I thank Robert Elliott for his comments on a draft of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to. William B. Stiles, Department of ...
Journal of Countering Psychology 1987, Vol. 34, No. 2, 236-239
Copyright 1987 by the American PsychologiralAssociation,Inc. 0022-0167/87/$00.75
COMMENT
Some Intentions are Observable W i l l i a m B. Stiles Miami University In discussing the relation of therapist intentions to verbal response modes (VRMs), Hill and O'Grady (1985) confused two senses of the term intention--(a) the private purpose of an intervention and (b) the meaning of the utterance, which is on record in the sense that the speaker accepts responsibility for saying it. Hill and O'Grady's list of intentions contained purposes, and they correctly pointed out that researchers' most direct access to these is by the speaker's self-report. VRM codes concern intended meaning, which goes beyond grammatical structure or literal meaning. Nevertheless, VRM codes reflect a level of communication that is intrinsically public in the following sense: The coder is in the same logical position as the communication's intended audience. recently, however, minimal research attempts have been made to verify whether intentions [purposes] do systematically vary with the choice of interventions. (p. 4) Stiles (1979) has argued that many measures &response modes confuse intent [meaning] with grammatical structure and has recommended that these are constructs that should be determined separately by judges. However, because intentions [purposes] are by definition a subjective cognitive process, it does not seem feasible to have judges determine a therapist's intention. (p. 20)
A confusion in Hill and O'Grady's (1985) article about classifying therapist intentions offers an opportunity to correct a common misconception about verbal process coding. The confusion concerns two senses of the term intention with respect to a therapist's or counselor's verbal intervention--(a) the purpose of the intervention and (b) the meaning of the utterance. Purposes (as I use the term in this article) are subjective, epistemoiogically private, and hence, knowable most directly by report, though the report can be made systematic and thorough by means of tape-assisted recall (Elliott, 1986). Meanings have many levels (Stiles, 1986), but the level that is most commonly studied in research on counselor interventions is inherently public, or on record, in a sense that I will discuss shortly. Roughly, on-record meaning is what the counselor aims to communicate to the client.
This confusion perpetuates a misunderstanding of the logical status of a major class of counseling process measures, verbal response mode (VRM) coding systems, which have long been used in counseling and psychotherapy process research (e.g., Barkham & Shapiro, 1986; Elliott et al., in press; EUiott, Stiles, et al., 1982; Goodman & Dooley, 1976; Hill, 1978; Russell & Stiles, 1979; Snyder, 1945; Stiles, 1979; Strupp, 1955). VRM systems do code intentions (in the sense of meanings), but unlike purposes, these intentions can be studied directly, without coders' needing to read the speaker's mind or interview the speaker after the fact.
The Confusion Hill and O'Grady (1985) began explictly with the first sense of the term: "Intentions can be defined as a therapist's rationale for selecting a specific behavior, response mode, technique, or intervention to use with a client at any given moment within the session" (p. 3). The intentions they listed evidently concern therapist purposes (e.g., "get information," "set limits," "support," and "clarify"), as do the intentions listed earlier by Elliott and Feinstein (1978; see also Elliott, 1979, 1985, 1986; Elliott, Barker, Caskey, & Pistrang, 1982). In contrasting their work with others' work on verbal process coding in which (according to my reading) intent and intention refer to utterance meaning, Hill and O'Grady (1985) did not, however, acknowledge this second sense of the term; examples of the confusion (with my glosses in brackets) follow: Goodman and Dooley (1976) assumed that advisements carry the intention [meaning] of guiding the client's behavior. Until
Verbal R e s p o n s e M o d e s a n d I n t e n d e d M e a n i n g s VRM classification systems code one aspect of an utterance's meaning, the speech act (or, more precisely, the illocutionary act; Austin, 1975; Searle, 1969; Stiles, 1981)---what the speaker does in making the utterance rather than what he or she says. Examples of VRM categories include question (e.g., "Have you felt that way in other situations?"), advisement (commands, suggestions, permission, and prohibition; e.g., "Tell him how you feel"), disclosure (e.g., "I was so angry I could hardly speak"), and reflection (e.g., "You were furious with him"). One would say, for instances that "Have you felt this way in other situations?" is meant as a question; its being this type of speech act is one aspect of its meaning. There are many other aspects of meaning, including semantic content and affective tone, which are coded by other types of systems (Russell & Stiles, 1979).
I thank Robert Elliott for his comments on a draft of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to William B. Stiles, Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056. 236
COMMENT One clue to an utterance's intended meaning is its literal meaning, as signaled by the grammatical structure and the constituent words. But intended meaning often differs from literal meaning; for example, "Could you repeat that for me?" is literally a question, but in most contexts, it would convey an advisement. (Thus, simply answering, "Yes, I could," would be inadequate.) Utterances containing discrepancies between literal meaning and intended, or pragmatic, meaning have been called indirect speech acts (Davison, 1975; Searle, 1975). To convey intended meaning, a speaker may rely on context (immediate context and cultural context), tone of voice and inflection, social and linguistic conventions, and specific knowledge about the intended audience. Both literal meaning and intended meaning are easily coded. Most of the VRM systems used in counseling and psychotherapy research, however, code only intended meaning (Elliott et al., in press). Some VRM writers have acknowledged common form-intent discrepancies, for example, the "frequent use of the question form to carry noninformationgathering intents such as interpretation, advisement, and reflection" (Goodman & Dooley, 1976, p. 109). Explicit rules for handling such discrepancies are built into some coding systems, for example, "If statements are phrased in the form of a closed question but meet the criteria for another category, they should be put in the other category" (Hill, 1978, p. 467). Hill and O'Grady's (1985) conclusion "Thus, response modes generally refer to a grammatical structure that can be observed behaviorally, whereas intentions refer to the internal processes of a therapist that might be quite undetectable to an outsider" (p. 20) is misleading in suggesting that VRM categories generally reflect only literal meaning, that is, grammatical structure. Hill's (1978) own definitions of VRM categories clearly concerned intended meanings rather than only grammatical structure, for example, "Approval-reassuranc~ This provides support, approval, or reassurance," "Interpretation: This goes beyond what the client has overtly recognized. It might take one of several forms: It might establish connections between seemingly isolated statements of events; it interprets defenses, feelings, resistance, or transference," "Self-disclose: . . . Note that not all statements that begin with an T are self-disclosure; it must have a quality of sharing or disclosing" (p. 467). In my VRM system, each utterance is coded twice, once for its grammatical form, or literal meaning, and once for its pragmatic, or intended, meaning (Stiles, 1978, 1979, 1981). Thus, the utterance "Could you tell him how angry you are?" is literally a question (grammatical form), but it apparently has advisement intent (counselor means to suggest that the client divulge the anger, not merely to inquire if this is possible), so it is coded as question in service of advisement. Similarly, "I think you should tell him how angry you are" is coded as disclosure in service of advisement, whereas "Tell him how angry you are" is coded as pure advisement. The purpose of VRM coding is to classify utterances according to an investigator's system, not to summarize the speaker's view. Unless a speaker is trained in the use of a particular VRM coding system, he or she might be unable to correctly classify the literal meaning or the intended meaning of his or her own utterances. Thus, although the correlation
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of a speaker's private purposes with response-mode use is certainly of interest (Elliott, 1986; Hill & O'Grady, 1985), speaker-coder agreement is not an appropriate criterion of an utterance's meaning having been correctly VRM classified. Intended Meanings Are on Record The sense in which intended meanings are observable was explicated by Grice (1957, 1969), who distinguished the intended, pragmatic, or occasion, meaning of an utterance from its literal, or timeless, meaning and sought to define the former. ~The definition, as systematized by Bach and Harnish (1979), is that occasion meaning is that which is intended to be recognized as intended to be recognized. That is, to mean something by an utterance (in the occasion-mcaning sense), the speaker (e.g., the counselor) must (a) be aware of the content, (b) intend that the audience (e.g., the client) become aware of the content, (c) intend that the communication appear intended, and (d) intend that the communication be attributable to the speaker. More simply, to mean something by an utterance, one must be on record as saying it (cf. Brown & Levinson, 1978). For example, "Please leave now" would normally be meant as a request (or command) and would be VRM coded as an advisement because the speaker intends it to be understood as a request and attributed to him or her as a request. In this on-record sense, intended meanings (Grice's, 1969, occasion meaning) are intrinsically public and communicative, at least with respect to the intended audience. One cannot mean something (in this sense) and simultaneously hide or disguise the meaning. For example, one cannot normally say, "The cat is on the mat," and mean, "Please repeat that statement." More subtly, a counselor's disclosure "I sometimes feel angry at my wife" is not a question (in the occasionmeaning sense) even if it has an off-record manipulative goal of eliciting reciprocal information from the client. VRM coding systems are usually explicitly or implicitly restricted to on-record meaning (e.g., Stiles, 1981). Failure to include this restriction can make a coding system chaotic because utterances may have several contradictory off-record meanings that are virtually impossible to code reliably (Stiles, 1986). Consequently, verbal process coders are in the same epistemological position as the intended audience, except they may lack some of the speaker's special knowledge of the audience (e.g., idiosyncratic meanings of words, dependent on the history of the speaker-audience relationship). With this restriction, an utterance's intended meaning can be validly coded without resorting to mind reading or to tapeassisted recall by the speaker. Miscommunication is possible, of course. Utterances may go astray in all sorts of ways (Austin, 1975; Searle, 1969) so that the audience misunderstands the speaker. Insofar as a speaker's sincerely intended meaning may be misunderstood, intended meanings are less observable than literal meanings ~Although aspects of Grice's (1957, 1969) analysis have been controversial within philosophy (Schiffer, 1972; Strawson, 1964), I believe it is appropriate for the sort of intended meanings coded by VRM systems (Stiles, 1981, 1986).
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COMMENT
or physical actions. The point is that meaning something entails being responsible for that meaning so that any misunderstandings (of occasion meaning) are by definition unintended by the speaker/ Coders may be more vulnerable to some misunderstandings than the intended audience insofar as it is not a requirement that the speaker sincerely intend to convey the meaning to coders. On the other hand, coders (who can replay a tape segment and may be more attentive) frequently catch intended meanings that the audience evidently missed.
Off-Record Levels of Meaning There are additional, off-record levels of communication that may be clinically important, although they are very difficult to distinguish empirically. For instance, a counselor's utterance "I feel very tired today" might in some contexts contain a manipulation or a hint that the client should not discuss difficult material or should leave early. (The counselor may hope that the client will decide to act considerately.) Unless there is a prior understanding that the client is to take particular actions when the counselor becomes tired, however, this hint is off record. The counselor may be aware o f an underlying advisement (e.g., "Leave early") and may intend that the client become aware of it but probably does not intend that the advisement appear intended and certainly does not intend it to be attributable. The client cannot accurately report of this utterance, "My counselor told me to leave early," although he or she might report, "My counselor wanted me to leave early." The client can report, "My counselor told me he was tired," regardless of any off-record meanings. In these circumstances, VRM coders would code the utterance as a disclosure (which is on record) rather than as an advisement. Conceptual distinctions among off-record levels, such as hints, manipulations, and deceptions, are presented and discussed elsewhere (Stiles, 1986). As Hill and O'Grady (1985) noted, conceptual work is needed for distinguishing among levels of intentions (purposes) and strategies. Clinical purposes probably have many hierarchical levels, with broader ones, such as facilitating beneficial change in the client, subsuming narrower ones, such as giving particular information. At the narrow end, at least, purposes may overlap with or be subsumed by the offrecord meanings of utterances.
Conclusion It is not my purpose to disparage the study o f purposes; nor is it my intention to quarrel with using the term intentions to describe them. The English word intentions can legitimately refer to meanings or to purposes. The term purposes is equally ambiguous, being potentially confused with broader therapeutic strategies;, other terms considered by Hill and O'Grady (1985), such as tactics, retrospections, aims, goals, and plans, seem no better. Regardless of the term used, authors in this area must strive for conceptual clarity, explain how they are using each term, and take care to use terms consistently within articles.
Occasion meanings are accurately described as intentions, and they are observable in the sense of being on record. They
are not simply a function of grammatical form, but neither are they private and accessible only by self-report. All that is required of VRM coders is that they understand, in a commonsense way (explicated philosophically by Grice, 1957, 1969), what the speaker means. The only inference required of them is the one that any audience performs in understanding an utterance.
2The required sincerity applies only to conveying the utterance meaning. It does not require honesty or sincerity about representing facts or feelings. For example, in saying, "I have never been angry at my wife," a speaker means (is on record as saying) that he has never been angry at his wife, even though this may be an obvious lie. What is on record and observable is the intended meaning of the utterance, not the speaker's true feelings or purpose in making the statement.
References Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words (2rid ed.). Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. Bach, K., & Harnish, R. M. (1979). Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barkham, M., & Shapiro, D. A. (1986). Counselor verbal response modes and experienced empathy. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 33, 3-10. Brown, P,, & Levinson, S. (1978). Universals in language usage: Politenegs phenomena. In E. N. Goody (Ed.), Questions andpoliteness: Strategies in social interaction (pp. 56-324). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Davison, A. (1975). Indirect speech acts and what to do with them. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, Volume 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press. Elliott, R. (1979). How clients perceive helper behaviors. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 26, 285-294. Elliott, R. (1985). Helpful and nonhelpful events in brief counseling interviews: An empirical taxonomy. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 32, 307-322. Elliott, R. (1986). Interpersonal process recall (IPR) as a research method. In L. Greenberg & W. Pinsof(Ed~), Thepsychotherapeutic process: A research handbook (pp. 503-527). New York: Guilford Press. EUiott, R., Barker, C. B., Casl~ey, N., & Pistrang, N, (1982). Differential helpfulness of counselor verbal response modes. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 29, 354--361. EUiott, R., & Feinstein, L. (1978). Helping intention rating procedures: Overview and uses. Unpublished manuscript, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH. Elliott, R., Hill, C. E., Stiles, W. B., Friedlander, M. L., Mahrer, A. R., & Margison, F. R. (in press). Primary therapist response modes: A comparison of six rating systems. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Elliott, R., Stiles, W. B., Shiffman, S., Barker, C. B., BurtOn, B., & Goodman, G. (1982). The empirical analysis of help-intended communications: Conceptual framework and recent research. In T. A. Wills (Ed.), Basic processes in helping rel~ionships (pp. 333356). New York: Academic Press. Goodman, G., & Dooley, D. (1976). A framework for help-intended communication. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice, 13, 106-117. Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 66, 377-388.
COMMENT Grice, H. P. (1969). Utterer's meaning and intentions. Philosophical Review, 78, 147-177. Hill, C. E. (1978). Development of a counselor verbal response category system. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 25, 461-468. Hill, C. E., & O'Grady, K. E. (1985). List of therapist intentions illustrated in a case study and with therapists of varying theoretical orientations. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 32, 3-22. Russell, R. L., & Stiles, W. B. (1979). Categories for classifying language in psychotherapy. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 404-419. Schiffer, S. R. (1972). Meaning. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in philosophy of language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. R. (1975). Indirect speech acts. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, Volume 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press. Snyder, W. U. (1945). An investigation of the nature of nondirective psychotherapy. Journal of General Psychology, 33, 193-223.
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Stiles, W. B. (1978). Verbal response modes and dimensions of interpersonal roles: A method of discourse analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 693-703. Stiles, W. B. (1979). Verbal response modes and psychotherapeutic technique. Psychiatry, 42, 49-62. Stiles, W. B. ( 1981). Classification of intersubjective illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 10, 227-249. Stiles, W. B. (1986). Levels of intended meaning of utterances. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 25, 213-222. Strawson, P. F. (1964). Intention and convention in speech acts. Philosophical Review, 73, 439--460. Strupp, H. H. (1955). An objective comparison of Rogerian and psychoanalytic techniques. Journal of Counsulting Psychology, 19, 1-7. Received J u n e 5, 1986 Revision received August 18, 1986 9
