal reference points, see Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, 1951, Toward a General Theory of Action, New York: Harper & Row, p. 15. Ego is a symbol for the actor the theorist is chiefly observing, whereas alter refers to the one the theorist observes insofar as he is observed by, or orienting to, ego. I will make use of this handy convention throughout this treatise without implying any reference to Parsons. 81 Talcott Parsons, 1968, "Interaction: Social Interaction", pp. 429-441 in David L. Sills, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences Vol. 7, New York: Macmillan, p. 436. 82 Parsons and Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action, p. 234. 83 Ibid, p. 14f. 84 Ibid, p. 65. 85 Parsons, The Social System, p. 37.
36
cific (say, at exactly the third) nesting level. Therefore, Parsons sees ideal typical interaction as characterized by the dilemma of "double contingency".86 It is one of the central tenets of Parsons' theory of social systems that the ensuing "problem of order" cannot be solved locally, that is, from within the encounter. Any party's decision to be honest or trustworthy is insufficient to reduce either party's uncertainty about the other party's next step. Social order has to enter from the outside, in the form of constraints on interaction that are organized in social systems. Parsons regards social norms as the most important form of interactive constraints. In his version of systems theory, it is up to a "shared basis of normative order" in the form of a "common culture or a 'symbolic system'" to guarantee the "stability" of social interaction.87 To use March and Simon's terminology, norms – preferably internalized ones – are expected to "absorb uncertainty"88 by forcing interactants to act conformingly and by making their conforming actions expectable. Consequently – and this consequence is vital – Parsons envisages norms as conditionals that have to be actually followed. I would like to suggest that Parsons' exposition of the dilemma of double contingency is a valid, pertinent and genuinely sociological characterization of the problem of observability, whereas his normative solution to the problem is flawed. In line with contributions to the discourses on other minds and intersubjectivity, Parsons sees observational contingency as a self-induced problem. He goes beyond these contributions when he characterizes the socially multiplied result of this form of contingency, but he falls behind them as soon as he opts for a normative solution. Naturally, if alter follows internalized norms, and ego can expect that he does so, she can also predict his behavior. However, Parsons' solution has to operate symmetrically on ego as well, which means that ego is constrained to let her behavior depend only on such expectations about alter's actions that alter himself can expect. Independent of the nesting-level of expectations allowed by the "normative order", ego and alter are transformed into norm-followers rather than norminterpreters. Norms are supposed to define human behavior as software defines the behavior of a computer. Any actor's attempt at covertly breaking norms will threaten the normative order just as a processor's failure to correctly execute a program will result in a crash. Thus, Parsons' solution must be rejected on the ground of turning interactants into "judgmental dopes".89 It 86
Ibid, p. 10, Parsons and Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action, p. 16, Parsons, "Interaction", p. 436. 87 Parsons, "Interaction", p. 437. 88 James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, 1958, Organizations, New York: Wiley. 89 Harold Garfinkel, 1967, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, p. 66ff. See also Wrong's rejection of Parsons' "oversocialized" conception of man, Dennis H. Wrong, 1961, "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology", American So-
37
may be part of the Freudian heritage in Parsons' works that they express much greater faith in the constraining power of the unconscious than that of the conscious, of internalized dispositions than of incentives for rational utility-maximization. Furthermore, Parsons' solution must be (and has been) criticized for being empirically implausible, since the "normative order" of present day Western society clearly does not inhibit but stimulates a great deal of individual rationality.90 If most social encounters in this society still proceed without sudden outbreaks of violence or long awkward silences, which seems to be the case,91 Parsons' "solution" has to be an at least incomplete account of the social order operative in typical interactions. Applying Sartre's distinction between observing causality (i.e., objects) and observing selectivity (i.e., subjects/observers), Parsons' solution to the problem of double contingency implies that people are made observable by never really achieving the interactive status of subjects. Parsons' "normative order" is a world where double contingency is abolished by way of double conditioning. However, like a dictatorship, a closed mental hospital or a concentration camp, this order can only survive if it can prevent the emergence of creative, self-referential actors.92 Again, a look at the reality of interaction in "total institutions"93 demonstrates that causal conditioning is not, and has never been, possible. In the course of this treatise, I will argue that the general constraint to "make yourself observable" is sufficient to bind rationality in a socially predictable way, leaving social norms the (important) task of
ciological Review 26: 183-193. Wrong's criticism remains topical even though his alternative, Freudian concept of internalization is hardly less "oversocialized" ("[…] for in psychoanalytic terms to say that a norm has been internalized, or introjected to become part of the superego, is to say no more than that a person will suffer guilt-feelings if he fails to live up to it, not that he will in fact live up to it in his behavior.", ibid, p. 187). 90 This has been demonstrated in detail in Goffman's empirical studies of people's situational enactment of norms; see especially Goffman, Stigma, Erving Goffman, 1961, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, New York: Anchor Books, but also by Garfinkel; see Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Chapter 5. 91 Note the extraordinary efforts it took Garfinkel and his students to "breach" the normal course of interactions and to produce embarrassment; see Harold Garfinkel, 1963, "A Conception of, and Experiments with, 'Trust' as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions", pp. 187238 in O. J. Harvey, Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Determinants, New York: Ronald Press. Even under disconcerting conditions, usually some form of communication went on (e.g., conflict) and neither violence nor silence was likely. Schneider remarks that these experiments should be seen as proof of the robustness of communication, rather than of its fragility; see Wolfgang Ludwig Schneider, 1994, Die Beobachtung von Kommunikation: Zur kommunikativen Konstruktion sozialen Handelns, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, p. 228. 92 Tom R. Burns and Helena Flam, 1987, The Shaping of Social Organization: Social Rule System Theory With Applications, London: Sage, p. 11. 93 Goffman, Asylums, p. 12ff, see also Vessela Misheva, 1993, "Totalitarian Interaction: A Systems Approach", Sociologia Internationalis 31: 179-196.
38
generating observably shared knowledge rather than regulating behavior/action. Niklas Luhmann is one of the most astute critics of Parsons' inability to incorporate situational contingencies, individual rationality (more generally: the operative autonomy of the psychical system) and conflict into systems theory. His own theory of social systems (in the version developed after 198094) is assembled on premises that are, among other things, intended to mend these defects. Interestingly enough, the construction of his theory begins with the same reference problem – double contingency. However, instead of using Parson's pragmatistic exposition of the problem, he adopts a more abstract construction that is grounded in the cybernetic theory of black boxes. Because he imports concepts like "system", "autonomy" or "observation" from this theory as well, it deserves a close look. The problem of "black" or impenetrable objects arose first in wartime telecommunications when engineers had to interpret and dismantle potentially hostile entities like sealed bombs or wreckage.95 Instead of taking them apart immediately, the engineer would treat them like autonomous subjects, stimulate their surface (e.g., attach a set of cables) and observe reactions. Depending on these reactions, he or she could form hypotheses about the unobservable internal mechanism of the black box. The cybernetic black-box theory of the 1950s generalized this procedure to a methodology of dealing with insufficient knowledge about causal mechanisms. The experimenter and the black box were seen as forming a composite system in which "input" from the experimenter to the box and "output" in the opposite direction are linked in a causally closed feedback loop. Starting with random assumptions, the experimenter would discover patterns in the output behavior and ultimately be able to hypothesize a model of the mechanism that transforms input into output.96 If early black-box theory did not lead to a breakthrough in engineering, it certainly did lead to a breakthrough in epistemology. Newer developments in black-box theory eliminate inconsistencies in the older approach that are due to a naïve concept of causality.97 The ignorance that gives rise to a black 94
Luhmann's publication of Soziale Systeme in 1984 marks his momentous turn from a theory of action systems to communication systems. For reasons behind this turn, see Rudolf Stichweh, 2000, "Systems Theory as an Alternative to Action Theory? The Rise of 'Communication' as a Theoretical Option", Acta Sociologica 43: 5-13. 95 W. Ross Ashby, 1956, An Introduction to Cybernetics, London: Chapman & Hall, p. 86. 96 Ibid, p. 89ff. 97 See especially von Foerster's essays, collected in Heinz von Foerster, 1999, Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie, trans. Wolfram K. Köck, 2 ed., Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag. Von Foerster and his colleagues are now known as representatives of a successor to classical cybernetics sometimes named second-order cybernetics. Wiener, the founding father of classical cybernetics, does not yet problematize the notion of causality – perhaps because he is chiefly interested in control, thereby taking causal-
39
box-experiment is no longer interpreted as a temporary white spot in the universal chain of causes and effects. Instead, the black box is renamed a system and seen as autonomous relative to external causes. Such a system is capable of selecting itself the environmental effects to which it reacts. Likewise, it is able to produce own effects. Given this conception, it is theoretically quite unimportant what else a system may be (e.g., whether it consists of elements plus relationships or temporalized operations98) – its single most important property is that it decides itself what it does. The newer black-box theory does not maintain that systems "really" exist, but it does make the following two claims. First, it argues that the constructivist assumption that some things in the world (especially living organisms) are systems leads to far more parsimonious explanations than does causal reductionism. The failure of biological behaviorism has shown that explanations that treat organisms as objects and not as systems are either simplistic or inefficient. Second, it asserts that the assumption made in the first claim mirrors the practical constructivism that is built into the ways in which higher organisms deal with each other in interaction – an idea we encountered earlier in this chapter. Luhmann conceives of double contingency as a real (i.e., practical) problem induced by the interaction of two systems. He rejects Parsons' pragmatistic formulation and normative resolution of the problem, arguing that Parsons is too concerned with the achievement of consensus.99 Thoroughly considered, Luhmann claims, double contingency makes consensus – as a static correspondence between beliefs or preferences – socially irrelevant, because agreement or shared understanding of separate minds will be unobservable.100 For the same reason, norms for the attainment of consensus are not sufficient to make consensus socially expectable. In consequence, ity for granted. See Norbert Wiener, 1961, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2 ed., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 39. See also Ranulph Glanville, 1979, "The Form of Cybernetics: Whitening the Black Box", pp. 35-42 in Society for General Systems Research, General Systems Research: A Science, a Methodology, a Technology, Louisville, KY, Ranulph Glanville, 1982, "Inside Every White Box There are Two Black Boxes Trying to Get Out", Behavioral Science 27: 1-11, Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, 1980, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Dordrecht: Reidel, Ernst von Glasersfeld, 1995, Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning, London/Washington D.C.: Falmer, Elena Esposito, 1996, "Observing Interpretation: A Sociological View of Hermeneutics", MLN 111.3: 593-619. 98 Luhmann (whose concept of "autopoietic" system emergence derives from second-order cybernetics) opts for the latter explanation; see Niklas Luhmann, 1978, "Temporalization of Complexity", pp. 95-111 in R. Felix Geyer and Johannes van der Zouwen, Sociocybernetics, Vol. 2, Den Haag: Nijhoff, and Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 76ff. 99 Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 150. 100 Compare Luhmann's critique of the notion of "intersubjectivity": "The 'inter' contradicts the 'subject'. Or more precisely: every subject has its own intersubjectivity." Niklas Luhmann, 1995 [1986], "Intersubjektivität oder Kommunikation: Unterschiedliche Ausgangspunkte soziologischer Theoriebildung", pp. 169-188 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, p. 170.
40
Luhmann sees the social relevance of norms as altogether reduced, and they enter his theory at a late and comparatively marginal point. Luhmann suggests that double contingency is solved dynamically instead of statically.101 If double contingency is not a static and analytical problem, but a problem occurring in the courses of concrete social encounters, almost any random "self-constrainment"102 of either participant will contribute to its reduction. Any attempt by ego to form an assumption about what alter is planning or intending, Luhmann argues, can be treated by alter as an interactive fact to which he can react. In Luhmann's words, "The experience of contingency brings about the […] transformation of random events into probabilities for the formation of structure."103 A sequence of interactive moves absorbs uncertainty by stabilizing ego's and alter's expectations, not their behavior.104 In Luhmann's theoretical edifice, such sequences of moves are theorized more precisely, but also more abstractly, under the heading of communication instead of interaction. Communication is conceived of as a "synthesis" – one of many unexplained concepts in Luhmann's theory – of three selections, namely, utterance, information and understanding.105 It involves two systems (not necessarily copresent ones, as in the case of written communication), ego and alter, with alter selecting an utterance meant to convey a bit of information, and ego understanding what alter is doing by way of distinguishing information and utterance. Of these three selections, Luhmann holds, understanding is the decisive one, since it "synthesizes" the other two, thereby producing one single, compact operation: communication. Puzzling about this link in the chain of evidence, Luhmann's reader learns that a threshold has silently been crossed. Contrary to earlier promises,106 ego's and alter's expectations are never coordinated. Instead, a social system appears on stage and takes over control. According to Luhmann's oftenrepeated definition, the operation of communication is the fundamental and unit-like constituent of social systems. It operates autonomously vis-à-vis the involved psychical systems, decomposing "itself" into utterance, information and understanding.107 Similarly, double contingency is depicted as an "auto101
Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 150. My translation of Selbsteinschränkung or (for the following: synonymously) Selbstfestlegung. 103 Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 170f. 104 Ibid, p. 158. 105 Ibid, Chapter 4. A more detailed analysis of understanding is carried out in Niklas Luhmann, 1986, "Systeme verstehen Systeme", pp. 72-117 in Niklas Luhmann and Karl Eberhard Schorr, Zwischen Intransparenz und Verstehen: Fragen an die Pädagogik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 106 E.g., Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 158. 107 For an unambiguous statement, see Niklas Luhmann, 1990, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 24. Luhmann never explains how communication can be a "unit" and at the same time be able to "decompose itself". Furthermore, some state102
41
catalytic" problem that contributes continuously to its own reduction by "consuming" selections of psychical systems and without ever being "consumed" itself.108 It leads to the emergence of a social system, which is to be seen as a new level of order, just as mental operations represent a higher level of order than neural events. The subsequent parts of Luhmann's argument as well as most of his "applied" analyses of specific social systems (law, politics, science, among others) or types of social systems (society, interaction, organization) simply presuppose the autonomy of social systems. Likewise, "equivalence functionalism", Luhmann's unique yet questionable method of theory construction, always proceeds by interpreting certain situations as "problems" of a social system to which it can respond by selecting "solutions"109 – a method that tacitly takes for granted that the system in question exists and has the capacity to solve a problem. Regardless of the question of whether Luhmann's theorem of emergence has to be rejected as metaphysical or not (I would not subscribe to this verdict), the crucial question seems to be whether double contingency does or does not prevent the interactive production of observably shared knowledge. Is observability unattainable? Luhmann's theorem of emergence clearly affirms this.110 Mutual intransparency creates the degrees of freedom that a social system needs for its self-creation or "autopoiesis". Against Luhmann, this treatise will argue that observably shared knowledge is interactively achievable. In accordance with other authors who have called for an operative, dynamic conception of shared knowledge or inter-
ments in Luhmann's works suggest (in explicit contradiction to the statements referred to above) that the "unity" of the selections is provided by the social system, whereas the selections (utterance etc.) are not; see Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 658, Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 38f. For a more favorable reconstruction of Luhmann's theory of communication by one of his students, see Peter Fuchs, 1993, Moderne Kommunikation: Zur Theorie des operativen Displacements, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 108 Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 169f. 109 For a detailed explanation of this method, see ibid, Chapter 1. A sophisticated inspection and critique is provided by Thomas Schwinn, 1995, "Funktion und Gesellschaft: Konstante Probleme trotz Paradigmenwechsel in der Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns", Zeitschrift für Soziologie 24: 196-214. 110 And so do other statements; see Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 26, Niklas Luhmann, 1997, "Grenzwerte der ökologischen Politik: Eine Form von Risikomanagement", pp. 195-221 in Georg Krücken and Petra Hiller, Risiko und Regulierung: Soziologische Beiträge zu Technikkontrolle und präventiver Umweltpolitik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 206. On the other hand, Luhmann makes a favorable reference to Bateson's suggestion to see communication as "creation of redundancy" (in the sense of shared knowledge); see Luhmann, "Intersubjektivität oder Kommunikation", p. 178, referring to Gregory Bateson, 2000 [1967], "Cybernetic Explanation", pp. 405-416 in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, p. 412. It is not up to me to decide whether these contradictions can be solved at an even higher level of abstraction or with more intense (or just more favorable?) exegetic efforts.
42
subjectivity,111 I will claim that observability is the consequence of an expectably similar observation of external events, especially utterances, by different minds. The achievability of shared knowledge follows directly from the premises of observational constructivism (which I will introduce in Chapter 2). The underlying conception of shared knowledge is highly abstract and does not imply any bias toward "consensus" – Chapter 4 will show that even conflicts create observably shared knowledge. At no point will I claim that one interlocutor can decide autonomously which direction a sequence of talk ultimately will take. It still takes two to talk. However, neither is it necessary to see the course of an interaction as a result of autonomous operations of a social system. Participants in an interaction become sufficiently observable to each other to allow them to coordinate their intentions. Just like the discourses on other minds and intersubjectivity, theories of social systems bring us important but small steps closer to a solution to the issue in question. The lesson to be learned from Parsons is that we need to convert the psychological problem of observability into a sociological problem of shared knowledge to solve both problems. Ego's and alter's problems of observability have to be solved at the same time, which means that their assumptions about each other need to be coordinated by an interactive "meta-solution". Accordingly, a theory of observability must come in the form of a theory of interaction. Luhmann, on the other hand, teaches us that any such coordination (whether the one he envisages or any other one) has to be a process, it must expend time and allow ego and alter to generate and validate assumptions about each other in a sequence of moves. These suggestions extend the field we have to survey for contributions to the problem of observability. Sociological research on interaction and talk now becomes highly relevant. Hence, it is no coincidence that it will be the founding father of Conversation Analysis who provides us with a first rough sketch of such a coordinating meta-solution.
111
And have partly done so before Luhmann; see mainly Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, p. 30; see also Schegloff, "Repair after Next Turn", p. 1298, Emanuel Schegloff, 1991, "Conversation Analysis and Socially Shared Cognition", pp. 150-171 in Stephanie D. Teasley, John M. Levine, and Lauren B. Resnick, Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, p. 152. For a good overview of nonoperative (static, non-interactive) attempts at elucidating the concept of shared knowledge (and related concepts), see Benny P. H. Lee, 2001, "Mutual Knowledge, Background Knowledge and Shared Beliefs: Their Roles in Establishing Common Ground", Journal of Pragmatics 33: 21-44.
43
1.4 A solution to the problem of observability Harvey Sacks develops an explicit solution to the problem of observability – a solution that is stunning in its intellectual audacity as well as its sociological reach. It can be found in two rather isolated (and long unpublished) parts of his intellectual legacy.112 Interestingly, it is only loosely connected to the more narrowly focused, but also more developed enterprise of Conversation Analysis for which he became known.113 Whereas all other authors discussed in this chapter situate the problem of observability in a symmetrical social situation, Sacks constructs his argument around an initially asymmetrical encounter. Ego observes alter and is in a position to draw consequences from this observation, consequences that will affect alter positively or negatively. For instance, ego is a police officer, alter a stroller, and ego has to decide whether to stop him and check his ID.114 Now, what if ego, though notoriously unable to look inside alter's skull, just decides to observe him arbitrarily? For instance, she may establish a rule that everybody wearing a grim expression has criminal intentions and is worth checking. If this were the case, it would be vital for alter to be able to anticipate her decision rule, even though he may find it unreasonable or unfair. To continue the example, if alter is able to anticipate ego's policing rule, it will be rational for him to adjust his behavior – for instance, by smiling at her. Having cultivated an early interest in the Scriptures,115 Sacks seems to take pleasure in finding the prototype of this situation in the tale of the Fall of Man and in the Book of Job.116 To recall the observational problem nar112
The first of the two is a student paper Sacks wrote for a seminar with Goffman while he was a graduate student in Berkeley in the early 1960s. It was published three years before Sacks' tragic death, see Harvey Sacks, 1972, "Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character", pp. 280-293 in David Sudnow, Studies in Social Interaction, New York: Free Press. The second is an early, unusually theoretical lecture Sacks gave to undergraduates at UCLA, first published posthumously in an abridged version in Teun A. van Dijk, ed., 1985, Handbook of Discourse-Analysis, Vol. 3, London/New York: Academic Press, and later in Sacks' collected lectures on conversation. I will refer to it according to this later and unabridged version, see Harvey Sacks, 1992 [1965], "The Inference-Making Machine (Lecture Fall 1964 - Spring 1965)", pp. 113-125 in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation I, Oxford: Blackwell. 113 David Silverman, 1998, Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. For a thorough epistemological discussion of Conversation Analysis, see Pär Segerdahl, 1998, "Scientific Studies of Aspects of Everyday Life: The Example of Conversation Analysis", Language and Communication 18: 275-323. 114 Sacks, "Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character", p. 282. 115 For Sacks' interesting intellectual biography, see Emanuel Schegloff, 1992, "Introduction (to Sacks, Lectures on Conversation, I)", pp. ix-lxii in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation I, Oxford: Blackwell, Silverman, Harvey Sacks. 116 A special interest in the Book of Job is a quirk Sacks shares with Goffman, who makes numerous references to Job and the problem of "vital tests" throughout his works. For details (but deplorably no references to Sacks), see the clever reconstruction by Paul Creelan, 1984, "Vicissitudes of the Sacred: Erving Goffman and the Book of Job", Theory and Society 13: 663-695.
44
rated in the former tale, consider that God is (or acts as if He is) "confronted" with the task of finding out why Adam and his wife are hiding themselves behind the trees. Adam answers to God's inquiry by avowing that he is ashamed of his nakedness – thereby revealing that he has acquired knowledge of good and bad and must have eaten from the forbidden tree. The consequences of God's observation (and Adam's failure to anticipate it) are, of course, devastating – the discovery of "being an observable"117 comes at a high price. The observational problem related in the Book of Job is only slightly less dramatic. Job's friends find themselves in the predicament of having to make sense of the series of bad blows by which his life has been struck. Since they, like Job, believe that a happy and prosperous life is God's reward for the good, they urge him to confess his guilt. Job's problem – Sacks calls it "one of the central dilemmas of Western civilization"118 – is precisely that the social observation of a fact that refers to the internal organization of another mind (viz. guilt119 and the ensuing ability to confess) is actually carried out independent of the internal organization of this mind. In Job's case, this observation is based on wrong assumptions, but the fact that a mistake has been made is socially irrelevant until God reinstates Job's social position. In the case of Adam and Eve, God's observation leads Him to correct conclusions. In this tale, it is particularly instructive that He uses mere verbal cues although He has a reputation of not needing them in order to look into the minds of men. God draws a conclusion that any grown-up, socialized and interaction-competent member of society could have drawn in His place. Adam, Eve and their children learn that observable behavior commits them to socially valid and highly consequential hypotheses about their unobservable self. They discover that they have to anticipate how social observations are carried out in order to gain control over their applicability. The very next time someone burdens himself with guilt, he will anticipate the consequences of his social observability and act on this anticipation – when God asks Cain where his brother Abel is, Cain tries to act the fool. His unavoidable punishment reflects the crime of dissimulation rather than the crime of murder. "He, we recall, is condemned not to death, but to 'observability for life'."120 These considerations are more than just an original interpretation of ancient Jewish mythology. Sacks uses the bible as a quarry for sociologically instructive tales. The problem he illustrates by the two tales discussed above 117
Sacks, "Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character", endnote 1, p. 444. Sacks, "The Inference-Making Machine", p. 118. 119 As a legal construction, guilt can be ascribed without reference to mental states. However, this does not hold for all sources of guilt, in particular not the one Job is being tested for: faithlessness. 120 Sacks, "Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character", endnote 2, p. 444. 118
45
is of general character. There exists no social situation in which the other's mental states or events are "observable" in the traditional, correspondencetheoretical sense of the word. The operation of observing other minds, however carried out, cannot establish equivalence between the represented and the representing. In consequence, the impenetrability of the observee cannot have, and can never have had, social relevance. The society we all live in, the encounters we all participate in must be of a kind that allows us to do without such information. Likewise, even if people's psychical organization is extremely complex, this complexity must be drastically reduced before it becomes socially significant.121 However, since only people themselves control (to some extent) their own psychical complexity, it must be up to them to simplify themselves in order to permit viable attempts at observing them. How can they be stimulated to do this? Obviously influenced by the dominant Parsonsianism of the 1960s, Sacks suggests that people are socialized to adapt themselves to the unsophisticated observational "apparatus" by means of which society matches individuals with social categories like gender, class or status.122 Socialization does not have to (and could never) convert children into norm-following "judgmental dopes", but it must be able to convert them into rational social beings who behave in crucial situations like judgmental dopes123 – in other words, who behave sufficiently expectable (including expectably creative, expectably eccentric, expectably "role-distanced"124 and so forth). Sacks' theoretical solution to the problem of observability contents itself with this reference to socialization, but we can push it further. The constraints under which Job's friends and the non-omniscient God of the Fall-ofMan tale carry out social observations do not just apply to those rare situations in which the entire existence of observees is at stake. They characterize the situation of every participant in an encounter who is unable to observe, but able to disappoint a co-participant. Granted that Parsons is right in assuming that interaction makes participants form expectations about each other's next actions (see Section 1.3), every interactive move creates a disappointable yet unobservable social self. Every move thereby shifts the burden of establishing observational correspondence, of transforming an observation from an arbitrary into a valid one, from the observer to the observee. This observee, alter, finds himself forced to anticipate or guess just how (on the basis of what observable information, imputable intentions, background knowledge, among other things ego has at her disposal) ego will proceed in 121
Sacks, "The Inference-Making Machine", p. 115. Ibid, p. 117. 123 A point also made by Quine, Word and Object, p. 8. 124 This concept was introduced and analyzed by Erving Goffman, 1961, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, p. 85ff. 122
46
constructing information that is actually unavailable to her. How he behaves, what he says, what he conceals will or will fail to provide ego with information that can become relevant to her next actions. In short, alter will discover that he is under the obligation of making himself observable, that is, of controlling his appearance in accordance with his anticipations of ego's anticipations. It is worth pointing out that this obligation can be satisfied equally well by honesty as by dissimulation. Luckily, dissimulations frequently result in observable inconsistencies that permit ego to impute dishonesty. However, this fortunate fact is not needed to force alter to make himself somehow observable. If the social encounter consists of a whole sequence of moves (more precisely: of at least two moves, see Chapter 4), the obligation to make oneself observable will oscillate between participants. In such a basic situation, the asymmetry between observer and observee that I mentioned above is itself symmetrical. Therefore, Sacks' reflections must not be misunderstood as a theory of "power".125 We are all each other's watchers126 – in each interactive move. Of all solutions to the problem of observability discussed in this chapter, only the one reconstructed from Sacks' writings can claim full sociological generality. Of course, it is altogether sketchy and leaves many white spots, but these are located inside the theoretical territory thus mapped out, not outside of it. Sacks' key idea is that ego's and alter's impenetrability is never a pure epistemological problem, but a characteristic of a social situation in which anticipatable sanctions force each of them to make herself/himself "penetrable". The remaining three chapters of this treatise will use this "big picture" as a theoretical reference point. I do not want to overstate Sacks' originality – surely, his approach owes much to his teacher Erving Goffman, whose early works exhibit an original interest in the highly rational adaptations people employ to fit themselves to the identificational machinery of society.127 However, unlike Goffman, Sacks is able to relate these adaptations 125
Unless one wishes to employ a concept of power that becomes indistinguishable from "structure". Sacks' thoughts are not necessarily incompatible with theories of power either, but they would demand conceiving of power as a non-universal suspension of the originally symmetrical asymmetry. On control of unobservable co-interactants, see Section 3.4.2 below. 126 In the twofold sense of observers and attendants. 127 See Erving Goffman, 1967 [1955], "On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction", pp. 5-45 in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Erving Goffman, 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor Books. Just like in Sacks' works, Goffman's interest is accompanied by the search for a sociologically adequate conception of psychology. Cf. the following quotation from the 1967 introduction to "Interaction Ritual": "What minimal model of the actor is needed if we are to wind him up, stick him in amongst his fellows, and have an orderly traffic of behavior emerge? […] Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men.", Erving Goffman, 1967, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, p. 3.
47
to a fundamental and generative interactive problem – the problem of observability.128 In line with Luhmann's and Sacks' postulates, the subsequent chapters develop a theory of social observability by way of a theory of interaction. For formal reasons that I will specify in Section 3.1, it will not involve a loss of generality if we reduce interaction to verbal interaction and interactants to interlocutors. Furthermore, I will confine myself to dyadic verbal interaction (i.e., dialogue). Based on the assumption that observability is primarily a problem for interlocutors and only secondarily a problem for society, the guiding question of this treatise is phrased socio-cognitively (in the sense given in the introduction): How and when does dialogue allow participants to form reliable assumptions about each other's unobservable mental states? My overall approach will be to theorize dialogue as a set of constraints on individual observations and inferences, constraints that lead ultimately to observably shared knowledge. Chapter 2 begins the discussion by synthesizing a precise socio-cognitive conception of the problem of observability. In line with Hollis and others, non-observability will be conceived of as a selfinduced confrontation with contingency. Others are unobservable because they are observed as causally autonomous entities, in other words, as observers. I will show that this origin of the problem points the way for overcoming it. In the face of intransparency, observers become "practical psychological functionalists" and reconstruct the intransparent other in terms of external-tointernal, internal-to-internal and internal-to-external respecifications. Because practical functionalism is the only path toward overcoming the intransparency of the other, Chapter 3 shows that this form of observation is socially anticipatable. Since a mind that is expectably determined to observe another mind in terms of the three aforementioned sets of respecification is no longer entirely contingent, the seed of valid observations is thereby strewn. I will show that such observations need external "props" that are unambiguously attributable to one and only one mind. The by far most important class of such props comprises utterances (in the sense of physically objective but socially attributable acoustic events). In virtue of practical functionalism, participants in an encounter are able to understand the producer of the utterance, while this producer is able to anticipate their presumable understanding. Drawing on contributions from the philosophy of natural language (especially by Grice), I will consider the inferential procedure of understanding in detail. While single utterances permit interlocutors to share primitive items of knowledge about participants' mental states, Chapter 4 shows that they fail to make knowledge of this knowledge observable and 128
Furthermore, the relationship between Sacks and Goffman was, indeed, not simply one between student and teacher. Goffman later remarked that he himself had learnt a great deal from his graduate student; see Schegloff, "Introduction I", p. xxiii.
48
thereby reliable. Sequences of (minimally three) utterances are required to produce items that are mutually known to be mutually known. It is only in consequence of the emergence of such items – to be named ratified interactive facts – that an instance of social interaction can be said to have resulted in a primitive form of consensus. However, since the emergence of ratified interactive facts can be highly momentous for one or all participants in the encounter, they sometimes become an object of overt conflictual negotiation or argumentation.
49
2. Observational constructivism
"Besides, it is always difficult to interpret the deep-seated motivations of an individual." Primo Levi129 Despite all their differences, the authors discussed in Chapter 1 agree that there exists a theoretical problem of observability. If any individual's observations of others' mental states were arbitrary, they certainly would not be able to interact, and their individual environments would look, feel and sound substantially more tangled. Given the complexity of the observational data every healthy, wide-awake mind is biologically constrained to observe by way of its primary irritability (i.e., the six senses), an observed world populated by other minds is potentially simpler and more ordered than a world without them. Every observed mind is a fixed point in the eventstructure of the world. All events a mind attributes to the selections of another mind are made subject to an ultimate causal explanation: They happen because someone brings them about. Intuitively, it seems plausible to suppose that such attributions are carried out whenever individuals meet. In social interaction, participants make guesses about the cognitive reasons for each other's behavior. What is more, social interaction appears to proceed quite successfully although – or because – participants make such daring guesses. Somehow, they manage to impute each other viable mental states. However, individuals cannot look into, grope for, hear, smell or taste each other's minds, and the reasons why such imputations are so frequently useful remain opaque. This chapter motivates the interactive solution that I will put forward in Chapters 3 and 4 by means of an epistemological inspection and formulation of the problem. Whereas the first chapter proceeded exegetically, this and all subsequent chapters are organized systematically.130 The chapter begins by defending the intuition that the problem of observability is a real (hence consequential) problem interactants experience in 129
Primo Levi, 1987, "Afterword", pp. 381-398 in Primo Levi, If This Is a Man - The Truce, London: Penguin, p. 395. 130 I have taken care to provide extensive references to the existing literature, but all of them are dictated by problems and consequently may seem more selective than many of the sources deserve.
51
real social interactions (Section 2.1). The fact that interactants do not always register the problem does not imply that it is nonexistent. Instead, it implies that they are able to solve it cooperatively and that sociology must try to unveil their solution. The key step toward my later formulation of an interactive solution to this problem is to adopt a highly abstract concept of "observation" (Section 2.2). Observation will be defined as selection and juxtaposed to causation. This definition licenses an equally abstract and simple model of mutual knowledge acquisition as carried out by interacting individuals. Interactants observe each other as entities that carry out observations – in other words, they make second-order observations. I will show that second-order observations are the reason why other minds are impenetrable. When an observer observes another entity as an observer, she confronts herself with contingency. This form of contingency can be overcome by means of attributions of mental states. The notion of observation thereby leads us to a genuinely constructivist model of observed minds. This model entails a tremendous simplification of the type of mind sociological studies of interaction need to presuppose. Attributions of mental states lack data, a condition that requires an observer to discriminate among possible attribution candidates in terms of their consistency or inconsistency with her own background knowledge. Attribution types that reconstruct the other mind as a target, processor and source of external events constitute the most important form of background knowledge. This triad defines the framework of a practical psychology of observees (Sections 2.3 and 2.4). I will show that many psychological constructs – from perceptions via emotions to intentions – find a place in this framework. Since the number of applicable attribution types is not limited in advance, many possible attributions are observationally equivalent to each other. The types are mere options observers have at their disposal to reconstruct other minds. To decide which imputation to carry out, the observer needs to give her observations a purpose. The two final chapters of this treatise show that verbal interaction obliges participants to understand (Chapter 3) and react to (Chapter 4) utterances, thereby providing their social observations with a sufficiently disambiguating purpose. In verbal interaction, attributions proceed "outside in", that is, from the conventionally decodable utterance to mental states that explain why the speaker selected it. Of key relevance are attributions of intentions and beliefs, whereas other attribution types (e.g., emotions and attitudes) are left with the auxiliary role of guiding choices among several plausible candidates of attributable intentions. However, other social situations – for instance, disinterested observation in psychological experiments – exist that provide participants with other observational purposes, leading to different solutions to the problem of observability. As men-
52
tioned before, this treatise considers only turn-based social interaction and limits this focus even further to dialogue, that is, dyadic, verbal, turn-based, face-to-face interaction.
2.1 Observability and contingency The first step toward a synthesized solution to the problem of observability is to develop a clearer conception of the problem. Underlying the theories discussed above are two distinct models of this problem. The first sees the predicament in the complexity of the other mind, the second in its contingency. Whereas complexity is a matter of degree, contingency is a qualitative concept: Some state or event either is or is not contingent (i.e., unpredictable, autonomous). The theories of Chapter 1 often allude to both positions without distinguishing them explicitly. Observability can be framed as a problem of complexity, that is, as a quantitative concern. There is an obvious gap between the enormous complexity of the mind and the low bandwidth of available media of communication, that is, talk,131 physiognomy, gestures, and unconscious motoric and vascular reactions. The optimistic intuition that we are sometimes able to guess each other's thoughts or feel each other's pain does not take the edge off this problem. Observational optimists like Plessner132 insist that uncontrollable or poorly controllable mechanisms like blushing, crying or laughing make people socially observable.133 However, they forget that such devices convey extremely little information and necessarily produce ambiguities that require usage of other media of communication. Especially the richest and most complex of these media, talk, is both too dependent on socio-cultural specification (a language, politeness rules134 etc. have to be provided by society) and too controllable by the individual (in every specific talk situation) to 131
This limitation is stressed by Grice-inspired linguistic pragmatics, to be considered in detail in Chapter 3. For the time being, see Stephen C. Levinson, 2000, Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 4. 132 But not only Plessner; see again Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, MerleauPonty, Phénoménologie de la perception, as well as Jürgen Habermas, 1984 [1972], "Wahrheitstheorien", pp. 127-183 in Jürgen Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 178. 133 As an example, see Helmuth Plessner, 1982 [1957], "Ausdruck und menschliche Existenz", pp. 435-445 in Helmuth Plessner, Ausdruck und menschliche Natur (Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 7), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 134 Even universalistic theories of politeness rules, like the prominent account by Brown and Levinson, deduce these (in a rather Goffmanian-Gricean vein) from the logic of social interaction, not from any expectable (hence observable) trait of "human nature"; see Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, 1987, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, 2 ed., Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
53
convey any "direct" (whatever that may mean) and unquestionable information about states and events in the other mind. However, observability can also be seen as a problem of contingency, in other words, as a qualitative concern. The complexity argument remains plausible, but an even more basic train of thought may generalize it. Authors like Sartre or Hollis make the important suggestion (at least according to my reading of them) that social observation involves a generalized attribution of external indeterminacy.135 Observing another mind seems to imply drawing an imaginary line between the world and this mind, a line that interrupts the causal order of events. In the world, events can be interpreted as necessary effects of prior happenings. However, the things an observed mind consists of as well as the things it does are observed as undetermined relative to the causal machinery of the world. Thoughts, feelings or attitudes are conceived of as high-level abstractions that are selected by the other mind (though not necessarily consciously selected). In consequence, if people (including sociologists) find other individuals impenetrable, they stumble over a selfconstructed problem. Other individuals are impenetrable because they are observed as deciding for themselves who they are. Numerous objections are likely to be made against this second conception of the problem of observability, but I will argue that it is plausible and serves as a fruitful starting point for a theoretical solution. Philosophical naturalists, materialists or physical reductionists might claim that a conception of other minds that violates the laws of causality is untenable. However, the question is not whether minds are causally autonomous, but whether social intercourse is built on the fact that every mind assumes that all others are autonomous things (and also assumes that it is being observed by them as an autonomous thing). Sociologists will probably object, saying that any clearcut distinction between mind and world neglects the complexity of the relationships that can be established between them – ideologies telling people what to think,136 cultures determining what they feel,137 what they see and even what they memorize,138 codes of conduct telling them what to do,139 135
This argument can also be found in Niklas Luhmann, 1995, "Die operative Geschlossenheit psychischer und sozialer Systeme", pp. 25-36 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, Niklas Luhmann, 1995, "Wie ist Bewußtsein an Kommunikation beteiligt?" pp. 37-54 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, Fuchs, Moderne Kommunikation, p. 15ff. 136 Karl Mannheim, 1998 [1936], Ideology and Utopia, London: Routledge. 137 Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1979, "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure", American Journal of Sociology 85: 551-575. 138 Eviatar Zerubavel, 1997, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, p. 23ff, 81ff. 139 Erving Goffman, 1967 [1956], "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor", pp. 47-95 in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
54
creative actors changing all of these constraints,140 among many other connections. Without rejecting these sociological insights, I will argue that it is reasonable and advantageous to begin with a clear distinction and to see unclarity, fuzziness and ambiguity as generated (which does not mean: less important) phenomena. Later in the chapter, I will try to show that observers can respecify the distinction between mind and world in complex ways by attributing irritability (worldly causes having mental effects) and expressivity/agency (mental causes having worldly effects). Such respecifications of the distinction occur because the distinction was established beforehand. In the remainder of this section, I will attempt to justify the conception of the problem of observability as a problem of observationally constructed contingency. I hope that the following three points make it sufficiently plausible to begin a theory of the practical achievement of observability with the assumption that minds observe each other quite abstractly as externally underdetermined, autonomous and therefore contingent units. For an observer, they appear as contingent, hence, essentially unpredictable sources of causally significant selections. In the next section I will try to show that this assumption amounts to saying that people observe each other as observers. The first two remarks are in direct support of the aforementioned assumption, whereas the third one substantiates it more indirectly by reflecting on the link between causality and observation. First of all, in almost all social relations we tend to treat others as individuals or selves, and sometimes speak of them as having an identity. All of these notions imply that numerical oneness is an essential characteristic of other human beings. In normal courses of interaction, we refer to each other by names and pronouns that are meant to stand for the whole person, and we form expectations about each other's behavior that assume that this behavior is determined by a single internal source of control (and not two conflicting ones, or three or eight). We do not routinely decompose other minds into left and right brain hemisphere, or Id, Ego and Superego, or intellect and soul. In fact, highly artificial social settings are needed to apply any of these (example) distinctions without producing too much astonishment on the side of the observee: a neurophysiologic test, an analytical therapy session or a philosophical seminar, respectively. To be sure, sociologists have claimed that interaction in public requires a routine distinction of other people's social and personal identity.141 However, this distinction does not serve to make an individual divisible, but to organize expectations about an indivisible other
140 This being emphasized by a growing body of literature; for an original statement, see Burns and Flam, The Shaping of Social Organization, but also Hans Joas, 1996, The Creativity of Action, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 141 Goffman, Stigma, p. 12, 73.
55
(e.g., let them vary with social contexts like home vs. work142). The "identity" of an individual can, of course, be observed as changing over time, but it is quite difficult and demands rather specialized interactive procedures (e.g., creating one of the above-mentioned social settings) to treat him as a bearer of two or more simultaneous identities. By the same token, social "roles" are only capable of standing in a many-to-one relationship to a person because his "self" is never expected to exhaust itself in any one of them. The individual can make the discrepancy between roles and self observable by displaying "role-distance",143 thus taking advantage of the fact that the social organization of roles leaves an "interstice through which a self [may] peer".144 Second, it seems obvious that a large degree of generalization and simplification is built into the ways in which minds observe each other. The "man on the street" is not a physical reductionist. Observing mere bodily movements or electroencephalograms can never satisfy a wish to catch what another individual is imagining, hoping or intending. Even if it could be established with scientific precision what minds do when they form – for example – an emotion, this would not be a model of the kind of knowledge all of us routinely draw on when we decide what others are currently feeling. Such decisions seem to be carried out on the basis of much more limited yet highly variable information. For instance, the observation that someone is "feeling sad" can be arrived at by simply looking at this individual's face, hearing his voice tremble during a telephone conversation, reading his therapeutic summary or finding out that he lost his job. Furthermore, such decisions depend on available semantics and vary cross-culturally.145 For example, the "grammars" and "vocabularies" of motives146 that we have at our disposal constrain the reasons and aims we can presume lie behind others' observable behavior. These vocabularies are limited, and they tend to be centered on a small set of basic events and dispositions (e.g., happiness, cunning or maliciousness) that are sufficient for most attributions. To achieve exhaustiveness nonetheless, these observation-guiding constructs have to be of a generalized kind, which means that they cannot correspond to the complex psychical organization of any mind or the even more complex neurological organization of any brain. 142
On the socio-cognitive relevance of this distinction, see Christena Ellen Nippert-Eng, 1994, "The Home/Work Nexus: Boundary Work in Everyday Life (Working, Family)", Doctoral dissertation, The State University of New York at Stony Brook. 143 Goffman, Encounters, p. 105-110. 144 Erving Goffman, 1974, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, p. 298. 145 See the rather taxonomic overview by R. Murray Thomas, 2001, Folk Psychologies across Cultures, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 146 Kenneth Burke, 1945, A Grammar of Motives, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
56
Taken together, these two considerations show why it is in no way overly theoretical to say that individuals observe each other as autonomous, selfreferential units. Mental events or states of other minds, being generalizations, must be constructions of an observer. In consequence, observing such entities means being burdened with the task of allocating a causal reason or source for them – independent of the question of whether the mental states psychologists observe are generated by a multitude of mental processes and in different parts of the brain. The oneness of observed minds disambiguates the causal foundation of mental events and states. It gives a universal answer to the question of who selected them. However, it also decouples them from the causal order of the world. The question of their causal origin always leads back to the mind that is observed as owning or comprising them. Third, the observational construction of causal autonomy simply parallels the observational construction of causality. It does not involve any higher or more intricate abstracting efforts than the normal observation of causes and effects, since both observations are two sides of the same coin. Causal naturalists might raise their eyebrows upon reading this claim, but it is a claim that can be traced back to Sartre (see Section 1.2), Kant and beyond. Drawing on more recent social-constructivist criticisms, I would like to enumerate a few reasons why causality as we routinely understand it cannot refer to something in the world. First of all, we routinely allow causes to have several synchronic and infinitely many diachronic effects, a concession implying that any effect we select and focus on (e.g., "poverty causes criminality") must be an arbitrary, hence non-deterministic, hence non-causal selection. The well-known positivist concept of "probabilistic causation" conceals this choice by delegating it to an indeterministic ontology.147 Second, explanations for effects routinely assign them "multiple causes" (to the extent that it is sometimes seen as questionable to apply "monocausal" explanations) but fail to answer how a cause can be a cause if its effect depends on the presence of other causes. Third, defaults (e.g., "neglected duties") and even abstractions (e.g., "patriarchy") are frequently attributed causal effects.148 In this case, the constructedness of the causal relationship is inherited from the constructedness of the cause. Fourth, if any two events are related as cause 147
Patrick Suppes, 1970, A Probabilistic Theory of Causality, Amsterdam: North-Holland, Wolfgang Stegmüller, 1973, Probleme und Resultate der Wissenschaftstheorie und analytischen Philosophie, Bd. 4: Personelle und statistische Wahrscheinlichkeit, Halbbd. 2: Statistisches Schließen, statistische Begründung, statistische Analyse, Berlin: Springer. On indeterminism as a form of ontology, see also Karl Popper, 1972, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Clarendon. 148 This point is mentioned by Niklas Luhmann, 1995, "Kausalität im Süden", Soziale Systeme 1: 7-28. Luhmann's seminal paper has the advantage of being written quite independent of his theory of social systems. According to Luhmann, causality is an observational "form" that any "meaning-processing observer" can construct (where "meaning-processing observers" denote both "social" and "conscious" systems).
57
and effect, it is debatable that "the world" or "nature" should be able to separate them. Effects begin when causes end, thereby occupying the same point in time. For the world, they will take the shape of one single, discrete event. Consider the example of a stone cracked in two – if I throw it, does one half cause the other half to move or do I throw the stone as a whole? The observer will have to decide at will. She is needed to unpack this singularity into two paradoxically distinguishable yet coinciding events. For all these reasons, the theoretical framework advocated here must regard observation as more basic than causation. If the presence of causes becomes a matter of observational constructions, so does their absence. In fact, (implicitly) attributing causal autonomy requires nothing but stopping the search for further causes at a certain point. Hurricanes are commonly observed as ultimate causes of certain damages because nobody (except for a few climatologists and environmental activists) takes the trouble to ask what caused the hurricanes. Similarly, other individuals are turned into autonomous, self-referential sources of causal selections by not asking what caused them to select their selections, or alternatively by observing these selections as effects of further causes inside the same mind. We ascribe minds (implicit) causal autonomy whenever we conceive of them as units, observe these units as causes of certain effects, and leave it there. Likewise, we cease to ascribe causal autonomy the moment we observe causes attributed to a mind as effects of further causes outside of this mind. It is worth mentioning that this constructivist conception of social causality reduces the sociological concept of action to a derivative of social observation. In line with Luhmann's version of systems theory, but against a common sociological conjecture,149 this treatise assumes that action and agency are not ontological primitives but observational constructs. Action is the result of an observer's decision to observe another individual as a source of causality. This implies that it takes two to act, an imputing observer and an observed actor150 – who, as social psychologists have known since Mead, 149
As a typical example, see Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, 1998, "What is Agency?" American Journal of Sociology 103: 962-1023. The article proposes a classification of "aspects" of agency, postulating that whenever people "do" something they enact more than a dozen different things. 150 No one has asserted this prerequisite of action more forcefully than Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 225ff, but the gist of the argument is already present in the works of Schütz. Unsurprisingly, Luhmann develops his criticism of action theory in a rather partial manner and insinuates that social systems (which Luhmann conceives as observers) are necessary to produce social action. Schütz, although less elaborate, seems to be more general. Starting with Weber's definition of action as meaningful behavior, Schütz asks how meaningfulness is constituted and assigned to behavioral selections. His phenomenological answer holds that meaning arises through the interpretation of prior experience "from the viewpoint of a later nowand-here" (Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau, p. 89). Meaning exists only in retrospect, since it
58
may be located in a single mind that distinguishes itself into "I" and "me".151 Similar to the case of causality, a constructivist revision of action can resolve a paradox that is built into this notion. As Dewey noted more than 100 years ago, the idea that actions can both be chosen and function as causes of worldly effects contains a contradiction. By definition, causality should not leave any room for options.152 However, a constructivist revision shows that this paradox has an important social function, since it allows observers to make other individuals responsible for arbitrary events. In fact, freely attributable and negotiable responsibility seems to be the quintessence of action. To open a door, to buy a toothbrush, to cause an accident, to pass a law and generally to "do something" or to "fail to do something" is to be observed as choosing or failing to choose effects according to inner states/events like intentions, emotions or even judgmental errors. Action means that minds or persons become ultimate causes of observed effects, and whether these effects are brought about by means of saying or not saying something, "in" or "by" the act, and accompanied or not accompanied by "real" psychical states are secondary problems.153 As soon as people learn that their behavior will be observed in these terms, they can observe themselves in the same way and anticipate the social consequences of their "actions". To sum up, it is empirically plausible and theoretically adequate to state that minds observe each other as contingent, causally underdetermined units because (1) the idea of an autonomous, self-referential unit is built into their conception of others as "individuals" or "selves", because (2) they observe each other's mental states in a generalizing, hence non-reductionist way, and because (3) causal heteronomy and selective autonomy are primitive and complementary observational constructions.
demands a "synthesis of re-cognition". In consequence, future meanings have to be projected in the future perfect tense – "it will have meant" this or that. Analogously, behavioral selections or "actions" are rendered meaningful by being observed retrospectively as "acts". This latter distinction is explained in detail in Schütz, "Choosing Among Projects of Action". 151 For instance, see George Herbert Mead, 1913, "The Social Self", Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 10: 374-380, p. 374. 152 John Dewey, 1894, "The Ego as Cause", Philosophical Review 3: 337-341. For a recent application, see Barry Barnes, 2000, Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action, London: Sage, p. 4. 153 For the same reasons, I believe that speech act theorists are misguided in binding actions to "felicity conditions" that are meant to refer to existing mental and worldly states. Instead, actions should be bound to observations that are at the mercy of an observer but can be anticipated by the observee. See John Langshaw Austin, 1962, How to Do Things With Words, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, but even more explicitly ontological is John Searle, 1969, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
59
2.2 A constructivist definition of social observation The upshot of grounding the problem of observability in the observed contingency of other minds is an uncompromisingly constructivist conception of social observation. Non-observability of other minds is a direct consequence of the procedure by which they are observed. Not what minds are, but what they are observed as creates their intransparency. In fact, what minds are is completely irrelevant to the question of how observers reconstruct them. Their oneness, their operational simplicity and their capacity to select states and events are imputed features. If we treat these features as a model of how minds generally observe each other, we can make an important and consequential theoretical stipulation. The contingency-based conception of the problem of observability can be expressed in the following line: Minds observe each other as observers. The parallel between observer and observee implied in this statement follows directly from a generalized and simplified notion of observation. Instead of letting observation stand for a specific perceptual operation like watching or hearing, it can be identified most abstractly with selection. An observation selects an item and distinguishes it thereby from other selectable items.154 Correspondingly, observers may be defined as temporal sequences of selections, sequences that maintain their identity despite the come and go of these selections. On these premises, examples of observers would include a thermostat observing the world in terms of the distinction "temperature above/below threshold", a retina registering the quantity and the color of light received, and a mind processing incoming or memorized data. Identifying observation with selection and observers with sequences of selections lifts both concepts to the same level of abstraction as the notion of an effect. Observations and effects form a contrast pair.155 Just like effects, 154 This useful definition of observation was first proposed by Spencer Brown, a fairly obscure mathematician whose major work, the Laws of Form, develops an ambitious calculus based on the notion of distinction and became famous in second-order cybernetics and social systems theory. This calculus is irrelevant to my argument, but it is worth mentioning that Spencer Brown believes that observation requires a sequence of two operations: distinction and indication. Against him and his systems-theoretical audience, I would claim that distinctions are not presuppositions of observations but results of them. Otherwise, it is not possible to explain why unobserved elements (Spencer Brown's "unmarked state") remain implicit (i.e., require another observation to come into being). E.g., only a second observer can maintain that a first observer observes "a man" by distinguishing him from "a woman" (and not, for instance, from "a primate"). See George Spencer Brown, 1969, Laws of Form, London: George Allen & Unwin, p. 1. For applications, see Dirk Baecker, ed., 1993, Probleme der Form, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, hilariously criticized by Thomas J. Fararo, 2001, "Review of 'Problems of Form', edited by Dirk Baecker", Contemporary Sociology 30: 306-307. 155 This contrast was first noted by Bateson and von Foerster; see Bateson, "Cybernetic Explanation", p. 405, Heinz von Foerster, 1999 [1973], "Über das Konstruieren von Wirklichkeiten", pp. 25-41 in Heinz von Foerster, Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie, Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag, Heinz von Foerster, 1999 [1976],
60
observations have causal relevance insofar as they make a difference to the world. For example, observing the presence of another being changes the state of an organism and may induce it to a specific course of action. But whereas observations select and are therefore indeterministic events, effects are brought about and are therefore deterministic events. Observations can choose what they observe, whereas effects cannot "choose their causes". Strictly speaking, observations cannot be caused and effects cannot be anything but caused. Conversely, if a selection is given a reason or a cause, it ceases to be a selection and becomes an effect.156 Observations and effects are two sides of the same coin: Effects reproduce causality, observations generate causality. Nonetheless, one logical asymmetry between observations and effects remains. I mentioned earlier that observation, though contrasted to causation, must be a more fundamental term. Rigidly applied, the concept of causality is universal and does not leave any room for selections. In contrast to observation, it postulates a single and wholly interconnected world in which every state (including every cause) is an effect of prior causes. An observation, on the other hand, is always an ultimate event. By describing an event as a selection, one terminates the search for reasons why it came to be selected. Therefore, an observation can serve the explanatory function of a "first cause", that is, of an arbitrary starting point of a set of statements about causes and effects, whereas an explanation that applies an effect obviously can never be more than a placeholder for an even more basic explanation. Observation is a recursive concept – it may apply to itself. Observation refers either to worldly events (including causes) or to other observations. These observed observations, too, may refer to worldly events or other observations, and so on. Ultimately, an observation has to refer to a worldly event. Depending on the number of observations it "passed through" on selecting this event, we may distinguish the level of first-order, second-order, third-order observation, and so forth.157 The first-order level denotes observation that is not second-order; the second-order level denotes observation that is not third-order, and so on. Thus, a first-order observer is one who registers only objects; a second-order observer is one who observes another first-order observer, and so on. I will continue to refer to the objects a first-order observer can see as "worldly". This is done in order to underline that they are not observed as constructions of another observer, not in order to maintain "Gegenstände: greifbare Symbole für (Eigen-)Verhalten", pp. 207-216 in Heinz von Foerster, Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie, Heidelberg: Carl-AuerSysteme Verlag. 156 For this reason, it is necessary to bear in mind that observers are merely sequences of, and not causes of, observations, even though I will often use abbreviating expressions like "observer X observes" or "observer X makes observation Y". 157 To my knowledge, this distinction is due to Foerster, "Gegenstände".
61
that they exist autonomously or to claim that observers are "unworldly". The question of whether something observable is an observer or a worldly event has to be answered by the original observer. Thus, even observers come into being as results of observations. For instance, whether the aforementioned thermostat has intrinsic selectivity cannot be decided without observation. An engineer, knowing its deterministic mechanism, is likely to deny that it "selects" temperature, whereas a technically unknowledgeable person might hold the contrary opinion. Observers bear sole responsibility for their observations. With each observation, they make a selection, that is, a contingent choice. Not the structure of the environment but the selectivity of observers determines the knowledge they acquire. For this reason, the simple notion of observation enforces a constructivist epistemology. The observational constructivism inherent in the definition of observation introduced above does not carry any correspondence-theoretical implications. In contrast to non-constructivist epistemologies, it avoids linking the observing operation directly to "things in the world". Observing is not just representing something that is given. Rather, it involves making an autonomous and contingent selection, in other words, generating a bit of information. Every bit of information, including information about observations, leads back to the entity that selected it. It can hardly be stressed enough that it takes an observer to let observations refer to the same identity, which may then be labeled an "observer", just as it takes an observer to step twice into Heraclites' river. Since infinite regression is practically not possible, the question of who is responsible for the observation of the observation of the observation of … has to stop at a point that cannot be made subject to further observation. Every event can be reduced to (or: is identical to) an original observation. In consequence, observers either construct their own, solipsistic worlds or form part of the solipsistic world constructed by another observer.158 Observationally pessimistic as this consequence may seem at first, it has the advantage of permitting us to ask how the observations of different, mutually intransparent observers can ever be identical. Sociologically rephrased, the question is whether society has a mechanism that coordinates the plurality of observations carried out by its members, and that does so in a reliable way.
158 Since observation interrupts causality, cause-effect chains can only be observed within the same observational level. However, within such a closed segment of reality, causality may again be observed as universal. This characteristic leads Esposito to conclude that observations can only be "formalized" by multiple-valued logical systems; see Elena Esposito, 1992, L'operazione di osservazione: Costruttivismo e teoria dei sistemi sociali, Milano: Angeli. I do not think that it is appropriate to see logic as a "medium" of scientific observation. In provably sound logical calculi, deductions preserve truth-values, whereas scientific observations (with the sole exception of mathematics) are, of course, not expected to preserve them.
62
The key suggestion of this treatise is that such a mechanism exists in the form of the universal socio-cognitive organization of (primarily verbal) social interaction. Sequences of interactive turns allow the turn-takers to coordinate their social observations, thereby leading to observably shared knowledge. The form of observability that emerges from such sequences has nothing to do with "transmission" of data from one mind to another. Earlier in this chapter, observation was defined rather generally as selection. We can now see the payoff in possessing such an unusually abstract definition. Since mental states are not observable from the outside (see Section 2.1), any form of social observation – however defined – cannot be a process that "mirrors" these states. To put it bluntly, social observation alone is not sufficient to achieve social observability. However, only theories that equate observing with "seeing" or "mirroring" will be daunted by this limitation. Under the constructivist premises advocated above, the achievement of shared knowledge is not a matter of feeding people's eyes and ears with reliable data, but merely of matching the unobservable selections they carry out in response to stimuli from their environment. Within this conceptual framework, shared knowledge is the result of externally triggered synchronization, rather than transmission of mental states. The specific relevance of social interaction lies in the fact that it makes available a class of stimuli that can be generated deliberately by all participants – that is, utterances, gestures and other forms of mutually observable behavior. Chapters 3 and 4 will show in detail how social observation and social interaction work together in order to distribute reliable knowledge of the states held by a certain mind over a set of individuals. In the remainder of this section, I will try to motivate the interactive solution to the problem of observability by analyzing the limitations, but also the possibilities that inhere in second-order observation. In order to understand how observations can become subject to any form of social coordination, it is necessary to develop a theoretically satisfying conception of observational constraints. The imminent tension between autonomy and conditioning can be resolved by postulating that observers constrain themselves to be irritated by external stimuli. I suggest summarizing this capacity by the notion of irritability, a term I borrow from Maturana and Varela.159 It serves as an umbrella term for all self-specified commitments (in the non-normative sense of the term) to letting oneself be influenced by external events, states or defaults. The next section will show that
159
To be just, Maturana's and Varela's term is "perturbability"; see Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, 1987, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, trans. Robert Paolucci, Boston: Shambhala, p. 22. "Irritability" is a systemstheoretical adaptation with similar meaning; see Luhmann, "Die operative Geschlossenheit psychischer und sozialer Systeme", p. 32.
63
well-researched psychological features like perception or attention form part of it. In the case of first-order observation, irritability alone is sufficient to enable an observer to produce reliable and useful assumptions about her environment. The structure of the world – its shapes, its sounds, its tastes, and so on – provides her with data that allow her to identify objects, borders, processes as well as singularities. But in order to achieve such identifications, observations must abandon part of their autonomy. For human observers (and organisms in general), this partial loss of autonomy is necessary for survival. As evolution theorists have long conjectured, the orderliness of the world imposes functional pressures that lead biological species to develop viable forms of irritability. These ensure that the internal organization of the individual organism becomes partially an effect of external causes, and that the organism can use the information it thereby acquires in order to select adequate courses of behavior. It would be theoretically meaningless to equate the realization of viable irritability with the achievement of correspondence between world and observation, since the observer is unable to compare world and observation objectively (i.e., without usage of more observations). Instead of aiming at correspondence, an observer will thus have to aim at consistent observations,160 and if she succeeds, she will be unable to distinguish the result from correspondence.161 Nonetheless, it is important to note that this success comes at the price of depriving the observer of part of her freedom to select. Once viable forms of irritability have emerged, they cannot be easily reversed or replaced by better innovations. Therefore, a real observer is generally not free to question the results of all of her observations. She is cognitively and pragmatically committed to them. Her observations are constructions, but they are real constructions that bind their holder to a specific view of the world. A highly developed observer (e.g., a human mind) may be able to mark some of her observations as self-constructed, imaginary or otherwise problematic. However, this procedure is not only cognitively demanding, it also blocks her ability to answer irritations quickly with adequate courses of behavior.162 For science, this constraint has the advantage of making it possible to reconstruct an observee's concrete observa160 Compare the remarks on epistemic adaptation and viability by Ernst von Glasersfeld, 2001, "The Radical Constructivist View of Science", Foundations of Science 6: 31-43, p. 39f. 161 I underline that this is a statement about the practical epistemology observers are forced to apply in order to deal with their environment. It should not be understood as a defense of philosophical coherentism (as opposed to foundationalism). 162 This conclusion is also drawn by Luhmann-inspired systems theorists; see particularly Armin Nassehi, 1992, "Wie wirklich sind Systeme? Zum ontologischen und epistemologischen Status von Luhmanns Theorie selbstreferenzieller Systeme", pp. 43-70 in Michael Welker and Werner Krawietz, Kritik der Theorie sozialer Systeme: Auseinandersetzungen mit Luhmanns Hauptwerk, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 63, 67.
64
tions indirectly by way of assumptions about the observee's general irritability. In the case of second-order and higher-order observation, irritability alone is obviously not sufficient to produce consistency. I recall that secondorder observation involves attribution of selective autonomy, which renders all selections contingent. However, second-order observation is never carried out in the abstract, but by concrete minds trying to observe others. In this situation, observers can take for granted that their observees are subject to certain forms of first-order irritability (e.g., information provided by way of the six senses). In consequence, observers can anticipate the irritability of their observees and produce situationally specific guesses about their likely internal responses to external stimuli. For instance, ego, the observer, can presume that alter, her observee, sees that she lifts her arm, and she may go on to speculate that he infers from this observation that she intends to greet him. It is clear that this sequence of guesses only shifts the problem of observability, since none of ego's guesses is objectively verifiable. However, the shift that takes place is extremely important and requires closer inspection. When irritability can be anticipated, the problem of observability is constituted by the fact that ego has to decide just what internal response to an external stimulus she will impute alter. Since imputations of effects internal to alter are not based on additional first-order data, they are irreducibly hypothetical. Put more formally, every imputation is substitutable by infinitely many alternatives. The present treatise will refer to this condition as the principle of observational equivalence. It entails that second-order observations that proceed on the basis of a prior imputation of irritability are burdened with a surplus of selectivity, a surplus that needs to be reduced before they can be carried out systematically and lead to consistent results. From a logical point of view, ego can reduce the degrees of freedom of imputations in two different yet complementary ways. First, she can discriminate among potential attributions by drawing on her background knowledge. She lets her hypothetical construction of alter's inner states cohere with, or conflict with, her beliefs. If they are organized in some systematical form, such beliefs constitute a "practical psychology" on which ego draws in order to reconstruct alter's (and not only his) behavior. Second, ego can prefer generalizations to specialized imputations. The more general an imputation, the less it is substitutable by alternative attributions. For instance, by postulating beforehand that alter's behavior has either "emotional" or "rational" causes, ego can reduce the degrees of freedom of her subsequent selection drastically. Above (Section 2.1) it was noted that a great deal of abstraction is built into the ways in which interactants observe each other. It is worth noting that we have now found a reason for this otherwise surprising fact.
65
Whereas ego can reduce the degrees of freedom of her observations in these two ways, she must avoid eliminating them entirely. Observing alter according to fixed rules would be as rigid as returning to first-order observation. This implies that full reduction of the degrees of freedom of ego's observations requires support by either her observee, or some third party, or both. Parsons' suggestion of putting the entire burden of reducing contingency on the shoulders of society was already ruled out in Chapter 1. As an alternative, I suggested considering a hint by Harvey Sacks and asking how ego's observee can be compelled to make himself observable. The coming two chapters will develop the idea that social interaction constitutes a situation in which this obligation can be enforced. However, even in social interaction, first-order irritability remains crucial. Not only does it ensure that all participants can expect their gestures and utterances to be seen and heard, respectively, it also standardizes interpretations of such events. Anticipations regarding co-interactants' presumable irritability constitute an important form of interpretive background knowledge, that is, knowledge observers draw on when trying to interpret utterances or gestures. It is a sociologically momentous result of observational constructivism that contingency introduced through second-order observation can only be reduced in virtue of the cooperation of the observee, as it entails a shift in the relationship between sociology and social psychology. In the context of the present treatise, it restricts the psychological assumptions a sociological analysis of social interaction has to take into account. Not what minds are, but what they can be observed to be determines these assumptions. Compared to the complex psychological conjectures that are vital for research in cognitive science,163 (social) psychology164 and even Luhmann's version of systems theory,165 the approach advocated here may opt for a much simpler model of the mind.166 Whereas the sciences of the mind must aim at models
163 A neat example being Pinker's 660-page long tour d'horizon, which capitalizes on the fascination of mental complexity by means of a well-positioned statement of humility: "First, we don't understand how the mind works [...]. Every idea in the book may turn out to be wrong, but that would be progress, because our old ideas were too vapid to be wrong." Steven Pinker, 1997, How the Mind Works, New York/London: W. W. Norton, p. ix. 164 Countless references would do – I recommend the sociologically inspired contributions to Richard M. Sorrentino and E. Tory Higgins, eds., 1996, Handbook of Motivation and Cognition, Volume 3: The Interpersonal Context, New York/London: Guilford. 165 See Luhmann, "Wie ist Bewußtsein an Kommunikation beteiligt?" p. 40, who is sure that "conscious systems" consist of discrete self-referential events (thoughts) that operate in the "medium" of "meaning". 166 Incidentally, this simplifying force of the principle of observational equivalence has boosted a far-reaching paradigmatic shift in a wholly unrelated discipline: software engineering. Modern object-oriented methods of analysis and design insist that software components must let themselves be treated as "encapsulated" and autonomous objects in order to generalize and simplify the assumptions user components (=observers) need to hold in order to communicate with them. For an already classical introduction, see Grady Booch, 1993,
66
of people's real psychology, studies of interaction that follow the line of reasoning advocated in this treatise can confine themselves to an externalistic psychology. For such purposes, it is sufficient to develop a model that mirrors the practical psychology that members of society attribute each other in social contacts. A focus on dialogue limits this model even further – only mental states that are expectably used in the process of planning or understanding an utterance have to be included. For example, a socio-cognitive theory of dialogue may assume that ego imputes only states that she thinks led alter to produce this and no other utterance.167 I will show that this purpose induces her consistently to confine her search for primary mental causes to certain intentions and beliefs.
2.3 The external embeddedness of observed observers In sum, ego rationalizes the observable results of alter's unobservable selections by attributing him causally relevant mental states that are consistent with her own belief system. As noted before, such attributions fall into three broad categories: respecifications of the effects of external events on internal features, respecifications of the dependence of internal features on prior internal events and states, and respecifications of the external effects of internal features. Taken together they allow observers to generate complete "working models" of other minds. It is not coincidental that this triad mirrors the old (and apparently indestructible) functionalist theory of the mind. According to psychological functionalism,168 these three sets of causal relations represent the essential characteristics of any type of mental state. Thus, psychological functionalism attempts to overcome self-created contingency in the same manner as interacting observers. Moreover, it mirrors their practical functionalism when it delegates the justificational burden of this construction to the world by turning it into ontology. Observed in terms of (practical as well as psychological) functionalism, other minds "consist" of municate with them. For an already classical introduction, see Grady Booch, 1993, Objectoriented Analysis and Design: With Applications, Redwood City, CA: Benjamin/Cummings. 167 Incidentally, these reflections show why an old pragmatist intuition is correct – if one interprets it in constructivist instead of ontological terms, thus limiting it to the externalistic psychology people apply in interaction: All internal states are, indeed, able to make an external difference (and are describable on these grounds). See William James, 1907, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York: Longmans, Green and Co. However, this characteristic is not due to the "pragmatic" nature of psychical organization, but to the pragmatic nature of its observational reconstruction. 168 For example, see Jerry A. Fodor, 1975, The Language of Thought, New York: Crowell. A critique from the perspective of a mind-to-brain reductionism is offered by Patricia Smith Churchland, 1986, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-brain, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
67
states that fulfill a causal purpose in terms of the three types of respecification. This section discusses external-to-internal and internal-to-external respecifications. Since the viability of imputations of such respecifications depends on their concrete interactive anticipatability and enforceability, both this and the next section will produce a mere list of possible imputations and inquire into their logical presuppositions and consequences, postponing the question of their actual interactive relevance to later chapters (see esp. Sections 3.2.3 and 3.3.3). Since the range of practical constructions is theoretically unlimited, it would be impossible to provide a complete catalogue. Alternatively, I have chosen to discuss what I believe are respecification candidates with high practical relevance. In addition, I have included discussions of a few constructs that are practically less relevant but widely appreciated within some currents of sociology and social psychology. The first group may be summarized under the label of irritability, the second under expressivity. As I mentioned above, the formal notion of irritability demands only that constraints be self-selected, it does not force theories to opt for (or rule out) any specific source of such constraints. For instance, observers may assume that a certain constraint is consciously selected, unconsciously selected, culturally/ethnically imposed or biologically/racially programmed. A bystander of a conversation may be observed as having "overheard" an utterance because it was spoken out loudly (and he could not help listening), or because he has a "curious personality", or because he is rationally "interested" in the specific topic. The abstract concept of irritability requires only that external-to-internal constraints are somehow owing to the unity of the observed other. Of course, sociologists may later observe that interactants misattributed a constraint or that their attribution was itself "culturally" determined (very plausibly so in the case of attribution to race). Nevertheless, since the behavior of interactants will depend on their own observations and not (or at least not directly) on sociologists' observations of their observations, the attribution will be interactively consequential at any rate.169 Irritability generalizes a set of observer's constructions that psychological research tends to reify. The most fundamental type of such constructions is perception, that is, an observee's observation of (typically) external events that supplies the observee with processable information about these events. Since biological perception is a universal and often highly reliable mecha169
This seems to be the essence of the so-called "Thomas-theorem"; see William I. Thomas and Dorothy S. Thomas, 1928, The Child in America: Behaviour Problems and Programs, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 572, and for some interesting remarks on its sociological impact George A. Hillery, 1957, "The Negro in New Orleans: A Functional Analysis of Demographic Data", American Sociological Review 22: 183-188, p. 184.
68
nism of providing minds with real-world data, it is not surprising that attributions of perception often comprise relatively unproblematic assumptions about what the observee presently sees, hears, feels, smells or tastes. However, attributed perception retains all the typical characteristics of observers' constructions. First, it is highly selective – only what an observer considers to be relevant to her purpose at hand will be attributed to an observee. Second, it is free to go beyond biological perception and observe the observee as a target of irritations not mediated through one of the senses. For instance, some religions legitimize routine (self-) attributions of perceptions of a deity (e.g., feeling its presence, hearing its voice etc.). Common to attributions of perception is the assumption that it is carried out passively. An observee who is ready to perceive cannot choose not to perceive – it is in his "nature" to make perceptions that his corporal equipment can register. In order to reintroduce autonomous selectivity, the observer has to make use of another attributive device: attention. Attention refers to consciously or unconsciously suspendable irritability. It implies a minimal degree of control before the irritation takes place. Of course, once it is switched on, the individual is momentarily forced to register those irritations he "attends to". Thus, attention demands control over a temporary lack of control – an unmistakable indicator of its observational constructedness. Expectations signify another type of (un-)consciously selectable irritability specifications, although they are more complex than attention. They require the observee to distinguish two mutually exclusive events beforehand and to constrain himself to be irritated by one of them (i.e., the "unexpected" event). For this reason, it seems logical to suppose that real psychical systems can only very rarely afford the cognitive costs of expecting normal events positively and explicitly. Alternatively, they may let themselves be alarmed negatively by abnormal events.170 However, used as attributions, positive expectations have the advantage of determining exhaustively what types of observable events an observee currently considers relevant and how he will react to these events. Events that either confirm or do not violate positive expectations are potentially less relevant than events that violate them. This implies that the attributing observer has a criterion that allows her to classify the perceptions she imputes her observee as momentous and tangential.
170
For a solid social-psychological overview of the literature on expectations, see James M. Olson, Neal J. Roese, and Mark P. Zanna, 1996, "Expectancies", pp. 211-238 in E. Tory Higgins and Arie W. Kruglanski, Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles, New York/London: Guilford. Compare also Goffman's ethological suggestion that all higher organisms must have a general "capacity for dissociated vigilance"; Erving Goffman, 1971, "Normal Appearances", pp. 238-333 in Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, New York: Harper & Row, p. 238.
69
Schemata, stereotypes or prejudices denote consciously non-suspendable, durable structures that pattern and interpret perceptions, harmonizing them with existing beliefs or alerting the observer if this is not possible.171 Ego can attribute them in order to explain why certain perceptions have an otherwise surprisingly strong impact on alter's presumable inferences or his observable behavior. For example, the schema "Black people are usually workers or servants" can explain why alter seems to treat persons with dark complexion less politely than persons with lighter skin color. However, attributing schemata or similar types may not always be the best observational strategy. Since they are expected to be durable, they will sometimes have too much explanatory power, making it difficult to explain behavior that fails to be overtly determined by the presence of a schema-cue. On the other hand, their highly abstract and subsuming quality seems to make schemata indispensable as devices for social scientific observation. In virtue of this quality, research can reduce behavior displayed by many observees over long periods to a single mental state shared by all of them. The final instance of attributed irritability that I will mention is persuasion, which refers to a social relationship in which one party causes another party to acquire a belief. Despite its irrational flavor it presupposes persuasive reasons and, therefore, a type of irritability that is induced (at least to a certain extent) by the self-selected constraint of rationality, a generic form of imputed internal organization that will be discussed in the next section. I reiterate that the number of devices for attributing irritability is theoretically unlimited. However, for the practical purpose of reconstructing the situated irritability of a co-interactant, attributions of perception, attention and expectation are sufficiently general to cover the majority of cases. Attributions of expressivity – that is, internal-to-external respecifications of alter's selective autonomy – are used to hold alter causally responsible for events or states in his environment. In Section 2.1, I pointed out that this allocation of responsibility forms the key ingredient in the social construction of intentional action. Since attributions of expressivity, just like attributions of irritability, are entirely at ego's mercy, she may choose to hold alter responsible for events or states that may vary greatly in complexity, momentousness, meaningfulness and number of persons physically involved in bringing them about (from "the president raises his eyebrows" to "the president raises the taxes"). In consequence, highly diverse sets of events or states are rendered comparable by anchoring them in expressivity. Expressivity also parallels irritability in that ego herself may decide why and how alter brought about these effects (e.g., consciously or unconsciously, maliciously 171
For a sociological investigation of schemata, see Paul DiMaggio, 1997, "Culture and Cognition", Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263-287, Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes. On beliefs, see Section 2.4 below.
70
or altruistically etc.). I mention in passing that these considerations should not induce the reader to fear that I am trying to shift the power to act entirely from the actor to the observer. As will become clear in Chapter 4, an attribution of expressivity that ego does not reveal through a response is socially irrelevant. But if she chooses to respond, she can anticipate that her behavior will be subject to complementary attributions by alter, which reintroduces symmetry. For the practical purpose of utterance understanding, the most fundamental instantiations of expressivity are intentions. They are fundamental because they are direct complements – causal "finalizations", if this semantic adaptation may be permitted – of observed actions. To observe that an action was carried out according to an intention is to explain it in its entirety.172 For this reason, it is not surprising that almost all existing sociological (Parsons and Luhmann excluded) and philosophical theories of action use intentionality to distinguish mindless behavior from purposeful action. For instance, Weber and Schütz tie action to "subjectively intended meaning",173 Searle includes certain speaker intentions in the core set of "success conditions" of speech acts,174 and Davidson maintains that actions come into being as (at once logical and causal) results of intentions and beliefs.175 However, at least Davidson introduces an important qualification. He relaxes the relationship between intentions and actions, suggesting that it is not necessarily the resulting action that must have been intended – as long as something has been intended at all. This may, in fact, be a philosophical response to an old sociological emphasis on the possibility of unplanned consequences of intentional action.176 However, far from making intentions less relevant, this restriction increases their attributive applicability. It entails that any ex-post astonishment observable on the part of the observee ceases to contradict an attribution of intentionality. Although the observee may have been unable to control the causal effects of his behavior, his observer may still presume that 172 An interesting theoretical consequence of this direct correspondence is that "intentionality" and "agency" become indistinguishable. 173 That is, "subjektiv gemeinter Sinn"; the German verb meinen applies chiefly to propositions but shares its transitive meaning with intendieren. See Max Weber, 1985 [1922], Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie, 5 ed., Tübingen: Mohr, p. 1f, and again Schütz, "Choosing Among Projects of Action". 174 Searle, Speech Acts. For a more favorable interpretation, see Wolfgang Ludwig Schneider, 1998, "Handeln, Intentionalität und Intersubjektivität im Kontext des systemtheoretischen Kommunikationsbegriff", pp. 155-198 in Andreas Balog and Manfred Gabriel, Soziologische Handlungstheorie: Einheit oder Vielfalt, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 175 Donald Davidson, 1990 [1982], "Paradoxes of Irrationality", pp. 449-464 in Paul K. Moser, Rationality in Action: Contemporary Approaches, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, p. 452f. See also Donald Davidson, 1980 [1970], "Mental Events", pp. 207-227 in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon. 176 See Merton's original statement, Robert K. Merton, 1936, "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action", American Sociological Review 1: 894-904.
71
the action was carried out intentionally. Thus, Davidson turns intentions into a universal resource for scientific second-order observation. Non-intentional actions become tantamount to non-selected actions – mere jerks or spasms as controlled as the sudden movements of a flower shaken by the wind. As I will try to show in detail in Chapter 3, the interactive relevance of intentions is outstanding. They are fine-grained enough to create one-to-one relationships between mental states and "actions", but not more fine-grained than that. Since they may be freely combined with other attributions of mental states (see the following section), there does not seem to be a strong interactive need for additional expressivity types. Nevertheless, I will mention two types that have gained social scientific prominence. First, habits (and their close relatives, scripts) are attributive finalizations of arbitrary patterns of actions. Attributions of habits tend to (but do not have to) stress subconscious or non-conscious selectivity. They can be understood as the expressive complement of attributions of schemata. They are slightly more complex than those of intentions, as they require discovering identical features in potentially heterogeneous behavior by way of abstraction. Of course, ego can discover almost anything by means of abstraction, but if the habits she discovers are meant to be communicated, she will be constrained to impute only patterns alter can understand and accept. Second, drives refer to generalized tendencies to select courses of actions according to specific and non-suspendable desires – for instance, for sexual pleasure or nutrition (and nowadays even cultural abstractions like "success" or "maliciousness"). Whatever their advantages may be, attributions of drives are difficult to communicate in dialogue because drives violate the notion that the observee is an autonomous and self-controlled unit. Drives are conceived of as quasiautonomous forces that fail to obey the commands of consciousness. Of course, this quality explains their psychoanalytical attractiveness. In a mind that is already compartmentalized into Ego/Id/Superego, drives represent an additional source of conflict and chaos, supplying the observer with sheer endless attributive possibilities. However, it is worth mentioning that the psychoanalytical observation of drives requires immense and highly artificial efforts before it can be imposed on dialogue. Freud's technical, emotionally detached "writings on treatment" still give ample evidence of these efforts177 – and, unsurprisingly, cast all the blame for failures on the staggered patient. As I will consider in Section 3.3, the interpretation of utterances normally requires the hearer to distinguish explicitly said from implicitly meant in-
177 Sigmund Freud, 1912, "Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung", pp. 376–387 in Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 8, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, Sigmund Freud, 1913, "Zur Einleitung der Behandlung", pp. 454-478 in Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 8, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
72
formation and to disambiguate the latter by assuming that it was selected according to the intentions of one and only one mind.
2.4 The internal organization of observed observers Attributions of irritations and expressions reconnect alter to his environment, but they do not answer the question of how he transforms the former into the latter. To apply the black box metaphor of Section 1.3, observing irritations and expressions alone is similar to cutting holes into all walls of the black box without switching on the light inside. Put in less colorful terms, if ego knows only of the attribution types of the preceding section, she can make use of templates for input and output but not of templates for the "processor"178 which apparently transforms input into output. To produce a model of this processor, ego needs to impute internal-tointernal respecifications. Practically relevant types of such respecifications include beliefs, emotions and attitudes. Before I discuss these and other types, however, I would like to suggest that attributions of all such types follow a surprisingly logical pattern. Even more surprising, this pattern results from the special difficulties involved in attributing internal-to-internal respecifications. Attributions of irritations and expressions can take partial recourse to observable first-order events, interpreting them as causes of irritations and effects of expressions, respectively. On the other hand, attributions that reconstruct alter's internal processor must proceed without such props – they are "free-floating". The principle of observational equivalence entails that every model of this processor can be substituted by infinitely many other models with identical properties (that is, properties regarding the connection between irritations and expressions). The ensuing degrees of freedom can only be reduced in virtue of constraints imposed by ego's background knowledge, which implies that there is plenty of room for cultural constructions and perhaps even (I cannot tell, but they would be a functional equivalent) for a few biologically hardwired assumptions about the internal organization of other minds. In fact, ethnographical studies of "folk psychologies" suggest that members of different cultures may employ diverse constructs to describe other minds, constructs that are sometimes not only semantically, but even conceptually orthogonal to each other.179 For instance, some but not all cultures count trance or obsession as plausible causes of behavior. The only certainty every observer has is that alter is, indeed, a processor, because it follows directly from the stable observation that input and output are very often non-randomly related. 178 179
A "cold" but useful metaphor that I will use extensively in this section. See the rich references given in Thomas, Folk Psychologies Across Cultures.
73
Nevertheless, since the aforementioned studies of folk psychologies tend to be highly reluctant with respect to generalizations, a more theoretically motivated interpretation may still find order in this chaos. Observed in terms of causes and effects, alter's internal processor resembles a mechanical apparatus. Since it will turn out to be advantageous if we assume that ego reconstructs this processor as a device for transforming information rather than causality, I will show first that the simple causal terminology I have used until now can be translated into information-theoretical concepts without loss of generality. In Bateson's classical characterization, a "bit" of information is "definable as a difference which makes a difference".180 In Shannon's older quantitative, though qualitatively similar explanation, it is defined as the amount of "'choice' [that] is involved in the selection of [an] event".181 In both cases, information is the result of an observation, that is, a selection. By way of carrying out a selection, a mind can change itself in a way that constrains future selections. If the mind's state changes, the selection can be said to have produced information, if it does not change, the selection has produced redundancy.182 This casts light on the range of states another mind can be in after an irritation. Whatever alter may be doing otherwise (ego cannot tell), he can process irritations either informatively or redundantly. In addition, he can either draw or not draw on information that was generated independently of the irritation. This leads to the following analytical distinction of three modes in which alter's inaccessible processor can be. 1. Alter processes irritations redundantly and without drawing on further, unobservable sources of information. In this mode, he will be operationally transparent, as all of his operations are informationally determined by irritations that ego has already specified. The prism of observational equivalence will not blur any conclusions he arrives at because of these irritations. 2. Alter processes irritations redundantly but draws on further, unobservable sources of information. In order to predict alter's conclusions ego must form hypotheses about this information. However, any hypothesis will be observationally equivalent to an unknown amount of alternative hypotheses and, therefore, underdetermined.
180
Gregory Bateson, 2000 [1971], "The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism", pp. 309-337 in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, p. 315. 181 Claude Elwood Shannon, 1963 [1948], "The Mathematical Theory of Communication", pp. 29-125 in Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, p. 49. 182 Ibid, p. 56.
74
3. Alter processes irritations non-redundantly and does or does not draw on further, unobservable sources of information. In any case, the conclusions he arrives at are unpredictable for ego. In cause-effect terminology, attributing Mode 1 is equivalent to observing alter as causally non-autonomous, that is, as a first-order object. By now it should be clear that this attribution fails to reconstruct alter as an observer. Attributing Mode 3 is equivalent to second-order observation with nonuniversal internal causality. This attribution is of dubious value to ego because it burdens her with degrees of freedom without specifying how they can be reduced. Therefore, attributing Mode 2 is the only viable alternative. It corresponds to second-order observation with universal internal causality. Although it burdens ego's observations with a certain amount of degrees of freedom, it specifies how they can be bound. Mode 2 is organized around a central distinction, that is, the distinction between a redundancy-preserving, hence predictable sequence of cognitive operations, on the one hand, and a heap of expectable or unexpectable premises, on the other. Even though premises depend on operations in order to achieve cognitive and ultimately behavioral relevance, these operations are fully determined by the premises that they (are forced to) make use of. The other mind that is observed as operating in Mode 2 is, therefore, a processor that is determinable by parameterization. This characteristic is adequately expressed by the venerable (and of course much disputed) identification of cognitive operations with logical inferences. It has two corollaries, first, that there exists only one type of operations, viz. thoughts or inferences, and second, that all other mental features must take the shape of information in order to be related or transformed by these operations. Observed mental operations are thoughts and observed mental states can only exist insofar as they can be made subject to them.183 A mind that processes information by means of logical inferences is rational.184 Many authors have noted that attribution of rationality is a necessary precondition for social observation, and the social relevance of Mode 2observation confirms their hypothesis.185 The underlying conception of ra183 It is understood that this abstraction demands that the distinction of conscious and unconscious operations come in at a later point of the observational reconstruction of the other mind; see below. 184 This cognitivistic usage of the term "rational" is in line with Boudon's "cognitive model", which suggests generalizing Rational Choice-theory by replacing the utilitaristic axiom of subjectively maximizing behavior with the logical axiom of subjectively reasonable behavior. See Raymond Boudon, 1996, "The 'Rational Choice Model': A Particular Case of the 'Cognitive Model'", Rationality and Society 8: 123-150. 185 Weber and Schelling confine this precondition to scientific observation, see Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 2f, Thomas C. Schelling, 1980 [1960], The Strategy of Conflict, 2 ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, p. 4. Other authors realize that it is a general prerequisite for social interaction, see especially Hollis, Models of Man, p. 149ff.
75
tionality is by no means discrepant with classical philosophical conceptions of rationality. Although the age-old philosophical and psychological discourse on (ir-) rationality was, and continues to be, structured by positions that defend the primacy of one over the other,186 these two concepts have almost universally been defined by way of mutual reference – as two sides of one distinction. Rationality is rational by avoiding the pitfalls of irrationality. I would like to suggest that this distinction is essentially a generalization of the observational difference between redundant mental operations and informative (i.e., surprising) premises. Rationality is a property of operations that follow from "reasons"187 without drawing on additional, undisclosed sources of information. This requirement of redundancy seems to be the greatest common denominator of otherwise divergent theories.188 For instance, it has been pointed out that the association of rationality with a tendency to maximize monetary interests was born in the specific socio-cultural circumstances of early Protestantism.189 In apparent contrast to this economic conception of rationality, contemporary theories of discursive rationality require that conclusions be motivated by "reasonable reasons".190 Despite their surface incompatibility (e.g., if observed with the distinction of individualism vs. altruism), both interests and reasons symbolize redundancy, that is, the possibility of explaining intentions or convictions exhaustively in terms of prior bits of information.191 Postmodernist attempts at pluralizing rationality into "rationalities" notwithstanding, rationality is a monovalent concept. Similar to thoughts vis-à-vis mental states, it stands in a one-to-many relationship to irrationality. In fact, irrationality owes its heterogeneity to the 186 From Aquinas' intellectualism via Hume's anti-intellectualism to the momentous Zajonc/Lazarus-debate in psychology; see Thomas Aquinas, 1978 [1273], Summa Theologica (Revised Dominican Translation), 22 ed., Chicago et al: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Part 1, Questions 75ff, David Hume, 2000 [1776], An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, Robert B. Zajonc, 1984, "On the Primacy of Affect", American Psychologist 39: 117-123, Richard S. Lazarus, 1984, "On the Primacy of Cognition", American Psychologist 39: 124-129. 187 In Luhmann's words: "symbols of redundancy", see Niklas Luhmann, 1993, Das Recht der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 373. 188 This requirement is mentioned as early as in Homer, although in a slightly different conceptual form: "'He speaks aright, and but as another would deem …'", Homer, 1879, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. S. H. Butler and Andrew Lang, Oxford: Clarendon, Book XVII. Homer's criterion of social substitutability is equivalent to the criterion of redundant inferencing, because only an inference that makes no use of private data carries no reference to the specific state of the inferring mind. 189 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. 190 That is, "vernünftige Gründe", Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 1, Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 2. As it seems, only the English translation exposes the tautology implied by this phrase. 191 Interestingly, both constructs are commonly supplemented with formulas that serve to limit the potentially infinite search for prior premises – "needs" in the case of interests, "values" in the case of reasons.
76
unlimited observational possibilities of supplying mental inferences with premises. The observational constructivism advocated in this chapter is rationalistic insofar as it assumes that interacting minds observe each other as rational (i.e., according to Mode 2). I hope to have made clear that the reasons for this assumption are purely formal: Observing another mind as rational is tantamount to observing its operations as non-arbitrary. In the remainder of this section, I will discuss several types of (attributed) premises for rational inferencing. Closest to the analytically primitive notion of a premise are beliefs, which denote atomic, storable and unconditionally retrievable results of observations or inferences. In the process of attribution, the key property of beliefs is that they can be treated as propositions. Independent of how alter represents any belief, its operative value is exhaustively describable by means of a proposition (a quality that other attribution types, like attitudes, do not have). This makes it easy for ego to reason about the role any belief plays in alters inferences, but also to communicate assumptions about his beliefs back to him or to others. Whether beliefs are consciously "held" or implicitly generated and propositionalized by need, whether they imply second-order beliefs (a belief in one's beliefs), whether they must be accompanied by epistemic commitment (an aversion against belief revision) and whether they are necessarily "rational" (in the older sense of the word) or justifiable are questions frequently raised by philosophical epistemology,192 but in the context of observational constructivism they are secondary. Preferences refer to generalized and inert criteria for the selection of mental states or behavior on the basis of their cognitive or causal consequences. Consequences that alter anticipates and disprefers can induce him to make a reversed ("abductive") search for alternative states or behavior. Preferences have a few important subtypes, especially motives (inert criteria for the flexible selection of situationally adapted intentions),193 desires (preferences that are bound to the general criterion of the well-being/happiness of the entire person), interests (an interest being a preference for some ob192 To give but one example, compare the ongoing epistemological discourse about the possibility of believing in false, futile, contradictory etc. beliefs; see, for instance, Davidson, "Paradoxes of Irrationality", Jon Elster, 1983, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, W. J. Talbott, 1995, "Intentional SelfDeception in a Single Coherent Self", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55: 27-74. It is sociologically interesting to observe that even proponents of the view that beliefs are always "rational" have found ways of explaining overtly irrational beliefs: Invalid relations between beliefs (e.g., inferences against contradictory beliefs), rather than beliefs themselves, account for irrationality. 193 This constructivist conception of motives may be contrasted to ontological classifications of universal motives of action, e.g., the one provided by Jonathan H. Turner, 1987, "Toward a Sociological Theory of Motivation", American Sociological Review 52: 15-27, p. 24.
77
servable state of the world over its absence, where the preference is logically deducible from a socially expectable desire),194 tastes (or "preferences" in one sense of the word, that is, predilections that do not require immediate satisfaction but survive disappointment) and values (generalized, durable, nonnegotiable, pro-social and expectably shared preferences).195 Since preferences may be observed as patterning the results of inferencing in rather complex ways, they can easily be depicted as irrational distortions of the procedure of inferencing. In fact, contemporary economic196 and sociological197 models of semi-rational decision-making emulate suboptimal behavior through preference-based modifications of an optimization procedure.198 194 See again the references to the classical literature on interests that I provided in the introduction. The idea that interests are (by definition) observable is a very old one; see J. A. W. Gunn, 1968, "'Interest Will Not Lie': A Seventeenth-Century Political Maxim", Journal of the History of Ideas 29: 551-564; on Gunn's discovery, see also Niklas Luhmann, 1989, "Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus", pp. 149-258 in Niklas Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Band 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 238, Niklas Luhmann, 1997, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 1033ff, Wolfgang Ludwig Schneider, 2002, "Handlung - Motiv - Interesse - Situation: Zur Reformulierung und explanativen Bedeutung handlungstheoretischer Grundbegriffe in Luhmanns Systemtheorie" in Uwe Schimank and Hans-Joachim Giegel, Beobachter der Moderne: Beiträge zu Niklas Luhmanns 'Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft', Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 195 This attributive conception of values may be contrasted to Hans Joas, 2000, The Genesis of Values, Cambridge: Polity Press, who treats them as psychologically real and sees their genesis as a primarily existentialist event. 196 See the vast literature on "satisficing"; Herbert A. Simon, 1972, "Theories of Bounded Rationality", pp. 161-176 in Roy Radner and C.B. McGuire, Decision and Organization, Amsterdam: North-Holland, Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, 1979, "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk", Econometrica 47: 263–291. Against the underlying SEUformalism, see Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd, 1999, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, who present models of heuristic decisionmaking as an alternative; see also Wendelin Reich, 2000, "Heuristics as Plausible Models of Rationality?" Acta Sociologica 42: 251-258. 197 Siegwart Lindenberg, 1992, "An Extended Theory of Institutions and Contractual Discipline", Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 148: 125–154, Hartmut Esser, 1996, "Die Definition der Situation", Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 48: 1– 34. 198 It needs to be added that the aforementioned models incorporate irrational preferences (e.g., "risk aversion" in Kahnemann/Tversky) into the transformative formalism (e.g., a biased "value function"), not into the parameters. This purely technical decision makes it look as if irrationality is a property of inferences and not their premises. Technically, it would be possible to delegate model properties from the formalism back to the parameters – a procedure that makes the models more general but in some cases also more complex. For this reason, it is also an open question whether Mode 2-observation, if formalization seemed desirable, would have to be formalized by a nonmonotonic calculus or simply by first-order logic. The reader may refer to the thorough overview provided by Witold Lukaszewicz, 1990, Non-monotonic Reasoning: Formalization of Commonsense Reasoning, New York et al: Ellis Horwood, as well as to an illuminating but deplorably unpublished manuscript by Michael J. O'Donnell, 1993, Against Nonmonotonic Logic; available from http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/ [last access 2002-10-27].
78
Besides beliefs and preferences, there exist at least two additional constructs to describe the state of another mind in terms of inferentially available premises. Since they are not significant to my further argument, it will do to mention briefly the role they can play in social observation. Decisions are mental self-constrainments of maximally disambiguated status. They are imputed through the twofold operation of distinguishing a contingent from a determined state and projecting it on a time-observing distinction (e.g., "before/after", "today/tomorrow").199 In contrast to other internal-to-internal respecifications, they thereby exploit a secondary observation in order to objectify a primary observation. In consequence, decisions are either taken or they are not taken – graded decisions do not exist, tertium non datur. Second, attitudes are conceptual borderline cases insofar as they combine preferences (i.e., internal-to-internal respecifications) and intentions (i.e., internal-to-external constraints) by means of describing the former quasipragmatistically in terms of the latter (e.g., in terms of a readiness to answer or to act in certain ways).200 Certain imputations of mental states serve to organize, generate or suppress entire sets of premises held by alter. I will confine my discussion to emotions, memory, consciousness, personality and intelligence. Emotions201 comprise a large and heterogeneous class of descriptors that subsume the total state of another mind202 and make further states (e.g., beliefs and preferences) relevant. Descriptors like love, hate, happiness or fear refer to the other mind or person as a unit and, thus, serve to describe it in its entirety. They can be used directly in order to attribute premises ("Fear made him distrustful"), but they can also be used more abstractly as directions (i.e., constraints) for more complex deductions of imputable premises. The multiplicity of emotions and their subsuming character have two interesting consequences. First, no single emotion can describe the normal state of a mind. Since every emotion is an exception relative to at least all other emo199 On the relationship between decisions and time (as an observational code), see especially Niklas Luhmann, 1989, Vertrauen: Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität, 3 ed., Stuttgart: Enke, Niklas Luhmann, 2000, Organisation und Entscheidung, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Luhmann treats decisions not as mental but as social (i.e., communicative) determinations, but the observational logic applies both to the social and the mental case. 200 As a result, attitudes make preferences observable. They warrant conclusions from behavior to motives, desires or tastes, a fact that seems to explain their popularity in social surveys. 201 Two well-known though non-constructivist studies of emotions are Thomas J. Scheff, 1997, Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality: Part/Whole Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, Jonathan H. Turner, 2000, On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry Into the Evolution of Human Affect, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 202 "It seems fair to say that 'being angry' is in many respects like 'having mumps'. It is a description of a whole pattern of events, including location, symptoms, feeling and manifestation, and possibly other factors besides." John Langshaw Austin, 1961 [1946], "Other Minds", pp. 44-84 in John Langshaw Austin, Philosophical Papers, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, p. 77.
79
tions, emotions in general can only refer to observationally abnormal conditions.203 Whether or not there is a unity of reasoning,204 there exists certainly no unity of feeling. Second, it is practically impossible to observe another mind as "feeling" all the time.205 Because emotions describe the other mind in its entirety, their scope is unlimited.206 They may be total, ultimate explanations of inferences and behavior. As a result, their attribution blocks the simultaneous application of a large set of alternative premises. The close connection between emotions and irrationality (both in scientific and in everyday observations) is produced by this inferential consequentiality. Whatever standard of rationality an observer of another person's behavior may apply, it is likely to be thwarted if the observation is accompanied by an imputation of an emotion. To rationalize this behavior, the observer will usually have to resort to a different type of attributed premises or states (like beliefs and preferences).207 Next, the imputation of memory allows ego to make beliefs alter can be expected to hold temporarily or permanently unavailable. Memory renders the relationship between beliefs and their storage contingent. Furnished with a mental "location", beliefs can either be accessible (which is the expected case), inaccessible (alter is "blocking") or absent (alter has "forgotten" something). By observing forgetfulness or "blocking", ego can elegantly resolve certain inconsistencies between alter's expectable beliefs and his observable behavior.208 For instance, alter might fail to congratulate her on her birthday although she informed him of this event a few days ago, a default that becomes rational behavior if ego attributes forgetfulness. I note that, independent of alter's real mental capacities and failures, memory must be an observational abstraction insofar as it relieves the observer of distinguishing between material and structural storage.209 203 Compare Hume: "[...] the real disorders and agitations of the passions." Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 13. 204 I reiterate that there is such a unity, given that reasoning is just a symbol for redundant inferencing. 205 Which compels me to agree with Walter Faber, the cold-blooded protagonist of Max Frisch, 1977, Homo Faber, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 91, on this point. 206 Or almost unlimited, since they can still be broadened by the emotional subtype "mood". 207 Of course, nowadays an observer may apply ingenious constructs like "emotional intelligence" in order to escape this trap and to rationalize behavior in terms of (and not against) emotions. However, the intricate scientific presuppositions of such an imputation (e.g., a specific discourse on the applicability the notion of intelligence) show that this solution is not a culturally and historically universal option. 208 For an analysis of interactive consequences of this attribution, see Charles Goodwin, 1987, "Forgetfulness as an Interactive Resource", Social Psychology Quarterly 50: 115-130. 209 Under the condition of operativity (no matter whether observed or real), the simple and intuitive "material storage model" of memory no longer works. Its technical substitutability by a dynamic model that generates identities as operative "eigenvalues" (paradigm: a calculator which generates additions instead of storing them) has been demonstrated elegantly by Heinz
80
Third, consciousness is a generalization of alter's total state that permits ego to attribute premises alter generates by means of mental selfobservation. Independent of the question of whether self-observation is innate or ontogenetically triggered by the experience of social interaction,210 to the observational constructivist it presents itself as a form of second-order observation that attempts to focus on itself. Since such "true" self-reference is paradoxical and, hence, impossible, consciousness only results in selfdecomposition into subject (Mead's "I") and object ("me"). However, this side effect of consciousness is precisely what renders this construct observationally useful. Ascribing consciousness is indispensable to observing the redundancy of inferences as a controlled and thereby "rational" achievement. Only an "I" that distinguishes itself from a "me" can compare hypothetical results of inferences and decide whether these are redundant or informative relative to premises (e.g., a particular belief). In other words, if rationality is observed as a process of selecting conclusions because of their conformance with certain criteria (e.g., utility, sensibility), and not just of selecting conclusions that happen to conform to them, then its observation must be accompanied by an attribution of consciousness. Whereas emotions, memory and consciousness appear to be plausible candidates of culturally universal generalizations of inner states, the remaining two are less likely to have this status. Personality (together with its nearequivalents, character and temper/-ament) is a subsuming descriptor of the unity of another mind. It accounts for this mind in terms of the expectable order of its self-constrainments (of which internal-to-external respecifications like the "habits" mentioned in Section 2.3 can form an important part). Since the 1960s, the observational constructedness of personality has been established by psychological research,211 but it is worth pointing out that the logic of the notion of personality itself unmasks its observational origins. Personality can refer both to the consistency as well as to the inconsistency of inferences (and ultimately behavior). In virtue of classifications like "erratic character" or "insidious personality", an observer can render even unexpected self-constrainments expectable or give them ex post facto explanations. An interesting consequence is that personality is not only von Foerster, 1999 [1963], "Gedächtnis ohne Aufzeichnung", pp. 133-171 in Heinz von Foerster, Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie, Heidelberg: CarlAuer-Systeme Verlag. See also Niklas Luhmann, 1981 [1979], "Identitätsgebrauch in selbstsubstitutiven Ordnungen, besonders Gesellschaften", pp. 198-227 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 3, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 210 See George Herbert Mead, 1912, "The Mechanism of Social Consciousness", Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9: 401-406, p. 405, Mead, "The Social Self". 211 See the landmark paper by Edward E. Jones and Richard E. Nisbett, 1972, "The Actor and the Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behavior", pp. 79-94 in Edward E. Jones, et al., Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior, Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, which features a critical discussion of "personality".
81
universally attributable (one cannot have no personality), but also inherently complex, thus proving an invaluable tool for observational professionals like criminologists, therapists or novelists.212 Finally, intelligence is also a subsuming descriptor of the unity of another mind, but a descriptor that accounts for this mind in terms of immutable capacities instead of (mutable though not controllable) self-constrainments. As the earlier restricted conception of intelligence appears to have given way to extremely far-reaching definitions,213 it is now a universally applicable device to make sense of another mind's unobservable ability to generate and organize premises that lead redundantly (i.e., rationally) to conclusions that observably solve intricate problems (e.g., passing an examination, playing an instrument, displaying creativity, and so forth).
212 To give an example, consider that the notion of personality can provide the subject matter for a novel as Gordian as Henry James, 1998 [1881], The Portrait of a Lady, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press (according to James' own concession in the introduction to this book). 213 Most prominently in the works of Gardner, see Howard Gardner, 1999, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, New York: Basic Books.
82
3. Utterances
"If one sees the behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul." Ludwig Wittgenstein214 To the very extent that the logic of social observation as outlined in Chapter 2 is general, it cannot prescribe the concrete sets of assumptions observers make about observees in diverse social situations. It does not determine which actions they observe and which intentions they attribute to the responsible observees, which emotions they diagnose and what beliefs they deem relevant. Nevertheless, observational constructivism needs only to be supplemented by a small set of further conditions in order to be turned from a theory of optional observations into a theory of expectably required observations. I will try to show that these conditions are operative in the social situation of dialogue, guiding interlocutors' attempts at observing each other's mental states and, thereby, solving what I suggested may be called the problem of observability. For reasons that were alluded to in Section 1.3 and that will be detailed below, dialogue is not the only but certainly the most important context for the imposition of such conditions. However, in order to demonstrate that such contexts really are independent supplements to the logic of social observation, it will be instructive to take a brief look at a different, simpler but also less significant context: non-interactive coordination. Under the heading of "tacit bargaining", Thomas C. Schelling has analyzed the problem of non-interactive coordination in a semi-formal gametheoretical framework.215 One of Schelling's countless ingenious examples may serve to explain what goes on in tacit bargaining. Consider the situation of two parachutists who jump off over hilly and wooded territory and lose sight of each other during the fall. They have to meet before they begin their operation, but they did not agree on a meeting place in advance. Without taking resort to drastic measures that may attract the attention of the enemy (e.g., light a fire), the odds of them finding each other are extremely small. Nonetheless, experiments Schelling conducted with individual test persons 214 215
Wittgenstein, PU/PI, p. 113/§357. For the following, see Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Chapter 3.
83
who were given a map of the territory and had to decide on a meeting place suggest that successful coordination is quite likely. Most persons simply choose to walk to what they consider to be the most distinct place on the map (e.g., a crossing or a hilltop), expecting the same behavior from their imaginary comrade.216 Since this decision is likely for each individual, it is also more-than-unlikely for each pair of individuals, thereby leading to a drastic increase in the likelihood of successful coordination. This increase is a result of the specific ulterior constraints217 under which the two parachutists must try to guess each other's mental states and achieve coordination. A socio-cognitive reformulation of Schelling's analysis may arrive at the following enumeration. Constraint number one is that the two are mutually dependent on each other: Their decisions must match. Since this match can be arbitrary (each meeting point is as good as any other), a second constraint holds that it is almost fully independent of the strategic cleverness of one or both parachutists.218 Finally, a third constraint is that any success must be immediate. Since searching the area is unfeasible and faceto-face interaction impossible, each soldier can only commit himself to one meeting place. No second attempt can be made.219 Although these constraints are harsh, the would-be interactants mutually know that they are operative and thereby give order to the social situation. Due to the constraints, the range of mental states the interactants can be expected to attribute each other is highly limited. The first constraint forces them to generate assumptions about each other's expectations. Based on what they know and do not know, they must try to predict each other's future actions – and mutually know that they must. As I laid out in Section 2.3, the simplest and most stable way of explaining actions "finalizes" them in attributed intentions. Since the interactive restrictions imposed by the situation operate expectably mutually, both would-be interactants know that they have to attribute an intention that was selected in order to match an intention that their respective other attributed them. The second constraint mentioned 216 Regarding the map task, Schelling did not create a representative sample, although 7 out of 8 participants in the map task that best reflects the one printed in Schelling's book managed to meet at the most conspicuous point, that is, a bridge. Other reported experiments (e.g., throwing a coin and guessing either heads or tails) involved higher numbers of test persons. In all of them, coordination was likely if a unique conspicuous choice existed (e.g., 36 out of 42 chose heads in the coin throwing experiment), see ibid, p. 55f. 217 I will speak of ulterior constraints of a type of social situation/constellation not in order to denote conditions that are externally "imported" by it, but in order to designate conditions that are part and parcel of it (to the extent that the type can be defined by means of them) and, therefore, not cancelable in any of its instances. 218 This is also mentioned by Schelling, see Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, p. 60, 100. 219 To be precise, moving along a trajectory of potential meeting places, which might appear as a qualitatively different strategy, is formally equivalent to waiting at one spot, for an encounter will only take place if the two parachutists are at the same place at the same time.
84
above, therefore, leaves no room for "smart" choices. Each interactant has to behave like a "Sacksian actor" (see Section 1.4) and reason as he is expected to reason.220 Taken together, constraints one and two have the interesting effect of turning constraint number three from an impediment into a resource for successful coordination. Since both parachutists can only make one guess (and mutually know of this restriction), they only have to make one guess at their respective other's guess in order to escape their predicament. They know from the outset that they have to find one unique answer to the question: "If I was him, where would I expect 'me' to walk to?" – and, scanning the map, their glance will (hopefully) be attracted by some feature that is more noticeable than any other on the map. The three constraints, therefore, disambiguate the multiplicity of attributable expectations221 and help the interactants in making themselves observable to each other. The example of the parachutists shows that some social forms222 or figurations223 disambiguate the rather general logic of social observation in such a way as to generate reliable, socially distributed knowledge of mental states. Given that the two soldiers actually try to match each other's expectations, and given that they are fortunate enough to be provided with a map that allows easy selection of a most conspicuous meeting place, they can be said to successfully observe each other. Other things being equal, it is likely that they will actually meet. This solution violates none of the restrictions discussed in Chapter 2. Specifically, the attribution of intentions passes the prism of observational equivalence and, thus, works without actual psychological correspondence of the interactants' inner states. Correspondence is only necessary on the level of second-order assumptions (assumptions about assumptions), and how these assumptions are represented (e.g., whether one of the soldiers is actually a robot) is socially irrelevant.
220
Epistemological analyses of the problem of "mutual knowledge" mention that such a situation leads to an infinite regression and, therefore, is not solvable, see the contributions to N. V. Smith, ed., 1982, Mutual Knowledge, London/New York: Academic Press, as well as the antidote (a finite induction schema) suggested by Herbert H. Clark, 1992, Arenas of Language Use, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, p. 35. I will not consider this problem here because it is only a theoretical, never a practical one. Just as in the puzzle of Achilles and the tortoise, a practically relevant reflection of the problem needs to incorporate time, and if the older riddle incorrectly assumes that time never crosses an (infinitesimal) threshold, the newer one presupposes erroneously that each actor has infinite time to generate an infinite amount of assumptions. 221 One could name such a situation a "reflective equilibrium" – if the term were not already given a different meaning in John Rawls' political ethics, see the latest revision in John Rawls, 2001, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap, p. 31. 222 To use Simmel's term, see Georg Simmel, 1971 [1908], "The Problem of Sociology", pp. 23-35 in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 223 To use Elias' term, see Norbert Elias, 1978, Was ist Soziologie?, 3 ed., München: Juventa, p. 141.
85
Together with the next chapter, the remainder of this chapter will discuss a second, more complex but also more pertinent social form that disambiguates the logic of social observation in a way that generates shared information about mental events and states: dialogue. I have imposed an analytical and somewhat artificial division of labor between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. The observational role of sequential adjacency of utterances will be delegated to the next chapter, thereby allowing this chapter to capitalize on the greatly simplifying but practically less relevant hypothesis that verbal interaction can occur in the form of singular utterances. Since almost all types of social structure are analyzable in terms of their contribution to solving the problem of observability, it would be possible to discuss social forms besides non-interactive coordination and dialogue in this treatise (e.g., written, organizational or institutional communication).224 However, I believe that the continuing social primacy of social exchange involving real-time, turn-based, verbal interaction over forms of social exchange that can do without such interaction (e.g., written communication) justifies the more narrow focus chosen here. In Section 1.3 it was noted that a theory of observability must include a theory of social interaction. Whereas non-interactive social forms can also establish observability, they presuppose a society that has technically nontrivial media of communications (e.g., writing) at its disposal and that is complex enough to release certain social tasks from the constraint of copresence.225 The concept of social interaction is broader than the concept of dialogue: Social interaction can be nonverbal, and it can have more than two participants. However, whereas the distinction between verbal and nonverbal interaction has empirical significance, I will argue in the next section that it is marginal and, therefore, negligible from a theoretical, socio-cognitive perspective. The distinction between interaction with two and interaction with more than two participants is less negligible. Admittedly, it is only for practical reasons that I have to confine myself to the dyadic case. Triad interaction is already substantially more complex than dyadic interaction, and the potential complexity of interaction grows exponentially with each new participant. Within the socio-cognitive framework, a precise analysis of interac224
Admittedly, I speak of "social forms" without mentioning what (and who) differentiates them. For an attempt at typifying (communicative) social forms into "genres", see Jörg R. Bergmann and Thomas Luckmann, 1995, "Reconstructive Genres of Everyday Communication", pp. 289-304 in Uta M. Quasthoff, Aspects of Oral Communication, Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Furthermore, it is worth noting that, in line with the present treatment of dialogue, other social forms have been analyzed in terms of the specific and ordering constraints they impose on interaction. For instance, see Garcia's analysis of mediation hearings, Angela Garcia, 1997, "Interactional Constraints on Proposal Generation in Mediation Hearings: A Preliminary Investigation", Discourse and Society 8: 219-247. 225 On this point, see André Kieserling, 1999, Kommunikation unter Anwesenden: Studien über Interaktionssysteme, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 32ff.
86
tion with more than two participants would be possible, but this would require another book. Section 3.1 will introduce a set of characteristic constraints (acoustic copresence, mutual dependence, relevance of coding) any instance of dialogue imposes on the observations of its participants. I will argue that dialogue generates social observability in virtue of these constraints. Sections 3.2 and 3.3 focus on the role of the hearer in dialogue. H. Paul Grice's hearer-centric, intentionalistic theory of conversation will receive a central role in both of them. Section 3.2 applies observational constructivism to the interpretation of utterances and claims that the main problem here is to let second-order observations (specifically, imputable intentions) depend systematically on first-order observations (specifically, the conventional content of an utterance). Section 3.3 extends this line of reasoning by incorporating background knowledge into the model. I will show that background knowledge often permits a hearer to choose the best candidate among several imputable intentions. Finally, and in line with the socio-cognitive assumption that social action is principally a problem of social anticipation, Section 3.4 will move the focus from hearer to speaker. Producing an utterance demands foreseeing how its hearer will understand it and to what reactions it will induce her. In other words, producing an utterance requires anticipating the process of understanding outlined in Sections 3.2 and 3.3 and, therefore, is most fruitfully analyzed subsequent to this process. To be sure, producing an utterance also calls for anticipating the process of sequential alignment of assumptions that I will detail in Chapter 4, but the reader will understand that I have to impose some form of linear ordering in order to begin a description of something as circular as dialogue.
3.1 A definition of dialogue Precisely like tacit bargaining, dialogue can be defined through a set of characteristic constraints it imposes on its participants. They are acoustic copresence, mutual dependence and coding. They specify the conditions under which the participants – I will continue calling them ego and alter, respectively – can try to observe each other. It may be added that the three constraints are not specific to dialogue (as dyadic verbal interaction), since they are independent of the number of participants. First, I include only those exchanges under the heading "dialogue" that require their participants for technical or normative reasons to be acoustically copresent. "Acoustic copresence" will denote the situation of at least two individuals who are expectably available as hearers of each other's utterances. If the interlocutors are within earshot, voice becomes a medium that
87
speaker and hearer register almost identically. Alter hears himself just as he hears others, and uncontrolled expressions like slips of the tongue or an unsteady pronunciation are phenomena that he and ego are potentially able to notice synchronously. Furthermore (and in sharp contrast to eyesight) voice is a producer-driven medium. Whereas it is sufficient to close one's eyes to avoid visual irritation, it is just about impossible to evade nearby sources of sound. Human beings are biologically constrained to be irritated by acoustic events from arbitrary directions, which means that it generally takes nothing but speaking to force copresent others to hear an utterance. From a theoretical point of view, this condition patterns dialogue in a way which is intimately related to observational constructivism. If acoustic copresence can be mutually presupposed, it does not only constitute shared knowledge, but the fact that it is mutually known constitutes shared knowledge as well. This has repercussions on the conditions under which ego and alter can provide each other with information or withhold it from each other. Most importantly, verbal expressions are, almost by definition, mutually observable and, therefore, undeniable. One party can coerce all participants (including himself) to hear the same utterance. Since this condition forms part of the knowledge shared in the situation, any utterance is automatically and expectably an observable social coordination of participants' cognitions. Trivial as this discovery may seem, it may be the reason why the evolution of earlier human societies selected voice and not gesture (or physiognomy, odor etc.) as their primary medium of communication.226 Exactly what chain of assumptions an utterance will trigger in all participants will be the guiding question of this chapter as well as the next one. For the case of face-to-face dialogue, the constraint of acoustic copresence is most often imposed automatically, because being within the field of vision normally implies being within earshot as well. If interlocutors are within earshot but not physically copresent, it depends on the specific medium of communication used whether acoustic copresence is normatively upheld. Dyadic telephone conversations generally impose this constraint, in the sense that it normally constitutes an act of rudeness to hang up or to walk away without applying a closing-sequence.227 However, newer media, like voice chat over the Internet, sometimes treat participation in dialogue as a 226
Sociologists of "the body" nowadays feel obliged to reject this view as either intellectualist or phonocentric. However, I would not claim that gestures etc. are irrelevant, but only that there is a statistically extremely significant surplus of phonetic signs. Even languages/cultures with a comparatively large set of standardized gestures (e.g., Italian) possess rarely more than a few dozens (cf. Adam Kendon, 1995, "Gestures as Illocutionary and Discourse Structure Markers in Southern Italian Conversation", Journal of Pragmatics 23: 247-279), whereas any modern language has a lexicon of several 10.000 distinct items. 227 Emanuel Schegloff and Harvey Sacks, 1973, "Opening up Closings", Semiotica 8: 289327.
88
matter of individual, interactively irrelevant choice. Whoever is present may talk, whoever is getting bored just leaves. Utterances are not guaranteed to be heard by co-participants, which entails that they cannot always be expected to be selected in order to be understood. Section 3.4 will make clear that this limitation renders attempts at understanding highly precarious. The second ulterior constraint characteristic of dialogue mirrors constraint one of tacit bargaining but is differently enforced. There must be mutual dependence of the interlocutors on each other. To combine suggestions from Parsons and Sacks, in any interactive move ego and alter have to behave as if they expect something from each other and thereby make their gratification contingent on their respective other's actions. What exactly they expect from each other is irrelevant as long as they (act as if they) expect something at all – indifference, not rejection, would be the end of the encounter. However, face-to-face dialogue can be distinguished from other social forms (e.g., exchanging letters) through its ability to generate strong mutual dependence over a sequence of moves. Only the first move has to be externally motivated, and in many cases, sufficient motivation will be produced by the simple event of encountering a person one knows or expects. A sequence of responses will follow because each interlocutor has to expect the respective other to be disappointed by his or her failure to dignify the other's message with an answer (closing sequences being an exception). Thus, typical dialogues take the form of a series of moves that ratify each other's prior moves. The third constraint ulteriorly imposed by dialogue on its participants is the relevance of coding228 (for reasons to be detailed in the next Section I avoid using the term "meaning"). Although every new member of a society needs to learn its systems of coded signs during his or her socialization, I will pretend that the normal form of dialogue is one in which such systems can and will be presupposed as shared by the participants.229 In other words, dialogue is not only a situation in which participants generally expect to understand signs offered by co-participants (and will be puzzled if they do not), but where they expect their own signs to be understood by them as well. This presupposition works because coding is part of the domain of irritability (see 228 Naturally, coding itself is also relevant in social forms other than dialogue, but since it is almost universally applicable to the media of communication used in dialogue, it is hard to imagine encounters that can avoid making use of coding once it exists. 229 I do not deny that cross-cultural encounters become more and more likely nowadays; see, with special emphasis on the interactive troubles induced by divergent linguistic codes, John J. Gumperz, 1982, Discourse Strategies, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Although detailed consideration of such encounters would exceed the scope of the present treatise, it is worth noting that almost all problems analyzed by Gumperz (e.g., misunderstandings) go back to the erroneous but natural assumption that the codes in use are shared. Thus, even the structure of cross-cultural encounters seems to reflect the primacy of intracultural interaction.
89
Section 2.3). Irritability opens a mind to external conditioning, and conventional signs are nothing but tokens of conditioning that are shared over a population. They standardize mental responses to external events and make this standardization socially expectable. In combination with acoustic copresence, coding, thus, gives rise to a second form of shared knowledge that is mutually expectable in dialogue. The representational values of actual signs are accessible to both ego and alter and do not have to be (or can be, for the most part230) negotiated between them. To be sure, codings are never exhaustively shared because sub-cultures, groups etc. define their own sign systems and because socialization cannot guarantee to provide individuals with exhaustive knowledge of the lexicon of the language in use. However, since linguistic and cultural sign-systems are hierarchically organized and highly redundant, and since all interlocutors understand many more signs than they themselves apply, even small overlaps between understood signs are often sufficient to permit two individuals to interact. None of these three constraints is unique to dialogue (or verbal interaction in general), but taken together they define this social form. They are (very generally) linked to the logic of social observation by way of socially observable events that are (more or less) unambiguously attributable to individual participants: utterances, grunts, gestures, postures, facial expressions and the like. Constraint 1 ensures that these events are observable by each participant of an encounter; Constraint 2 ensures that their interpretation is relevant to each of them; and Constraint 3 ensures that this interpretation is standardized in an expectable way. The smooth attributability of such events makes them interpretable as indices of intentional (or at least significant) selections of other minds, and they are, therefore, the physical building blocks of (face-to-face) dialogue. Furthermore, although the listed eventtypes do not seem to bear strong physical resemblances, the fact that they can all be subject to coding makes them fundamentally alike. Since the coding of utterances, as mentioned before, appears to be universally more developed than the coding of any other type, it makes sociological sense to focus on verbal interaction and see nonverbal interaction as derivative. However, it should be kept in mind that the essential distinction is not found between verbal and nonverbal but between coded (symbolic, significant) and uncoded events. Chapter 1 concluded that the interactive problem of observability requires some form of socially enforced cooperation between the participants. In dia230 Of course, it is not always impossible to negotiate the meaning of conventional signs in dialogue. However, as usual, smoothly working normal expectations tend to be converted into norms as soon as they are violated. As a result, it takes highly specialized "remedial interchanges" to generate interactive contexts in which the negotiation of meanings is expectable, see Erving Goffman, 1971, "Remedial Interchanges", pp. 95-187 in Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, New York: Harper & Row.
90
logue, this means that both hearer and speaker must contribute to the achievement of observability. Since the speaker is, by definition, the only participant who produces smoothly attributable first-order events, only the speaker can make himself actively observable. To gain control over her social appearance, the hearer needs to provide some form of behavioral reactions – in other words, she must herself become a speaker. This symmetry confirms the analytical usefulness of the speaker/hearer-distinction as much as the efficacy of my confinement to dialogue (as contrasted to interaction in general). Although real dialogues produce a great number of overlapping turns,231 and although a hearer who provides the speaker with conventionally decodable feedback is, from an analytical point of view, already a speaker, the distinction continues to apply to two distinct forms of social observation. Sections 3.2 and 3.3 investigate how the hearer, Section 3.4 analyzes how the speaker applies the aforementioned constraints (together with the logic of social observation) in order to understand utterances or to generate them, respectively. In order to keep the analysis simple at the beginning, Section 3.2 confines itself to the essentially unrealistic situation of an unmotivated, unknowledgeable hearer who is faced with the problem of understanding, but not responding to, a single utterance. Section 3.3 makes the situation of this hearer one degree more realistic by allowing her to interpret the utterance in recourse to her own background knowledge. Section 3.4 moves the spotlight from hearer to speaker and investigates the anticipations this speaker needs to make upon selecting an utterance. At this stage, we will have sufficient conceptual equipment to consider the motivations the speaker and the hearer have for participating in dialogue. Throughout these sections, and in contrast to the fact that dependence is mutual (Constraint 2), dialogue will take the form of single utterances. The next chapter will remove this final limitation.
3.2 Understanding utterances It follows from the tenets of observational constructivism that the question of how real brains interpret utterances under the conditions of dialogue is unanswerable. As before, this limitation only simplifies the task of describing what happens inside interlocutors' minds, because it allows us to substitute the quest for unobservable states and events with the search for socially expectable and enforceable states and events. Therefore, the speaker whom this section identifies as the source of an utterance is a purely imaginary entity. He is the image of an interlocutor as projected by the other participant in the 231
See Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, "A Simplest Systematics".
91
dialogue. To apply the terminology of Chapter 21, understanding refers to an observationally constructed observee, not to a real mind. In the following, this point of reference can be taken for granted even if I generally replace awkward but correct expressions like "alter as ego sees him" or "ego as she sees herself" with "alter" and "ego". Without implying any decision as to whether understanding should be conceived of as a singular event or a process, a single-state or a multi-state phenomenon, I suggest ordering the expectable cognitions involved in understanding analytically along the lines of first-order observation and second-order observation. My intuition is that understanding will normally be observed as a discrete event and that it takes additional cognitive efforts to rationalize it into an explicit sequence of irritations and inferences (e.g., during the identification of misunderstandings). The level of first-order observation includes decoding utterances (compare Constraint 3 above) and drawing basic logical inferences from them, whereas the level of second-order observation demands drawing inferences based on the additional premise that some utterance was selected by another mind that is also an observer (Constraints 1 and 2). It should be kept in mind that the picture will not be complete until we consider the role of background knowledge in both levels of understanding, an issue that has its own complications and thatwill be deferred to Section 3.3.
3.2.1 First-order observation: turning utterances into information Because of their irritability, participants in dialogue can normally expect that utterances are immediately available to them in the form of sounds and decoded information. Psycholinguistic and neurophysiologic studies suggest that this primary information is subject to immediate and uncontrolled further processing.232 Most importantly, the processing of utterances appears to be built on the assumption that sequences of morphemes are related to each other according to syntactic rules that permit the compositional233 and (nearly) unambiguous234 recovery of the semantic value of an entire sentence 232 For an overview from the perspective of aphasiology, see David N. Caplan, 1992, Language: Structure, Processing and Disorders, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 233 In formal semantics, the principle of compositionality stands for the assumption that sentence meaning is determined by word meaning plus universal transformation rules (e.g., syntax). It is an indispensable working hypothesis of most contemporary semantic theories; see Jerry A. Fodor and Ernest LePore, 2002, The Compositionality Papers, Oxford: Clarendon, p. 43ff. 234 Although ambiguity phenomena like semantic underdetermination are common, linguists generally assume that syntax reduces the combinatorial complexity of sentence meanings enormously.
92
from the semantic values of their morphemes. From a linguistic point of view, the determination of this "literal meaning" of utterances from morphemes plus syntax is, of course, extremely complex. However, a sociocognitive, top-down account of dialogue will do well by taking it as given. Of course, abstracting from the linguistic intricacies of utterance meaning makes it impossible to consider sociolinguistically interesting phenomena like the syntax-pragmatics or the semantics-pragmatics interface – a price that a socio-cognitive analysis will gladly pay. What remains sociologically important, however, is to distinguish literal information that is extractible from decontextualized sentences from implicit information that can only be recovered by paying attention to additional contextualizing premises. In linguistics, this distinction usually marks the boundary between semantic and pragmatic analyses, although it is known to be notoriously blurred. For our purposes, I will assume that it can be specified with sufficient selectivity through the "syntactic correlation constraint",235 which demands that only information that can be shown to be generated by syntactic variation be defined as part of the "literal meaning" of an utterance. In the following, information that correlates with syntax will be treated as available and unproblematic and, thus, serve to mark the boundary between a sociological and a linguistic analysis of the cognitions involved in utterance interpretation. As outlined in Section 2.4, observational constructivism must assume that these cognitions result in information, that is, in atomic "differences that make a difference" (Bateson) for future cognitions. Some words are in order that explain the relationship between this "cold" approach and "warmer" ones that center on the notion of meaning – a concept that continues to enjoy great popularity in sociological and philosophical theories of interaction and conversation. Both disciplines have proposed several theories of meaning, theories that differ with respect to how meaning is supposedly constructed, where it is thought to be located, and what is to be found "in" it. Practically the only issue that has been agreed upon – explicitly or implicitly – is the elusiveness of meaning. Meaningful object and meaning-ascribing subject, details of phrasing and social context – by now, many factors have been suspected to be at work in order to make meanings as imprecise as possible. Attempts at tackling this problem can be divided into two classes. On the one hand, there are monolithic conceptions of meaning, conceptions that see its unclearness as an intrinsic property. They are predominant among poststruc235
An expression coined by Kent Bach, 2001, "You Don't Say?" Synthese 128: 15-44, p. 15, elaborating on a suggestion by H. Paul Grice, 1989, "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions", pp. 86-116 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, p. 87. Against Bach and Grice, see François Recanati, 2001, "What Is Said", Synthese 128: 75-91.
93
turalists236 but equally common in a large body of theoretically naive studies of social "meaning-making".237 Such approaches tend to claim that meanings "are" labyrinthine and signifiers floating. On the other hand, there are (mostly philosophical) conceptions of meaning that observe it as characterized by a central dualism: denotation versus connotation,238 extension versus intension,239 directness versus indirectness,240 or explicitness versus implicitness.241 All of these distinctions attempt to describe the same phenomenon: Word, sentence or utterance meaning is assembled from "literal" meaning plus meaning that is somehow imported externally. The second component, although imported, is nonetheless observed as part of the meaning of the entity in question – for instance, words, sentences or signs are observed as "having" a (however "context-dependent") connotation. The paradoxical structure of this definition never seems to come into view. The perspective taken in this treatise is orthogonal both to monolithic and dualistic conceptions of meaning. Whereas these approaches suspect the unity of meaning to lie in the signifier (among nominalists and constructivists), or in the signifier-signified relationship (among semioticians), or even in the signified (among realists), the present treatment sees it, unsurprisingly, in the process of observation. Signs are not intrinsically connected to a connotation or a context. In fact, since signs exist only relative to an observer capable of decoding them, they are not even intrinsically connected to their denotation and can, therefore, hardly be said to have any independent existence at all. Only the irritability that makes an observer sensitive to signs is 236
E.g., Roland Barthes, 1964, Éléments de sémiologie, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Jacques Derrida, 1972, "La différance", pp. 1-29 in Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Minuit. 237 To give some exemplary references, see Deborah Lupton, 1994, "Food, Memory and Meaning: The Symbolic and Social Nature of Food Events", Sociological Review 42: 664685, Anne E. Kane, 1997, "Theorizing Meaning Construction in Social Movements: Symbolic Structures and Interpretation during the Irish Land War, 1879-1882", Sociological Theory 15: 249-276, John W. Mohr, 1998, "Measuring Meaning Structures", Annual Review of Sociology 24: 345-370, J. M. Barbalet, 1999, "Boredom and Social Meaning", British Journal of Sociology 50: 631-646, Michèle Lamont, 2000, "Meaning-Making in Cultural Sociology: Broadening Our Agenda", Contemporary Sociology 29: 602-607. 238 This distinction goes back to Ockham, see William of Ockham, 1957 [1328], Philosophical Writings, Edinburgh/London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, p. 56f. It has survived in modern semiotics, see, for instance, Umberto Eco, 1984, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Houndmills et al: Macmillan Press. 239 E.g., in analytical philosophical, see Rudolf Carnap, 1947, Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, p. 41ff, Richard Butrick, 1970, Carnap on Meaning and Analyticity, Den Haag: Mouton. 240 For example, see studies in Speech Act Theory, most prominently John Searle, 1975, "Indirect Speech Acts", pp. 59-82 in Jerry L. Morgan and Peter Cole, Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, London/New York: Academic Press. 241 This distinction is widely (but hardly ever systematically) applied in all of the aforementioned discourses.
94
able to turn identical stimuli into identical information and, thus, to establish highly consistent, quasi-deterministic relationships between stimuli and denotations. Furthermore, invariant background knowledge will often induce an observer to draw identical inferences from identical denotations and to establish consistent relationships between denotations, contexts and connotations. Hence, it can be hardly surprising that (situated as well as scientific) observers of this entire process reify its results and define them as properties of the original stimulus. For the case of situated interlocutors, this fiction may even be socially necessary, since it supports the hearer in making the speaker expectably responsible for the "connotations" of the words and sentences he utters. Nevertheless, scientific observers should not let themselves be lured by this reification. The unity of meaning lies in the processes of cognition and inferencing and their capacity to generate new conclusions from highly heterogeneous sources of existing or supplementable information. At least for the purposes of a socio-cognitive theory of dialogue, these considerations render the notion of "meaning" useless. In sharp contrast to a meaning-centered perspective, which discovers complexity only in signs and not in observers, an observational constructivist perspective urges us to appreciate ego's capacity to let herself be informed by signs as an important socio-evolutionary achievement and to ask for the cognitive and social consequences of this capacity. For dialogues, this capacity implies that ego can rely on her interpretation of certain stimuli as signs and commit herself to the (otherwise precarious) assumption that others caused her to perform this interpretation. It thereby helps ego to make the social situation comprehensible. In this situation, ego can not only assume that utterances have intrinsic significance ("denotation"), but she can also presuppose that they have additional significance ("connotation") that is reconstructible on the basis of the viable assumption that alter uttered them intentionally. These reflections lead over to second-order observation and will be developed in short. Signs render ego as well as her observee another service that would be unavailable if she were not irritable by them. Since distinct stimuli can lead to identical irritations, sign systems have the effect of creating a layer of abstraction between signifiers and "their" contents. Most relevantly, identical information and identical inferences are constructible both from utterances and from thoughts. Although they comprise entirely different classes of events, both of them can be examined similarly with respect to the code values they convey and the inferences they trigger, respectively. It is only in a world of signs, therefore, that interlocutors can make explicit comparisons of their responses to internal and external events. This option is necessary in the planning of own utterances, as it permits formation of hypotheses about the mental states of co-participants (see Section 3.3). Regarding the scientific
95
observation of dialogue, without sign systems it would be nonsense to employ concepts like "shared knowledge" to describe states distributed over more than one mind. Shared knowledge is an abstraction that presupposes comparability and, in consequence, cognitively available systems of signs.242
3.2.2 Interlude 1 – Grice on intentions Semantic codes invite the hearer to hold the speaker responsible for the seemingly intrinsic denotations and connotations of signs. The attention of the hearer is drawn to social stimuli and provided with additional behavioral data: suprasegmental cues that accompany utterances (from prosody to intonation),243 gestures, postures, and more. In consequence, first-order observation almost automatically leads to second-order observation. Nevertheless, due to the limitations of social observability, the hearer is never provided with direct information about the speaker's mental states. Just like all other observers, she has to bridge the unbridgeable gap between her own and the speaker's cognitions by means of imputations. Section 2.4 suggested that intentions are the most fundamental starting points for these imputations, for the reason that they can be conceived of as direct complements of observable actions. This section discusses a theory that, though differently motivated, connects directly to these reflections and is compatible with the overall constructivist framework advocated in this treatise. Grice's meanwhile classical theory of meaning focuses on the role of intentions in the interpretation of utterances. As Grice's semantic intentionalism is intricate, widely discussed and – I believe – widely misunderstood, this section will be devoted to a comparatively exegetical reading of Grice's ideas. I will try to show that they fit extremely well into, and add to, the perspective of observational constructivism if only we are willing to give up the premise that Grice develops a theory of saying instead of understanding. This doubtful premise, which is almost universally (but usually tacitly) subscribed to in Gricean semantics and pragmatics, will turn out to be the only major obstacle to a fruitful constructivist assimilation of the Gricean framework. I will attempt this assimilation in the next section. 242 Incidentally, this layer of abstraction is also responsible for the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier an signified, see Ferdinand de Saussure, 1969 [1915], Cours de linguistique générale, Paris: Payot, p. 100ff. 243 For detailed discussions of the interactive relevance of such cues, see especially Gumperz, Discourse Strategies, John J. Gumperz, 1995, "Mutual Inferencing in Conversation", pp. 101123 in Ivana Marková, Carl F. Graumann, and Klaus Foppa, Mutualities in Dialogue, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, p. 103, John J. Gumperz, 1999, "On Interactional Sociolinguistic Method", pp. 453-471 in Celia Roberts and Srikant Sarangi, Talk, Work, and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, p. 461.
96
Grice develops the central points of his semantic intentionalism in a paper entitled "Meaning".244 However, this publication relates only superficially to the old and long-winded discourse on "meaning" which I criticized briefly in the preceding section. Grice observes that the concept of "meaning" seems to denote two entirely different phenomena. On the one hand, some signifiers seem to relate to their signifieds in a "natural sense".245 For instance, clouds "mean" rain because there is some physical link between clouds and rain that works independent of communication about them. On the other hand, there are (philosophically more fertile) cases where meaning is not determined by natural but by what Grice calls "nonnatural" relationships. For example, the utterance, "It is really cold in here," pronounced in the right circumstances, might "mean" that some copresent person should close the window. As illustrated by this example, even a superficial reading of Grice's paper reveals that "nonnatural meaning" is intrinsically connected to second-order observation.246 A detailed reconstruction of the logical steps of Grice's argument will help to make this connection explicit. I want to suggest that Grice's argument, though highly subtle and wary of simple summarizations, can be divided into three logical steps. I will sum up them and then supplement them with three own remarks. In a first step, Grice refutes the popular causal theory of nonnatural meaning.247 Communication is not a process of causally transferring meanings from one person to the other. Apart from letting communication degenerate into mere conditioning, such a causal theory can only account for the "standard meaning"248 of 244 H. Paul Grice, 1989 [1957], "Meaning", pp. 213-223 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 245 Ibid, p. 213. It is worth noting that the early Husserl discusses the same type of relationships (which he terms Anzeichen, cues) and, similar to Grice, contrasts them to Zeichen (signs), which are founded on intentions. See Edmund Husserl, 1913, Logische Untersuchungen II/1: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, 2 ed., Tübingen: Niemeyer, p. 25. 246 For this reason, it seems surprising that Grice thought that his conception of "nonnatural" meaning subsumes conventional meaning; see Grice, "Meaning", p. 215. The issue of conventional meaning reappears in different form in Grice's writings of the late 1960s, see especially Grice, "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions", H. Paul Grice, 1989, "Utterer's Meaning, SentenceMeaning, and Word-Meaning", pp. 117-137 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. In my opinion, conventional meaning (that is, irritability by code systems) must be distinguished both from "natural meaning" (which remains an unfortunate term) and from meanings that are inferred by way of projecting intentionality (= Grice's "nonnatural meaning"). The structure of the present chapter reflects this distinction by distributing first-order and second-order observation over different sections. 247 Grice's only critical reference is the theory of communication developed by Charles L. Stevenson, 1944, Ethics and Language, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, Chapter 3 – a theory that, to my knowledge, does not play a significant role in contemporary discourses on semantics and communication. Incidentally, the causal theory of meaning seems to be a close cousin of the "transmission theory" of shared knowledge that I criticized in Chapter 2. 248 Grice, "Meaning", p. 216. By speaking of "standard meaning", Grice tacitly contrasts his intentionalism to the monolithic and dualistic conceptions of meaning I mentioned above.
97
an utterance, not the meaning given to it by a particular speaker or writer. This theory is, therefore, entirely asocial, or rather, in the terminology used here: entirely unaware of second-order observation. A sentence like, "May I ask you to close the window, please?" is not rendered comprehensible by being blessed with code values for each of its morphemes as well as with conformance to a set of syntactic rules. To understand it, a hearer or reader must observe or at least imagine that someone utters it in order to achieve a social goal. In consequence, an adequate theory of communication must take into account what the act of uttering does to the "standard meaning" of a sentence. Speech act theorists who apply this Gricean argument to defend an action-based conception of communication against the dominant (Chomskyan) cognitivism249 in linguistics have early recognized its thrust.250 Nonetheless, it will become clear in short that Grice's theory of communication replaces the linguistic focus on individual cognitions by a consideration of socially distributed cognitions (that is, coinciding observations of interlocutors). Thus, Grice's theory remains cognitive in nature but gives linguistic cognitivism a decidedly social twist. This aim makes Grice fundamentally compatible with a socio-cognitive theory of dialogue. Secondly, Grice details the cognitive states of a speaker that are relevant to the meaning of his utterances. To have nonnatural meaning, he claims, an utterance must be accompanied by an intention to make a hearer believe something.251 Intentions are, thus, the fundamental cognitive building blocks of Gricean communication. This is an important and fruitful discovery, because only intentions fulfill the dual purpose of committing communicants to second-order observation and of making their behavioral selections sociocognitively oriented toward others. Not all intentions to bring about beliefs in other minds may be said to determine nonnatural meaning, however. Grice asserts that only those intentions count that are joined by an intention to be recognized by a hearer. For instance, an utterance that is tacitly intended to mislead the hearer could not be said to mean a plot. On the other hand, an utterance that is intended to inform the hearer about a plot could well be said to "mean" that a plot is taking place.
249
Noam Chomsky, 1965, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. See John Searle, 1971 [1965], "What Is a Speech Act?" pp. 39-53 in John Searle, The Philosophy of Language, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Furthermore, Grice was a colleague of Austin at Oxford in the 1950's, and the two influenced each other to some extent. For interesting biographical and historical information on Grice and his colleagues, see the introduction to Thomas Nagel, 1995, Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969-1994, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, as well as H. Paul Grice, 1986, "Reply to Richards", pp. 45-106 in Richard E. Grandy and Richard Warner, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, Oxford: Clarendon. 251 Grice, "Meaning", p. 217. 250
98
In his third and final argumentative step, Grice concedes that his model is not yet selective enough. Intentions do not only have to be intended to be recognized, but their recognition has to be relevant to the interpretation of the utterance.252 This is by no means an overly subtle modification of the second step. It is easy to invent examples of utterance planning in which the speaker's intention to have his informative intentions recognized fails to determine the meaning of his utterance. For instance, a judge pronouncing the words, "You are hereby sentenced to three months of prison" in the correct legal circumstances may well utter them with the intention that his or her intention to pass sentence be recognized – however, the sentence will be passed even if the judge fails to have this intention. Conversely, if the judge were to say, "You deserve being sentenced to three months of prison" he or she would not pass sentence but express an opinion. In this case, the intention to inform the audience about the judge's intentions (Grice calls such intentions "primary"253) should certainly be said to form part of the utterance's meaning – for otherwise, the utterance could not be understood. To sum up Grice's intentionalistic theory of meaning in his own words, a speaker A will have furnished utterance x with some nonnatural meaning if it is true that "A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention."254 Three remarks on Grice's model are in order. First, the model does not apply to verbal utterances only but to communication in general. Any behavior selected because of these two basic intentions has nonnatural meaning. If these intentions are present, a gesture and an utterance (or two distinct utterances, for that matter) can convey identical nonnatural meanings. A police officer waving his hand can mean the same thing as an officer shouting, "Stop!" Grice emphasizes that the key difference between meaningful ways of behavior is not how they are executed at the surface, but which intentions underlie them. To continue his own example,255 the officer who stops a car by waving his hand and the officer who stops it by standing in its way mean two entirely different things (and this second officer does not necessarily convey nonnatural meaning at all). The first officer requires his audience to recognize his intentions and thereby to establish some reference to his mind (that is, to perform second-order observation), whereas the second officer uses his body just as he could use a lifeless object to block the passage of the car.256 To generalize from the example, 252
Ibid, p. 218. Ibid, p. 221. 254 Ibid, p. 219. Step three is ingeniously hidden in the words "by means of". 255 Ibid, p. 220. 256 To be sure, the example is not perfect. It is less than likely that the driver of the car stops only because she sees the officer as an object. In that case, she might as well drive around – a tactic not to be tried out in the presence of a police officer. A fully adequate example would be: A pedestrian stopping a car by standing in its way and looking aside. Here, the car driver 253
99
the difference lies between an intention to have a hearer perform first-order observation and an intention to have her execute second-order observation – in other words, between affecting her causally and affecting her indirectly by conditioning her observational autonomy. Hence, Grice's model recommends itself as a sociological alternative to purely linguistic theories of utterance meaning. In accordance with the line of argument pursued in Section 3.1, Grice uses a formal and not a naturalistic concept of dialogue (or "conversation", to use Grice's later, formally conceived term for the same phenomenon). Conversation is what takes place between actors who use behavior to inform copresent actors about their mental states. Both verbal and nonverbal behavior can be used to this end. Second, until this point I have covered up Grice's oscillation between a speaker-centric and a hearer-centric model. Readers can easily be misguided by the fact that Grice frequently writes about the speaker's intentions as if they were real psychological objects and not just communicative fictions. A careful reading of his meaning-paper resolves this tension. Grice comments ironically on his own, slightly careless rendering of intentions when he states that he "must disclaim any intention of peopling all our talking life with armies of complicated psychological occurrences."257 Not psychological states or events but attributions of psychological states or events are necessary to all our talking life. In other words, communication does not require the speaker to select his utterances together with a well-defined set of intentions, but it requires the hearer to assume that utterances are selected in this way. For this reason, Grice writes that nonnatural meanings are "within the control of the audience".258 They are the hearer's own creation, but a creation that she finds compellingly rational and consequently unavoidable. Contrary to the normal presumptions of both speaker and hearer, the speaker is not free to determine the nonnatural meaning of his utterances.259 Grice knows that
can anticipate that double contingency cannot be established. Therefore, she must switch to first-order observation and treat the pedestrian as an object. Incidentally, this is an effective (but slightly risky) way of enforcing priority rules at zebra crossings in countries where motorists routinely ignore them (e.g., Sweden or Italy). 257 Grice, "Meaning", p. 221. 258 Ibid. 259 A presumption that social scientists must be careful not to reproduce. Making the speaker responsible for "the meaning" of his utterances would, in fact, result in nothing better than the infamous "Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning" – it is still worth a full quote: "'I don't know what you mean by "glory"', Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't – till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"' 'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected. 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
100
this theoretical shift from speaker to hearer is necessary in order to make the model consistent. If the hearer were not in control, she would be causally influenced by the speaker – an assumption that Grice counters himself in his first argumentative step. However, I would like to add that this shift makes step three above redundant. Because the hearer must impute intentions in response to an utterance, intentions are selected due to their relevance. Imputing irrelevant intentions needs to be a separate task, which means that there is no chance of confounding them with relevant ones. Third, Grice's shift to a hearer-centric model leads to an extraordinary simplification of the (notoriously elusive) problem of what the (nonnatural) meaning of any concrete utterance comprises. Linguistically or otherwise explicitly and objectively determined nonnatural meanings are the exception and not the rule. For want of such stipulations, the hearer can and will presume that the speaker intends what is normally intended by his utterances.260 The great personal freedom of any speaker to choose words, rhythm and stress of his utterances according to secret thoughts, to give or to hold back certain pieces of information and to calculate their possibly complex social effects is not a refutation, but a confirmation of this condition. If the "general usage"261 of words and utterances does not suffice to disambiguate the intentions behind them, "context" will usually be called on to determine what purpose the speaker is pursuing. If all of these devices fail, the hearer's imputations can receive a normative quality. Given general usage and the context of an utterance, the hearer expects the speaker to use it to convey certain expectable intentions. Again, these considerations are in line with an observation-theoretical perspective on intentions in dialogue. Grice dissects nonnatural meaning into its constitutive components: uttered information and underlying intentions. Their unity is an epiphenomenon – without a hearer, utterances never get to the point of "having" nonnatural meaning. Grice's later writings do not generally keep up his earlier transition to a hearer-centric theory of meaning. Instead, they often get stuck in longwinded taxonomies of what Grice calls "speaker meaning". After the preceding discussion, it should be clear that "speaker meaning" is an oxymoron. Thus, it is hardly a surprise that, once the unifying principle of understanding disappears, Grice's theory of meaning becomes complex and unconvincing.262 Unfortunately, the voluminous philosophical and linguistic literature
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master – that's all.'" Lewis Carroll, 1962 [1872], "Through the Looking Glass", pp. 165-347 in Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, London: Penguin, p. 274. 260 Grice, "Meaning", p. 222. 261 Ibid. 262 For instance, Grice feels compelled to distinguish "utterer's meaning", "sentencemeaning", "word-meaning", "timeless meaning", "applied timeless meaning", and "occasion-
101
that Grice inspired with his ideas opts almost universally for his later stand.263 Due to the sociological scope of the present contribution, it will suffice to illustrate the predicament of this discourse by the development of the works of Schiffer. Drawing on Grice, an early monograph by Schiffer proposes a reductionist, intention-based and speaker-centered understructure for philosophical semantics.264 As a result, Grice's complex later taxonomies of "utterer's meaning" become even more intricate. Dissatisfied with these complications, Schiffer later revokes his earlier views as a whole.265 His attack against these views transmutes into a harangue against theories of meaning in general, resulting in a curious theory of the impossibility of theories of meaning, the so-called "No-theory of meaning". These equally dissatisfying results are ample warning against letting theories of utterance meaning start on the wrong side of the verbal exchange, namely, on the side of the speaker. Admittedly, my reading of Grice is unorthodox – even Grice's critics frequently premise a speaker-centric model. Bilgrami266 (like Searle267) sees intentionality as a real ontological category and rebukes Grice for degrading intentions to simple prerequisites of meaningful utterances. Not without metaphysical undertones, he labels Grice's comparatively formal conception of intentions a "fierce reductionist path", thereby taking as given that Grice speaks of intentions as psychological entities.268 Harman thinks likewise that Grice correlates meaning with certain psychological representations of words, namely, intentions to mean these words.269 Unsurprisingly, he dismisses this distorted view as circular. Brandom is one of the first to see that the intentionalistic theory of meaning, even if understood in psychological terms, is at least ready to be transposed "into a social key".270 In this key, the meaning of an utterance type", among others, see Grice, "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions", Grice, "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning". 263 Prominent examples of speaker-centered interpretations of Grice's theory include those offered by Searle, Schiffer, Bach, Recanati and W. Davis. 264 Stephen R. Schiffer, 1972, Meaning, New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 265 Stephen R. Schiffer, 1987, Remnants of Meaning, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 266 Akeel Bilgrami, 1992, Belief and Meaning: The Unity and Locality of Mental Content, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 253. 267 John Searle, 1983, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Searle argues for a "naturalistic" theory of intentionality that sees intentions as primitive evolutionary achievements similar to "digestion, growth and the secretion of bile" (p. 160). Although this "realistic" view does not lead to an answer concerning what intentions "really" are, it neither does any theoretical harm until the point at which Searle claims that intentions are also primitive causal actors (p. 86). For arguments against a naturalistic conception of causality, see Section 2.1 above. 268 Very similar objections are raised by Anita Avramides, 1989, Meaning and Mind: An Examination of a Gricean Account of Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 269 Gilbert Harman, 1999, "Three Levels of Meaning", pp. 155-165 in Gilbert Harman, Reasoning, Meaning and Mind, Oxford: Clarendon, p. 156. 270 Robert B. Brandom, 1983, "Asserting", Noûs 17: 637-650, p. 648.
102
result of making an utterance is not a certain set of mental states, but enforceable commitment to a set of socially shared assumptions. This valuable insight makes it even more deplorable that Brandom's principal work on inference in discourse contends itself with a short rebuff of the Gricean framework271 – and continues along a pragmatist, non-constructivist path. In a recent series of works, Saul rediscovers the social and normative quality of Grice's conception of utterance meaning.272 However, like other authors before her, she succumbs to the temptation of conceiving of utterance meaning vaguely as a matter of cooperative co-determination. Once again, Grice remains more radical than his exegetes. If meaning ever achieves social objectivity, it must do so on the basis of, and not against, the fact that the hearer can autonomously determine the meaning of utterances. It is, therefore, necessary to ask how Grice's framework contributes to a theory of observability in dialogue.
3.2.3 Second-order observation: understanding intentions Grice's shift from a speaker-centric to a hearer-centric theory of meaning anticipates the transition from a psychological to a constructivist theory of cognitions in dialogue. The previous section attempted to verify this parallelism but left open what exactly Grice adds to the constructivist model that this work tries to spell out. However, it will become clear that Grice's reflections on meaning are almost exclusively concerned with the level of secondorder observation. Questions of syntax or semantics273 never arise at central passages of his writings. Grice's model thereby corroborates implicitly my earlier suggestion to distinguish, analytically, a first-order level and a second-order level of utterance interpretation. A hypothesis that derives from the discussion of expressivity in Section 2.3 is that the transition from first-order data to second-order attributions begins logically with the attribution of intentions. Second-order observations of intentions complement first-order observations of behavior and turn them into actions. A similar theory of the relationship between intentions and actions can be found in the works of Schütz. To recall, Schütz distinguishes psychological "because motives" from socially attributed "in-order-to motives". Despite their causal meaninglessness, in-order-to motives serve as 271
Robert B. Brandom, 1994, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, p. 146f. 272 Jennifer M. Saul, 2002, "Speaker Meaning, What is Said, and What is Implicated", Noûs 36: 228-248, p. 229. See also Jennifer M. Saul, 2001, "Review of Wayne A. Davis, Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle in the Failure of Gricean Theory", Noûs 35: 630641. 273 In the classical sense of the term, that is, compositional calculation of sentence meanings on the basis of word meanings.
103
powerful rationalizations of first-order data. In essence, Grice's article on meaning provides us with a subtle analysis of such rationalizations. In addition, his analysis does not rest on highly selective or questionable assumptions about dialogue or cognition. Its only vital presupposition is that intentions are socially unobservable (that is, communicatively intransmissible) and need to be projected externally by the hearer. Observational constructivism shares this presupposition with the Gricean approach. For this reason, Grice can give us a precise answer to the question of what kind of intentions a hearer must attribute to a speaker in order to make sense of his utterance. The central step in Grice's line of reasoning, the second one, holds that speaker's intentions have to be twofold and not primitive. None of the pre-Gricean philosophers and sociologists I discussed in Chapter 1 makes this important qualification. The hearer needs to observe the speaker as both (1) intending to signify proposition y by saying proposition x and (2) intending to signify y in virtue of the hearer's recognition of (1). The example of the intended plot illustrates the difference between intending only (1) and intending both (1) and (2). It would not be plausible to say that a hearer observes an utterance as signifying a plot just because she suspects the speaker of intending to execute his plot by means of his utterance. For obvious reasons, it is essential for plots not to be signified by utterances made vis-à-vis their victims. However, Grice denies us a general explanation why intending only (1) does not conform to our linguistic intuitions. Why exactly is intention (2) so vital? "Recognizing" an intention is a form of observation. Transposed into a hearer-centric model, condition (2) requires that the hearer satisfy condition (1) by selecting an intention that she can expect to be mutually expectable. In other words, condition (2) does not actually add a second intention to an already imputed first intention, as Grice seems inclined to think, but it constrains the original attribution of this first intention. Intentions have to be socially expectable in order to conform to (2). An intention to signify y by saying x must be such that its intendedness is a social matter of course. Thus, I rephrase Grice's condition (2) as follows: Utterance "meaning" comprises only intentions that can be expected to be mutual knowledge. In a hearercentric model, this condition entails that ego, the hearer, must not think that alter would be surprised upon learning that ego thinks he intended to signify y by saying x. How can ego satisfy this constraint? Making us ask this question is not the least achievement of Grice's early work, but its answer is outside its scope. Apart from a vague allusion to "context", Grice does not explain why the police officer who lifts his arm means to stop the driver and not to greet a friend. An adequate theoretical answer would address two points. First, the hearer must be able to decide whether a certain intention is likely to be mu-
104
tually expectable. Second, she must be able to pick the most plausible candidate of a set of intentions that all satisfy this condition. Both problems require a decision procedure as well as decision criteria. Assuming for the moment that a single procedure may work for all situations and that it is inborn, learnt in socialization or simply a matter of redundant, premise-driven inferencing, the question remains how ego obtains the criteria for this procedure. Analytically speaking, three different sources could be of relevance. 1. The utterance in question. Taken by itself, the original utterance does not convey criteria for either problem. Observed as an index of intentionality, this utterance opens the door to a world of interpretive possibilities, but it does not close this door at the same time. It would be inconsistent for ego to be both committed to taking the utterance as a license for second-order observation and committed to taking it as a criterion for overcoming the contingency induced by second-order observation. 2. General background knowledge. Ego's entire history of exposure to (interactive and non-interactive) irritations will have supplied her memory (or some observational equivalent, see 2.4) with information about the world and possibly about alter's mental organization (from beliefs to "personality"). This stock of knowledge is organized independent of the utterance in question but potentially relevant to its interpretation. Interestingly, Grice's later work on what he calls "conversational implicature" contains the scaffold for a general answer to the question of how background knowledge supplies ego with interpretation-guiding criteria. 3. Subsequent utterances. Although unavailable immediately after the utterance in question, subsequent utterances are an extremely important aid in disambiguating the informativeness of utterances. I will consider sequential disambiguation in Chapter 4. Since only cases 2 and 3 turn out to be actual sources of criteria, it is now necessary to turn to the first of them and investigate how background knowledge supplies ego's interpretation of alter's utterance with cues about relevant imputable intentions. In real-world dialogues, sources 2 and 3 are used together. Taken alone, source 2 cannot lead to an anticipatory equilibrium similar to Schelling's tacit coordination – an equilibrium that is established after one single step instead of zero steps. Background knowledge alone permits a good guess, but only alter's future utterances can reveal how good the guess actually was. These future utterances, on the other hand, must be able to presuppose that some form of disambiguation has already taken place, or else the problem of interpretation is postponed to infinity. Furthermore, the two sources interact, because subsequent utterances can and will
105
be anticipated in the selection as well as the interpretation of single utterances. Until Chapter 4, I will simply assume that the distinction between sources 2 and 3 continues to be analytically useful.
3.3 Understanding and background knowledge We encountered cases of applied "background knowledge" in several of the examples above. Already Schelling's story of the two parachutists presupposed shared background knowledge in propositions like: The two men know that they must meet at any price; they know what the territory looks like; and so forth. In the example of the police officer, the fact that this officer will be universally recognized as an officer (with an associated set of rules for adequate behavior) remained a tacit background assumption. In other cases, background knowledge was delegated to weasel words like "context" or "circumstances". The unifying principle behind such extremely heterogeneous forms of knowledge is that they are already available when a certain utterance (or any other utterance) is heard. Only in this sense do I suggest calling such propositions "background knowledge", not to suggest any hierarchical order. Given the conjectures of observational constructivism, to say that knowledge is "background" means that one or more observers have (more precisely: are observed by us as having) stored it and keep it available for inferencing. In other words, background knowledge consists of beliefs in the sense proposed in Section 2.4. By speaking of background knowledge instead of beliefs, I want to stress that the beliefs this section is about to consider are always functionally related to the processing of foreground knowledge (that is, explicit semantic information "conveyed" by an utterance). For the purposes pursued here, it is not necessary to discuss the different sources of background knowledge. It is clear that knowledge that, for instance, originated in previous dialogues of the same individuals (e.g., a married couple) has different effects on understanding than, say, knowledge that was imparted through socialization (e.g., the experience of growing up in a working class household).274 From the perspective of a theory of utterance understanding, all background knowledge is fundamentally alike in that it can aid the hearer in her interpretive efforts. For background assumptions to receive functional relevance, an observer's reconstruction of an observee's inferences must make use of them. 274 For strong views on the socially differentiating force of knowledge of this latter kind, see Bourdieu's discussion of "cultural capital" in Pierre Bourdieu, 1986, "The Forms of Capital", pp. 241-258 in John G. Richardson, Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood Press.
106
Of course, observers can use such assumptions in all cognitive tasks, but in this section, my only concern is their role in utterance creation. In this specific case, inferences combine background assumptions with the explicit semantic content of an utterance. Intuitively, background assumptions should aid the hearer in solving the two aforementioned aspects of the problem of discovering the underlying intentions of utterances. The hearer must both be able to decide whether a certain intention is likely to be mutually expectable and be able to pick the most plausible candidate of a set of intentions that all satisfy this condition. Once more, the works of Grice, if read from a sociological point of view, help us substantiate mere intuitions.
3.3.1 Interlude 2 – Grice on implicatures In a series of invited lectures in the late 1960s, Grice proposes a solution to what he considers a rather specific problem in philosophical semantics, that is, the interactive determination of implicit meanings.275 Yet although he claims to tackle only this specific problem, he departs from (tacit as well as open) premises that prove not only compatible with, but even constitutive of, observational constructivism. Grice's solution turns out to be a general theory of the application of background knowledge in utterance understanding. Similar to the division of labor made in Sections 3.2.2 and 3.2.3, this section will provide a detailed and comparatively immanent reconstruction of Grice's ideas, whereas the next section will attempt to merge them into the framework of a constructivist theory of dialogue. Again, the fit between Grice and the present approach will be surprisingly close. The most important of Grice's initial premises is his hearer-centric model of meaning determination. To be sure, I will not conceal that a slight tension between a speaker-centric, hearer-centric or mixed model reappears in Grice's work on implicit meaning. However, I will try to show that this tension can be resolved in the fashion I already applied above, that is, by prioritizing Grice's arguments for the hearer-centric model over his more implicit applications of other models. Similar to the case of "nonnatural meaning", Grice sees implicit meanings of utterances as chiefly determined through what the present treatise refers to as second-order observation. To understand how implicit meanings are calculated, Grice argues, we need to look at the social situation that provides them a stage as well as the individual inferences that reconstruct them. Again, questions of literal word and sentence meaning are outside Grice's scope. He begins his analysis by describing the social situation in which 275
Not all of these lectures seem to be published. For my purposes, the most relevant of them is H. Paul Grice, 1989 [1967], "Logic and Conversation", pp. 22-40 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
107
speaker and hearer find themselves as a system of social constraints on individual inferences. The key property of this situation, registered by the interlocutors as a substantial limitation of their range of possible actions, is its cooperative character. Both speaker and hearer observe their utterances as contributions to some common purpose. Although Grice phrases this "Cooperative Principle"276 as a normative condition, he leaves no doubt that only its social effects and not its origin are normative. Cooperativity does not have to be enforced by society. It follows from the formal structure of dialogue (Grice continues to use the term "conversation") itself. In absence of cooperativity, dialogue would consist of nothing but a "succession of disconnected remarks".277 In other words, there would be no social situation at all. In this perspective, even a fight counts as a highly cooperative enterprise.278 The net effect of the operation of the Cooperative Principle is that it licenses the mutual assumption that interlocutors orient themselves to each other by way of their contributions. Conversely, it excludes contributions that their authors believe not to be oriented toward other interlocutors. Incidentally, the ensuing, highly formal view of dialogue resembles Parsons' definition of social interaction (see Section 1.3). Social expectations (that is, expectations about alter's mental states) are seen as an integral part of the social situation and consequently incorporated into its theoretical definition. From a comparative point of view, the Cooperative Principle is just another version of Grice's older hypothesis that the hearer universally assumes that the speaker selects utterances according to mutually expectable intentions. However, Grice's proposal to disaggregate this principle into a set of universal background assumptions goes beyond his earlier analysis. These assumptions – Grice christens them "maxims" – are supposed to guide the interpretation of all interactive moves. Exactly how they aid in interpretation probably remains Grice's most original contribution to the theory of dialogue. Before I detail his solution, I will briefly reproduce his short list of maxims.279 1. The maxim of Quantity has two sides: Be as informative as the context of your utterance requires, but do not be more informative than that. 2. The maxim of Quality is paraphrased by the supermaxim: Try to speak the truth. It can be broken down into two aspects: Do not 276
Ibid, p. 26. Ibid. 278 In sociology, this insight is already classical, see especially Georg Simmel, 1992 [1908], Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Chapter IV. Akin to Grice, Simmel sees this counterintuitive conception of conflict as derivative of a "formal" analysis of social phenomena. 279 For the following, see Grice, "Logic and Conversation", p. 26f. It is important to keep in mind that Grice considers this classification tentative and incomplete. 277
108
knowingly speak untruth, and say only that for what you have sufficient evidence. 3. The maxim of Relation simply demands: Be relevant. 4. The maxim of Manner can again be paraphrased by a supermaxim: Be perspicuous. Grice mentions four aspects: Be clear, be unambiguous, be brief, and be orderly. Despite their normative formulation, these maxims are not rules of behavior but rules of interpretation.280 I suspect that Grice chose the term "maxim" as well as the normative phrasing for reasons of conciseness. Grice does not only assume that all of these maxims are routinely transgressed in dialogue, but discusses cases where they are (or seem to be) transgressed with special care. In fact, Grice mentions only in passing that the maxims can be smoothly followed, and he does not consider the dialogical consequences of this possibility any further. Operationally, Grice conceives of maxims as dialogical background expectations that trigger inferences when violated. In general, the speaker may be able to plan and the hearer may be able to observe transgressions, but the hearer does not necessarily register all cases where the speaker intends to violate a maxim. Tacitly transgressed maxims (e.g., in the case of lies) are dialogically irrelevant because they do not contribute to the hearer's interpretation of an utterance. In consequence, only overt violations of maxims281 affect how the hearer interprets an utterance. If the speaker flouts a maxim but anticipates that his transgression is observable, he is said to "exploit" the maxim and generate a "conversational implicature".282 In such situations, the speaker observes the Cooperative Principle although he transgresses some specific maxim.
280 Identical, "cognitive" interpretations of Grice's maxims are made by Stephen C. Levinson, 1983, Pragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, p. 250f, Allen D. Grimshaw, 1987, "Disambiguating Discourse: Members' Skill and Analysts' Problem", Social Psychology Quarterly 50: 186-204, p. 194, Denis J. Hilton, 1995, "The Social Context of Reasoning: Conversational Inference and Rational Judgment", Psychological Bulletin 118: 248-271, Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra, 2000, Interaction and the Standardized Survey Interview: The Living Questionnaire, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, p. 63. Other authors misinterpret Grice's maxims as social or even ethical norms, e.g., Aaron V. Cicourel, 1981, "The Role of Cognitive-Linguistic Concepts in Understanding Everyday Social Interactions", Annual Review of Sociology 7: 87-106, p. 99, Erving Goffman, 1983, "Felicity's Condition", American Journal of Sociology 89: 1-53, p. 25f, Hans-Peter Mai, Fritz Strack, and Norbert Schwarz, 1991, "Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Part-Whole Question Sequences: A Conversational Logic Analysis", Public Opinion Quarterly 55: 3-23, p. 5. Especially among social scientists, this fundamental misinterpretation is often the key obstacle to an appreciation of the Gricean framework. 281 In these cases, Grice speaks of the maxim being "flouted", see Grice, "Logic and Conversation", p. 30. 282 Ibid.
109
"Conversational implicature" and its associated verb, "to conversationally implicate", are neologisms Grice introduces in order to refer to utteranceinduced inferences and the triggering of such inferences, respectively. Besides conversational implicatures, Grice suggests that there are also conventional implicatures, which comprise inferences routinely triggered by the code values of signifiers (e.g., the standard connotations of metaphors or idiomatic expressions).283 Regarding their relationship to additional background knowledge, conversational implicatures can be broken down into two subtypes: generalized and particularized conversational implicatures. Generalized conversational implicatures, only hinted at by Grice, have received careful attention in recent psycholinguistic studies.284 Similar to fundamental syntactic and semantic processing, such implicatures are automatically (hence expectably) triggered by utterances. In contrast to these, they proceed independent of the syntactic structure of utterances; in contrast to other types of conversational inferences, they are insensitive to their immediate linguistic context (i.e., prior utterances).285 It is convenient to introduce generalized conversational implicatures by way of example. Consider the sentence, "Some guests have already left the party." Here, an inference that is both independent of the details of syntactic construction286 and of linguistic context information would be: "So far, not all guests have left the party." This inference rests on the assumption that the speaker obeys the Cooperative Principle and is concise (compare the "Maxim of Quantity"). If he knew that all guests already left the party, his utterance would not be as informative as it could be. However, it does not presuppose knowledge of prior utterances during the encounter. In sum, although the hearer must infer generalized conversational implicatures and, thus, go beyond immediately given information, they still form part of the "standard" content of utterances, to use Grice's term. They depend on second-order observation, but only in a standardized way, independent of the specific context of the dialogue. The only form of background knowledge that generalized conversational implicatures presuppose is Grice's set of universal maxims. Since these are expectably available to the hearer,287 the speaker can use them reliably to
283
Ibid, p. 25. Most significantly by Levinson, Presumptive Meanings. It may be added that Levinson is a former student of Grice. 285 As a result, generalized conversational implicatures can be activated by all phrases that a hearer or reader observes as selected intentionally, not just phrases uttered in the specific sociolinguistic context of dialogue. 286 Levinson demonstrates this independence by showing that identical inferences will be drawn if such English sentences are translated to languages that work with entirely different syntactic constructions, like Tamil or Finnish; see Levinson, Presumptive Meanings, passim. 287 Brown and Levinson, Politeness, p. 13ff, argue forcefully (with an argument similar to Hollis, see Section 1.1 above) that they are not culturally relative. Even if specific standards 284
110
convey implicit information. In the example above, the speaker can apply the utterance, "Some guests have already left the party", in order to implicate that some guests are still there. However, insensitivity to context renders such implicatures relatively inflexible. If the speaker does not mean to implicate that some guests are still at the party, he will have to utter a different phrase. Particularized conversational implicatures, on the other hand, are triggered in virtue of additional – and often very concrete, hence "particular" – background knowledge.288 They arise when an utterance violates one or more maxims at a superficial level (i.e., upon first hearing it) and the hearer is able to recall or generate a background assumption that allows her to assign the utterance some implicit information that does not contradict this maxim. This implicit information is what Grice calls a conversational implicature. I will outline its dependence on a suitable background assumption in more precise terms. Logically, the hearer's search for such an additional assumption is a search from a given conclusion ("The speaker means to be cooperative") to missing premises (guided by the question: "What do I have to assume to arrive at this conclusion"). It is, therefore, a logically underdetermined "abductive"289 search, and any search of this kind can be satisfied by an infinite amount of different premises. Thus, the hearer must pick what she considers the most plausible or parsimonious premise. The entire inference procedure operates in two stages and bears some affinity to nonmonotonic logic (see Section 2.4). The first, superficial attempt at interpreting the utterance suggests that a maxim is being violated. The second, deeper and more exacting attempt at interpreting the utterance produces an additional premise that allows the hearer to substitute this result with the conclusion that the maxim has only been exploited to generate an implicature. A few examples of what Grice would consider particularized conversational implicatures will help illustrate this concept. Each example suggests a
of informativeness, clarity etc. vary strongly between cultures and groups, every culture/group is likely to have some idea of what constitutes unclear, uninformative etc. contributions. 288 They are the primary field of interest of Grice's later work, see H. Paul Grice, 1981, "Presupposition and Conversational Implicatures", pp. 183-198 in Peter Cole, Radical Pragmatics, London/New York: Academic Press, Grice, "Reply to Richards", H. Paul Grice, 1989 [1987], "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation", pp. 41-57 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, H. Paul Grice, 1989 [1987], "Retrospective Epilogue", pp. 339-385 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 289 Grice does not use this term or explain the logical details of implicature. However, abduction – that is, search for premises that entail a given conclusion if applied to a set of given inference rules – seems to be a precise term for the underlying procedure. For a related account of inferencing in dialogue, see Gumperz, "Mutual Inferencing in Conversation", p. 118ff.
111
possible conversational implicature of an otherwise surprising utterance. In each case, dialogue is the immediate social context of this utterance. 1. "New York is New York." • Superficially, this utterance seems to violate the Maxim of Quantity (tautologies are devoid of information). • But together with the background assumption, "If an object is famous and unique, attempts at describing it may prove redundant or meet rejections", the hearer can assign the speaker an intention to trigger the implicature, "New York is famous, unique and does not require further descriptions". 2. "Your new sable fur looks as if you skinned these sables yourself." • Superficially, this utterance seems to violate the Maxim of Quality (nowadays furs are made industrially). • But together with the background assumption, "Attempts to produce complex objects by hand often result in an aesthetic disaster", the hearer can assign the speaker an intention to trigger the implicature, "Your sable fur is ugly." 3. "The weather is lovely today, isn't it?" • Superficially, this utterance seems to violate the Maxim of Relation (the speaker was just asked a personal question). • But together with the background assumption, "It is impolite to rebuff personal questions directly", the hearer can assign the speaker an intention to trigger the implicature, "I prefer not to answer this personal question." 4. "You are not just clever, you are, if I may do you the honor to say so, and if you are willing to do me the honor to admit that you would hardly want to believe me if I used a less wordy expression, almost smart." • Superficially, this utterance seems to violate the Maxim of Manner (it is long and contorted). • But together with the background assumption, "Observably contorted expressions are sometimes meant ironically", the hearer can assign the speaker an intention to trigger the implicature, "You are not at all clever." Whereas Grice's early publications on "implicature" remain slightly ambiguous with respect to the question of whether the speaker generates or the hearer imputes an implicature, his (presumably) last words on the subject leave no doubt that implicatures have a purely attributed existence. They
112
lead to Grice's most precise definition of "implicature" and deserve a full quote. I have suggested a provisional account of a kind of nonconventional implicature, namely a conversational implicature; what is implicated is what is required that one assume a speaker to think in order to preserve the assumption that he is observing the Cooperative Principle (and perhaps some conversational maxims as well), if not at the level of what is said, at least at the level of what is implicated.290
Largely, the philosophical and linguistic discourse on implicature has failed to recognize Grice's choice of a hearer-centric model as well as the underlying reasons of his choice.291 A well-known and influential exception is Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson, which draws explicitly on Grice and claims to generalize his model to a cognitive theory of communication.292 This theory acknowledges that a hearer is left to her own devices in calculating the implicated meaning of a superficially surprising utterance. According to its main authors, the principal problem this hearer needs to solve (and the theory needs to account for) is to select one of possibly many and contradicting candidates. Sperber and Wilson claim that the hearer is routinely able to solve this task because it is, in fact, much simpler than Grice believes. Grice's open set of maxims, they hold, can be condensed into a single maxim, the Maxim of Relevance, which the hearer satisfies by way of finding a maximally relevant implicature. However, despite its mathematical neatness (blessed be the metaphorical value of calculus), quantitative maximization is, as always in psychological models of reasoning, a makeshift solution. "Maximizing relevance" is not only cognitively straining and, thus, psychologically implausible,293 it is, in essence, a mere encryption of the unsurprising postulate that selection is taking place. 290
Grice, "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions", p. 86, emphasis added. Interestingly, this definition is missing in the original publication of this paper from 1969. Either Grice changed his mind or he considered this aspect of his theory sufficiently often misunderstood and, thus, in need of authoritative clarification. A similar hearer-centric definition is given in Grice, "Retrospective Epilogue", p. 370. 291 Prominent examples include Geoffrey Leech, 1983, Principles of Pragmatics, London/New York: Longman, Jacob L. Mey, 1993, Pragmatics: An Introduction, London: Blackwell, Kent Bach, 1994, "Conversational Impliciture", Mind and Language 9: 124-162, Wayne A. Davis, 1998, Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle in the Failure of Gricean Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 292 On the following, see Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, 1995, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2 ed., Oxford: Blackwell. For a critical defense of Grice against Sperber and Wilson's revision, see Stephen C. Levinson, 1989, "A Review of Relevance (Review of Sperber/Wilson, Relevance)", Journal of Linguistics 25: 455-472. 293 See again the solid criticism of Subjectively Expected Utility-theory offered by Gigerenzer and Todd, Simple Heuristics, as well as my own comments in Reich, "Heuristics as Plausible Models of Rationality?"
113
Taking the logical model of observed inferencing introduced in Section 2.4 as a basis, I would like to propose a more general, yet less subsuming criterion: consistency. The hearer uses this criterion to select plausible implicatures. Although (imputed) beliefs-systems are certainly too complex to be always fully consistent, the most plausible candidate for an implicature is the one that harmonizes the most pressing background assumptions with the literal information conveyed by an utterance. This coherentist solution draws its credibility from the fact that implicatures themselves are devices for transforming inconsistency into consistency. In consequence, imputing an implicature would not be a quantitative but a qualitative, logical task. The coherentist conception of implicature generation will now have to be investigated in detail.
3.3.2 Inferential normalization Thanks to Grice, we can now complete the constructivist model of utterance understanding. To provide a brief reminder, the constructivist point of departure of this model (Sections 2.3-2.4) holds that observers are practical functionalists and reconstruct each other's mental operations in terms of irritations, inferences and expressions. Beliefs, emotions, expectations, and other attributable states are different types of premises for, or constraints on, inferences carried out by an observee. Inferences proceed rationally, that is, they transform given states (e.g., beliefs) into further states (e.g., intentions) without adding new information. Grice provides the missing link for the application of this model to the more specific problem of interpreting utterances. Here, interpretation proceeds from "outside" to "inside", namely, by observing utterances as actions that are caused by intentions. Grice answers the question of how ego imputes intentions in the common case where she is able to attribute alter a wealth of background states (e.g., beliefs). Grice's ingenious solution holds that ego discriminates among imputable intentions by asking how or to what extent each candidate intention is able to harmonize the conventionally decodable content of the utterance with a small set of prioritized, universal and nonsuspendable background suppositions. Grice refers to them as maxims, but a sociological generalization of his theory will do better in calling them normal expectations, thereby avoiding the risk that maxims will be confounded with social norms. These expectations permit the hearer to apply inferences in order to normalize an otherwise surprising utterance. Within a constructivist adaptation of Grice's model, ego's initial observation that some normal expectation has been "violated" is unveiled as a way of making alter responsible for an inconsistency between her first-order observations (i.e., observations of the literal information conveyed by an utterance) and her second-
114
order observations (i.e., observations of alter's putative mental states). This allocation of responsibility is essential because it allows ego to ask what reasons alter may have for producing this overt inconsistency. Answering this question permits ego to preserve the presumption that alter organizes his inferences redundantly and is, therefore, rational. However, the price she pays for the resulting normalization of his utterance is that she must retransfer the burden of inconsistency from alter to herself. She needs to impute him some intention to inform her that permits her to suppose that he has only superficially, but not actually, been inconsistent.294 Curious as this procedure of calculated self-contradiction may seem, once it is expectably shared among all members of a population, it is, in fact, a logically very efficient method of using a limited number of shared normal expectations to generate an almost infinite array of communicable propositions. Despite the small bandwidth of dialogue,295 this social form can develop exceedingly complex courses of action – courses all of us experience in day-to-day dialogues. Not all utterances violate normal expectations at a surface level and require inferential normalization. Nevertheless, normal expectations guide imputations in these cases as well. Those expectations that are consistent with the explicit content of the utterance and ego's background knowledge define the implicit information of the utterance. Ego can assume that alter accepts that she will impute him the standard intentions his utterance makes relevant: for instance, the intention to greet by saying "Hello!", the intention to make a factual contribution to a discussion by saying "I think you really got a point there because…", the intention to give advice by saying "From my own experience, I can tell you…", and so forth. Whether violated or not, normal expectations permit the hearer to organize her background knowledge insofar as they provide her interpretations with criteria for searching for matching background assumptions. In consequence, such assumptions turn out to be implicitly categorized with respect to the normal expectations they are able to support as well as the surprising utterances they are able to explain. Taken together, normal expectations and utterances are selectors of background assumptions and compartmentalize ego's stock of assumptions accordingly. Since alter's mental states lead a purely attributed life (which does not exempt ego from having to take them as real), the organization of attributions relative to normal expectations may sometimes overrule their organization relative to types of mental states. For instance, it is often pointless for ego to ask whether some observed mental
294
Compare Wittgenstein's brief but compatible remarks on the relationship between consistency and understanding in Wittgenstein, PU/PI, §206. 295 Levinson, Presumptive Meanings, p. 6.
115
state "is" believed or felt, or whether thoughts always dominate feelings or vice versa.296 The post-Gricean discourse on implicatures has paid vast attention to two related problems: How many universal maxims are there, and is Grice's choice of maxims altogether tenable?297 We may reopen this debate in virtue of our improved knowledge of the socio-cognitive role of normal expectations. Since normal expectations comprise the (finite) set of those background assumptions that are inferentially protected against interpretations of utterances that could contradict them, the guiding question of this debate should be whether Grice's set is an exhaustive description of such assumptions. It seems rather obvious that his proposal cannot be complete. Grice's maxims appear to encompass more or less exhaustively the formal parameters of utterances: length, degree of informativeness, syntactic clarity, among others. Because such parameters are observable in any utterance, it is likely that every culture has some conception of what is within limits and what is not, no matter how strongly these limits vary cross-culturally. However, many standards of normality do not pertain to the formal properties of utterances, but to other fields. Most importantly, the maxims give an incomplete account of social standards of normality. Many social standards may not be implemented by all societies, but at least in Western societies there are rather specific expectations regarding presentation of self, politeness298 or degree of personal involvement.299 As long as the hearer takes such standards to be universal, they fulfill the same task as Grice's conversational maxims. The Maxim of Relevance may cover some of them, but it is too vague and general, thus hardly a plausible candidate for a normal expectation that actual interlocutors routinely use.
3.3.3 Attributing mental states beyond intentions and beliefs Attributed intentions and beliefs are helpful in interpreting many utterances, but much of the normalization real-world interlocutors appear to perform draws on additional states. Beliefs and intentions have observational alternatives, a condition implying that their attribution may be substitutable for at296 For a famous exchange of punches in this debate, see again Zajonc, "On the Primacy of Affect", Lazarus, "On the Primacy of Cognition". 297 The opinions range from Leech, Principles of Pragmatics, Chapter 6 and passim, who believes that many more maxims exist, to Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, who reject all but one. 298 Independent of Brown's and Levinson's plausible hypothesis that politeness as such is universal; cf. Goffman, "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor", Brown and Levinson, Politeness. 299 Erving Goffman, 1963, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, p. 33ff.
116
tributions of different mental features. In the case of intentions, the two alternatives I discussed in Section 2.3 were habits and drives. In contrast to intentions, which create a direct (point-to-point) linkage between a worldly state or event and a mental state, habits as well as drives generalize internalto-external respecifications. A drive causes behavior because it is a deepseated, multi-functional and autonomous force, whereas a habit does so because alter conditioned himself to behave identical to preceding behavior. Both constructs have a noteworthy limitation: They generate behavior selfsufficiently, thus blocking any form of rationalization of alter's utterance. It is difficult to combine them with attributions of beliefs and inferences, which makes them too primitive to explain utterances. For instance, attributing "libido" cannot explain why alter said, "May I invite you for a drink", instead of just taking down his pants. By the same token, the meaning of alter's, "Good morning, honey, can I make you a coffee?" is hardly determined exhaustively by the explanation that he utters this phrase every morning. It seems that both drives and habits gain interactive relevance only through thematization – for instance, in disputes, in gossip or in psychotherapy. To the more basic problem of utterance understanding, intentions remain indispensable. In contrast to intentions, beliefs are smoothly substitutable and/or supplementable by several attributive types. I will confine myself to a discussion of preferences, emotions, personality and attitudes. As selection criteria, preferences (i.e., motives, desires, interests, tastes and values) combine well with other mental states. In utterance normalization, motives can serve as ultimate causal reasons behind the generation of intentions. They reduce the complexity of observational data to a single plan. For instance, the shop assistant's compliment, "This scarf looks so nice on you", shrinks to the motive of selling. The reconstructible intention to make a compliment combines with an underlying motive and allows ego to attribute beliefs that turn alter's intention into the result of a redundant inference (e.g., "I want the customer to buy this scarf", "I believe the customer may buy what she likes", "I believe the customer may like what she gets compliments for", "I should make her a compliment"). Since the degree of concreteness or abstraction of a given motive depends on the inferences it must make redundant, it becomes clear why the notion of "motive" does not contain an intrinsic association with either side.300 The same is true of desires and tastes. They, too, can be very fine-grained ("Alter wants/likes apple-pie") or abstract ("Alter wants/likes food"). The distinctive quality of desires and tastes lies in their close tie to the generalized "well-being" of the other as an organism. In consequence, they are imputable on the basis of a universal conception of hu300
Which is a feature a non-constructivist conception of motives would be unable to explain.
117
man nature. If ego believes (or considers it useful to assume) that whatever men do is derivative of their desire to control others, an utterance like, "Please, let me open the door for you", uttered by a male, becomes a direct confirmation of this urge. Conversely, and similar to the observational fate of habits and drives, desires sometimes have too much explanatory power, leaving the details and the circumstances of certain utterances incomprehensible. Furthermore, desires allow only extremely schematic consideration of alter's anticipation of ego's presumable understanding of his utterance. If ego attributes desires at all, she will often have to assign them an indirect role, such as the role of motivating an intention or an attitude. Next, interests are an institutionalized means of reconciling desires with rational anticipations. They refer to expectable preferences for states-of-the-world (e.g., acquiring a stock or passing a law) that derive logically from expectable, socially standardized desires (e.g., material wealth). Since interests can be assumed to be cultivated and followed by others, observers are entitled to deduce their presence from states of the world. For this reason, ego can use her sociocultural knowledge of interests to disambiguate an utterance. For instance, instead of interpreting alter's statement, "I would be pleased if you could come to my vernissage" as a generous offer, she may take for granted that alter has an interest in having his work reviewed by the magazine she edits. Finally, values refer to highly abstract, non-negotiable, pro-social, temporally stable and expectably shared preferences. They express commitment to socio-culturally ratified standards of acting, believing and desiring, and are, therefore, very sensitive to cultural variation. If ego has reason to believe that alter may be sufficiently committed to a certain set of values, she can apply these in order to explain utterances that observably disappoint either her or alter himself. Thus, values permit ego to understand an utterance in virtue of an underlying conflict of preferences. For instance, if alter concludes a tête-à-tête in an expensive restaurant with the statement, "Now, please let me take care of that bill", ego can reduce the implicit content of this utterance to alter's gentlemanlike values in spite of an equally attributable, but momentarily irrelevant, interest in maximizing monetary outcomes. Personality and emotions are two other attribution types that serve to subsume the unity of an observee. In contrast to emotions, personality is expected to be situationally invariant. This means that, similar to the case of habits, attributions of personality are easily disappointed by sequences of observations. If they are used, they are likely to have a relatively indirect role in utterance understanding, such as motivating a specific belief. For instance, if the utterance, "You cannot expect me to accept a takeover bid, this company was founded by my grandfather", is made by a "calculating" person, ego may rationalize it by imputing this person the belief that he can make ego come up with a higher bid. Emotions, on the other hand, are
118
changeable and can be attributed flexibly. Furthermore, their subsuming quality and their antagonistic relationship to "reason"301 do not hamper their observational usefulness. In contrast to drives, desires or values, they do not prescribe specific courses of behavior. They are behaviorally relatively inconsequential, modifying the general "state" alter is in but leaving him without a clear path for reestablishing normality.302 For this reason, they are able to coexist with other mental states, either by allying with them, or by thwarting them, or by being thwarted (but not erased) by them. For example, ego can identify alter's question, "Are you going to drive carefully?" as rhetorical if she observes him as fearing that she will get hurt together with believing that careless driving causes accidents. A second dialogically relevant feature of emotions is their incomplete controllability. Emotions are conceived of as bypassing consciousness, thereby leaving unmediated interactive fingerprints through the nonverbal (suprasegmental, physiognomic or gestural) cues303 that every member of a society (or, in some cases, humankind) understands as their indicators. On the other hand, such cues reveal little about alter's informative intention. The implicit content of his utterance, selected in virtue of his anticipation of ego's presumable understanding, remains to be reconstructed. Since emotions combine smoothly with other mental states, this limitation does not impede their general applicability. Attitudes come into play as short cuts between preferences and intentions. Unlike emotions, attitudes do have direct behavioral relevance. They entail a "readiness" to act or respond,304 thus potentially accounting for some of the information conveyed through behavior. Once more, this unmediated behavioral consequentiality limits their role in normalizing utterance interpretations. For instance, the proclamation, "President Bush will help us bringing faith back into schools", could be observed as an expression of a conservative religious attitude, but this observation would not elucidate what informative effect alter wants to bring about here and now (e.g., rebuff, persuade or ridicule). Like emotions, personality, drives and habits, attitude imputations remain confined to background subsumptions of alter's entire "state" – a limited but important function in utterance understanding.
301
On the opposition between feeling and thinking, see Ronald de Sousa, 1990, The Rationality of Emotion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 195, who suggests defining emotions functionally as "gap fillers" of "pure reason". 302 I dare to make the conjecture that the cognitive and behavioral inconsequentiality of emotions partly accounts for their current sociological popularity. Not only can the discipline feel reassured that it does not ignore man's "irrational" side, but emotions also leave sufficient ambiguity for rich scientific allegements. 303 See already Jones and Nisbett, "The Actor and the Observer", p. 84. 304 To cite Mead's pragmatistic definition of "attitude"; see George Herbert Mead, 1910, "Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning", Psychological Bulletin 7: 397-405, p. 399.
119
It needs to be mentioned that normalizing inferences are free to proceed from expressions via inner states all the way back to irritations. I will confine the discussion of irritations to perceptions, attention and expectations. Perceptions are the primitive and direct results of external events, mediated by one of the (expectably universal) six senses. The observation that alter perceived an event does not reveal anything new about his internal organization, but it does specify the situation he is/was in and consequently some of the information he can be expected to possess. If the event was indexical (ego and alter were knowingly copresent while it happened), alter can also be expected to expect to be expected to possess this information. In this case, ego may test whether this shared knowledge helps in determining the implicit or even the explicit content of alter's utterance (the latter being necessary for anaphora resolution). Second, attention refers to the capacity to consciously or unconsciously suspend and restore irritability. Its attribution is useful for framing alter's relationship to a potentially perceivable event as contingent. It thereby permits upholding attributions of perceptions despite contradictory information. If alter makes a surprising – but not intentionally normalizable – utterance (e.g., standing below the hands of Big Ben he asks, "What time is it?"), ego can sometimes rationalize it by assuming that he is currently inattentive to his surroundings. Third, expectations make an exhaustive distinction between two mutually exclusive irritations and bind a belief or a preference to one of them. Expectations are generally needed for describing the conditions under which an observee is going to be disappointed by events in his environment. Because such events can include utterances, expectations play an extremely important role in utterance production and comprehension. They allow ego to explain alter's informative intention in terms of a wish to have it observably accepted by ego's response. Chapter 4 will discuss the details of this inference. Three conclusions emerge from the preceding examination of attributions beyond intentions and beliefs. First, while Chapter 2 was forced to treat all attributive constructs as observationally equivalent, we are now dealing with an observer who is able to select useful and dismiss useless attributions. The purpose of utterance understanding permits ego to decide which form of irritability, which inner states and which forms of expressivity she needs to attribute. This purpose generates criteria (=constraints) that exclude some attributions (e.g., a mere habit of babbling) and make others central. In Gricean understanding, each attempt at inferring the implicit content of an utterance by means of its explicit content and self-supplemented background knowledge begins with a search for a normalized (non-surprising) informative intention. Thus, additional mental states need only be considered insofar as they guide this search. This constraint applies again with every new state ego attributes, since each ascription introduces further constraints. For in-
120
stance, once ego has decided to "frame"305 alter's statement as a compliment by way of attributing him the desire to please her, she does not necessarily have to consider other attributable states anymore. In this way, understanding becomes a process of gradual inferential self-constrainment, stoppable once a sufficiently disambiguated intention has been found and its consistency with relevant attributions of other states verified. Because it is largely irrelevant to utterance understanding, the complete inner organization of the observee, whether psychologically reconstructible or not, does not have to be reconstructed. Second, it becomes clear why intentions and beliefs alone are frequently insufficient for the purpose of understanding. Intentions establish point-topoint correspondences between events outside and states inside alter, whereas beliefs are primitive, discrete premises of inferences. Both constructs are maximally fine-grained, which entails that they are immediately applicable in abductive search but unable to describe their bearer as a mental unity. However, second-order observation defines an observee automatically as an integrated whole (see Section 2.1), which makes descriptors of this unit relevant to understanding. Desires, some forms of motives, personality, emotions and attitudes are such descriptors. With the exception of attitudes, their attribution cannot determine the implicit information conveyed by an utterance. On the other hand, their attribution entails maximum clarity. An emotion or a personality type defines another person almost exhaustively and can serve as a guideline for the exclusion of otherwise attributable intentions and beliefs. For example, a happy person is unlikely to produce a sarcastic statement, whereas a greedy personality would never come up with a generous offer. Third, remaining ambiguities are resolved via two additional sources of constraints: subsequent utterances (to be discussed in the next chapter) and social standardizations of the meaning, applicability and relevance of attributive types. Utterance understanding leaves plenty of room for social codification and institutionalization of attributions. To be relevant to utterance understanding, such standardizations have to become part of alter's expectable background knowledge (compare source number 2 in Section 3.2.3). On the one hand, they operate on the surface of the utterance, that is, they encode or institutionalize implications and implicatures of its explicitly conveyed information. For example, idiomatic hedges like "I believe" or "I feel" invite attributions of corresponding mental states, nonverbal cues trigger attributions of certain emotions (see above), and in some cases the "definition of the situation" as a whole tells ego what informative intentions she can expect (e.g., a sermon communicates moral advice and criticism, whereas a 305 In Goffman's sense of "frame", i.e., a "definition of the situation" that helps to interpret actions, see Goffman, Frame Analysis.
121
celebrity interview conveys personal information). On the other hand, social standardizations also establish path-dependence between mental states, which thereby guides ego's progressive search for the main informative intention. For instance, someone with a kindhearted personality is expected to cherish a belief in the good nature of other beings, whereas a progressive political attitude typically implies some fundamental knowledge about cleavages in society and a desire or motivation to mend them.
3.4 Producing utterances To sum up, utterance interpretation is a specific form of observation a hearer carries out in response to a decodable irritation. It consists principally of attributing the irritation causally to a speaker and imputing him some underlying informative intention (plus necessary additional states) that is consistent with the most relevant items of the hearer's (existing or inferable) background knowledge. Because dialogue requires understanding as much as uttering, this section takes a closer look at utterance production and its relationship to utterance understanding. In accordance with the sociocognitive orientation of the argument so far, I underscore once more that I see uttering as an observational and not as a "pragmatic" problem. A speaker does not produce actions but behavior, and deciding what kind of behavior to select is a cognitive task.306 In consequence of this orientation, uttering must be conceived of as essentially derivative of understanding.307 The problem of the speaker is to anticipate how the hearer will understand his utterance, and this requires anticipating what intentions the hearer will attribute him upon taking notice of the utterance. 306 This emphasis may be contrasted to the literature on "accounts", which displays a speechact-theoretical bent, see Marvin B. Scott and Stanford M. Lyman, 1968, "Accounts", American Sociological Review 33: 46-62, Terri L. Orbuch, 1997, "People's Accounts Count: The Sociology of Accounts", Annual Review of Sociology 23: 455-478. In the framework of Scott and Lyman, the speaker determines the interactive status of an "account" autonomously. In consequence, the authors do not discuss the interactive co-construction of accounts. Instead, they provide classifications of account types (i.e., excuses and justifications), accountavoidance types, "linguistic styles" etc. – in short, ad hoc classifications that speech act theorists never seem to become tired of producing. I am grateful to Jim Kemeny for drawing my attention to the literature on accounts. 307 Starting from different premises, Luhmann arrives at a similar conclusion; see Luhmann, "Systeme verstehen Systeme", p. 94f. Klaus Gilgenmann, 1997, "Kommunikation - ein Reißverschlußmodell", Soziale Systeme 3: 33-56, p. 40, rejects this conclusion as one-sided. The socio-cognitive approach corroborates Gilgenmann's objection because the asymmetry between understanding and uttering is itself conceived as symmetrical – after all, the problem of the hearer is to anticipate how the speaker will anticipate her understanding. I repeat that the infinite regress implicit in this interdependence vanishes once we grant that inferences take time and are constrained to finish in finite time.
122
Other things being equal, the speaker will be able to solve this problem if the hearer observes him according to the logic of understanding outlined in Sections 3.2 and 3.3. Because this logic has the important property of being anticipatable, the speaker can assume that the if-clause of the preceding sentence denotes a viable working hypothesis. More precisely, the logic of understanding • attributes the utterance to the interlocutor to whom it is most plausibly attributed (recall Constraint 1 from Section 3.1), • reconstructs the unobservable mind of this interlocutor in obedience to the principle of observational equivalence, • applies an inference procedure that would be carried out by any observer who organizes her background assumptions hierarchically, wants to keep them consistent and tries to preserve the validity of her most central assumptions, • and relies exclusively on socially shared data, namely, conventionally decodable information and socially/culturally shared normal expectations. It needs to be mentioned that this last condition sometimes has to be qualified. Independent of the fact that interlocutors generally have to assume to be able to observe each other's mental states and events,308 interlocutors will hardly ever expect full congruence between their own and co-participants' systems of background knowledge. Furthermore, if the last condition does not hold, this condition may sometimes be mutually expectable. If incongruences are "open secrets"309 – say, ego and alter negotiate but keep their respective bidding limits confidential – speaker and hearer mutually know that the speaker has to be particularly cautious and avoid disclosing strategic information. The fact that the speaker prepares utterances by anticipating how he will be understood can be interpreted in two different yet complimentary ways. On the structural side, it leads to shared knowledge. On the side of the individual, it grants the speaker the opportunity to exert control over the hearer. The remainder of this section will discuss these two issues separately.
3.4.1 Sharing knowledge through utterances The procedure of utterance understanding does not violate the axiom that mental states are socially unobservable. Nonetheless, it allows interlocutors to share certain forms of knowledge in response to utterances. Figure 1 illustrates how and at what stages of the cognitive procedure of utterance inter-
308 309
Compare Husserl's "general thesis of the natural attitude", Husserl, Ideen 1, §30. In the sense of Simmel, Soziologie, Chapter V.
123
utters utterance anticipates 1. observed event 2. decodable content 3. assumptions about hearer's assumptions about speaker's intentions
Speaker
hears
= = =
1. observed event 2. decodable content 3. assumptions about speaker's intentions
Hearer
Figure 1: Sharing knowledge through utterances pretation the simultaneity of speaking and hearing results in shared assumptions. In Stage310 1 on both the speaker-side and the hearer-side of Figure 1, a speaker anticipates and a hearer responds to an utterance. The acoustic irritability of interlocutors ensures that all of them are likely to notice the utterance independently but synchronously. However, at this stage, comparisons of the cognitive results of the irritation are impossible because there exists no objective representation of the object of comparison. In Stage 2, socially shared code systems, which Section 3.2.1 mentioned as a prerequisite for comparing mental states distributed over a set of observers, guarantee that interlocutors decode the literal information conveyed by the utterance automatically and identically. This information is a socially determined cognitive abstraction and, thus, independent of specific representations. In consequence, the utterance turns out to establish a rudimentary form of correspondence between mental states of different interlocutors. In Stage 3, the rather schematic but anticipatable procedure of utterance understanding takes explicit information as input, processes it by drawing on equally inflexible but shared normal expectations, and produces second-order assumptions (i.e., assumptions about other interlocutors' assumptions). I do not claim that the density of real-world dialogue exhausts itself in these three stages, but I maintain that additional sources of order, if they exist, must take the form of
310
The distinction of "stages" should be understood logically, not temporally.
124
anticipatable constraints on the procedure of inferencing that comprises Stage 3.311 An utterance will lead hearer and speaker to expectably identical interpretations according to these steps if the aforementioned conditions of anticipatability are met. Provided that inferences from explicit to implicit information are always carried out according to the (reinterpreted) Gricean model, the only remaining contingency is shared background knowledge. Most importantly, participants' sets of normal expectations need to be identical or almost identical. For instance, if a hearer fails to be surprised by ostentatious lies, the speaker will be unable to display irony. Likewise, if a hearer thinks that any sentence of more than three words is overly long, the speaker may surprise this hearer unintentionally. As mentioned before, this limits the amount of "cross-cultural variation" that dialogue tolerates – in general, interlocutors must share their normal expectations.312 On the other hand, more specific forms of background knowledge need not always be shared. For instance, threatening phone calls "normally" (as abnormal as they are) require strangers to understand subtle allusions, but an empirical study of this genre shows that this requirement does not hamper such conversations.313 As long as the speaker can reliably suppose that the hearer shares his normal expectations, many misunderstandings are, in principle, avoidable.
3.4.2 Uttering exerts "control through observability" On the side of the individual, the fact that utterance understanding is anticipatable self-constrainment permits a speaker to convey information about his mental states by means of producing an utterance. Although no such information is actually transmitted between speaker and hearer,314 the effect of
311
Levinson's generalized conversational implicatures (Section 3.3.1) can be interpreted as one such source that may have been marginalized in the preceding discussion, and others could appear. 312 See again the empirical studies of failed cross-cultural conversations in Gumperz, Discourse Strategies, John J. Gumperz, 1992, "Contextualization and Understanding", pp. 229252 in Charles Goodwin and Alessandro Duranti, Rethinking Context, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 313 See Viveka Adelswärd and Per Linell, 1994, "Vagueness as an Interactional Resource: The Genre of Threatening Phone Calls", pp. 261-288 in Walter M. Sprondel, Die Objektivität der Ordnungen und ihre kommunikative Konstruktion (Festschrift für Thomas Luckmann), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, an interesting analysis of rare material. At first sight, the recorded conversations display many misunderstandings, but it is important to observe that almost all of them are resolved through additional turns. Some of the threats require some time to be understood, but in the end, they are understood. 314 "[…] thoughts do not travel", Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p. 1.
125
this possibility is that the speaker has power315 over the second-order assumptions the hearer produces in response to his utterances. Viewed causally, utterance comprehension results in partial surrender to external selections. It makes the hearer conditionable by the speaker. Undeniably, the form of control a speaker thereby exerts has comparatively intricate sociocognitive and socio-structural prerequisites. Furthermore, it is error-prone – misunderstandings remain possible and may sometimes go undiscovered. Nevertheless, in all or most societies, control by uttering works sufficiently well to give everyday subjects (as well as some scientists) the idea that dialogue consists of a sequence of causal "actions" people carry out in order to affect each other. The simultaneity of uttering (as surrender to understanding) and understanding (as surrender to uttering) works as if it reinstates causality between two autonomous observers. Whoever takes the floor and produces an utterance exerts momentary influence over the hearer. Nevertheless, the reach of this influence is limited. The speaker forces the hearer to register an utterance, to decode it and to ascribe him a set of normalizing informative intentions. In many situations, he may also compel the hearer to certain reactions (e.g., desirable answers) to his utterance. This requires him to make his thirdturn responses to these reactions anticipatable (see the next chapter). However, under no circumstances can he limit the inferences the hearer carries out in addition to the ones triggered by his utterance. The hearer can qualify her understanding with arrière-pensées or second thoughts and she can form an unfavorable (or overly favorable, or otherwise distorted) but unobservable image of the speaker. The irrepressible "inner infinity" of the hearer remains lurking behind utterance interpretation. Something like the "real" or complete psychological organization of the hearer never gets into the reach of the speaker. Despite this limitation, access to a hearer's assumptions about one's informative intentions establishes a powerful quasi-causal link between the hearer and oneself. Among other things, it forms the basis of what Goffman calls "impression management": controlling a social situation by controlling others' evaluations of one's "face".316 From a sociological point of view, impression management may look like a strange and unexpected form of control. The speaker's success in "making himself observable" and his ability to control go hand in hand. In fact, the speaker can be said to control by observability (or equivalently: by self-constrainment). Because the hearer, too, can only observe a very narrow range of mental states of the speaker, the 315 Not in the Weberian sense, for the hearer can, in principle, resist; see Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, I, §16. However, "resistance" comes at the price of terminating the dialogue, a price that will often make it impracticable. 316 Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Chapter VI.
126
latter can exploit the hearer's lack of knowledge strategically and convey impressions he secretly believes are invalid. Among other things, this shows that Goffman was correct in supposing that impression management and "strategic interaction"317 are universal aspects of face-to-face dialogues.318 The interactive production of (partial) observability comes at the price of turning honesty into an option. This may not be too dramatic if we keep in mind that the alternative to interactive observability is a world where observability is inexistent and "honesty" ceases to have a meaningful reference. Alter, the model speaker who emerges from this section, is neither a heroic self-made man who enacts (or refuses to enact) social order through creative engagements319 nor a worn out cogwheel in the machinery of social structure.320 He is simply an "awfully random thing"321 that becomes an assessable actor by suspending his randomness and carrying out anticipatable anticipations. His freedom to control is built on a prior renunciation of his freedom to be intransparent. In order to experience more power, he would have to choose to interact with an object instead of another observer – but as soon as he opts for the latter and participates in dialogue, he is constrained to anticipate how this observer will interpret his behavior and to make this interpretation (partially) valid.
317
Erving Goffman, 1969, Strategic Interaction, Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. "[...] the very obligation and profitability of appearing always in a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces one to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of the stage." Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, p. 251. Countless similar quotations could be given. 319 A point of view I am tempted to attribute to Anthony Giddens, 1984, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, but also Ann Swidler, 1986, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies", American Sociological Review 51: 273-286. 320 A perspective attributable to Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, eds., 1999, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Oxford: Polity Press, as well as Ulrich Oevermann, 1999, "Strukturale Soziologie und Rekonstruktionsmethodologie", pp. 7284 in Wolfgang Glatzer, Ansichten der Gesellschaft: Frankfurter Beiträge aus Soziologie und Politikwissenschaft, Opladen: Leske und Budrich, to give but two well-known examples. 321 Gordon Pask, 1961, "A Proposed Evolutionary Model", pp. 229-248 in Heinz von Foerster and George W. Zopf, Principles of Self-organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois Symposium on Self-Organization, Robert Allerton Park, 8 and 9 June, 1961, New York: Pergamon Press, p. 230; reference taken from Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 158. 318
127
4. Sequences of utterances
"'Completely understandable.' 'How lovely, Doctor, your "completely understandable". How pleasing and encouraging. This is a good interlocutor who is ready to speak this good word at any moment.'" Thomas Mann322 Naturally, dialogue can occur in the form of single utterances. The practical relevance of this theoretical borderline case should not be underestimated. In some situations, an utterance routinely fails to invite a second turn because it would be interactively unnecessary (e.g., a response to a warning cry), institutionally prohibited (an answer to a benediction) or technically impossible (a reply to a message delivered over a one-way communication channel). Because the conditions of acoustic copresence and mutual dependence (see Section 3.1) become almost irrelevant in single turns, such degenerate types of dialogue are nearly indistinguishable from other, non-dialogical social forms (e.g., giving a speech). Correspondingly, they may be sufficient for highly formalized, ritualized, institutionally embedded or otherwise disambiguated encounters, but they are too inflexible to provide the hearer with rich information about the speaker and they do not support the speaker in observing the hearer. The fate of a military command can sometimes be measured by the observable obedience of the addressees, but already the outcome of a greeting remains unclear if it is not ratified by a response. If the intended result of an utterance lies even partially in transforming the mental states of a hearer, information about this transformation will become relevant to the speaker. Such information can only be conveyed through subsequent turns. Therefore, even military hierarchies tend to require their members to dignify every legitimate order with the interactive equivalent of a receipt. Furthermore, many situations impose neither a technical nor an institutional barrier to subsequent turns. Even if an answer to the first turn may be functionally unnecessary in such a situation (which is often not the case), the simple fact that it is possible and cheaply deliverable turns it quickly from an option into a normal expectation – and consequently into an obligation. 322
Thomas Mann, 1999 [1939], Lotte in Weimar, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 102.
129
On a high level of abstraction, the relationship between utterances in a sequence of two or more turns can be understood as a problem of coordination. This coordination can be theorized in different ways, e.g., pragmatically as a consequence of cooperating toward a common goal,323 ethically as an expression of obedience to the obligation to establish consensus324 or sociocognitively as a result of successfully generating and sharing assumptions with the hearer. In line with the socio-cognitive direction of this treatise, this chapter will address the following problem: How does an utterance's adjacency to a preceding or a succeeding utterance change the implicit information that is conveyed by it (willingly or unwillingly)? Once again, it will be necessary to treat the occurrence of an utterance as a surface expression of the speaker's mental states. Although practical observation proceeds from observable behavior to hypothetical mental states, theoretical explanation needs to take the reverse path and reduce utterances to the expectable mental states and events that selected them. Specifically, I will analyze sequences of utterances in terms of an additional cognitive constraint imposed by utterance proximity, that is, the universal condition that second turns are able to reject expectations conveyed in first turns (Section 4.1). In dyadic encounters (to which the following analysis remains confined), third turns apply the distinction of rejection/acceptance reflexively to itself, leading either to observably shared knowledge (acceptance of acceptance), conflict (rejection of rejection) or repair sequences (Section 4.2). I will then discuss argumentation as a general form of negotiating both shared knowledge and observable commitment to rejections or acceptances (Section 4.3). This will complete the sociological theory of dialogue expounded in this treatise. Section 4.4 demonstrates how the completed framework can be applied by analyzing a small conversational transcript.
4.1 Rejection and acceptance Chapter 3 claimed that the hearer reconstructs a speaker's unobservable mental states by way of searching for an underlying informative intention that she can ascribe him. While this procedure allows the hearer to observe the speaker as a second-order observer who selects utterances in anticipation of her presumable understanding, it implies that the speaker is also observed as someone who expects a certain causal effect from his utterance. In other words, understanding is based on the assumption that the speaker wants to be 323 Clark, Arenas of Language Use, Herbert H. Clark, 1996, Using Language, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 324 Jürgen Habermas, 1990, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
130
understood325 and that his wish may be disappointed (compare the second constraint characteristic of dialogue as discussed in Section 3.1). Through becoming observable, a speaker also becomes socially defined as disappointable. Therefore, alter, the speaker who is observationally constructed in dialogue, is a Parsonsian actor (see Section 1.3). Here, on this observationally constructed level of reality, minds finally assume the fallible agency that sociological theorists from Weber via Parsons to Joas have included in their respective conceptions of human nature.326 Alter selects utterances because he expects them to have certain intended effects. Fulfillment of his expectations is contingent on ego, the hearer of his utterances. This view of the speaker's expectations is fully compatible with observational constructivism. It is independent of the question of whether interlocutors have real psychological expectations. I reiterate that, from a psychological point of view, the almost infinite variety of events that appear to be able to disappoint or surprise a mind hardly translates into an equally large set of expectations held by this mind.327 In consequence, "expectations" turn out to be cleverly constructed labels for possibly complex and not always automatic inferences a mind carries out ex post facto in order to check whether it should be alarmed by some observation. However, alter's observer can and must permit herself to act as a psychological realist and assume that alter's utterance makes him disappointable by her. To reveal to alter whether his informative intention has succeeded or failed, ego has to assume the role of the speaker and produce an utterance. Thus, second turns are less general than utterances as such. Their specificity can be phrased in the form of an additional constraint: Second turns must either reject or accept what was conveyed in preceding turns – tertium non datur. The distinction between rejection and acceptance operates exhaustively because the latter serves as its default value. Everything that is not interpretable as a rejection automatically becomes an acceptance.328 325
In turn, a speaker who is not observed as wanting to be understood is not understood (given the formal socio-cognitive conception of understanding applied here). This might be the reason why society sometimes observes indifference as a greater threat to social order than maliciousness; see already Revelation 3:15-16: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot! So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I am going to vomit you out of my mouth." 326 This common theoretical ground exists despite the different emphases of the respective approaches (intentionality in Weber, disappointability in Parsons, creativity in Joas), see Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 1, Parsons, "Interaction", p. 436f, Joas, The Creativity of Action. 327 This being the main reason why Husserl's construction of a "natural attitude" and Schütz' thick descriptions of the "structures of the life-world" remain platonic, neither completely implausible nor sociologically momentous enterprises. 328 Apart from Parsons' and Luhmann's versions of systems theory, the distinction of rejection/acceptance also plays an important role in Conversation Analysis; see Harvey Sacks,
131
To understand why the distinction between rejection and acceptance is universally relevant in turns that have at least one preceding turn, it is first necessary to consider what exactly can become subject to rejections/acceptances. It would be tempting but misleading to say that utterances themselves can be subject to it. For the following, it is crucial to realize that only socially observed social expectations (that is, expectations about ego's reaction that ego attributes alter) are rejectable.329 I will refer to such expectations as claims. Because claims and not utterances are objects of rejection or acceptance, the relevance of this distinction is not suspended through reflexive thematization (be it explicit thematization as in: "Are you saying that …?", or implicit thematization by simply mumbling: "Hmm"). Reflexive thematization rejects the preceding speaker's expectable claim of having made an understandable, unambiguous statement (recall Grice's fourth maxim). Thus, reflexive thematization counts as rejection, although it will often be a relatively harmless and quickly resolvable form of rejection.330 While planning her response, ego can impute claims on the basis of two distinct sources, namely, explicit and implicit information conveyed by alter's prior turn. The explicit content of the utterance together with its presuppositions331 breaks down into a set of claims about the current structure of the world. For instance, the utterance "Could you please close the window?" can 1975, "Everyone Has to Lie", pp. 57-79 in Ben G. Blount and Mary Sanches, Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use, London/New York: Academic Press, p. 62, Emanuel Schegloff, 1988, "On an Actual Virtual Servo-Mechanism for Guessing Bad News: A Single Case Conjecture", Social Problems 35: 442-457, p. 455f, Jack Bilmes, 1997, "Being Interrupted", Language in Society 26: 507-531, p. 523, Wolfgang Ludwig Schneider, 2000, "The Sequential Production of Social Acts in Conversation", Human Studies 23: 123-144, p. 128. Certainly Schneider, but apparently also Sacks and Bilmes see it as universally applicable after every turn. For empirical support of the hypothesis that non-rejections are acceptances, see Schegloff, "Repair after Next Turn", p. 1331, Helga Kotthoff, 1993, "Disaggrement and Concession in Disputes: On the Context Sensitivity of Preference Structures", Language in Society 22: 193-216, p. 195. 329 Luhmann, who imports the distinction of rejection/acceptance from Parsons, states that communications (as defined in his theory) are proper objects of rejection; see Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 204f, Niklas Luhmann, 1995, "Was ist Kommunikation?" pp. 113-124 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, p. 120. This flaw is not mended by the fact that Luhmann sees expectations as a general prerequisite for communication, since he writes clearly that only communications in their "synthesized" entirety can be connected to through rejection/acceptance. Besides, the expectations I see as rejectable are imputed mental states, not structures of a social system, as Luhmann might hold. 330 Luhmann, however, lists reflexive thematization as a "third possibility", see Niklas Luhmann, 2000, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 36f. 331 In the linguistic sense of the term, see Levinson, Pragmatics, Chapter 4: Presuppositions are propositions that must be assumed to hold in order to render the explicit content of an utterance meaningful and true. For instance, the utterance "Stop blaming me!" presupposes that the hearer just blamed the speaker and becomes rejectable if this is false or at least deniable.
132
be observed as claiming that ego is able to understand English, that she and alter are located in a room with a window, that the window is open, and so forth. In consequence, all these claims are in principle rejectable through a second turn ("Jag förstår inte", "What window!" and so forth). The implicit content of the utterance – the intention(s) and additional mental states ego attributes alter to normalize its explicit content (Section 3.3) – translates into a corresponding set of expectations to have each of these intentions fulfilled and each of the underlying mental states satisfied or at least not contradicted. For instance, depending on ego's background knowledge, the utterance used in the preceding example may be observed as claiming that alter wants ego to get up and close the window, that he fears catching a cold or that he is trying to order ego around. Each of these claims can be rejected through ego's turn ("And how do I climb out of my wheelchair?", "You only feel cold because you're a sissy", "That's typical, go and do it yourself!" and so forth). I will mention a complication of the simple correspondence between claims and rejections that has an important impact on the structure of argumentation (see Section 4.3). If some claims are logically related, which is often the case, they can only be rejected together. For example, by rejecting alter's claim that he wants ego to close the window, ego also rejects the imputable claim that he has the right to ask this favor of her or to give her this order. Special devices like excuses or polite hedges are needed to reject only a subset of a set of logically related claims ("I feel so tired, could you do it yourself?"). Furthermore, explicit claims can sometimes be rejected by rejecting or even accepting implicit claims, and vice versa. Ego may ask "What window?" although the window is expectably visible to her, forcing alter to generate the implicature that she intends to disappoint the implicit and not the explicit content of his first turn. Similarly, she can simply close the window and put on a sour face, thus rejecting the claim that his request was legitimate. However, it is never possible to reject all imputable claims at the same time. The very construction of a rejectable claim acknowledges that this claim is meaningful, hence satisfiable under different circumstances. This, too, has repercussions on the logic of argumentation. For instance, rejecting alter's underlying intentions requires recognizing that the utterance's presuppositions about the structure of the world, the specific situation and the interlocutors are essentially correct.332 Something like an "exhaustive re-
332
From this condition, proponents of Discourse Ethics (Apel, Habermas) conclude that participation in "Discourse" normatively requires interlocutors to follow a procedure of cooperative truth-seeking; see Karl-Otto Apel, 1973, "Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft und die Grundlagen der Ethik", pp. 358-435 in Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie 2: Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Such theories neglect that the intention of participating in "Discourse" (which must be present) is not an objective fact but
133
jection" requires "totalitarian interaction"333 – less pathetically put, it requires denying alter's behavior the status of an utterance (e.g., treating it as a mere twitch or "missing" it). In contrast to rejection, acceptance can be exhaustive. Being the default or unmarked334 value of the distinction under scrutiny, an exhaustive acceptance occurs whenever none of alter's claims is observably rejected. In the example above, an exhaustive acceptance may require ego to get up and close the window. In purely verbal interaction, it will be sufficient to produce an utterance that satisfies alter's principal informative intention. However, the question of whether ego and alter agree that the second turn really accepts all claims conveyed by the first turn can only be answered by a third turn (to be discussed in the next section). From alter's perspective, ego's ability to reject claims conveyed in his utterance represents a major source of contingency. Making an utterance means taking a risk. However, in strict parallel to the simplicity of the exclusive disjunction "rejection or acceptance", this contingency is of simplified as well as simplifying character. It is from the outset simplified contingency because it allows alter to assess beforehand what exactly he has to fear from ego. Ego can reject, but that is all she can do if she wants to continue the dialogue. It is also simplifying contingency because it subsumes the unobservable complexity of alter's possible motives. In view of ego's next turn, all the hidden motives or desires ego may dread behind the surface of alter's utterance generalize to the expectable motive of being understood and receiving a positive answer. Once more, it will be fruitful to rephrase these conditions of dialogue as a constraint on cognition. A dialogue forces alter to make utterances that he believes will not result in rejection. I would like to suggest that this constraint is the most exact formulation that can be given to Sacks' vague, but nonetheless important, hint at society's practical solution to the problem of observability (see Section 1.4). To recall, Sacks acknowledges that people are both too complex and too creative to be fully transparent to social observation. He intimates that society somehow forces them to make themselves observable. For the case of dialogue, I suggest that this force is exerted through rejectability. A second turn imposes a negative or positive sanction on alter's first turn. Whether this second turn results in rejection or acceptance, ego is entitled to expect that the first turn conveys claims alter actually holds. Without the option to reject these claims, ego's attributive reconstrucan observer's attribution. Enforcing its acknowledgement by the respective speaker requires special social rules or institutions (e.g., the institution of political debate). 333 An expression I borrow from Misheva, "Totalitarian Interaction". 334 In the precise linguistic sense discussed by Wayne Brekhus, 1998, "A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus", Sociological Theory 16: 34-51.
134
tion of alter's inner states would remain purely hypothetical and, thus, may turn out to be useless or inconsequential to the subsequent course of the encounter. The universally relevant distinction of rejection/acceptance also has an important structural effect on dialogue. Strictly speaking, it produces sequentiality. Within a socio-cognitive framework, mere spatio-temporal adjacency of two utterances would not warrant speaking of an actual sequence of dialogical turns. Adjacent utterances are turned into dialogues in virtue of the repeated relevance of rejection and acceptance. Two utterances become related to each other because participants in dialogue can expect that the second utterance rejects or accepts claims conveyed by the first utterance. The fact that interlocutors are disappointable makes their utterances observable in terms of their relationship to first/second turns to which they become relevant as second/first turns. Because the distinction between rejection and acceptance applies recursively also to later utterances, it thus sequentializes a set of otherwise unrelated utterances into a succession of turns. Normally, sequentiality may be taken as given whenever we observe spatio-temporally proximate utterances. Nonetheless, sociological theory seems well advised not to forget that the smoothly ordered façade of dialogue rests on surprisingly complex (yet analyzable) socio-cognitive foundations. It is not always the case that a rejection or acceptance refers to claims conveyed by an immediately preceding utterance. Conversation Analysis reflects this possibility by distinguishing between turn (absolute sequential location of an utterance) and position (relative sequential location).335 The socio-cognitive perspective of this chapter generalizes this distinction. Due to interlocutors' acoustic irritability, successions of utterances enumerate turns objectively and, thus, belong to the shared informational infrastructure of an encounter. Positions are allocated by (and, thus, derivative of) explicit or implicit references to other turns made in an utterance. References, on the other hand, are derivative of turns. By default, they coincide with them, but if the speaker uses special means, this coincidence can be canceled. "Special means" include temporal reference (e.g., "But before that you said …"), thematic reference (e.g., "Your earlier proposal seemed more interesting"), and certainly more. Since their applicability depends on the knowledge shared by the interlocutors, their range is unlimited. In the right circumstances, allusions like, "You know what I'm referring to" may be sufficient. In the following, I will continue to confine myself largely to rejections/acceptances of claims conveyed by immediately preceding turns. 335
Schegloff, "Repair after Next Turn", p. 1304; compare Sacks' earlier distinction between slot and item in Harvey Sacks, 1972, "On the Analyzability of Stories by Children", pp. 325345 in John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 341.
135
4.2 Reflexive application of rejection and acceptance Both rejection and acceptance require ego to take turns and produce an utterance. This simple fact has two pertinent consequences. First, ego's rejection or acceptance permits alter to observe some of the claims ego believes underlie his first turn. If alter observes ego's turn as a rejection, he is entitled to believe that the object of her negative response corresponds to something she believes he claimed upon making his utterance. If he observes her turn as an acceptance, he is entitled to infer that his social expectations, which he anticipated would become observable by way of his utterance, have been approved. Hence, a second turn (whether rejecting or accepting) is the first position in a sequence of utterances at which information about mental states is socially objectified. Ego's response delivers an overt (i.e., mutually observable) description of alter's mental states.336 Ego thereby confronts alter with an objective perspective on his unobservable inner states, and alter can check whether her account corresponds to what he anticipated would be the observable content of his utterance. Naturally, social objectifications of prior turns are always highly selective enterprises. From the multiplicity of imputable claims and additional mental states, ego can only choose one or very few to become part of the objectifying description conveyed in her response. In turn, not only what ego objectifies, but also what she does not (but could) objectify becomes part of the shared informational infrastructure of the encounter. For instance, at a later point alter may justify a rejection by saying, "But you seemed to have nothing against XYZ, at least you didn't say that you did." Second, it follows that any rejection/acceptance is itself both rejectable and acceptable. Any rejection or acceptance is itself a claim. Alter can respond to ego's second turn by a third turn and either reject or accept (some of) the claims conveyed by her utterance. As I will try to show in the following paragraphs, third turns apply the distinction between rejection and acceptance reflexively. They impute the second turn the claim that the first turn was worthy of rejection/acceptance and then either reject or accept this claim. In consequence, ego has to select her response to alter's first turn under a double constraint: Her turn is bound to become observable as a rejection or an acceptance, and it can itself be rejected or accepted. By means of exploiting the asymmetry built into the distinction between speaker and hearer, ego actually reestablishes symmetry between alter and her.337 Interest336 Where "forces" should be understood in the sense illustrated in Figure 1 in Section 3.4.1; ego's response both irritates alter and requires ego to anticipate this irritation, thereby leading them to identical second-order assumptions. 337 Conversation analysts have shown that the mere threat of having a rejection rejected forces even "powerful" interlocutors to minimize the rejectability of their turns; see, for instance, the use of litotes by psychiatrists in intake interviews, analyzed by Jörg R. Bergmann, 1992,
136
ingly, this means that whenever ego cannot exclude that her turn will be followed by a third turn, she has a normative reason for listening to a first turn.338 She has to reconstruct the assumptions alter will use to decide whether the upcoming response to his turn is rejecting any of his claims. This constraint is entirely independent of the cordiality or maliciousness of ego's unobservable intentions. If she plans to have a pleasant talk without any rejections, she still must watch out and avoid responses that alter could interpret as rejections. On the other hand, if she wants to create interactive trouble, she has to be on her guard and confront alter only with rejections she thinks she can defend in a fourth turn in case he has reason to reject them in turn three. As rejections/acceptances can be applied reflexively, social objectifications of mental states can occur reflexively, too. Ideally – a qualification I will spell out in short – third turns objectify objectifications of claims conveyed in first turns. In sequences of at least three turns, something like a ratified interactive fact, a true fait social339 emerges: Ego and alter observably agree that alter intended to convey this or that with his initial utterance. If the dialogue goes on, a whole sequence of ratified facts will materialize. However, the emergence of ratified interactive facts is, indeed, nothing but an ideal possibility. If at least one of the two responses in a three-turn sequence conveys a rejection, agreement about the legitimacy of at least one of the claims conveyed by the initial turn is observably absent. For the following, it will be convenient to distinguish four combinatory possibilities340 – rejection of rejection, acceptance of rejection, rejection of acceptance and acceptance of acceptance – and discuss them separately. A rejection of a rejection makes disagreement about the validity of an initially communicated or implied claim mutually observable. The interlocutors know that they disagree, and they know that the respective other knows this as well. Drawing on studies from Conversation Analysis, such a situation can be termed a conflict nucleus.341 However, there appears to be a lack of "Veiled Morality: Notes on Discretion in Psychiatry", pp. 137-162 in Paul Drew and John Heritage, Talk At Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 338 That is, in addition to the cognitive reason discovered by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, "A Simplest Systematics", p. 727f: Turn-taking must take place at transition-relevance places (TRPs: boundaries between syntactically complete parts of an utterance); to anticipate a TRP and take turns, the hearer actually has to listen to what the speaker says. 339 I borrow this fortunate term from Durkheim but emphasize that it is orthogonal to, if not incompatible with, Durkheim's socio-structural definition; see Emile Durkheim, 1977 [1895], Les règles de la méthode sociologique, 19 ed., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 340 In verbal interactions with more than two participants, more turns and many more combinatory possibilities would have to be distinguished. 341 See Schneider, Die Beobachtung von Kommunikation, p. 201ff. Schneider emphasizes (against Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 530) that three and not two turns are the minimal sequence length for the emergence of a conflict. In my interpretation, this is an excellent proof
137
consensus in the conversation-analytical literature regarding the question of what marks the observable transition from a conflict nucleus to a full-grown conflict. A distinguishing criterion that has received considerable empirical treatment is the reversal of the preference structure of dialogue.342 In supportive, polite exchanges ("conversations" in the original sense), rejections are normally accompanied by hedges, lengthy explanations and mitigations, whereas (some) conflicts allow rejections to be sudden, short and unexplained.343 However, this criterion fails to extend to situations where participants do not normally expect rejections to be carried out politely.344 Preference reversal does not indicate conflict as such; it indicates only that certain norms of politeness have been suspended. Conflicts can proceed highly politely (e.g., in drawing room conversations), and sudden, short rejections need not be impolite (e.g., in discussions). This shows that criteria that consider only the formal turn-structure and -length instead of participants' expectable observations and inferences are too rigid. It also shows that the term "conflict" is too coarse and subsuming to catch the often complex mixture of rejections and acceptances in observably non-cooperative courses of dialogue. Rejections as well as rejections of rejections, on the other hand, are guaranteed to be observable, since they cease to fulfill their interactive function and, therefore, fail to be rejections if they remain hidden. Instead of classifying rejections into open and hidden forms, I will show in Section 4.3 that they can be categorized consistently into explicit and implicit forms. An acceptance of a rejection corresponds to what conversation analysts identify as an other-initiated repair sequence.345 A rejection of an acceptance is, either, a self-initiated repair sequence (in case the rejection refers to turn one) or the first and incomplete half of either a conflict nucleus or an otherof the superiority of a socio-cognitive approach over systems-theoretical treatments of interaction, such as Kieserling, Kommunikation unter Anwesenden. Since Luhmann's version of systems theory ignores participants' cognitions, it overlooks that rejections first have to become mutually ratified knowledge in order to enable participants to differentiate conflicts from repair-sequences (i.e., acceptances of rejections). Within systems theory, two-turn and threeturn sequences are simply indistinguishable. Similarly, compare the essentially sociocognitive answer Schegloff and Sacks, "Opening up Closings", p. 297 give to the following question: Why do conversational closings typically take four turns instead of one? 342 See Harvey Sacks, 1973, "On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in the organization of sequences in conversation", pp. 54-69 in John R. E. Lee and Graham Button, Talk and Social Organisation, Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, Anita Pomerantz, 1984, "Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of prefered/disprefered turn shapes", pp. 57-101 in J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 343 Schegloff, "On an Actual Virtual Servo-Mechanism", p. 445. 344 For a detailed study of conflict-preferring contexts, see Kotthoff, "Disaggrement and Concession in Disputes". 345 Paul Drew, 1997, "'Open' Class Repair Initiators in Response to Sequential Sources of Troubles in Conversation", Journal of Pragmatics 28: 69-101, Schegloff, "Repair after Next Turn".
138
initiated repair sequence (in case the rejection refers to turn two). No matter if initiated by alter or by ego, repair requires alter, the interlocutor who repairs ego's understanding of his previous turn, to create and resolve an inconsistency between his own claims. He singles out a claim conveyed in his prior turn and replaces it by a contradicting new claim. Depending on whether he identifies ego or himself as responsible for the contradiction, two types of repair can be distinguished. If alter identifies ego as responsible (e.g., "No, I didn't say Clinton did a bad job, it’s the whole political class that…"), the sequence is framed as a misunderstanding: Ego attributed alter a claim that alter did not expect would be conveyed in his utterance. If alter identifies himself as responsible (e.g., "Ok, I should have said 'undemanding', not 'trashy'"), the sequence becomes a self-correction: Ego imputed a claim that alter anticipated she would impute, but that for some reason turns out to be untenable. Incidentally, once alter has acknowledged the necessity of a repair-turn (e.g., by making it), it is irrelevant whether the claim that requires repair was conveyed explicitly or implicitly. Through repair, this claim, even if previously implicit, is always made explicit and the distinction vanishes. Finally, an acceptance of an acceptance, as mentioned before, gives rise to a ratified interactive fact. The mutually approved status of this piece of information lends it operative significance. It is undeniable in future turns – more precisely, its rejection by any party can be expected to meet resistance by the other party. The interlocutors have to take it as given and cannot but move on in their talk and produce or negotiate more items of observably shared knowledge. For this reason, reflexive acceptances are often practically preferred over sequences that contain at least one rejection. They avoid (observable) disappointment of their participants and they spare them a prolonged focus on the same piece of information. Normative theories of conversation, argumentation or discourse conclude that acceptance-acceptance sequences must be the real or ideal purpose of such exchanges346 – in other words, that they are somehow more desirable than dissent. This idea is, of course, just a reformulation of the speaker's expectable expectation to have 346 Well-known examples include Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1990 [1960], Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Gesammelte Werke Bd. 1), 6 ed., Tübingen: Mohr, p. 183f, Karl-Otto Apel, 1973, "Einleitung: Transformation der Philosophie", pp. 9-76 in Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie 1: Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 59f, Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 1, p. 397ff, Nicholas Rescher, 1988, Rationality: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature and the Rationale of Reason, Oxford: Clarendon, p. 173. For an elegant dissection of Gadamer's/Habermas' "telos of consensus", see Georg Kneer, 1997, "Beobachten, Verstehen und Verständigung: Zur Reformulierung hermeneutischer Grundkonzepte in der Diskursanalyse und der Systemtheorie", pp. 50-69 in Tilmann Sutter, Beobachtung verstehen, Verstehen beobachten: Perspektiven einer konstruktivistischen Hermeneutik, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
139
each of his dialogical claims ratified by ego. In fact, the logic of expecting entails that it is tautological to say that interlocutors expect (hence "prefer") acceptance over rejection. Consensus-orientation is simply a necessary practical fiction – even overt conflicts require that the speaker select each turn as if he expects his adversary to respond acceptingly (which does not mean that ego really has to believe in his performance). Otherwise, it would not be possible for the speaker to meet rejections of his claims with observable disappointment or indignation. From a socio-cognitive point of view, neither side of the distinction between rejection and acceptance is dispensable. Expecting an acceptance is meaningless without the possibility of facing a rejection. If interlocutors never dared to reject each other's interactive claims, there would be no real coordination of such claims and consequently no real dialogue. Since reflexive acceptances are, by definition, preferred by interlocutors, it is possible to conceive of dialogue abstractly as a device for the sequential production of observably shared information about participants' mental states. A second pertinent property of the inferences that comprise understanding (as discussed in Chapter 3) thereby comes into view. Understanding is not only anticipatable (and, thus, interactively useful), but also sequentially revealing. Applied over a sequence of turns and accompanied by participants' desire to avoid rejections, it either leads to shared and ratified knowledge (acceptance-acceptance sequences) or makes the absence of such knowledge mutually observable (all other sequences). Two complications of my simple classification of three-turn sequences deserve mentioning. First, the claim alter rejects/accepts in turn three does not always correspond to ego's claim that some claim conveyed in turn one is worthy of rejection/acceptance. For instance, the sequence, "That's a pretty picture"/"You heff no taste"/"Get rid of your German accent, will ya" can be interpreted as an observable thematic mismatch between two rejections. If the first rejection is re-thematized at a later sequential position, it seems recommendable to follow a suggestion from Conversation Analysis and treat turn three as the beginning of a side-sequence.347 In this case, the preceding distinction of sequence-types applies to the referential position-structure instead of the temporal turn-structure. If the first rejection is never rethematized, a logical three-position sequence does not come into being. Second, turns beyond the third introduce new possibilities and new complexity. For instance, it takes at least four turns to ratify other-initiated and five turns to ratify self-initiated repair. Nonetheless, insofar as concrete dia347
Gail Jefferson, 1972, "Side Sequences", pp. 294-338 in David Sudnow, Studies in Social Interaction, New York: Free Press, Harvey Sacks, 1992 [1972], "Adjacency Pairs: Distribution in Conversation; A Single Instance of a Q-A Pair (Lecture Spring 1972)", pp. 533-541 in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation II, Oxford: Blackwell.
140
logues "solve" the foundational problem of observability, their specific solution always translates into a three-position sequence. For example, in the five turns of a self-initiated and finally ratified repair sequence, the emerging interactive fact is introduced in turn three, accepted in turn four and reflexively accepted in turn five. For this reason, I will not go further into the discussion of the distinctive properties of turns beyond the third.
4.3 Argumentation and the management of observability Any emergence of a ratified interactive fact is an event of latent "procedural consequentiality".348 Not only is such a fact hard to reject later on, it can also be used as a premise in overt inferences that inherit its poor rejectability. For instance, once both interlocutors observably agree that alter has insulted ego, ego may claim that she deserves an excuse from alter. To remain interactively committed to this claim, she only needs to enforce ratification of the inference rule, "Insults require excuses", not of the premise that she has actually been insulted. If ego and alter are members of cultures that sanction this rule, alter will experience difficulties trying to withhold an overt excuse from her. To generalize from this example, facts can emerge from conflictual situations that invite logically related claims that favor observable or expectable preferences of one of the interlocutors over those of the other. For this reason, dialogue can be said to impart interests in the enforcement or suppression of ratifications of certain facts to both participants.349 Whoever speaks needs to anticipate the desirability and the sequential relevance of the interactive facts he or she might ratify and adjust his or her utterance to reject those facts that seem undesirable. Unlike "conflicts" in general, rejection-rejection sequences that emerge when interlocutors negotiate potential interactive facts form an empirically identifiable part of social reality. I will refer to such sequences as instances of argumentation. This concluding section shows that the order of argumentation can be explained straightforwardly within the existing socio-cognitive framework. Argumentation will be uncovered as the result of interlocutors' strategic attempts at managing their observability in order to enforce ratification of the interactive fact they prefer and suppress the interactive fact their adversary prefers. To summarize the subsequent discussion, argumentation 348
A fortunate expression I borrow from Emanuel Schegloff, 1991, "Reflections on Talk and Social Structure", pp. 44-70 in Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmermann, Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, p. 52ff. 349 A claim that remains within the externalistic psychological framework of Section 2.4.
141
receives its order through the way in which interlocutors are expectably forced to deal with a new constraint. In argumentation, alternating turns become reducible to one of two mutually exclusive positions350 that are defined by a topic. Whenever this constraint is operative, rejections/acceptances of interactive claims automatically become rejections/acceptances of argumentative positions. As long as interlocutors function rationally, they can use this constraint as a resource for making highly implicit rejections that they never have to ratify explicitly and, therefore, can never be committed to. In other words, interlocutors try to enforce acceptances by making rejections whose rejection is rejectable. Classical theories of argumentation are not built on socio-cognitive premises. Since Aristotle, they generally confine themselves to speaker-centered analyses and classifications of arguments. Whether they focus on the logical structure or – following Toulmin's and Perelman's attempts to renew the study of argumentation as a "pragmatic" or "rhetorical" discipline351 – the persuasive "substance" of arguments, these are universally seen as speakerproduced and isolatable building blocks of argumentation.352 If sequentiality enters the picture at all, then it is almost exclusively by asking what argument types can counter a given argument type. Thus, the process of argumentation appears as a mere combinatorial problem, and the problem of the argumentation theorist (once he or she has boxed up all types) is to play "the arbiter of goodness in ordinary arguing"353 and decide which arguments are logically or normatively good at any step.354 350 That is, argumentative positions, not sequential ones. This section will use the term "position" consistently in this way. 351 Stephen E. Toulmin, 1958, The Uses of Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1970, Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, 2 ed., Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires. 352 To provide an example from formal studies of argumentation: "Considered quantitatively, argumentations consist principally of arguments."Christoph Lumer, 1995, "Der theoretische Ansatz der Praktischen Argumentationstheorie", pp. 81-101 in Harald Wohlrapp, Wege der Argumentationsforschung, Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, p. 87. Even in Perelman's New Rhetoric, argumentation is reduced to the individual act of putting forward an argument, see Chaïm Perelman, 1970, Le champ de l'argumentation, Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires, p. 42. 353 A task that Robert W. Binkley, 1998, "Review of Johan van Benthem, Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst and Frank Veltman (eds.), Logic and Argumentation", Argumentation 12: 508-512, p. 509, considers uncontroversial. 354 The "informal" approach is currently dominated by the "Amsterdam Research Group on Argumentation", see Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, and Tjark Kruiger, 1984, The Study of Argumentation, New York: Irvington, Douglas N. Walton, 1991, Begging the Question: Circular Reasoning as a Tactic of Argumentation, New York: Greenwood Press, but see also Robert Alexy, 1989, A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification, Oxford: Clarendon, who presents an even more normatively oriented, Habermasian approach to argumentation. For a critical overview of the large and diffuse field of formal argumentation theory, see Tim Heysse, 1997, "Why Logic Doesn‘t Matter in the (Philosophical) Study of Argumentation", Argumentation 11: 211-224.
142
Logical approaches to argumentation assume that all information about interlocutors' inner states is exhaustively shared, hence representable in one logical model of the dialogue.355 Divergent stocks of knowledge are not a resource – at least not a theoretically warranted resource – of valid argumentation. Considered from an observational constructivist perspective, the underlying conception of interlocutors, if understood empirically and not just normatively, assumes that they are first-order observers, that is, observably deterministic automata. If this were adequate, argumentation would proceed in exactly the way logic-based argumentation theories want it to proceed – it would take the shape of a well-ordered, fully explicit syllogism, where shared, credible premises and accepted inference rules eventually disqualify one position and verify its competitor. However complex this (inevitably cooperative) deduction turned out to be, it would lead to conclusions that are redundant relative to their premises. But despite its analytical neatness, it is built on an empirically untenable premise. At first sight, the so-called "substantial" theories of argumentation seem better attuned to the empirical reality of argumentation. They generally agree that argumentation is complex,356 multi-layered, often logically incomplete,357 often logically flawed and often irrational. However, similar to Speech Act Theory, these approaches attribute the complexity of argumentation to the unlimited forms of arguments. This idea is subject to Sacks' objection (which I used before in this treatise): Since argumentation occurs in concrete dialogues (among other places), interlocutors would have to display similar troubles with the practice of argumentation as scientists display with its theory. For example, before they could reject an instance of "begging the question" as circular, they would have to consult scientific literature. If this were A well-known representative of the dominant "prescriptivist" current (my expression) in formal theory is Lumer; see Christoph Lumer, 2000, "Reductionism in Fallacy Theory", Argumentation 14: 405-423, who prescribes argumentation theory the tasks of defining "valid arguments" and "fallacies" and making the correctness or fallacy of any argument analytically decidable. 355 Against the popular but usually tacit reduction of dialogues to monologues, see Per Linell, 1998, Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspectives, Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, Chapter 2. For an explicit adoption of "monologism", see Lumer, "Der theoretische Ansatz der Praktischen Argumentationstheorie", p. 87f. 356 Compare Kopperschmidt's expression: "the confusing abundance of situationally used, concrete arguments", Josef Kopperschmidt, 2000, Argumentationstheorie zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius, p. 126. 357 See the growing literature on enthymemes (syllogisms in which some premises are "implicit" and can legitimately be "supplemented" by the analyst), Trudy Govier, 1987, Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation, Dordrecht: Foris, Chapter 5, Alfred F. Herbig, 1992, 'Sie argumentieren doch scheinheilig!' Sprach- und sprechwissenschaftliche Aspekte einer Stilistik des Argumentierens, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, p. 75ff; whereas Geert-Lueke Lueken, 1999, "Prämissenergänzung", Dialektik 1999.1: 95-115, thoughtfully suggests reconstructing premise completion as part of argumentation.
143
the case, argumentation would not occur very often – a conclusion we had better interpret as reductio ad absurdum of the idea that argumentation "is" complex. Alternatively, I suggest that argumentation merely appears to be complex. Its surface complexity is the result of a prior socio-cognitive simplification, namely, the continuous reducibility of arguments to positions. Interlocutors are able to handle the abundant variety of practical arguments because they know that arguments are always arguments for or against a position. Argumentation never occurs without reference to an interactively shared topic that defines two or more mutually exclusive positions. Such a topic is a social generalization that can typically be phrased as a question, for instance, as an uncontroversially identifiable upcoming decision ("Who is going to do the dishes?"), as part of a culturally shared stock of contingencies ("Do angels exist?"), as a medially defined day-to-day issue ("Who should profit from the tax cut?"), as an intra-dialogically defined subject matter ("Can we afford a second car?"), and more. Once a topic is "on the table" (an event that occurs at the latest when an interlocutor claims a position), it subsumes everything that is said. For this reason, the distinction of rejection/acceptance and the distinction of positions become inseparable. A contrary position is now identifiable in virtue of a rejection, and vice versa. Thus, special procedures are required to make "off-topic" remarks (e.g., "Hold on for a second, you know what we almost forgot?"). The reducibility of interactive claims to positions operates already on first turns. By way of introducing a topic, alter can expect that his utterance will be subject to this reduction. In consequence, he can claim a position by means of an almost unlimited variety of logically far-fetched or highly implicit arguments. For instance, the position, "We should go to the opera tonight, not to the boxing match" can be supported by utterances as diverse as, "Going to the opera is generally preferable to boxing, and we should do what is generally preferable", "If you have seen one fight, you have seen them all", "For once, can't we just do what I want?" or "Darling, let's be good role models for the kids". Only the first example provides all the premises for a logical inference that corroborates alter's position. The other three require supplementation of premises, and at least the last two even draw on implicit imputations about ego's and alter's mental states. However, it is misleading to say that they are incomplete arguments. Since ego expectably knows that they have to be complete arguments that ultimately support one position and not another, she knows the inferential path along which she must try to supplement missing information and thereby normalize the seemingly irrelevant explicit content of the utterance. Therefore, "premise completion"358 is sim358 See again Govier, Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation, p. 81f, Lueken, "Prämissenergänzung".
144
ply an instance of the attributive reconstruction of a speaker, that is, an instance of understanding as defined in Chapter 3. All understanding requires imputation of mental states. More specific to argumentation is the condition that explicitly communicated (="not missing") and imputed (="missing") premises diverge with respect to their rejectability, as I will consider in short. Similar to the case of first turns, a second-turn rejection also exploits the fact that the first turn is reducible to a position. Since it can take for granted that position and explicitly conveyed information stand in a logical relationship, it can reject the explicit information by means of rejecting the position (equivalently, claiming a contrary position), or reject the position by way of rejecting the explicit information, or reject both through rejecting intermediate premises. In the examples above, ego can reject utterance number four – "Darling, let's be good role models for the kids" – by saying, "But boxing is much more fun to watch" (rejection of position), "We don't have to tell the kids, do we?" (rejection of intermediate premise), or "We are good role models for our kids" (rejection of explicit information). Whereas their relevance as rejections increases the argumentative possibilities of second turns, they invite an even greater range of third-turn rejections. I recall that rejections of positions or intermediate premises are rejections of imputed information. In contrast to the ascription of a position, which is usually a safe bet (and otherwise easily resolved), the ascription of intermediate premises is precarious. For instance, utterance number two in the last example presupposed that "telling the kids" is part of the state of the world alter claimed to describe through his first turn. However, his argument could be made valid by means of alternative and contradictory premises (e.g., "the kids will find out in any case"), premises that may have an impact on the validity of ego's rejection. For this reason, third turn rejections have an additional strategic resource at their disposal: They can reject a rejection by means of rejecting its implied description of claims conveyed by the first turn. To continue the example, alter can reject utterance number two – "We don't have to tell the kids, do we?" – by stating, "Oh, I think we do" (rejection of explicit information), "You just want to see the blood gush" (rejection of an imputed preference) or "We are not going to lie to our own children" (tricky rejection of a daringly imputed intermediate premise that describes a claim conveyed in turn one). Although interlocutors always accept some claims implicitly by rejecting others explicitly, ongoing argumentations are notoriously deficient in creating explicitly ratified, unchallengeable pieces of information along the way. For this reason, argumentative possibilities multiply even after turn three and seem to be only limited by interlocutors' (expectable) cognitive capacities. In turns four, five etc., argumentative possibilities continue to grow, and it is not astonishing that argumentation theorists are awe-struck by the "confusing
145
abundance" of real-world arguments. I recall that interlocutors themselves handle all this complexity only as long as arguments are reducible to positions. However, a more serious problem remains. If rejections are always possible, how can it be that at least some real-world argumentations end with an acceptance-acceptance sequence and consequently with the emergence of a ratified interactive fact? To describe this observably consensual situation, classical theories of argumentation resort to psychological constructs like conviction (generally defined as "good") or persuasion ("bad").359 From a psychological point of view, it is all too obvious that comparatively indisputable cognitive features like a well-secured, positive self-concept360 may prevent a mind from ever being "convinced".361 From a sociological perspective, the question of whether this mind is "really" convinced remains externally undecidable, hence, interactively irrelevant. For this reason, conviction and persuasion need to be replaced by a non-psychological, operative condition of dispute termination. Considered operatively, argumentation terminates cooperatively when one party fails to reject the adversary's position and thereby acts as if he or she were convinced by the preceding argument. Thus, cooperative termination is identical to the emergence of a ratified fact that holds that one position is superior to the other. The strength of this fact lies in its proponent's ability to treat any subsequent rejection as an overt (i.e., fully explicit) selfcontradiction ("But you just said that…", "But we already agreed that…", "Senator, you are contradicting yourself now"). In consequence, the problem of each participant in argumentation is to produce an argument to which his or her opponent is unable to come up with a rejection that the opponent himself/herself believes cannot be rejected legitimately as an overt selfcontradiction. It is worth noting that this termination condition consists of a certain match between the argument and the (imputable) belief system of the respondent. Winning or losing in argumentation is a co-constructed event. It will not take place if the respondent is skilled or simply bold enough to reject any argument. In consequence, the termination of argumentation is generally not anticipatable. Whichever hopes argumentation theorists build on it, pure argumentation is a highly unreliable medium of consensus creation. To make consensus expectable, additional social institutions are necessary. At least 359 With the possible exception of the Amsterdam School with its emphasis on "externalization", see Eemeren, Grootendorst, and Kruiger, The Study of Argumentation, p. 6. 360 For a simple but sufficient overview, see William W. Purkey, 1988, An Overview of SelfConcept Theory for Counselors; available from http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/files/ selfconc.html [last access 2002-11-5]. 361 For principal lack of reliable sources of data, the author admits that at least he leaves most lost argumentations with the idea that he "was right" and only lost because he failed to come up with better arguments.
146
Western societies seem to enforce consensus by means of two different kinds of institutions. On the one hand, there exist cultural and (to a smaller extent) legal constraints on arguing. In many situations, argumentation is expected to stay factual and focused, some argument types are ruled out beforehand, daring imputations of mental states are forbidden, participants have to act as if every argument they meet is worthy of consideration, certain claims are rejectable as immoral, insults are legally sanctioned, and so forth. On the other hand, institutionalized or legalized resolution mechanisms permit arbiters or judges to terminate argumentation and to compel interlocutors to accept a summary of the dispute that favors one position over the other or proposes a compromise. Since these two forms of institutions are obviously insufficient to make every argumentation cooperative, it may be noted that the social momentousness of argumentation, if present, does not always lie in the emergence of a ratified interactive fact. Private argumentation often remains unresolved and leaves behind nothing but a "bad feeling". Public argumentation – i.e., debates observed by third parties, like an audience or a readership – requires a possibly large amount of non-participants to summarize the validity of each side's arguments and decide who "is right". If third party-observation is overt (which excludes only rather unusual situations, like criminal investigations or espionage) and observers can be expected to sanction the "winner" positively (e.g., when the observers are voters or consumers), it will be anticipated by the interlocutors and change their argumentative behavior drastically. The intra-dialogical gains of achieving consensus give way to the extra-dialogical gains of making the audience believe that one's arguments are better. In such a situation, it becomes less promising to confront the other interlocutor with a statement he or she believes to be unable to reject without becoming inconsistent. Rather, it becomes promising to force interactively unconnected, blunt arguments on one's audience.362 Although the surface of argumentation is indisputably complex and irrational, the preceding conception of argumentation shows that this surface may fruitfully be observed as generated by the inferences through which rational interlocutors expectably process simple constraints on understanding and uttering. Argumentation, just like dialogue in general, activates and binds individual rationality at the same time. For this reason, I remain optimistic with respect to the possibility of formalizing argumentation by means of logical calculi. The key error of existing approaches is to formalize argumentation in the shape of a monological succession of arguments, instead of 362 For examples, see the conversation-analytical literature on news interviews, e.g., David Greatbatch, 1992, "On the Management of Disagreement Between News Interviewees", pp. 268-301 in Paul Drew and John Heritage, Talk At Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
147
describing the observations and anticipations of each interlocutor independently.363 As soon as argumentation is formally represented by two mutually intransparent but sequentially self-revealing "anticipation machines", it will become obvious that logical calculi are not "too limited"364 but too general to model their inferences. An interlocutor who can operate on all kinds of premises is not adequately constrained, hence, unable to understand and to produce understandable utterances. In consequence, the main challenge formalization of the preceding model would face is finding a socio-cognitively plausible set of axiom schemata that incorporates all the interactive constraints of the preceding sections and chapters. The author of this treatise is currently evaluating the possibility of such formalization.365
4.4 An application of the completed framework For the sake of illustration, it will be instructive to apply the framework developed in this treatise to a case of real conversation. The following is an excerpt from a call-in radio conversation366 between a "therapist" and an advice-seeker. The transcription follows standard conversation-analytical conventions.367 C, the caller, is a mother who wants to know whether she should let her 16year-old boy date a girl. T is the therapist. 1. C: .hh i guess a- (.) my question is (0.3) do we let it go without or do we [continue 2. T: [hey im nO:t going to tE:ll you haha ((high pitch, cheerful)) what to do with your kIds= 363 Additional problems of formal approaches are mentioned by Harald Wohlrapp, 1999, "Jenseits von Logizismus und Zweckrelativismus: Zur Rolle der Logik im Argumentieren", Dialektik 1999.1: 25-36. 364 This objection is expressed by Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, 1997, "Die (Un)Wahrscheinlichkeit des Verstehens: Bemerkungen zur Indeterminiertheit des Begriffs der Bedeutung", pp. 225-254 in Geert-Lueke Lueken, Kommunikationsversuche: Theorien der Kommunikation, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, p. 248f. 365 For a short and preliminary report, see Wendelin Reich, 2003, "Geteiltes Wissen in der Interaktion: Welchen Beitrag leisten Spieltheorie und Künstliche Intelligenz?" in Jutta Allmendinger, Entstaatlichung und soziale Sicherheit: Verhandlungen des 31. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Leipzig, 2 Bände + CD-ROM, Opladen: Leske und Budrich. 366 For comprehensive analyses of this genre, see Erving Goffman, 1981, "Radio Talk", pp. 197-327 in Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, Ian Hutchby, 1995, "Aspects of Recipient Design in Expert Advice-Giving on Call-In Radio", Discourse Processes 19: 219-238. 367 Specifically, "(.)" denotes a short pause, "(1.0)" marks a pause of about one second, ":" denotes prolonged pronunciation, CAPS show stress, ".hh" stands for audible breathing in, braces mark overlapping turns, equality signs mark turns that follow without pause, double parentheses denote a comment.
148
3. C: =mmh 4. T: .hh (0.2) yOu have chOices to make 5. C: mmh Call Dr. Laura, WIBC, 2000-12-06
There is nothing in the excerpt that would contradict the assumption that Constraints 1-3 from Chapter 3 (acoustic copresence, relevance of coding, mutual dependency) are operative. The interlocutors seem to be able to hear each other, they seem to share a common language (American English), and they act as if they accept that each turn needs to be dignified with a reply. Therefore, we may take for granted that we are dealing with an instance of dialogue. Furthermore, we can (and have to) presuppose that, besides knowing the English language, the interlocutors also draw on cultural background knowledge in order to convey rich information about their intentions, beliefs etc. through compact utterances. In order to make sense of each of these turns, we, too, have to make use of the cultural knowledge a normal, adult, interaction-competent American can be expected to have. However, since the preceding chapters did not systematize such knowledge, but only the logical ways in which it can be put to work in utterance understanding and planning, I will have to project items of such knowledge on an ad hoc basis. Due to my selection, the caller's first turn is deprived of its preceding sequential context. Let us begin the analysis of the excerpt by checking whether the turn can be read as the result of the caller's intention to convey literal information. By and large, this seems to be the case: If the phrase, "my question is do we let it go without or do we continue", is meant as what it seems to be – an explicit request to be told which of two courses of action should be taken – it does not contain any inconsistencies that would require inferential normalization. However, the caller introduces this phrase with the remark "I guess a-" followed by a pause. Interpreted literally, this means that the caller only guesses that the phrase is, in fact, a question – an interpretation that would be surprising because it violates Grice's maxim of Quantity. Since it is up to the caller to decide whether she asks a question, she can be expected to know whether she does so. In order to fully normalize turn one, we need to suppose that the caller makes a hedge in order to display conventional politeness and/or respect toward the therapist. Being granted the right to define what is true or false is part of the interactive role of "experts", so turn one may also be read as a confirmation of this role. Whether this is what the caller "really meant" is, of course, unanswerable. Turn two begins as an interruption – an event that occurs frequently in talk radio, especially in the "Call Dr. Laura" show. Literally, the therapist announces that she will not provide the caller with advice on "what to do with your kids". This confirms our interpretation of the first turn as a request for information, although it rejects this request observably. The rejection is
149
carried out quickly and bluntly, a format that in ordinary conversation would normally mark the beginning of a conflict. Turn three, however, shows that the caller accepts both the therapists reconstruction of her interactive claim – the request for information – as well as the therapist's rejection of this request (the untranscribed intonation of the caller's "mmh" marks it unambiguously as a "yes"). On the one hand, this acceptance is not necessarily surprising, since it may just be another instance of the caller's confirmation of the therapist's role as expert. On the other hand, turn two pronounced the words "what to do" in an ostentatiously cheerful voice, an event that can be normalized by assuming that the therapist wants to display that it would be ridiculous to try to tell a mother "what to do" with her kids. Given that the threat of a conflict has just been repulsed, turn four can a priori be interpreted as an "explanation" of turn two – in other word's, as an instance of self-initiated repair that confirms that turn two would be misunderstood (in the sense of Section 4.2) if interpreted as a conflict initiator. The therapist tells the caller that she has to "make choices", in other words, that she has to select autonomously instead of following the selections of someone else (e.g., the therapist). Again, turn five confirms the therapist's turn explicitly. It is noteworthy that this small example can be interpreted as going beyond the framework laid out in this treatise. Radio conversations like the one analyzed here can be expected to proceed on the premise that both interlocutors know that they are being observed by an audience. Although the audience cannot intervene, it can sanction (=disappoint) the therapist negatively by switching to another channel and the caller by expectably evaluating her unfavorably (e.g., as aggressive or bashful). Therefore, we can assume that certain features of the transcript display the interlocutors' orientation toward the audience and not toward each other. For instance, "Dr. Laura" presents herself as bold and direct in practically all her radio conversations, not just in this one. As mentioned before, verbal interaction between three or more parties can become substantially more complex than dialogue. However, whether the transcript "really is" an instance of triadic conversation is inherently undecidable. It is my hope that this example demonstrates that the problem of observability is not just a puzzle for theoreticians. The analytical framework that this treatise attempted to derive from it recommends itself as a tool to generate and systematize assumptions about interlocutors' mental states – features that are indispensable to determining what an age-old philosophical tradition calls the "meaning" of an utterance.
150
Summary and conclusion
"Observe yourself. Others do it."368 The guiding question of this treatise was: To what extent and by what mechanisms may individuals share knowledge with each other? This final chapter will first summarize the dialogical solution developed in the preceding chapters and then provide a few additional reflections on the conception, the limitations and some potential applications of this solution. The starting point of the solution advocated here is to situate the problem of shared knowledge in dialogue, thereby transforming it into a practical problem of observability that can be expressed by the question: How does dialogue allow an interlocutor to make her or his mental states observable to the other interlocutor as well as (often unintentionally) to uninvolved third persons (e.g., researchers)? By situating the problem, it is possible to take advantage of the fact that it never occurs in pure form, as a matter of exchanging quantums of knowledge between two humans, but only in encounters that take place in a physical environment that humans can be presupposed to be able to observe. In consequence, it is not necessary to state the problem of observability as a problem of transmitting knowledge, as it has often been done. Instead, it can be framed as a problem of external synchronization, that is, of matching the cognitions of two autonomous yet irritable minds. As opposed to the idea of transmission, this conception of the problem has a solution that does not lead into the much-feared paradoxes of intersubjectivity, because it does not violate the (plausible) assumption that mental states are never directly observable from the "outside". With this conceptual starting point, a solution can be developed in two stages. In Stage 1 (see Chapter 2) I specify the constructivist conception of human minds that is implied in the phrase "autonomous yet irritable". In Stage 2 (see Chapters 3 and 4) I describe the mutually observable irritations to which interlocutors are subject, together with the expectable cognitive and interactive consequences of these irritations. The result is a theory of shared knowledge in the sheep's clothing of a theory of the socio-cognitive prereq-
368
Advertisement of the fashion company Sisters in the Swedish periodical Damernas Värld, issue 11/2001, with the original text: "Se dig själv. Andra gör det."
151
uisites and conditions that lead individuals to produce369 shared knowledge whenever they are "wound up" and "stuck in amongst their fellows".370 Instead of asking what minds "really are", the constructivist conception of human minds that I propose in Stage 1 addresses the question of what minds can possibly be socially observed as. Since interlocutors are unable to observe each other's mental states and events directly, I argue that they are forced to be practical functionalists and reconstruct other minds hypothetically as a priori autonomous entities that are subject to external-to-internal, internal-to-internal and internal-to-external respecifications. External-tointernal respecifications define a mind's irritability, that is, the forms in which it can become causally influenced by its environment. In dialogue, the most relevant instances of irritability are acoustic perceptions, since they expectably constrain a mind to hear what co-participants are saying. Internalto-internal respecifications can operate either redundantly or informatively, but only the former case is of interactive relevance. Since minds who transform old states redundantly into new states work rationally, their observers can attribute "irrationality" only by means of attributing irrational premises (e.g., emotions or moods). Finally, internal-to-external respecifications define how an observed mind influences its environment. The most pertinent class of influences comprises intentional actions, that is, one-to-one linkages between observable effects and underlying intentions. Stage 2 describes the specific set of socially expectable constraints on individual inferencing to which both the hearer and the speaker of an utterance are subject. The set defines how interlocutors may understand and produce utterances as well as relate utterances sequentially to prior and following utterances. It thereby renders participants' (as well as scientists') attempts at reconstructing other minds in terms of practical functionalism non-arbitrary. Thus, the axiom that minds are never directly observable does not contradict people's everyday assumption that they know and learn a great deal about those they interact with and observe. However, it requires seeing this knowledge as an interactive achievement instead of a given. In order to keep things analytically pure, Chapters 3 and 4 adopt a relatively abstract conception of dialogue as verbal, turn-based, dyadic interaction.371 The aforementioned set of socially expectable constraints has the 369
Compare Kenneth Burke's suggestion to interpret the observable complexity of an empirical domain as produced by a small set of underlying "generative principles", see Burke, A Grammar of Motives, p. XVI. 370 To paraphrase Goffman, Interaction Ritual, p. 3. 371 This abstract conception of dialogue is the reason why I avoid using the more common term "conversation". In fields like Conversation Analysis, "conversation" retains too much of its original association with pleasant sociability and seems to imply some form of closure (i.e., presence of a ritual beginning and closing). Conversation Analysis typically contrasts conversation to institutional communication, which is conceived as a more formal type of social
152
following seven members. The first three define the very situation of dialogue. Constraint 1 [Acoustic copresence]: Both ego (the hearer role) and alter (the speaker role)372 are able to observe alter's utterances and mutually assume that they are. Under this condition, any utterance is automatically and expectably a basic synchronization of some of ego's and alter's assumptions. Most importantly, upon hearing a linguistically decodable sequence of sounds they both presume that an utterance has been made, and they both presume that only alter is causally responsible for the utterance. Constraint 2 [Coding]: On the level of abstraction defined by cultural and linguistic codes (most importantly: languages), and only on this level, is it possible to speak of different minds as being in identical states. Ego and alter, being members of the same culture373 and language-community, expectably react to utterances by turning them into identical semantic representations. In consequence, they share the explicit information conveyed374 by the utterance. Constraint 3 [Mutual dependence]: The very fact that alter participates in dialogue and produces an utterance licenses the assumption that he selects it together with a set of expectations about ego's reaction and that he will be disappointed if these are thwarted. Therefore, ego can expect alter to expect that social expectations that underlie his utterance are satisfied by ego. These constraints are interactively relevant because both ego and alter find themselves forced to anticipate that their respective other expects them to be operative. Ego needs to let them guide her inferences about the underlying mental states that made alter select a certain utterance. Alter needs to take into account that ego carries out these inferences, that is, he must anticipate them in his own inferences before he starts talking. In such inferences, each constraint becomes a reliable premise, that is, a condition with which an interlocutor's inferences have to remain consistent. Additional premises ego and alter usually will have to be able to draw on include culturally provided encounter; see the contributions to Paul Drew and John Heritage, eds., 1992, Talk At Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, as well as the critical annotations on this practice by Heiko Hausendorf, 1992, Gespräch als System: Linguistische Aspekte einer Soziologie der Interaktion, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, p. 89-91. 372 In the following, ego and alter denote formal perspectives on the two interlocutors. Ego (addressed with female pronouns for the sake of legibility and conciseness) is the perspective we primarily observe, whereas we observe alter (male pronouns) only insofar as he is observed by, or orienting to, ego. This terminology is due to Talcott Parsons (see Section 1.3). 373 I use the term "culture" only as a residual concept – "culture" is a convenient abbreviation for any society's success in equipping most members with sufficiently overlapping sets of background knowledge. 374 "Conveyance", too, is merely a convenient abbreviation, in this case for an a priori unlikely but practically normal and expectable interplay between the speaker's expressivity and the hearer's irritability. It should not be read as an instance of the "transmission theory" of shared knowledge that I discard above.
153
background knowledge about common types of mental attributions (e.g., emotions, attitudes, personality) and about intentions and beliefs normally (e.g., conventionally) conveyed by most utterances. Such inferences result in the attribution of an underlying informative intention that defines the implicit information "conveyed" by the utterance. Because of Constraint 3, ego can be sure that alter "makes himself observable" and provides her with information he thinks she can actually reduce to an attribution of an underlying informative intention. Further attributions of mental states (e.g., beliefs or emotions) can help explain what made alter select the intention. For the common case where a verbal exchange comprises more than one utterance, Constraint 3 can be elaborated by specifying four constraints that define the sequential conditions under which alter can be disappointed by ego's response to his utterance. Constraint 4 [Rejection/acceptance as utterance]: Rejections and acceptances of interactive claims require new turns (normally utterances, but conspicuous silence or walking away can also be a "turn") in order to become observable. Constraint 5 [Relevance of rejection/acceptance]: Because of Constraint 3, any utterance that comes (more or less immediately) after a prior utterance is expected to either reject some of the claims conveyed by the first turn or accept all of them. In sequences of utterances, the relevance of the distinction between rejection and acceptance can only be suspended by employing "special means". An example of special means would be initiation of a side sequence (as defined by Conversation Analysis). Constraint 6 [Reflexivity of rejection/acceptance]: Because second turns are observable as claiming that claims conveyed through a first turn are worthy of rejecting or accepting, third turns are observable as claiming that prior rejections or acceptances are worthy of rejecting or accepting. Constraint 7 [Ratified interactive facts]: As every third turn gives alter the option to reject a prior rejection or acceptance of claims conveyed in his first utterance, alter's failure to observably reject (which includes: to question through reflexive thematization) a rejection or acceptance at this sequential position authorizes ego to assume that her rejection/acceptance has been ratified. That is, in dialogue, third-turn acceptances lead to the emergence of mutually and observably ratified interactive facts. This final constraint specifies the conditions under which dialogue provides participating observers with reliably and observably shared knowledge about a (first-turn) speaker's mental states. With a slight functionalist undertone, one may say that Constraints 1-7 together "solve" the problem of observability. Some forms of dialogues impose additional constraints (e.g., argumentation reduces interactive claims to argumentative positions, see Section 4.3), but these are not operative in all dialogues.
154
*** The epistemological predicament that underlies the problem of observability has a number of interesting theoretical and methodological consequences. Most importantly, since the problem has no objective solution, the old constructivist conjecture that assumptions about others' mental states are never more than mere assumptions is essentially right. However, it requires an important qualification: Although such assumptions are precarious, interlocutors have to be (or act as if they are) committed to them and, thereby, become interactively predictable – otherwise, ratified interactive facts can only emerge accidentally and remain unreliable. In other words, all interlocutors normally need to take their hypothetical reconstructions of other interlocutors' mental states as real.375 This shows that the epistemological conclusions of Chapter 2, despite their constructivist emphasis, go beyond conventional constructivism. A conventional account would miss that the problem in question is also a practical problem interlocutors themselves need to overcome. Since it is interactively sufficient that interlocutors act as if they anticipate the relevance of Constraints 1-7 above, dialogues do not require their participants really to "be" humans. Any system that is complex and clever enough to process these constraints can participate in dialogue, at least in principle. Thus, even implementers of the upcoming generation of artificially intelligent dialogue systems may profit from the sketched solution to the problem of observability. Once such systems are able to process syntax reliably and to transform it into rich semantic representations, automatically understanding contributions to a dialogue may become possible. However, to the best of my knowledge, the automatic production of semantic representations of natural language sentences is still too difficult to answer whether this problem will ever be solved satisfactorily.376 The methodological relevance of the problem of observability stems from the fact that it concerns participants and their scientific observers identically. This implies straightforwardly that "participant observation", other things being equal, cannot provide systematically more reliable reconstructions of interlocutors' mental states.377 In fact, it means that no sociological analysis 375 The insight that hypotheses become realities if acted upon is already classical; see again Thomas and Thomas, The Child in America, p. 572. 376 For an overview of the state of the art in this new field, see Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos, 1999, "Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics, Volume II: Working with Discourse Representation Structures", unpub. manuscript, Universität Saarbrücken, 225 pages. 377 This does not challenge other advantages of participant observation, like access to otherwise inaccessible dialogues.
155
of dialogue can lead to fully reliable reconstructions. On the other hand, sociological analysis is not in a worse position than a situated hearer is in when it comes to reconstructing a speaker's mental states (e.g., his underlying informative intention). Sociologists' inferences about them have a good chance of mirroring the hearer's inferences about them. Since observability is (or must be scientifically treated as) a real problem, interlocutors' attempts at overcoming it by means of more or less viable imputations are real, too. For this reason, sociology is entitled to work with systematic assumptions about their unobservable states although it would never be able to verify these assumptions objectively. Likewise, it is entitled to work with small numbers of cases. Empirical reconstructions of imputations made by real interlocutors are never rendered more reliable by heightening the amount of cases under scrutiny. Increasing their number can only help to bring the analyst's background assumptions more in line with the knowledge of attribution types and normal expectations held by the observed interlocutors. However, whether it takes 1 or 100 cases in order to provide the analyst with reliable background assumptions is empirically undecidable. Therefore, the solution developed in this treatise can motivate single-case as well as multiple-case studies of dialogue.378 Far from inviting rhetorics like "anything goes" or "forget theory, let the data decide", this symmetry between scientists' and interlocutors' lack of knowledge leads both to a simplification and a systematization of the conception of human nature that sociological studies of dialogue need to presuppose. Although sociology may never be able to build complete and adequate models of how "real interlocutors" operate inside, sociology is able to develop adequate models of how real interlocutors have to believe other interlocutors operate inside. For the purpose of interpreting and explaining empirical occurrences of dialogue, this knowledge is all that sociology needs. These considerations should suffice to challenge the dogma cherished by some conversation analysts that only assumptions that are provably relevant in transcripts of real conversations may receive an explanatory function.379 378 A feature it shares with Conversation Analysis, see Emanuel Schegloff, 1987, "Analyzing Single Episodes of Interaction: An Exercise in Conversation Analysis", Social Psychology Quarterly 50: 101-114. 379 This is at least my understanding of Sacks, "On hypothetical data; Puns; Proverbial expressions", p. 419f. However, since Conversation Analysis must face the problem of observability like anybody else, conversation-analytical studies frequently go beyond provably relevant imputations. I am inclined to see this as a demonstration of the overall compatibility of Conversation Analysis' research reality with the more skeptical epistemology developed in this treatise. Of course, against the sometimes rather mechanistic structuralism of Conversation Analysis I would insist, in line with Section 4.1, that the "sequential order" of dialogue derives from its "inferential order" – on this distinction, see Ian Hutchby and Robin Wooffitt, 1998, Conversation Analysis, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 39. Since the inferential order of dialogue
156
Features like "recipient design"380 are never verifiable by means of conversational data. Even worse, acting the observational fool and pretending not to be able to ground utterances in underlying informative intentions (among other mental states) means overlooking how interlocutors themselves are constrained to deal with the problem of observability. The example of recipient design is an excellent demonstration of this divergence. Understood formally, recipient design is equivalent to the constraint of mutual dependence (see Constraint 3 above) and must be presupposed in order to make sense of an utterance. A speaker who is not observed as carrying out recipient design fails to follow Grice's Cooperative Principle and, therefore, cannot be observed as participating in dialogue at all. To conclude this treatise, I would like to show in brief that an interactive solution to the problem of observability has even macrosocial relevance. The socio-cognitive conception of the relationship between interlocutors (as constrainable "anticipation machines"381) and verbal interaction (as a system of constraints on interlocutors' anticipations) developed in this treatise leads to a new solution to the venerable agency-structure-transition problem (or micro-macro problem).382 The collaboration of social constraints, on one side, and individual observations and inferences, on the other, functions beyond face-to-face encounters. In all forms of social intercourse, minds can be conceived of as autonomous yet constrainable observers. Conversely, social structures that guide behavior (and do not just set parameters of behavior, like statistical [e.g., income] or topological [e.g., access to health-care] distributions of resources), like social norms or laws, can never have direct causal relevance. They can only influence behavior by becoming constraints, that is, premises of individual inferences. If they are to bring about quasicausal effects, they need to have a form that allows them to exploit members' basic desire to avoid rejecting replies by "making themselves observable". For instance, politeness rules exploit this desire by allowing people to anticipate that they will be subject to unfavorable observations and behavior if they fail to display overt observance of these rules,383 whereas tax laws utilis fixed and determinable, its sequential order is equally determinable, and conversation analysts may read this treatise as an attempt at confirming that their inquiries into the universal, non-contingent order of turn taking are valid. 380 For some definitions, see Harvey Sacks, 1992 [1971], "Spouse Talk (Lecture Fall 1971)", pp. 437-443 in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation II, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 438, Sacks, "Adjacency Pairs: Distribution in Conversation; A Single Instance of a Q-A Pair", p. 540, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, "A Simplest Systematics", p. 727. 381 See Daniel C. Dennett, 1991, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown, p. 178. 382 See the contributions to Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., eds., 1987, The Micro-Macro Link, Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, as well as Schegloff, "Reflections on Talk and Social Structure". 383 Goffman uses the example of the "good deviant" to illustrate society's ability to enforce conformance by exploiting individual rationality, see Goffman, Stigma, p. 141.
157
ize it by stipulating that only filed tax returns clear citizens of the universal suspicion of being tax dodgers. In this conception of the relationship between agency and structure, there is a match between the complexity and rationality of minds and the simplicity of social constraints. These do not have to be complex in order to permit complex interpretations of individual behavior and, therefore, complex forms of "action". Since all interpretation distinguishes explicit and implicit information, people can overtly violate yet implicitly observe behavior-guiding social structures and, thereby, enforce intricate forms of understanding, like those discussed in Section 3.3. The only condition social constraints need to fulfill is to be able to activate people's anticipation competence in a way that leads to forms of (and interactions between) individual behavior that can be interpreted as conformance.384
384
Using a much more confined yet highly demanding conception of rationality, theories of Rational Choice advocate a similar, rationality-mediated transformation of existing into new social structures. As an example, see James S. Coleman, 1987, "Microfoundations and Macrosocial Behavior", pp. 153-173 in Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al., The Micro-Macro Link, Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. Because this family of theories does not allow model actors to base rational evaluations on the expectable evaluations of other actors, it presupposes a world in which the problem of observability does not exist – cf. the continuous allusions to allegedly objective and observable "interests". For critical inspections of Rational Choice-axioms, see once more Elster, Sour Grapes, Boudon, "The 'Rational Choice Model'".
158
References
Adelswärd, Viveka, and Per Linell, 1994. "Vagueness as an Interactional Resource: The Genre of Threatening Phone Calls". Pp. 261-288 in Walter M. Sprondel, Die Objektivität der Ordnungen und ihre kommunikative Konstruktion (Festschrift für Thomas Luckmann). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil J. Smelser, eds, 1987. The Micro-Macro Link. Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. Alexy, Robert, 1989. A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Oxford: Clarendon. Apel, Karl-Otto, 1973. "Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft und die Grundlagen der Ethik". Pp. 358-435 in Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie 2: Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1973. "Einleitung: Transformation der Philosophie". Pp. 9-76 in Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie 1: Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Aquinas, Thomas, 1978 [1273]. Summa Theologica (Revised Dominican Translation). 22 ed. Chicago et al: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ashby, W. Ross, 1956. An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall. Aune, Bruce, 1961. "The Problem of Other Minds". Philosophical Review 70: 320339. Austin, John Langshaw, 1961 [1946]. "Other Minds". Pp. 44-84 in John Langshaw Austin, Philosophical Papers. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. ———, 1962. How to Do Things With Words. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Avramides, Anita, 1989. Meaning and Mind: An Examination of a Gricean Account of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———, 2001. Other Minds. London: Routledge. Bach, Kent, 1994. "Conversational Impliciture". Mind and Language 9: 124-162. ———, 2001. "You Don't Say?" Synthese 128: 15-44. Baecker, Dirk, ed. 1993. Probleme der Form. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Barbalet, J. M., 1999. "Boredom and Social Meaning". British Journal of Sociology 50: 631-646. Barnes, Barry, 2000. Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action. London: Sage. Barthes, Roland, 1964. Éléments de sémiologie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
159
Bateson, Gregory, 2000 [1967]. "Cybernetic Explanation". Pp. 405-416 in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. ———, 2000 [1971]. "The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism". Pp. 309337 in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Berger, Joseph, Susan J. Rosenholtz, and Morris Zelditch, 1980. "Status Organizing Processes". Annual Review of Sociology 6: 479-508. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann, 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin. Bergmann, Jörg R., 1992. "Veiled Morality: Notes on Discretion in Psychiatry". Pp. 137-162 in Paul Drew and John Heritage, Talk At Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Bergmann, Jörg R., and Thomas Luckmann, 1995. "Reconstructive Genres of Everyday Communication". Pp. 289-304 in Uta M. Quasthoff, Aspects of Oral Communication. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Bilgrami, Akeel, 1992. Belief and Meaning: The Unity and Locality of Mental Content. Oxford: Blackwell. Bilmes, Jack, 1997. "Being Interrupted". Language in Society 26: 507-531. Binkley, Robert W., 1998. "Review of Johan van Benthem, Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst and Frank Veltman (eds.), Logic and Argumentation". Argumentation 12: 508-512. Blackburn, Patrick, and Johan Bos, 1999, "Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics, Volume II: Working with Discourse Representation Structures". Unpub. manuscript. Universität Saarbrücken. 225 pages. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1997 [1353]. Decameron. 6 ed. Torino: Einaudi. Booch, Grady, 1993. Object-oriented Analysis and Design: With Applications. Redwood City, CA: Benjamin/Cummings. Botero, Giovanni, 1997 [1589]. La Ragion di Stato. Roma: Donzelli. Boudon, Raymond, 1996. "The 'Rational Choice Model': A Particular Case of the 'Cognitive Model'". Rationality and Society 8: 123-150. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1986. "The Forms of Capital". Pp. 241-258 in John G. Richardson, Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant, eds, 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Polity Press. Brandom, Robert B., 1983. "Asserting". Noûs 17: 637-650. ———, 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Brekhus, Wayne, 1998. "A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus". Sociological Theory 16: 34-51. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson, 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. 2 ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Burke, Kenneth, 1945. A Grammar of Motives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Burns, Tom R., and Helena Flam, 1987. The Shaping of Social Organization: Social Rule System Theory With Applications. London: Sage.
160
Butrick, Richard, 1970. Carnap on Meaning and Analyticity. Den Haag: Mouton. Buytendijk, F. J. J., and Helmuth Plessner, 1982 [1925]. "Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom Bewußtsein des anderen Ichs". Pp. 67-129 in Helmuth Plessner, Ausdruck und menschliche Natur (Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 7). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Caplan, David N., 1992. Language: Structure, Processing and Disorders. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Caplow, Theodore, 1968. Two Against One: Coalitions in Triads. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Carnap, Rudolf, 1947. Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Carroll, Lewis, 1962 [1872]. "Through the Looking Glass". Pp. 165-347 in Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. London: Penguin. Carruthers, Peter, and Peter K. Smith, eds, 1996. Theories of Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Chomsky, Noam, 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Churchland, Patricia Smith, 1986. Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cicourel, Aaron V., 1981. "The Role of Cognitive-Linguistic Concepts in Understanding Everyday Social Interactions". Annual Review of Sociology 7: 87106. Clark, Herbert H., 1992. Arenas of Language Use. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. ———, 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Coleman, James S., 1987. "Microfoundations and Macrosocial Behavior". Pp. 153173 in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch and Neil J. Smelser, The Micro-Macro Link. Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. Creelan, Paul, 1984. "Vicissitudes of the Sacred: Erving Goffman and the Book of Job". Theory and Society 13: 663-695. Davidson, Donald, 1980. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon. ———, 1980 [1970]. "Mental Events". Pp. 207-227 in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon. ———, 1990 [1982]. "Paradoxes of Irrationality". Pp. 449-464 in Paul K. Moser, Rationality in Action: Contemporary Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Davis, Wayne A., 1998. Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle in the Failure of Gricean Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. de Sousa, Ronald, 1990. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dennett, Daniel C., 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown. Derrida, Jacques, 1972. "La différance". Pp. 1-29 in Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit. Descartes, René, 1926 [1637]. Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. 2 ed. Paris: J. Vrin. Dewey, John, 1894. "The Ego as Cause". Philosophical Review 3: 337-341.
161
Dijk, Teun A. van, ed. 1985. Handbook of Discourse-Analysis, Vol. 3. London/New York: Academic Press. DiMaggio, Paul, 1997. "Culture and Cognition". Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263-287. Downes, Chauncey, 1965. "Husserl and the Coherence of the Other Minds Problem". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26: 253-259. Dretske, Fred I., 1973. "Perception and Other Minds". Noûs 7: 34-44. Drew, Paul, 1997. "'Open' Class Repair Initiators in Response to Sequential Sources of Troubles in Conversation". Journal of Pragmatics 28: 69-101. Drew, Paul, and John Heritage, eds, 1992. Talk At Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Durkheim, Emile, 1977 [1895]. Les règles de la méthode sociologique. 19 ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Eco, Umberto, 1984. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Houndmills et al: Macmillan Press. Eemeren, Frans H. van, Rob Grootendorst, and Tjark Kruiger, 1984. The Study of Argumentation. New York: Irvington. Elias, Norbert, 1978. Was ist Soziologie? 3 ed. München: Juventa. Elster, Jon, 1983. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Ann Mische, 1998. "What is Agency?" American Journal of Sociology 103: 962-1023. Esposito, Elena, 1992. L'operazione di osservazione: Costruttivismo e teoria dei sistemi sociali. Milano: Angeli. ———, 1996. "Observing Interpretation: A Sociological View of Hermeneutics". MLN 111.3: 593-619. Esser, Hartmut, 1996. "Die Definition der Situation". Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 48: 1–34. Fararo, Thomas J., 2001. "Review of 'Problems of Form', edited by Dirk Baecker". Contemporary Sociology 30: 306-307. Fleck, Ludwik, 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Fodor, Jerry A., 1975. The Language of Thought. New York: Crowell. Fodor, Jerry A., and Ernest LePore, 2002. The Compositionality Papers. Oxford: Clarendon. Foerster, Heinz von, 1999 [1963]. "Gedächtnis ohne Aufzeichnung". Pp. 133-171 in Heinz von Foerster, Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag. ———, 1999 [1976]. "Gegenstände: greifbare Symbole für (Eigen-)Verhalten". Pp. 207-216 in Heinz von Foerster, Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag. ———, 1999. Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie. Translated by Wolfram K. Köck. 2 ed. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag.
162
———, 1999 [1973]. "Über das Konstruieren von Wirklichkeiten". Pp. 25-41 in Heinz von Foerster, Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag. Frank, Manfred, 1995. "Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität". Revue Internationale de Philosophie 194: 521-550. Freud, Sigmund, 1912. "Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung". Pp. 376–387 in Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 8. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———, 1913. "Zur Einleitung der Behandlung". Pp. 454-478 in Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 8. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Frisch, Max, 1977. Homo Faber. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fuchs, Peter, 1993. Moderne Kommunikation: Zur Theorie des operativen Displacements. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1990 [1960]. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Gesammelte Werke Bd. 1). 6 ed. Tübingen: Mohr. Garcia, Angela, 1997. "Interactional Constraints on Proposal Generation in Mediation Hearings: A Preliminary Investigation". Discourse and Society 8: 219247. Gardner, Howard, 1999. Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. New York: Basic Books. Garfinkel, Harold, 1963. "A Conception of, and Experiments with, 'Trust' as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions". Pp. 187-238 in O. J. Harvey, Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Determinants. New York: Ronald Press. ———, 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, Harold, and Harvey Sacks, 1970. "On Formal Structures of Practical Actions". Pp. 338-366 in John C. McKinney and Edward A. Tiryakian, Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments. New York: AppletonCentury. Giddens, Anthony, 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. Gigerenzer, Gerd, and Peter M. Todd, 1999. Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Gilgenmann, Klaus, 1997. "Kommunikation - ein Reißverschlußmodell". Soziale Systeme 3: 33-56. Glanville, Ranulph, 1979. "The Form of Cybernetics: Whitening the Black Box". Pp. 35-42 in Society for General Systems Research, General Systems Research: A Science, a Methodology, a Technology. Louisville, KY. ———, 1982. "Inside Every White Box There are Two Black Boxes Trying to Get Out". Behavioral Science 27: 1-11. Glasersfeld, Ernst von, 1995. Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London/Washington D.C.: Falmer. ———, 2001. "The Radical Constructivist View of Science". Foundations of Science 6: 31-43.
163
Glendinning, Simon, 1998. On Being With Others: Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein. London: Routledge. Goffman, Erving, 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. ———, 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books. ———, 1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. ———, 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ———, 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———, 1967 [1956]. "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor". Pp. 47-95 in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———, 1967 [1955]. "On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction". Pp. 5-45 in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———, 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. ———, 1971. "Normal Appearances". Pp. 238-333 in Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper & Row. ———, 1971. "Remedial Interchanges". Pp. 95-187 in Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper & Row. ———, 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press. ———, 1981. "Radio Talk". Pp. 197-327 in Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. ———, 1983. "Felicity's Condition". American Journal of Sociology 89: 1-53. ———, 1990 [1963]. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin. Goodwin, Charles, 1987. "Forgetfulness as an Interactive Resource". Social Psychology Quarterly 50: 115-130. Govier, Trudy, 1987. Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. Dordrecht: Foris. Grathoff, Richard, and Bernhard Waldenfels, eds, 1983. Sozialität und Intersubjektivität: Phänomenologische Perspektiven der Sozialwissenschaften im Umkreis von Aron Gurwitsch und Alfred Schütz. München: Fink. Greatbatch, David, 1992. "On the Management of Disagreement Between News Interviewees". Pp. 268-301 in Paul Drew and John Heritage, Talk At Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Grice, H. Paul, 1981. "Presupposition and Conversational Implicatures". Pp. 183198 in Peter Cole, Radical Pragmatics. London/New York: Academic Press. ———, 1986. "Reply to Richards". Pp. 45-106 in Richard E. Grandy and Richard Warner, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends. Oxford: Clarendon.
164
———, 1989 [1987]. "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation". Pp. 41-57 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. ———, 1989 [1967]. "Logic and Conversation". Pp. 22-40 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. ———, 1989 [1957]. "Meaning". Pp. 213-223 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. ———, 1989 [1987]. "Retrospective Epilogue". Pp. 339-385 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. ———, 1989. "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions". Pp. 86-116 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. ———, 1989. "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning". Pp. 117-137 in H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Grimshaw, Allen D., 1987. "Disambiguating Discourse: Members' Skill and Analysts' Problem". Social Psychology Quarterly 50: 186-204. Guicciardini, Francesco, 1994 [1524]. Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Translated by Alison Brown. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Gumperz, John J., 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ———, 1992. "Contextualization and Understanding". Pp. 229-252 in Charles Goodwin and Alessandro Duranti, Rethinking Context. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ———, 1995. "Mutual Inferencing in Conversation". Pp. 101-123 in Ivana Marková, Carl F. Graumann and Klaus Foppa, Mutualities in Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ———, 1999. "On Interactional Sociolinguistic Method". Pp. 453-471 in Celia Roberts and Srikant Sarangi, Talk, Work, and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gunn, J. A. W., 1968. "'Interest Will Not Lie': A Seventeenth-Century Political Maxim". Journal of the History of Ideas 29: 551-564. Habermas, Jürgen, 1981. Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 1, Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1981. Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Band 2, Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1982. Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften. 5 ed. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1984 [1972]. "Wahrheitstheorien". Pp. 127-183 in Jürgen Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1988. Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
165
Harman, Gilbert, 1999. "Three Levels of Meaning". Pp. 155-165 in Gilbert Harman, Reasoning, Meaning and Mind. Oxford: Clarendon. Hausendorf, Heiko, 1992. Gespräch als System: Linguistische Aspekte einer Soziologie der Interaktion. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Hegel, Georg W. F., 1970 [1807]. Phänomenologie des Geistes (Werke Bd. 3). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Henrich, Dieter, 2000, "Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität (22 Thesen und Begründungsskizzen)". Unpub. manuscript. University of Munich. 5 pages. Herbig, Alfred F., 1992. 'Sie argumentieren doch scheinheilig!' Sprach- und sprechwissenschaftliche Aspekte einer Stilistik des Argumentierens. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Heysse, Tim, 1997. "Why Logic Doesn‘t Matter in the (Philosophical) Study of Argumentation". Argumentation 11: 211-224. Hillery, George A., 1957. "The Negro in New Orleans: A Functional Analysis of Demographic Data". American Sociological Review 22: 183-188. Hilton, Denis J., 1995. "The Social Context of Reasoning: Conversational Inference and Rational Judgment". Psychological Bulletin 118: 248-271. Hirschman, Albert O., 1977. The Passions and the Interests. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Hobbes, Thomas, 1651. Leviathan. London. Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 1979. "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure". American Journal of Sociology 85: 551-575. Hollis, Martin, 1977. Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Homer, 1879. The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by S. H. Butler and Andrew Lang. Oxford: Clarendon. House, Floyd N., 1926. "The Concept 'Social Forces' in American Sociology. Section V. The 'Interest' Concept". American Journal of Sociology 31: 507512. Houtkoop-Steenstra, Hanneke, 2000. Interaction and the Standardized Survey Interview: The Living Questionnaire. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Hume, David, 2000 [1776]. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Husserl, Edmund, 1901. Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Theil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———, 1913. Logische Untersuchungen II/1: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. 2 ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———, 1956 [1938]. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (Husserliana VI). 2 ed. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 1. Teil: 1905-1920. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 2. Teil: 1921-1928. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 3. Teil: 1929-1935. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
166
———, 1976 [1922]. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, 1. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Husserliana III/1). 2 ed. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1992 [1929]. Cartesianische Meditationen: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie. Hamburg: Meiner. Hutchby, Ian, 1995. "Aspects of Recipient Design in Expert Advice-Giving on CallIn Radio". Discourse Processes 19: 219-238. Hutchby, Ian, and Robin Wooffitt, 1998. Conversation Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. Hyslop, Alec, 1995. Other Minds. Dordrecht/London: Kluwer. James, Henry, 1998 [1881]. The Portrait of a Lady. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. James, William, 1907. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. Jefferson, Gail, 1972. "Side Sequences". Pp. 294-338 in David Sudnow, Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press. Joas, Hans, 1996. The Creativity of Action. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. ———, 2000. The Genesis of Values. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jones, Edward E., and Richard E. Nisbett, 1972. "The Actor and the Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behavior". Pp. 79-94 in Edward E. Jones, David E. Kanouse, Harold H. Kelley, Richard E. Nisbett, Stuart Valins and Bernard Weiner, Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. Kahnemann, Daniel, and Amos Tversky, 1979. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk". Econometrica 47: 263–291. Kane, Anne E., 1997. "Theorizing Meaning Construction in Social Movements: Symbolic Structures and Interpretation during the Irish Land War, 18791882". Sociological Theory 15: 249-276. Kant, Immanuel, 1974 [1787]. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 2 ed. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kendon, Adam, 1995. "Gestures as Illocutionary and Discourse Structure Markers in Southern Italian Conversation". Journal of Pragmatics 23: 247-279. Kieserling, André, 1999. Kommunikation unter Anwesenden: Studien über Interaktionssysteme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kirk, Carol A. van, 1986. "Kant and the Problem of Other Minds". Kant-Studien 77: 41-58. Kneer, Georg, 1997. "Beobachten, Verstehen und Verständigung: Zur Reformulierung hermeneutischer Grundkonzepte in der Diskursanalyse und der Systemtheorie". Pp. 50-69 in Tilmann Sutter, Beobachtung verstehen, Verstehen beobachten: Perspektiven einer konstruktivistischen Hermeneutik. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Kopperschmidt, Josef, 2000. Argumentationstheorie zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Kotthoff, Helga, 1993. "Disaggrement and Concession in Disputes: On the Context Sensitivity of Preference Structures". Language in Society 22: 193-216.
167
Kozlowski, Richard, 1991. Die Aporien der Intersubjektivität: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Edmund Husserls Intersubjektivitätstheorie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Lamont, Michèle, 2000. "Meaning-Making in Cultural Sociology: Broadening Our Agenda". Contemporary Sociology 29: 602-607. Lazarus, Richard S., 1984. "On the Primacy of Cognition". American Psychologist 39: 124-129. Lee, Benny P. H., 2001. "Mutual Knowledge, Background Knowledge and Shared Beliefs: Their Roles in Establishing Common Ground". Journal of Pragmatics 33: 21-44. Leech, Geoffrey, 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London/New York: Longman. Levi, Primo, 1987. "Afterword". Pp. 381-398 in Primo Levi, If This Is a Man - The Truce. London: Penguin. Levin, Michael E., 1984. "Why We Believe in Other Minds". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44: 343-359. Levinson, Stephen C., 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ———, 1989. "A Review of Relevance (Review of Sperber/Wilson, Relevance)". Journal of Linguistics 25: 455-472. ———, 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lindenberg, Siegwart, 1992. "An Extended Theory of Institutions and Contractual Discipline". Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 148: 125– 154. Linell, Per, 1998. Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspectives. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins. Lueken, Geert-Lueke, 1999. "Prämissenergänzung". Dialektik 1999.1: 95-115. Luhmann, Niklas, 1978. "Temporalization of Complexity". Pp. 95-111 in R. Felix Geyer and Johannes van der Zouwen, Sociocybernetics, Vol. 2. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1981 [1979]. "Identitätsgebrauch in selbstsubstitutiven Ordnungen, besonders Gesellschaften". Pp. 198-227 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 3. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———, 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1986. "Systeme verstehen Systeme". Pp. 72-117 in Niklas Luhmann and Karl Eberhard Schorr, Zwischen Intransparenz und Verstehen: Fragen an die Pädagogik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1989. "Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus". Pp. 149-258 in Niklas Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Band 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1989. "Staat und Staatsräson im Übergang von traditionaler Herrschaft zu moderner Politik". Pp. 65-148 in Niklas Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Band 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1989. Vertrauen: Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität. 3 ed. Stuttgart: Enke.
168
———, 1990. Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1993. Das Recht der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1995. "Die operative Geschlossenheit psychischer und sozialer Systeme". Pp. 25-36 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———, 1995 [1986]. "Intersubjektivität oder Kommunikation: Unterschiedliche Ausgangspunkte soziologischer Theoriebildung". Pp. 169-188 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———, 1995. "Kausalität im Süden". Soziale Systeme 1: 7-28. ———, 1995. "Was ist Kommunikation?" Pp. 113-124 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———, 1995. "Wie ist Bewußtsein an Kommunikation beteiligt?" Pp. 37-54 in Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———, 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1997. "Grenzwerte der ökologischen Politik: Eine Form von Risikomanagement". Pp. 195-221 in Georg Krücken and Petra Hiller, Risiko und Regulierung: Soziologische Beiträge zu Technikkontrolle und präventiver Umweltpolitik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 2000. Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 2000. Organisation und Entscheidung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Lukaszewicz, Witold, 1990. Non-monotonic Reasoning: Formalization of Commonsense Reasoning. New York et al: Ellis Horwood. Lumer, Christoph, 1995. "Der theoretische Ansatz der Praktischen Argumentationstheorie". Pp. 81-101 in Harald Wohlrapp, Wege der Argumentationsforschung. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. ———, 2000. "Reductionism in Fallacy Theory". Argumentation 14: 405-423. Lupton, Deborah, 1994. "Food, Memory and Meaning: The Symbolic and Social Nature of Food Events". Sociological Review 42: 664-685. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1997 [1532]. Il principe. 6 ed. Milano: Feltrinelli. Mai, Hans-Peter, Fritz Strack, and Norbert Schwarz, 1991. "Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Part-Whole Question Sequences: A Conversational Logic Analysis". Public Opinion Quarterly 55: 3-23. Malcolm, Norman, 1958. "Knowledge of Other Minds". Journal of Philosophy 55: 969-978. Mann, Thomas, 1999 [1939]. Lotte in Weimar. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Mannheim, Karl, 1998 [1936]. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge. March, James G., and Herbert A. Simon, 1958. Organizations. New York: Wiley. Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela, 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: Reidel. ———, 1987. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Translated by Robert Paolucci. Boston: Shambhala. Mead, George Herbert, 1910. "Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning". Psychological Bulletin 7: 397-405. ———, 1912. "The Mechanism of Social Consciousness". Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9: 401-406.
169
———, 1913. "The Social Self". Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 10: 374-380. ———, 1934. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Merton, Robert K., 1936. "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action". American Sociological Review 1: 894-904. Mey, Jacob L., 1993. Pragmatics: An Introduction. London: Blackwell. Mill, John Stuart, 1872. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings. 4 ed. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Misheva, Vessela, 1993. "Totalitarian Interaction: A Systems Approach". Sociologia Internationalis 31: 179-196. Moerman, Michael, and Harvey Sacks, 1988 [1971]. "On 'Understanding' in the Analysis of Natural Conversation". Pp. 180-186 in Michael Moerman, Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. Mohr, John W., 1998. "Measuring Meaning Structures". Annual Review of Sociology 24: 345-370. Nagel, Thomas, 1995. Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969-1994. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Nassehi, Armin, 1992. "Wie wirklich sind Systeme? Zum ontologischen und epistemologischen Status von Luhmanns Theorie selbstreferenzieller Systeme". Pp. 43-70 in Michael Welker and Werner Krawietz, Kritik der Theorie sozialer Systeme: Auseinandersetzungen mit Luhmanns Hauptwerk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Neumann, John von, and Oskar Morgenstern, 1944. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Nippert-Eng, Christena Ellen, 1994. "The Home/Work Nexus: Boundary Work in Everyday Life (Working, Family)." Doctoral dissertation, The State University of New York at Stony Brook. Ockham, William of, 1957 [1328]. Philosophical Writings. Edinburgh/London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. O'Donnell, Michael J., 1993. Against Nonmonotonic Logic. Available from http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/ [last access 2002-10-27]. Oevermann, Ulrich, 1999. "Strukturale Soziologie und Rekonstruktionsmethodologie". Pp. 72-84 in Wolfgang Glatzer, Ansichten der Gesellschaft: Frankfurter Beiträge aus Soziologie und Politikwissenschaft. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Olson, James M., Neal J. Roese, and Mark P. Zanna, 1996. "Expectancies". Pp. 211238 in E. Tory Higgins and Arie W. Kruglanski, Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles. New York/London: Guilford. Orbuch, Terri L., 1997. "People's Accounts Count: The Sociology of Accounts". Annual Review of Sociology 23: 455-478. Papafragou, Anna, 2002. "Mindreading and Verbal Communication". Mind and Language 17: 55-67.
170
Parsons, Talcott, 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ———, 1968. "Interaction: Social Interaction". Pp. 429-441 in David L. Sills, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences Vol. 7. New York: Macmillan. Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils, 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. New York: Harper & Row. Pask, Gordon, 1961. "A Proposed Evolutionary Model". Pp. 229-248 in Heinz von Foerster and George W. Zopf, Principles of Self-organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois Symposium on Self-Organization, Robert Allerton Park, 8 and 9 June, 1961. New York: Pergamon Press. Perelman, Chaïm, 1970. Le champ de l'argumentation. Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires. Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1970. Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique. 2 ed. Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires. Pinker, Steven, 1997. How the Mind Works. New York/London: W. W. Norton. Plessner, Helmuth, 1982 [1957]. "Ausdruck und menschliche Existenz". Pp. 435-445 in Helmuth Plessner, Ausdruck und menschliche Natur (Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 7). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Pomerantz, Anita, 1984. "Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of prefered/disprefered turn shapes". Pp. 57-101 in J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Popper, Karl, 1972. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon. Purkey, William W., 1988. An Overview of Self-Concept Theory for Counselors. Available from http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/files/selfconc.html [last access 2002-11-5]. Putnam, Hilary, 1975. "Other Minds". Pp. 342-361 in Hilary Putnam, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Quine, Willard Van Orman, 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rawls, John, 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap. Recanati, François, 2001. "What Is Said". Synthese 128: 75-91. Reich, Wendelin, 2000. "Heuristics as Plausible Models of Rationality?" Acta Sociologica 42: 251-258. ———, 2003. "Geteiltes Wissen in der Interaktion: Welchen Beitrag leisten Spieltheorie und Künstliche Intelligenz?" in Jutta Allmendinger, Entstaatlichung und soziale Sicherheit: Verhandlungen des 31. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Leipzig, 2 Bände + CD-ROM. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Rescher, Nicholas, 1988. Rationality: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature and the Rationale of Reason. Oxford: Clarendon. Reynaert, Peter, 2001. "Intersubjectivity and Naturalism - Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation Revisited". Husserl Studies 17: 207-216.
171
Römpp, Georg, 1992. Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität und ihre Bedeutung für eine Theorie intersubjektiver Objektivität und die Konzeption einer phänomenologischen Philosophie. Dordrecht/London: Kluwer. Russell, Bertrand, 1993 [1914]. Our Knowledge of the External World. London: Routledge. Sacks, Harvey, 1972. "Notes on Police Assessment of Moral Character". Pp. 280293 in David Sudnow, Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press. ———, 1972. "On the Analyzability of Stories by Children". Pp. 325-345 in John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ———, 1973. "On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in the organization of sequences in conversation". Pp. 54-69 in John R. E. Lee and Graham Button, Talk and Social Organisation. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. ———, 1975. "Everyone Has to Lie". Pp. 57-79 in Ben G. Blount and Mary Sanches, Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use. London/New York: Academic Press. ———, 1992 [1972]. "Adjacency Pairs: Distribution in Conversation; A Single Instance of a Q-A Pair (Lecture Spring 1972)". Pp. 533-541 in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation II. Oxford: Blackwell. ———, 1992 [1965]. "The Inference-Making Machine (Lecture Fall 1964 - Spring 1965)". Pp. 113-125 in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation I. Oxford: Blackwell. ———, 1992 [1971]. "On hypothetical data; Puns; Proverbial expressions (Lecture Fall 1971)". Pp. 419-424 in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation II. Oxford: Blackwell. ———, 1992 [1971]. "Spouse Talk (Lecture Fall 1971)". Pp. 437-443 in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation II. Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, 1974. "A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation". Language 50: 696-735. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1976 [1943]. L'être et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. ———, 1988 [1937]. La transcendence de l'ego. Paris: J. Vrin. Saul, Jennifer M., 2001. "Review of Wayne A. Davis, Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle in the Failure of Gricean Theory". Noûs 35: 630-641. ———, 2002. "Speaker Meaning, What is Said, and What is Implicated". Noûs 36: 228-248. Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1969 [1915]. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Savigny, Eike von, 1988. Wittgensteins Philosophische Untersuchungen: Ein Kommentar für Leser, Bd. I: §§ 1-315. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Scheff, Thomas J., 1997. Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality: Part/Whole Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Schegloff, Emanuel, 1987. "Analyzing Single Episodes of Interaction: An Exercise in Conversation Analysis". Social Psychology Quarterly 50: 101-114.
172
———, 1988. "On an Actual Virtual Servo-Mechanism for Guessing Bad News: A Single Case Conjecture". Social Problems 35: 442-457. ———, 1991. "Conversation Analysis and Socially Shared Cognition". Pp. 150-171 in Stephanie D. Teasley, John M. Levine and Lauren B. Resnick, Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. ———, 1991. "Reflections on Talk and Social Structure". Pp. 44-70 in Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmermann, Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. ———, 1992. "Introduction (to Sacks, Lectures on Conversation, I)". Pp. ix-lxii in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation I. Oxford: Blackwell. ———, 1992. "Repair after Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation". American Journal of Sociology 97: 1295-1345. Schegloff, Emanuel, and Harvey Sacks, 1973. "Opening up Closings". Semiotica 8: 289-327. Scheler, Max, 1973 [1922]. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Gesammelte Werke Bd. 7). 6 ed. Bern: A. Francke. Schelling, Thomas C., 1980 [1960]. The Strategy of Conflict. 2 ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Scherbel, Martina, 1994. "Deskription oder Postulat? Zur Intersubjektivitätstheorie in der V. Cartesianischen Meditation Edmund Husserls". Perspektiven der Philosophie 20: 275-288. Schiffer, Stephen R., 1972. Meaning. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. ———, 1987. Remnants of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schneider, Wolfgang Ludwig, 1994. Die Beobachtung von Kommunikation: Zur kommunikativen Konstruktion sozialen Handelns. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———, 1994. "Intersubjektivität als kommunikative Konstruktion". Pp. 189-238 in Peter Fuchs and Andreas Göbel, Der Mensch - das Medium der Gesellschaft? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, 1998. "Handeln, Intentionalität und Intersubjektivität im Kontext des systemtheoretischen Kommunikationsbegriff". Pp. 155-198 in Andreas Balog and Manfred Gabriel, Soziologische Handlungstheorie: Einheit oder Vielfalt. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———, 2000. "The Sequential Production of Social Acts in Conversation". Human Studies 23: 123-144. ———, 2002. "Handlung - Motiv - Interesse - Situation: Zur Reformulierung und explanativen Bedeutung handlungstheoretischer Grundbegriffe in Luhmanns Systemtheorie" in Uwe Schimank and Hans-Joachim Giegel, Beobachter der Moderne: Beiträge zu Niklas Luhmanns 'Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft'. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schütz, Alfred, 1962. "Choosing Among Projects of Action". Pp. 67-96 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
173
———, 1962. "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action". Pp. 3-47 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1962. "On Multiple Realities". Pp. 207-259 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1962 [1942]. "Scheler's Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis of the Alter Ego". Pp. 150-179 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1964. "The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology". Pp. 91-105 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1964. "The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge". Pp. 120-134 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1966 [1957]. "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl". Pp. 51-84 in Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———, 1974 [1932]. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schwinn, Thomas, 1995. "Funktion und Gesellschaft: Konstante Probleme trotz Paradigmenwechsel in der Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns". Zeitschrift für Soziologie 24: 196-214. Scott, Marvin B., and Stanford M. Lyman, 1968. "Accounts". American Sociological Review 33: 46-62. Searle, John, 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ———, 1971 [1965]. "What Is a Speech Act?" Pp. 39-53 in John Searle, The Philosophy of Language. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. ———, 1975. "Indirect Speech Acts". Pp. 59-82 in Jerry L. Morgan and Peter Cole, Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. London/New York: Academic Press. ———, 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Segerdahl, Pär, 1998. "Scientific Studies of Aspects of Everyday Life: The Example of Conversation Analysis". Language and Communication 18: 275-323. Shannon, Claude Elwood, 1963 [1948]. "The Mathematical Theory of Communication". Pp. 29-125 in Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press. Shoemaker, Sydney, 1965. "Ziff's Other Minds". Journal of Philosophy 62: 587-589. Silverman, David, 1998. Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Simmel, Georg, 1971 [1908]. "The Problem of Sociology". Pp. 23-35 in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. ———, 1992 [1908]. "Exkurs über das Problem: Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?" Pp. 42-61 in Georg Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
174
———, 1992 [1908]. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Simon, Herbert A., 1972. "Theories of Bounded Rationality". Pp. 161-176 in Roy Radner and C.B. McGuire, Decision and Organization. Amsterdam: NorthHolland. Simon, Josef, 2001. "Intersubjektivität: Ein philosophisch problematischer Begriff". Archivio di filosofia 69: 41-50. Skinner, B. F., 1953. Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan. Small, Albion W., 1905. General Sociology: An Exposition of the Main Development in Sociological Theory from Spencer to Ratzenhofer. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Smith, N. V., ed. 1982. Mutual Knowledge. London/New York: Academic Press. Sober, Elliott, 2000. "Evolution and the Problem of Other Minds". Journal of Philosophy 97: 365-386. Sofsky, Wolfgang, and Rainer Paris, 1994. Figurationen sozialer Macht: Autorität, Stellvertretung, Koalition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sorrentino, Richard M., and E. Tory Higgins, eds, 1996. Handbook of Motivation and Cognition, Volume 3: The Interpersonal Context. New York/London: Guilford. Spencer Brown, George, 1969. Laws of Form. London: George Allen & Unwin. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson, 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2 ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Srubar, Ilja, 1983. "Abkehr von der transzendentalen Phänomenologie: Zur philosophischen Position des späten Schütz". Pp. 68-84 in Richard Grathoff and Bernhard Waldenfels, Sozialität und Intersubjektivität: Phänomenologische Perspektiven der Sozialwissenschaften im Umkreis von Aron Gurwitsch und Alfred Schütz. München: Fink. Stegmüller, Wolfgang, 1973. Probleme und Resultate der Wissenschaftstheorie und analytischen Philosophie, Bd. 4: Personelle und statistische Wahrscheinlichkeit, Halbbd. 2: Statistisches Schließen, statistische Begründung, statistische Analyse. Berlin: Springer. Stekeler-Weithofer, Pirmin, 1997. "Die (Un)Wahrscheinlichkeit des Verstehens: Bemerkungen zur Indeterminiertheit des Begriffs der Bedeutung". Pp. 225254 in Geert-Lueke Lueken, Kommunikationsversuche: Theorien der Kommunikation. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Stevenson, Charles L., 1944. Ethics and Language. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Stichweh, Rudolf, 2000. "Systems Theory as an Alternative to Action Theory? The Rise of 'Communication' as a Theoretical Option". Acta Sociologica 43: 513. Strawson, Peter F., 1959. Individuals. London: Methuen. Suppes, Patrick, 1970. A Probabilistic Theory of Causality. Amsterdam: NorthHolland. Swidler, Ann, 1986. "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies". American Sociological Review 51: 273-286. Talbott, W. J., 1995. "Intentional Self-Deception in a Single Coherent Self". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55: 27-74.
175
Thomas, R. Murray, 2001. Folk Psychologies across Cultures. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Thomas, William I., and Dorothy S. Thomas, 1928. The Child in America: Behaviour Problems and Programs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Toulmin, Stephen E., 1958. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Turner, Jonathan H., 1987. "Toward a Sociological Theory of Motivation". American Sociological Review 52: 15-27. ———, 2000. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry Into the Evolution of Human Affect. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Walton, Douglas N., 1991. Begging the Question: Circular Reasoning as a Tactic of Argumentation. New York: Greenwood Press. Weber, Max, 1985 [1922]. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. 5 ed. Tübingen: Mohr. Wiener, Norbert, 1961. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2 ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953. Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Wohlrapp, Harald, 1999. "Jenseits von Logizismus und Zweckrelativismus: Zur Rolle der Logik im Argumentieren". Dialektik 1999.1: 25-36. Wooldridge, Michael, 2000. Reasoning About Rational Agents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wrong, Dennis H., 1961. "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology". American Sociological Review 26: 183-193. Zahavi, Dan, 1996. Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. Dordrecht/London: Kluwer. Zajonc, Robert B., 1984. "On the Primacy of Affect". American Psychologist 39: 117-123. Zerubavel, Eviatar, 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Ziff, Paul, 1965. "The Simplicity of Other Minds". Journal of Philosophy 62: 575584.
176
