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| Quotation | Topic |
"A person is thus a socially created entity, uniquely identified by a name, and deriving its stability through the continuity established by the habitual consistency of his transactional choices such that it more or less conforms to a perceptibly coherent set of transactional expectations, called "personality," "character" or "conversational identity." The concept of "conversational identity" involves an elaboration of the concept of "name identity" in such a way as to extend the property of uniqueness of interpersonal intimacy. To put it another way, while a name bestows upon the person certain public legal and officious statuses (rights, privileges, responsibilities, expectations), conversational identity uniquely locates a person within a smaller and more intimate network of particularized other persons. The way in which conversational identity is established and its practical importance for interpersonal transactions are topics of great interest and importance" |
PERSON
or IDENTITY
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A speech community is a group of persons whose joint and separate activities are governed by the specific rules of the transactional code in force there. The process of "socialization" refers to the speech community's efforts at maintaining the structure of activities it defines as "possible" by guiding the developing organization of infant, pre- socialized persons such that they gradually mature into adult persons whose intrapersonal and interpersonal activities are those and only those, specified as possible by the specific transactional code in force in that particular speech community-. Language, speech, the rules of talk, discourse thinking, are various conceptions that are intended to account for the way in which the socialization process is accomplished. |
SPEECH
COMMUNITY
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| "The transactional code specifies the possible activities of a person, intrapersonally and interpersonaliy. "Topical organization" refers to the identity of the transactional elements and their structured interrelationships. Thus, a person cannot ordinarily do something that is not specified as possible by the transactional code (e.g. he cannot run for President in a monarchy or become a Millionaire in a communist republic). A person cannot ordinarily say something that is not allowed by the topical organization of the transactional code (e.g. an Australian aborigine cannot talk about the docking operations of a moon buggy, and most Americans today cannot talk about the Bardos of the Tibetan rituals of death). A person cannot ordinarily think something that is not generically contained in the categorical system established by the semantic and syntactic code of the language used, in the person's relevant speech community." |
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| "The perceived coherence and consistency involved in the day- - to- - day ordinary activities of a person is insured by a commonly accepted and adhered to "account" of what a person is. This commonly held account is continually protected and fostered by specific techniques of socialization, including the reinforcement contingencies which members of the speech community jointly uphold through an adversary relationship set up by the enforced conceptual dichotomy of "the individual" vs. "the community." I shall now elaborate on some of the features of this account, which I shall call the "defining account." |
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| "Historically, more primitive societies allowed less freedom in the , image management activities of the person's various egos. Modern urban technological communities introduced a hitherto unknown degree of freedom for the person in amassing sets of interrelated ego images around the persona, leading to the development of overlapping sets of transactional expectations that may be either congruent with each other or contradictory. Interpersonally, the incongruous transactional expectations (sometimes referred to in the literature as "role conflict") could be maintained by selectivity of contact with other persons such that expectation- set X could be protected with persons in group A while the contradictory expectation set - X could be protected with persons in group B. Interpersonally, however, the need to protect conflicting sets of expectations can produce psychic and organismic stress leading to a third "reactive" set of expectations that are seen by others as character aberrations, the so- called "neuroses" and "psychoses" of behavior (anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms, hysteria, compulsion, depression, schizophrenia, delusions)." |
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| "A person's day- to- day behavior in a speech community can be seen to consist largely in the maintenance - activities required to protect the sets of transactional expectations governed by the predispositions of his essence type, by the practical solutions demanded of his persona, by the image building requirements of his egos, and by the reactive dynamics that results from the instability of the person's successes and failures in carrying out these various tasks within the social interpersonal environment. All of this complex transactional activity needs to be supervised and coordinated. This administrative task is handled by the person's various "managers." A manager is an intrapersonal psychic construction, an entity that is redintegrated in experience as the "I," "you" and "(s)he" of internal discourse thinking. When persons give reports, descriptions, accounts, of intrapsychic conscious activity, they ordinarily reproduce what appears to be conversational transactions (cf. "I told myself not to worry about it," "I thought , you mustn't catastrophize, Leon, buddy boy," "I saw myself doing it and thought, he is uncontrollably in rage, stop it, for God's sakes, I mustn't let myself,..." and so on); or alternately, long stretches of monologue describing events as if doing public reporting. These various pronominal intrapersonal entities are experiential redintegrations of the person's managers. A manager's level of control or awareness corresponds to the level of consciousness at which he operates at particular times. As indicated earlier, these levels of consciousness are structured into a hierarchy of inclusion. At the lowest level, there is to be found the manager of the deep sleep state." |
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| "In the system of logic of geometry, the first level of unity transforms into the second level of "structure" which comes about minimally through the association of two points (a "line"). A line formed by two points now becomes the simplest structural unit. Adding a third point complicates the structural configuration but does not alter the level of structure. No matter how many points are included in a configuration, the notion of structure remains the only significant descriptor. In philosophy, the instantiation of the level of structure is expressed through the idea of "duality" and its derivative, "dialectics." In human speech and thought, duality manifests itself as "the dialectics of relationship" which we shall refer to as "association." When two points are related to each other through a dialectic association, what might be referred to as "assertion." An assertion is thus a structural level phenomenon and translates as the joining in relationship, of minimally two points. When two points are thus joined, they form an adjacency-pair which manifests a tension sustained by the line of association. This shard tension will be called a "contention point." |
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| " Level 1,
"FORM" metamorphoses into "STRUCTURE" at level 2, which in turn
metamorphoses into "FUNCTION" at level 3. This third jump establishes the
(FORM/STRUCTURE/FUNCTION) compound which we've named "trigram." In geometry, the
structural configurations at level 2 yield a horizontal expansion series as represented by
two-dimensional figures of N sides (e.g., point, line, or angle, triangle, quadrangle,
pentagon, hexagon, etc. to the N-sided polygons). The vertical jump from level 2 to level
3 is accomplished through the addition of third, fourth, and subsequent dimensions (as in
the cube, the tecerac, and other multi-dimensional manifolds). In philosophy, the third
level of "function" is discusses as the "dialectic resolution" of
contention points manifesting as a new local system. For example, the structural
combination of parents as (Father + Mother) yields a dialectic contention point at level 2
which resolves itself at level 3 as children. New the local system (Father + Mother
children) raises the level of an assertion to that of a "concept." Concepts are therefore third level reifications defining a local semantic field and are always "trigrammatic" since they embody three morphogenetic components (form/structure/ function). In discourse, the forms here, am, and I, are structured into an assertion by various possible configurations (e.g., "I am." and "Am I?"). At this level, the assertion compound lacks functional differentiation or "meaning." Function is added when the structure is elevated through a vertical dimension by the addition of the localizer, here. Now, (I am here.) or (Am I here?) is a trigrammatic component: it survives as an independent or integrated functional field. This is known as a "concept." |
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| "The establishment of
function at the third level completes the first ring of ethnosemantic morphotopology. This
first ring is called "the light trigram" (levels 1, 2, 3) and contrasts with the
second ring (levels 4, 5, 6) which is known as "the dark trigram." Between the
two rings is a space bounded by a "double line. n This boundary or inter-face will be
defined its significance discusses in the sixth chapter on "hexagrams." The jump
from levels 3 to 4 is thus not equivalent to the other level switches which are simplex
metamorphoses. The Euclidean geometric analogy is no longer applicable to the morphogenetic evolution beyond the third level. The double line separates inanimate and animate systems. In other words, while the behavior of points in a space or graph is fully exhausted through the first three levels, the behavior of organisms includes these at the lower level, but then goes on to higher level not attained by inanimate entities. The first of these higher levels is level 4 symbolized by the expansion of the quadrangular system. Here a particular technique we've evolved serves to define the character of this expansion." |
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| "When the medium of argument is constrained by a particular frame, the fifth level is reached. We call this the "transactional" level since its constitutive elements are determined by the rules governing the ritual exchanges of two or more individuals who are coparticipants in a social episode. The minimal transactional system consists of five interconnected steps, forming a pentagram. We may illustrate this by using one of Goffman's examples of "remedial interchanges": | PENTAGRAM or ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
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| "The referential function in topicalization achieved at level 7 is non-reflexive. Children can easily predicate, refer, and topicalize, but they have difficulty with the thematic significance of topics. Their topicalization is associative, conceptual, and transactional, i.e., they model paradigmatically on adult behavior. But, when it comes to making a speech or writing a composition, they act "lost" and inept. They are unable to sustain thinking at the eighth level. This is because they lack a sufficiently developed "metalanguage" which serves adults to "annotate" events, i.e., to realize their acts at level 8 by taking into account thematic cycles and their natural evolution in relationship. "Annotations" are footnotes to others communicative acts and operate according to standard interpretation rules. These shared ways of annotating and keeping track are called "reciprocally ratified recognitions" (or "RRR"s). They form the basis of the generational character of communities "traditions," "mores"). " |
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| "The third ring
culminates in the highest form of literacy at level 9 thinking, namely "biography.
" This may be defined as the integrating or unifying phenomenon of self-consciousness.
The possibility of biography rests on what we may call the "ordinary social
competence" of people. Biography gives a justifying context or "rationale"
for the coherent evolution of personality. The phenomenon of personality are already
manifest in the second ring (level 4, 5, 6) but they are not fully elaborated even at the
stages of referential predication (level 7) and annotation (level 8) since there is
lacking an organizing device for accumulating their effects. Biographic channels are
provided for the individual as "sociomaps" to locate oneself on (e.g.,
reputation, age, stature in the community, seniority). Using these cognitive/normative
maps, the individual keeps track of the self's progression in time. These shared
accounting methods are called "community cataloguing-practices" (or
"CCP"s). To account for these phenomena of biography and ordinary social competence of humans a minimal and sufficient model of the order of 9 is needed. The enneadic model of social competence is such an attempt and consists of three rings identified as Territoriality, Variability, and Biography." |
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| "Kates freely
acknowledges Chomsky's good influence in linguistics, which was that he successfully
redefined linguistics science assigning a central focus to competence. In effect, Chomsky
evolved techniques that allowed researchers to investigate the relation between
linguistics and cognitive processes (operations functionally equivalent to knowledge,
intuition, or competence). The big rift came when Chomsky turned to Cartesian rationalism
as the theoretical vehicle for dealing with ideal objects or forms. Because Cartesian and
Kantian rationalism posit a scientifically empty duality, which is to say that the second,
underlying world is unobservable, therefore it is that Kates rejects GT oriented
research today. To her, unobservables are unscientific. She finds in Husserl a more
agreeable turn, permitting her to invent the notion of observable ideal objects.
Note however that she retains the rationalistic concept of "ideal" as real, but
not as in place and time. This is the great leap for the empiricist who is still stuck at
the monistic level of crude behaviorism; that is, an empiricism that relies entirely on
analogy or generalization to account for novel language use (creativity). Carol Kates' important contribution is apparent here. This notion that generic reference is transformed into observable intentional structures gets empiricists in the language sciences off the hook. It gives them a new and powerful tool to investigate language use, linguistic intuition, communicative competence, and speech acts. Her proposal may be outlined in three steps as follows: " |
PARADIGMATIC STRUCTURES vs. GENERATIVE RULES
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| "The way in which
transactional idioms are specifically used to do conversational work hinges on a general
fact about conversations that has to do with what Sacks (1970) refers to as the
"sequential implicativeness" of conversational utterances. That is, recognizing
the fact that a conversation has a sequential structure, i.e. that what happens now is not
independent of what happened earlier, and what happens now has restrictive effects on what
will happen next, it is proper to inquire into the matter of how this sequentiality is
brought off by participants, how it is that they can keep track so as not to lose the
related stream of events in the conversation. And we would like to argue that the notion
of sequential implicativeness of transactional idioms refers to one important technique
whereby participants help each other to "keep track." To see how this works in
detail, it will be necessary to refer to some further general facts about conversational
encounters, those that have to do with the implications regarding claims participants lay
upon each other as to the nature of their standing conversational relationship. Thus, for
instance, if A wants to claim that he has a standing relationship with B that is intimate,
then one of the implications of this claim is that he will be watching out for certain
peculiar obligations that intimates are expected to adhere to, such as for instance, that
if something should happen to A that is "news worthy," he has the obligation of
informing B of this before someone else does (e.g. news of an engagement, death,
pregnancy, illness, and so on). It turns out that these standing obligations provide a selective pool of topical content that a party can use for a number of purposes, one of which is to use it as a transactional idiom for beginning a greeting-less conversation (historicalizing technique) or for introducing topical material after a greeting exchange. Thus, it can be appreciated that part of the answer to the problem of how participants help each other to keep track turns on the use of transactional idioms that historicalize the on-going conversation by virtue of relating what's being said to the standing claim that exists between them, as developed over a more or less long sequence of prior conversational episodes. We shall now take up in greater detail the matter of how transactional idioms accomplish the various functions that they have." |
TRANSACTIONAL IDIOMS and KEEPING TRACK TECHNIQUES OF CONVERSATION- ALISTS
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| F=father; R=Rex F: Everyone has to die
sometime. (to other adult during dinner conversation.) |
CONVERSATIONS WITH MY THREE-YEAR OLD
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| "To begin with, let us
focus on a set of events that occur at the beginning of conversations that may be related
to this issue. Consider such a common routine as "Hi.; Hi; How are you?; Fine. And
you?; Not too bad. What's new?; Oh, nothing. What's new with you?; Nothing." What's
going on in such an exchange? One thing that is plainly going on is that the participants
are getting into the business of striking up a conversation and in order to accomplish
that they go through this kind of a routine. But to understand in a deeper sense what is
going on we must look at a particular exchange such as this one as a member of a class of
events that occur at the beginning of conversations that has to do with the attempt to get
to the beginning of the conversation. Thus, such routines must be seen in terms of what it
is that they accomplish for the purpose of getting into the beginning of a conversation,
as for instance, getting to the first topic of this conversation. Thus, the second utterance of the first party "How are you?" can be seen as an opportunity he is providing to the second party to get on to a first topic, just in case the second party wants to avail himself of the opportunity. If he doesn't wish to do so he may decline the offer by saying "Fine. And you?" Now, it is the second party that extends the same opportunity to the first party of getting on to the first topic, just in case he should wish to do so. If he chooses to decline, the first party then can say "Not too bad. What's new?", thus giving the other a second chance to raise a first topic. Again, the second party may decline, and simultaneously return the ball to the first party by saying "Oh, nothing. What's new with you?", which can again be declined by saying "Nothing." At this point, the two parties have reached a critical point in the conversation. They have gone through several times the routine of offering the other the opportunity of raising a first topic, but no first topic has been raised by either. Now, they are standing around being still in a standing conversation but with nothing to talk about. In that case, they are in danger of becoming embarrassed unless one of them does something either to come up with a first topic or ending the conversation right then and there by going into a leave-taking routine. If the latter happens, not only have they failed in beginning a conversation and therefore getting on to some topic either of them or both wished to get on to, but also, they have gone through a topicless exchange which can be variously embarrassing since it indicates that they have the kind of meaningless relationship where they have nothing to say to each other. " |
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| "Educational
Psycholinguistics" relates to the function of language use as a socialization
vehicle. Investigating the underlying structure of language use involves the
construction of a theory of performance. For instance, the following subdivisions present
a theory of language use: The Underlying Structure of Language Use: Three Aspects
Educational psycholinguistics is a systematic application of the pedagogic implications of a prescriptive or normative perspective on language use. This may be represented by the following diagram:" |
EDUCATIONAL PSYCHO-
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| "Face oriented moves
have specifiable characteristics as discussed by Goffman (19, pp. 156-163): Priming Moves,
where participant makes a first move whereby he is seen as requesting a remedy;
Ratificatory Moves provide a remedy where its absence would be seen as a slighting of the
other's face in normative exchanges (greetings, legitimizers, appreciation, commisezating,
etc.); Pre-emptive Moves provide a remedy for a possible self-offense by the other (e.g.
"That's a fine job!"). According to Goffman's territiorial model of face work
exchanges, all remedial moves deal with the correction of potential "incursive
violations" and include accountings (= justifying), requests, remedies, apologies,
etc. Topic oriented moves orient to sequential development of an argument presentation: what comes next, what needs to be said along with this, what's being further specified or identified as topic focus. In transcripts of verbal exchanges, telling something or referring to something (face oriented moves) may involve several sub-moves that are topic oriented moves. Topic oriented moves can be sequenced as sub-moves with an internally complex structure (e.g. DESOCS units) in which case, face oriented moves are often inserted (legitimizers, positive and negative; and others). " |
TOPIC ORIENTED MOVES in FACE WORK
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| We shall now describe some
routine paradigmatic solutions that we follow in our task of identifying oriented to
features in conversation and in elaborating upon their character and structure. Step l: Select a particular conversation for thorough and detailed
inspection. In theory, it should not matter, in the long run, where you start, though we
suspect that, in practice, certain particular problems may be of greater or lesser
relevance to the analyst at any particular time in the endeavor and, as the task proceeds
cumulatively, viz. as the character and structure of particular oriented to features are
discovered and recorded,-certain specialized directions for analysis would indicate
themselves as of more compelling immediate interest than others. To demonstrate what we
mean by "thorough and detailed inspection", let us take up a discussion of the
following particular conversation: |
IDENTIFYING ORIENTED
TO FEATURES
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| "In retrospect, George Miller's conception of what psycholinguistics is all about, as outlined in "The Psycholinguists" suffers form this same weakness. His description of sentence understanding as a hierarchical process involving separate levels (phonological mapping, syntactic analysis, semantic interpretation, implication, pragmatic validity) follows closely the earlier formulations of Chomsky (at least for the first three levels). Not only has this view been challenged by second generation generative linguists (cf. Fillmore, Lakoff, McCawley, Ross) but from the psychological point of view it never really made much sense. We've known for some time that auditory decoding is intimately related to the meaning of speech input, that successful syntactic analysis involves semantic interpretation and, of course, vice versa, that both the implicative meaning of the utterance as well as its communicative context affects its interpretability, and so on. A linguistic model of separate processes functioning hierarchically could not form the basis of an adequate psycholinguistic theory of the language user." | PSYCHO- LINGUISTICS QUO VADIS 1969
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| "The are at least two types of difficulties with the Katz and Fodor proposal. One is internal and has to do with the characteristics of the semantic features they postulate and the nature of the projection rules they propose The other is external and relates to the psychological processes that must be postulated to account for the interpretations of utterances. Both Bolinger (1965) and Weinreich (1966) have shown the internal inadequacy of the Katz and Fodor proposal, and in addition, Weinreich has offered some specific alternative suggestions within the transformational-generative formalization. Although his proposal is incomplete it indicates, at least, that the transformation rule device can be powerfully applied to solve such problems as metaphor and figurative speech, phenomena that completely eluded the frozen "atomistic" approach of Katz and Fodor." | COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE and PERFORMANCE
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| "One might think, at first, that this kind of fuzziness of the meaning of words is a disadvantage. Quite the contrary is true. For it is this kind of indeterminacy which gives language such an unbounded power of expression, Putting it this way is not quite correct, for it is not the word that has the power of expression but the language user, Because words refer to concepts, and because concepts are indeterminate, people can use words as indexical devices to "home in" on ideas they wish to convey. But note that "indeterminate" does not mean "randomly variable," for in that case, communication would be impossible. Some constraints must operate. What those are cannot at the present time be specified, but the amount of constraint undoubtedly varies with such factors as the nature of the concept, the amount of information provided by the context (verbal and non-verbal), the inferential capacities o f the listener, and the degree of shared background experiences between the speaker and the listener." | MEANING IS INDEXICAL
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| "Similarly, a theory of
communicative competence, while not directly concerned with particular instances of
communicative acts, must deal with individual differences in the ability to use verbal
communication. This will take the form of a description of the relationship between the
inferences that are possible in a communicative situation and the resultant communication
that is achieved. For instance, the theory will specify that a failure to make a
particular implicit or implicative inference in a given utterance, will result in that
utterance being assigned a different meaning from that it would have, had the inference
been made in just the particular way specified. Furthermore, such a theory would also
concern itself with the relationship between experiential factors (e.g., socialization)
and the ability to make certain kinds of inferences in verbal communicative situations. In
particular, it will have to account for such commonplace facts that people with apparently
similar experiential histories (at the social psychological level) fail to communicate
effectively in some situations and, as well, the fact that people with quite different
backgrounds are able in some situations to communicate quite effectively. What sense can be attached to the phrase "communicate effectively"? In one well-known approach to communication, the "information theory" paradigm (see (Cherry, 1957), efficiency of a communication system is defined as the fidelity of the message as it goes through the encoding-decoding cycle (from speaker to hearer) and is inversely proportional to the amount of "noise" the system generates Within the approach outlined in this paper, the "fidelity of the message" is given by a comparison between the intention of the speaker and the intention the hearer attributes to the speaker. But this definition is only an approximation and leaves out several important factors." |
COMMUNICATION THEORY
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| "The universe of discourse has been recognized in the writings of the world's literature to possess two directions of variation. The first direction may be called the height of discourse because it is a continuum that arranges discourse according to its level of abstract; that is, its degree of removal from the concrete. What this "concreteness/abstract" continuum consists of will be discussed in a moment. The second direction of the breadth of discourse because it is a continuum that arranges discourse according to its phase of externalization from the inmost impulses of human activity to its outermost manifestation in time and space or the external act itself. In this section I present a theoretical rationale for specifying these two fundamental dimensions of the existence of discourse. This work is based on the writings of Emannuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)." | COMPREHENSIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
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| "Diagram 4a pictures the three domains of human affairs and their associated symbols. Note that this is a model or theory of human action in that it specifies a sequential causative relation for any human act. Note also that the model defines discourse symbols as triadic. Another way of stating this is to say that dictionary entries are interrelated according to the domain of the information each entry contains. For example, "hammer" is an affective symbol when used to represent a human striving or affection as in emblems or slogans. But when "hammer" is used to represent a means to some result, such as a tool for banging, it is then a cognitive symbol. When used to represent the effect or presence of the hammer - as-a-tool, it is then a sensorimotor symbol. ("Hand me the hammer!" or "I'm hammering this nail real flush ... There!")" | LEVELS OF DISCOURSE
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| "One reaction to the growing presence of cyberspace is to see it as a threat to the traditional human value of social, face to face exchange. Glued to the screen, chained to the keyboard, alone at the workstation, the addicted hacker is the very picture of a lone individual enslaved by the machine. Yet this is a false appearance. Note the feverish pace of the hands typing. Nothing to be alarmed about, for it is the eagerness to communicate and the desire to be heard by another that activate those fingers. The fact is that when we use computers we are having an exchange with other humans, through the machine, not with the machine." | COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION
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| "From the psychological
perspective, hypertext links in a virtual super-document created by members of a
cyberspace learning community have three characteristics: affective, cognitive, and
sensorimotor. A link is a communicative act by which a member of the community transmits new information or new meaning by connecting two independent ideas which have not been related before. Links in a virtual learning community are thus motivated actions or behaviors responding to members' wishes to exchange and communicate their mental life to each other. The affective feature of links refers to their motivation. It answers the question, Why the link was created, or, What was the person's purpose for putting a link there. The cognitive feature of links refers to their argument or implication. It answers the question, What new information or knowledge is being created through the link, or, What is the new idea that is communicated by the link. The sensorimotor feature of links refers to their location and appearance. It answers the question, How the link was created, or, What is its physical appearance. The study and analysis of linkage structure is the study and analysis of communicative acts in cyberspace by members of a virtual learning community. It is the natural history of culture (ethnography), language (ethnolinguistics, sociolingusitcs, and psycholinguistics), and behavior (social psychology)." |
COMMUNICATIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF A HYPERTEXT LINK
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| "Having drawn a
connection between cyberspace and mind, one is led to investigate the spiritual
implications of virtual reality since mind and spirit are closely related, as shown by the
root word "psych-" or "psyche" which refers to both mind and spirit.
Virtual presence is created through access and usage which are determined by interests and
intentions, both of which are spiritual acts. When we choose to click on a hypertext link
we are performing a spiritual act. Our virtual traveling creates a trail with visible
consequences affecting others. The act of clicking creates virtual reality, shapes it, makes it more dense, more visible, more accessible to self and others. A popular Web site is a spiritual beacon for netizens, visible around the globe, attracting children and adults, men and women, individuals and groups, communicating with them, bringing them together through the communal mind of shared information and activities, thus transcending demographic and ethnic identities. Clicking in hyperspace is equivalent to one's spiritual practice in daily life. This is because clicking is at once a moral, ethical, economic, and psychological act. (This document made it to someone's Web list of Worst Pages. I inquired from the owner why my article has merited his ire. He replied that it was because of my idea that clicking is a spirtual act. However he admitted that he had not read the entire article and was merely reacting to the surface idea.)" |
SPIRITUALITY of CYBERSPACE
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| A group of 20 college
seniors were enrolled in a seminar on "The Social Psychology of Learning
Internet." They were all novices at telecommunications though the majority described
themselves as comfortable at using a wordprocessor or searching the online library
catalog. Students received no individual or group instruction but were directed to the
computer lab where they had access to lab attendants for help with logon procedures. In
actuality, they had to rely on independent trial and error experimentation and on the use
of online Help on Internet and UNIX. Weekly two-hour class discussions were used to assign
homework, hand in reports, share information, solve individual problems, build solidarity,
and maintain a high level of motivation. Biweekly lab reports were required consisting of
the self-witnessing notes students kept of each Internet session to which they scheduled
themselves at the computer lab. These formative journal entries left a copious trail of objective data on the affective and cognitive behaviors of novice end-users learning to navigate Internet over a three-month period. Content analysis of archived records showed (a), the importance of group facilitation and solidarity in overcoming initial bewilderment and affective resistance, quickly followed by acceptance and enthusiasm; and (b), a specification of the range of cognitive acquisition in a few weeks of experience regarding access, operation, navigation, and searching. A taxonomic inventory was derived from the leraner reports listing three levels of affective and cognitive acquisitions (skills and errors) making up the process of becoming a regular user of Internet. |
DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES IN BECOMING INTERNET LITERATE
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| Self-witnessing reports by
drivers reveal that driving behavior is a complex entity occurring simultaneously within
three conscious behavioral areas of the individual: affective, cognitive, and
sensorimotor. Content analysis of the reports shows the driver to be involved in the
effort to comply to rules (e.g., traffic signs), norms (e.g., don't follow
too closely), and roles of driving behavior (e.g., I'm a bully, or I'm a polite
driver). In this struggle to comply, three aspects of the driver's inner world are
prominent: compliance in relation to the driver's feelings (affective compliance),
compliance in relation to the driver's thoughts (cognitive compliance), and compliance in
relation to the driver's sensory and motor responses, such as, sensations, perceptions,
motor acts, and overt verbalizations (sensorimotor compliance). These three domains of
compliance constitute the driver's threefold self. Growth, maturity, or expertise as a
driver will be a function of the driver's threefold self. The struggle for affective compliance involves the driver's motivation, character, and conscience; it is a matter of the driver's good will or bad will. Affective non-compliance to driving rules, norms, and roles engenders driving behaviors that are irresponsible, dangerous, callous, brutish, and imaginatively full of violence, bullying, and domineering attitudes or intentions. The struggle for cognitive compliance involves the driver's rationality and understanding. Cognitive non-compliance to rules, norms, and roles engenders behaviors that are irrational, unsafe, rude, petty and full of self-serving explanations and attribution errors. Sensorimotor compliance involves the driver's performance efficiency, sensory awareness, and overt verbalizations. Sensorimotor non-compliance engenders erratic and discoordinated vehicle operation that increases the potential for accidents; it also allows the driver to be rude and opportunistic.
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THE DRIVER'S THREEFOLD SELF: AFFECTIVE, COGNITIVE, SENSORIMOTOR
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Driving Psychology brings
together five scientific areas that we consider critical for a full understanding of driving
behavior:
Driving Psychology is now in the beginning stages and is still evolving in content and method, in response to the new need for managing driving behavior in an industrialized society. The goal of Driving Psychology is to reverse the natural trend of escalating accidents that occur with a sharp increase in the number of drivers and miles driven. The escalation of accidents, injuries, and their financial cost is a preventable phenomenon, but it requires socio-cultural interventions by government, social agencies, and citizen organizations. It is not preventable or containable by law enforcement methods alone because these are external coercion mechanisms that have only a limited effect. Drivers will revert to aggressive driving styles when detection by police can be avoided. Compliance is dependent on surveillance. See the congressional testimony here. On the other hand, it is possible to use internal methods of managing drivers’ attitudes and habits of thinking in order to influence the norms of driving in a society or region. Driving Psychology provides the theory and methods for creating this type of internal influence by securing the voluntary cooperation and support of drivers for lifelong self-improvement activities. These internal methods are fully effective in the long run since they are incorporated into the personality and moral philosophy of each driver. Internal influence cannot be coerced since drivers can fake attitudes to comply with tests or inspections. As soon as surveillance is withdrawn or eluded, the negative attitude asserts itself in freedom. Therefore, internal influence is possible only through the voluntary cooperation of each individual. This voluntary cooperation can be engineered by means of the social influencing process that naturally occurs in Quality Driving Circles (QDCs) functioning through a Standard QDC Curriculum. Long term QDC membership erodes resistance to change and builds enthusiasm for practicing collectivist and supportive driving scripts, schemas, roles, and norms. |
DRIVING
PSYCHOLOGY
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| It is likely that most if
not all drivers regularly experience exchanges with other drivers that are upsetting,
denigrating, and aggressive. We feel badly treated by other drivers and we in turn treat
them badly. We yell at them, we give them the 'stink-eye,' we threaten them by tailgating,
we close ranks in our lane so as to prevent anyone from changing lanes. Even worse,
mentally we insult them and in our fantasy we ram them, torture them, ridicule them, even
kill them. What causes these horrifying impulses? How can we protect the community from
the danger that these feelings might suddenly break out into the open in acts of insanity
and violence? My experience with traffic psychology since 1980 has identified two principal causes of traffic violence. One may be called the comic strip mentality of drivers, and the other is their lack of moral training. Imagine a comic strip or cartoon featuring driver behavior. Picture to yourself what the characters with their cars are doing and mentally fill in the balloons with their verbal expressions. I believe you'll have a fairly accurate picture of what is happening in reality. Drivers symbolize exchanges with other drivers using a variety of metaphors of competitiveness, of victory and defeat. The attitude and language of competition in traffic transform ordinary activities like overtaking and changing lanes into provocation and threat accompanied by feelings of anger and vengeance. Each of us must take steps to modify our self-talk while driving. First note that you are doing it, that you talk or think to yourself in terms of the role of a comic book character on driver behavior. Note the sentences you say to yourself. Note the fantasies you allow yourself, even if for only a second or two. Then force yourself to stop. Substitute positive dramatizations for the negative ones. Imagine yourself as a wise and caring driver, prudent and polite, forgiving, and willing to give up being first, or even second in any line. Need for Better Moral Training Psychologists studying the development of morality in children and adults have found various natural stages. Young children avoid doing the wrong thing by willingly obeying the orders of parents and authority figures. This is the stage of innocence. As they get older children are less willing to merely obey and require external surveillance with the threat of physical punishment. Adolescents and young adults begin to be governed less and less by physical threat and more and more by the threat of social disapproval. In maturity and old age, we begin to be governed more and more by inner standards of right and wrong. This is the deepest stage of moral development when we freely choose the right and the good out of a sense of caring and love. |
AGGRESSIVE
DRIVING AS MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE
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| In naturally occuring face-to-face interchanges the presence of the participant may provide a sufficient condition for counting as a second move; further conditions can be specified; e.g. eye-to-eye contact, minimal distance, nods, withholding from moving around or sounding off, etc., depending on community practices (viz. normatively appropriate behavior in specified settings vary according to empirically derivable catalogues of cultural behaviors, recognized situations, reported belief systems, etc.). Thus, in conversational transcripts we typically find turns at talk during which participants execute a round of exchange during one person's turn: it appears as if one person performs a series of first moves before another person supplies a reply move, often to only the last sub-move in the preceding sequence or turn (e.g. describing something that takes several sentences or "thought units", with the reply being a comment on the last thought unit (e.g. A: Can I speak to Gary? This is John. B: Oh, John, how goes it? etc.). But closer scrutiny of what's involved would prefer a description that shows B's second move to A's first move to have occurred by virtue of his not-mentioning anything when he could have; alternately, one can say that second moves may be "presumed by absence to the contrary"; later in the exchange, participants may return to a first move whose second move has that presumed status. | CONVERSATIONAL MOVES IN TURN TAKING
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| Educational
Psycholinguistics relates to the function of language use as a socialization vehicle. #5. Investigating the underlying structure of
language use involves the construction of a theory of performance. For instance, the
following subdivisions present a theory of language use:
#6. Educational psycholinguistics is a systematic
application of the pedagogic implications of a prescriptive or normative perspective on
language use. This may be represented by the following diagram: |
EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUSITICS
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| #1. Topicalization dynamics involves a referential and a derivational syntax. Referential syntax includes pronominal snd deictic reference. Derivational syntax includes ethnosemantic outlines (e.g. Color Charts, Double Hexagrams, Trigramatic Topic Units, etc.) and situational glossaries (e g. argument sequence, dramatic theme, behavioral performatives, etc.) | TOPICALIZATION DYNAMICS |
| Returning to the myth of the
human individual being a micro-cosmos, Swedenborg's eyewitness
accounts actually confirm that the shape of the spiritual world is that of the human
anatomy. Spiritual world, not natural. The ancient, pre-modern mind did indeed represent
the universe as human, as does today, the so-called postmodern movement , which assumes for
instance, that earth is alive! The most ancient view was possibly more correct in this
sense than the postmodern view, because the ancients represented the spiritual through the
natural. I don't think the postmodern movement does that, as it seems to take the view
that material things are spiritually alive. This view devolved in h istory when the Golden
Age of spiritual perception ended with the most ancients, and was replaced by more and
more materialistic views. Eventually it came to be believed that the physical universe is
of a human shape, but this pre-modern view became unte nable under the march of modern
science. It was clear that the physical universe was not in the shape of the human body.
But what about the spiritual world? Swedenborg was given the ability to perceive the shape of the spiritual world, confirming that it is human in every detail. This makes rational sense since the spiritual world in Swedenborg's writings is defined as the world of humanity's communal mind. At birth, a unique spirit or mind is divinely created within the communal mind of the race, that is, in the spiritual world. This spirit or mind is immortal and, as a person, grows forever in accordance with spiritual laws that can be dis covered through rational and observational analysis. The mind grows within the physical body through experiences that result from two simultaneous sources, one inner from the spiritual world into the mind, the other external, from the physical world into the senses and brain. |
SPIRITUAL WORLD AND COMMUNAL MIND
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| Existence in the spiritual
world is concretized as experience which is modeled representatively after our earlier
temporary existence in the physical body. In other words, one assumes a life in virtual
reality. Swedenborg's eyewitness reports over 26 years of daily observations
catalog this new existence that we enjoy as "a spirit". When he was in a dual
mode of consciousness, Swedenborg seemed to himself phenomenologically walking around in a
spiritual body, recognizably similar in appea rance to his physical body, and seeing and
talking to others whom he knew from history or as acquaintances. During his travels
through spiritual space he oriented himself in relation to his knowledge of the physical
body. He might say for instance that he was going through "the region of the
eye" or "the province of liver" and so on. Each place he visited was in
reality a mental state represented by specific affections and thoughts. Those whom he
encountered in each anatomical region were in a mental state that Swedenborg knew to be
related to an anatomical or physiological property. To put it another way, the perfection, beauty, and harmony of life for the human race is to form a unity out of endless variety. Virtual reality in eternal life is a process for moving towards an ever greater perfection. Communal mind, without space or limit, is the context or medium for carrying out this process. Swedenborg testifies that all the planets are created as earth seminaries for spirits in virtual reality called heavenly states. He witnessed the population of the spiritual world expand at an explosive rate as spirits from numberless planets passed on and arrived "daily" to populate the heavenly states of the Grand Human. Thus does the Divine insure that the perfection of the human race continues to deepen endlessly. |
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| A contemporary Swedenborg scholar interested in medicine, Christen A. Blom-Dahl, wrote about his excitement when in 1973, after years of reading Swedenborg, he suddenly noticed that the character of the spirits Swedenborg encountered in various parts of the body-regions, were in agreement with medical discoveries about the function of these organs. But these discoveries were made more than 100 years after Swedenborg's death in 1771! Blom-Dahl's observations are extremely important because they throw light on a new method of discovery in science, namely content analysis of descriptions of experiences in communal mind. |
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| The communal mind is humanity itself, as Henry James Sr often described it. In his little known and out of print book, The Secret of Swedenborg (1869), which I hope one day to post here, Henry James Sr summarizes his valiant attempt to present Swedenborg to his doubting friends and critics such as Carlyle and Emerson. I quote the original with slight grammatical changes introduced to fit our norms today (e.g., we do not personify nature, we do not use sex coded language, and we use the word "science" instead of "philosophy" or "natural philosophy" which today carry a different meaning): | HENRY JAMES ON THE SECRET OF SWEDENBORG
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| Communal mind distributes
its substances in relation to the body anatomy. I have referred to this characteristic
above as spiritual geography. There is a relation between
Swedenborg's descriptions of communal mind and the character of cyberspace as I argue elsewhere. In other words, what we learn from spiritual
geography can be applied or extended to what we can predict and know about cyberspace. The
laws governing both cyberspace and spiritual geography are the same. They are the laws of
virtual reality. For instance, we can have the expectation that the virtual shape of cyberspace mirrors the anatomy of the body. Swedenborg describes many characteristics of spiritual geography that, I expect, will be useful to understand the evolution of cyberspace. Fo r instance, in physical space the coordinates are fixed independently of the body; if you face the rising sun in the morning and turn around, you now face west and the sun is no longer in view. This is not what happens in the spiritual world or communal mind which is virtual, not physical. When we pass on into our afterlife, our existence in a spiritual body is strictly virtual, projected out of the common experiential background we had in the body, what Henry James Sr calls our "spiritual infancy." Th e memories and orientation of the natural world are maintained in virtual form in the spiritual world. So though there is a north and an east, they are projected in communal mind through our current affective and cognitive state. |
CYBERSPACE, VIRTUAL REALITY, AND THE SPIRITUAL WORLD
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This type of
driving can be termed "visceral" or "reptile" because it is controled
by one's emotions known to be located in the "old brain" or cerebellum. In this
mental state, drivers act obsessed by time-urgency and feel compelled to drive
aggressively, taking all sorts of risks that are dangerous. A symptom of reptilian driving
is continuous anger and frustration behind the wheel, accompanied by rigid,
one-dimensional thinking. Actions by other drivers are perceived and interpreted
personally and symbolically. For example, if the car behind you comes very close, the
reptilian thinker sees this as an invasion of one's territory and assigns to it negative
and hostile significance. This interpretation calls for instant retaliation in various
forms such as
Switching from reptilian driving to cerebral driving can be achieved by acquiring "inner power toolsTM " that help drivers manage themselves with greater self-control. These tools include... |
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| The idea that persons and
personalities behave towards others (interpersonally) in conformance to their
"internal regions" (psychological space) is a basic formulation that sets up the
cognitivist paradigm in social psychology. Internal regions translate psychodynamically
into the wholistic entity of personality. Lewin set himself the strict task of plotting,
mapping, diagrammlng, and expressing mathematically the form, structure, and dynamics of
personality. Of particular interest to him, and to us, is the notion of the permeability
of the boundaries (membranes) within the social organization of the layers of personality.
In the diagram, you can note that there is a thick boundary separating region 5 from the
other regions in Pl where the boundaries are thin (for P2, the thick boundary is between 1
and 2). The thickness of the boundary line-stands for degree of resistance to penetration. A person is viewed as a region or space with boundaries set up, as in concentric circles. Penetration from peripheral (outer) to central (inner) regions indicates greater accessibility of the person (as in intimate relations). Personality is indexed by the characteristics of these inner regions, fields, and boundaries ("psychological space"). |
INTERNAL REGIONS OF PERSONALITY
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| When I was in college at
McGill University during the 1950's, famed neurophysiologist, Donald 0. Hebb, taught the
introductory course in psycho- logy. How one did in that course determined whether one
could go on to major. The competition was keen, the lessons learned well. LAJ made it and
went on to write an honor's thesis that traced the hypothetical network of the
neurophysiological basis of the mind. He took the matter quite literally and reasoned as
follows: if the little rG's are tiny neurophysiological responses associated with
reinforcement of overt responses, then those rG's were actually an archaeological record
of prior reinforcement history! One could map a person's habits, attitudes,
predispositions, meanings by measuring the little rG's the person has firing in the brain
(these were called cell assemblies by Hebb who was interested in studying the phase
sequences of their firings in the brain). If meanings are little rG's and rG's function in
clusters and patterns, then we have a new field in psychology that we may call
neurosemantics. Personality is a unifying concept used to refer to a person's many social presences; it is an abstraction from the actual ways in which a person behaves in various social circumstances. "Personality" presupposes acquisition of habits, and implies social stimuli acting as triggers for a person's involvement in a situation. "Neurosemantics" refers to the hook-up between social stimuli and physiological and neuronal reactions; the latter are called activation, affect, or emotion. The Hullian-system treats conditioning of physiological states in terms of reflexes; the Hebbian system treats the conditioning of neurons in terms of patterns of firings in the brain. Experiments by Osgood have shown that humans in all cultures investigated have an emotional/affective world made up of three main universal dimensions, thought to be related to people's evolutionary adjustment to survival techniques. These are Evaluation, Potency, and Activity. |
NEUROSEMATNICS AND PERSONALITY
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| Topological Features of Group Space. Lewin's terminology gives us the possibility of analyzing in schematic form, some of the important (predictive) elements of behavior in social settings. Interpersonal relations, group forces, and personality structures are translatable through Lewin's system into diagrams that schematize the forces acting in a region, whether geographic (country, neighborhood, office), social (member vs. non-member of a group), or "mental" (cognitive dynamics - attitudes, preferences, problem solving style, etc.). We may familiarize ourselves with Lewin's topological system (geometric diagrams) by looking at how he takes the notion of social distance and gives it a strict operational definition in terms of these topological diagrams. "Topological" is a word made up of "top" (= surface, e.g., the surface of the planet) and "-ology" (= study of). Topological psychology uses concepts from geometry and algebra, as does "field theory" in physics, geophysics, and astrophysics. In its non-mathematical version, Einsteinian Relativity Theory has been adapted for use in most sciences. Of close import to social psychology are the field theories of behavior in Lewin, Pike (Young, Becker & Pike, 1970), Barker ("ecological psychology", 1968), Ouspensky (1974), and Thom (1975). | TOPOLOGY AND COGNITIVE DYNAMICS
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| A previous story (7) refers to the scientific concept of generalization gradients in adaptation level. This means that after a particular sensory stimulus (noise, sight of an object, taste, touch, movement) recurs unchanged, it quickly enters the range of perceptual normalcy or adaptation level. In other words, it fades into the background and is apparently forgotten. Now if you change the stimulus in some way, the adaptation to it ceases. However, if the change is very small, it only takes one or two repetitions to re-adapt; but if the change is large, adaptation level is disturbed and the organism now responds with full, or near full, intensity--until the new adaptation. This business of determining just how much or how little to change the stimulus to get particular effects, is called by learning theorists "gradients of generalization." The operation of "gradients" of stimulus similarity and difference, and their effects on birds, is easily noted when observing a backyard aviary. Say you station yourself comfortably in front of the aviary. The birds stay away from the corner or side where you are. Clearly, your visual presence has disturbed their adaptation level, and this is visible in their behavior (avoidance). Less than five minutes later, the birds act like they've forgotten you, and you now form part of their background. You change your position to another spot three feet away. Now the same things happen, but a little earlier, one minute instead of four. You move back and forth a few more times and you notice that, after a while, your movement has adapted. Now you can play a trick on them: you change your regular style of moving--say a little faster and jerky instead of smooth. suddenly the birds notice you again. Their activities are again disturbed or affected You can continue your antics in front of the bird cage, demonstrating the generalization gradient for adaptation level. Whenever you make a novel gesture or sound, the degree-of its "notice value" will be proportional to the degree to which the new stimulus departs from stimuli to which the birds are already habituated. You can go inside the aviary and repeat the demonstrations. For example, if you sit or stand without moving, the birds will soon treat you as an inert post. If you control- your movements slowly enough, you'll be producing a smooth generalization curve ("gradient") so that you can sneak up on them without evoking the avoidance response. And that's a secret known to all bird lovers! | BIRD STORIES: DEMONSTRATING LEVEL OF ADAPTATION
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| As we were interested in the objective description of behavior in social settings, we were quite naturally attracted to objective methods of reporting that already existed all around us, namely, the Witness' deposition. We realized at one point that we must separate out, as the legal community does, forms that are used to collect opinions/evaluations/judgments from formats of reporting that censor out these subjective reports, and retain only the objective report of the Witness. What kind of a format is that? Again we took our cues from the surrounding community. Subjects turn into Witnesses as a result of training received from the lawyer! Of course, today, we meet the lawyers in our living rooms (more than an idiot box!!), and as the Watergate proceedings on T.V. have demonstrated, bureaucratic offices attract people who enact their roles on the Witness stand with admirable skill and verve. This socio-legal literacy allows the mere Subject to be empowered as the all important Witness without whom facts cannot be determined, and therefore, reality cannot be reconstructed. There lives or perishes history! Thus, natural history (which is science) and history (which is reality reconstructed) share the central feature of being verbal discourse that allows for the possibility of reconstructing reality through Witnesses. The trick (or methodology) of maintaining capital "W", i.e. of achieving a reporting format that is objective and, has an exact correspondence to events, lies in a marking system: "legalese" is what we call the lawyer's "jargon." In our jargon of ethnosemantics and psycholinguistics, we call it saorogat; which is an acronym whose letters spell out the words self-analytic-objective reporting of on-going authentic transactions!!! | SAOROGAT: SELF-ANALYTIC OBJECTIVE REPORTING OF ONGOING AUTHENTIC TRANSACTIONS
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| For example, you might find, in an autobiography, diary, or journal, all sorts of reports about realizations, knowings, understandings, etc. Note very carefully that these reports are subjective: they are topics written about, cast in the language of giving opinions, making statements about all sorts of ideas, and giving all sorts of details about events, doings, topics, and so on. Similarly, with biographies, we get the biographer's perspective, his report prepared according to his training and audience. Finally, the psychohistorical studies of famous men give all sorts of details of order, quantity, and rated value of their products, deeds, and reputations. None of these reports would stand as testimony or evidence: they will only be subjective objective facts which help form the witness' testimony, but are not in and of themselves, that. Where, then, are we to find the witnesses for the biographic dimension, and where, if such be found, are we to deposit their testimony and evidence of what it's like to be a person and to exist in a community? Testimony as Data in Social Psychology. The answer we propose lies in the method of science known as morphogenesis, and discussed above. Aristotle, Goethe, and Rene Thom have already accomplished the technical side of this in biology. We only need to extend and apply these ideas to social psychology. What we need to do to accomplish this, is to investigate the phenomenon of testimony and how it is related to field theory concepts. This inquiry will lead to the vector values of a social occasion, i.e., the field forces that dct jointly to make up what we call "an event to be witnessed" or, a witnessable event. | TESTIMONY DATA OF SOCIETY'S WITNESSES
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| We may take this opportunity here to discuss briefly the "objectivity status" of annotations, especially those types that describe "internal" events. The experimental analysis of behavior tends to avoid the recording of "inner" thoughts and feelings, a procedure that is often identified in the literature as introspectionism (intro = inside; -spect- = looking; hence, "looking inside"'). John B. Watson, the modern "founder" of "elemental or strict behaviorism" was influential in "stamping out" from behaviorism any kind of data that was based on a person's observations when introspecting. These kinds of reports were deemed subjective and unreliable. We feel, however, that in this the baby was thrown out with the bathwater! There are two reasons we would like to mention. First, the significance of so-called "introspective data" does not lie in their being an exact record Of what the person thought of, sensed, or felt. Rather, as pointed out above, they are to be classified as annotations the person presents, and it is this presentation that is of interest, not whether they contain a precise record of what actually was thought of or felt. Presentations are not introspective; they are interpersonal, public, and objective. Their function is to elaborate upon the experimental context of an event or involvement. They allow the "third party" to witness more fully the events being reported. The second reason we may give concerning the validity and utility of these annotations, is that they are of the same type that a person ordinarily and commonly uses all the time for the self-direction of behavior. To leave them out, would mean to eliminate a source of information that people actually use and rely on, and the theories the experimental analyst makes up about human behavior would thus be inadequate and falsified. | INTROSPECTIVE DATA AND OBJECTIVE ANNOTATIONS
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| Sample 6 (DRA, Spring
1977) "My husband and I are at a military party being welcomed to the
group over cocktails. We have to cross the room and go to the head table as our names are
called out. As I hear our names called I feel my mouth tighten, and my neck feels hot, my
forehead begins to feel moist near my hair line. The palms of my hands are moist and they
feel like lead weights hanging down at my sides." The loss of poise weakens the individual and neutralizes one's presence. There is
a gap of authenticity created between the public self and the private self. One's social
legitimacy is damaged; one's self-legitimacy is shot to pieces. Question: What is the
mechanism that empowers social occasions with such overwhelming power? We would like you
to look at some evidence that shows the important function of the idea of privacy, and how
the private/public dichotomy, serves to maintain the power of social occasions over
people's emotions and physical reactions. Consider the following brief exchanges reported
by a student of Psychology 222 in Spring 1976:
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FORMAT OF DAILY ROUND DATA OF SOCIETY'S WITNESSES
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| When we get to know another individual, whether person, dog, or bird, we gain precise information on what the individual's range of reactivity is to changes in the environment The environmental changes include time-of the day and level of adaptation, i.e., what is perceived by that individual as the state of normalcy. Any variation within the normalcy range evokes strong adjustment behavior until adaptation occurs. In two previous stories (10 and 11) I have described the daily round pattern of the birds in our backyard aviary. During the regular mid-day low, roughly between 10:30 and 1:30, the birds of all four species (i.e., cockatiels, lovebirds, Java Rice birds, and parakeets) engage in a mostly solitary activity during which each stays in its own place and appears intensely involved in itself. At these times, the individual birds show a low reactivity to external stimuli, either the surrounds of the aviary, or the presence of other birds inside (see graph in story #l0). What on earth are the birds doing? They are not sleeping, that's for sure, as can easily be observed by the intense twitching of their bodies, and the rhythmic up-and-down movement of their heads. The eyes remain open, and there comes forth from inside the articulatory apparatus, a constant noise(?) or sound that continually varies in intensity from whispering to a strident staccato chirping. This sound is easily distinguishable from singing, calling out, whistling, etc., all of which appear outer-directed. Instead, this kind of chirping is non-monotonous, discordant, and appears inward-directed. The label I use to refer to this activity is "praying." Of course, I do not mean this in the same sense as the praying we do ordinarily, since I know nothing about the language of the birds, except that it is plain to me, that it springs from a similar well, the involvement of the ordinary self with something higher and beyond. What is the beyond for a bird? We can only wonder, conjecture, and imagine. | WITNESSING BIRDS IN A BACKYARD AVIARY
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| The Positive Bias. What kind
of a procedure can be used to demonstrate the influence of praying upon circumstances ?
This question reverses the negative bias of the Skinnerian proposal: instead of
presupposing that praying doesn't work (how, then, can it be proven?! Not fair. ), let us
presuppose that it does work, and see where that leads us. This would appear to us to be a
fairer position to take, as long as we are being serious about it. It also has the
advantage of being more respectful of community feelings, since we found that praying is a
common behavior among the students of this course. The first consequence of what we shall
call, the positive bias towards praying, is to get us to establish a rational and orderly
context for it. You are already familiar with two components of the field forces that
permeate our social world (or 'life-space"). These are the forces carried by
situational circumstances (called, ethnodynamics), and, the forces carried by
psychological processing (called, psychodvnamics). Now we only need to add a third
component, that of astrodynamics, to complete what we shall term. the sociodvnamic trigram
(tri- = tres = three). Astrodynamics and Consciousness. All great theories of "the present" include a formulation of genesis and of eschatology, i. e., of the origin of things and their final disposition. Darwin's theory of the past takes us back to the ocean-soup-of-life idea, and places "the future" under the forces of survival, genetic mutation, and selection. The physical scientists place "the present" in phenomenological time, i.e., in existence (= natural phenomena), and sensory observations, and places "the future" under the forces of interstellar, or galactic, movement. Primitive and contemporary religions place "the present" as well as "the future" into a cyclical pattern, while 'the past" is always related to an origin in a deity, or a deity's commandments (e. g., "Let there be light. "). Finally, the secular-spiritual theories relate "the past" as well as "the future" to a sociocultural "present" (i.e., existence), and "the present" is defined as a natural phenomenon of consciousness. The following chart will help you study these definitions: ... Secular spiritual theory presupposes a natural order of things ("Nature"), as well as a governing code or meta-language that may be called "spiritual knowing." Through the act of knowing, man has access to the natural order of things ( = "truth" or objectivity). This contact with essence through a natural language code (speech and thought) is defined as spiritual knowing, or just "knowing." Its content is expressed in the form of true and false "propositions" (or, predications). The negative bias views the proposition "In God We Trust" as a psychological phenomenon reflecting truths about attitudes and beliefs of people. The positive bias views "In God We Trust" as a spiritual phenomenon reflecting truths about knowing--it takes it literally, in other words, i.e., as a definition of the natural order of things ( = actuality). In the first view, God is an attitudinal object in an individual's belief system; in the second, God is an actual object in consciousness, and where the world exists within consciousness. The direct consequence of admitting the value of the positive bias in science is the incorporation of "praying" as a method for "circumstantial modification," or, the modification of circumstances that are not accessible to current methods of modification available with the negative bias. This hinges on the acceptance of praying as a natural phenomenon, rather than a mere psychological one. In that case, praying may be redefined in behavioristic terms as "the texting of the future," in the same sense that narratives or story-telling is defined by Skinner as "texting the past." Effective texting of the future, i.e., effective praying, becomes then a technical problem investigatable through the behavioristic methods of "contingency management. |
ASTRODYNAMICS, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF PRAYING
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| Peirce answers the objections raised by "scientific" psychologists who view spiritual phenomena as delusional: "By experience must be understood the entire mental product. Some psychologists whom I hold in respect will stop me here to say that, while they admit that experience is more than mere sensation, they cannot extend it to the whole mental product, since that would include hallucinations, delusions, superstitious imaginations and fallacies of all kinds; and that they would limit experience to sense-perceptions. But I reply that my statement is the logical one. Hallucinations, delusions, superstitious imaginations, and fallacies of all kinds are experiences, but experiences misunderstood; while to say that all our knowledge relates merely to sense- perception is to say that we can know nothing - not even mistakenly - about higher matters, as honor, aspirations, and love. Where would such an idea, say as that of God, come from, if not from direct experience? Would you make it a result of some kind of reasoning, good or bad? Why, reasoning can supply the mind with nothing in the world except an estimate of the value of a statistical ratio, that is, how often certain kinds of things are found in certain combinations in the ordinary course of experience. And skepticism, in the sense of doubt of the validity of elementary ideas - which is really a proposal to turn an idea out of court and permit no inquiry into its applicability - is doubly condemned by the fundamental principle of scientific method - condemned first as obstructing inquiry, and condemned second because it is treating some other than a statistical ratio as a thing to be argued about. No: as to God, open your eyes - and your heart, which is also a perceptive organ - and you see him. But you may ask, Don't you admit there are any delusions? Yes: I may think a thing is black, and on close examination it may turn out to be bottle-green. But I cannot think a thing is black if there is no such thing to be seen as black. Neither can I think that a certain action is self-sacrificing, if no such thing as self-sacrifice exists, although it may be very rare. It is the nominalists, and the nominalists alone, who indulge in such scepticism, which the scientific method utterly condemns." Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (born in Leiprig, Germany in 1646), inventor of modern mathematics ("calculus"), asserts the existence of "unconscious ideas" and makes them the basis of psychological "conscious" awareness - according to John Dewey's analysis(Dewey, 1961): ... |
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| Attribution theory in contemporary social psychology refers to the general tendency of people to see events in their social environment as "caused" by some identifiable factors, hence the term "causal attribution." One effect of this tendency, as noted by many social psychologists, is the predisposition people show towards seeing the world in either a positive Or negative light. This "perceptual orientation" leads a person to notice either positive or negative "stimulus attributes" of events and actions. The "Pollyana Hypothesis" refers to the general tendency of Americans to see the world in an optimistic light, and as a result, the most frequently used words in English tend to be "good or pleasant" words. An important effect noted with attributions is called "the halo effect." This refers to the fact that people's attributions regarding an evaluative (or "attitudinal") object cluster in groups. Some attribution terms appear to be "central" in the sense that, if included, they pull along other attribution terms that correlate with the central term. For example, if an unknown person is described to you as "intelligent and dedicated" (these being "central" traits in our society), you tend automatically to ascribe additional terms to this person (e.g., "capable", "successful", "valuable", etc.). Such clusters of attribution traits ascribed to people represent the rater's "implicit theory of personality"--also called by some social psychologists "intuitive psychology." The person's implicit or intuitive theories are also known as "cognitive constructs." The tendency to respond in a predictable or standardized manner given certain situations, is variously known as "response set," "behavioral disposition," or "goal set. A person's response repertoire is seen by S-R psychologists as originating from the person's reinforcement history. The daily round context presents common types of causal attributions. These may be observed in the natural talk we engage in known as "interior dialog"--i.e., talking to oneself. When you keep track of your interior dialog, you notice that you frequently attribute causes to what you notice. This is called "situational attributions" and refers to our tendency to want to make sense out of social occasions. This tendency takes the form of an automatic "annotation," i.e. a comment made to what one notices is happening around us ( = "labeling events"). Ethnic variability in socialization style produces differences in how people perceive events, label them, and assign value to them (good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, etc.). These attributions are a person's figurings of what antecedents lead to what consequents ( = "standard logic" or common sense). Causal attributions in natural talk are either explicitly rendered (e.g., "because," "if....then") or implicit (e.g., by collocation and punctuation), and play important relationship functions. |
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTIONS IN DAILY LIFE
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TAXONOMY OF IMPLICATIVE MEANING IN THE ACT OF COMPOSITION
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The accompanying TABLE lists
the three main principles and specifies six techniques which are to be put into effect
(for the first time all together) during the Fall 1979 semester.
How are the topics of Social Psychology related to Community Classroom techniques?The topics of Social Psychology lend themselves peculiarly well to their study through the Community Classroom approach. This is because the large-size and diverse composition of the class form a social microcosm which can be directly used as a source of data on interpersonal relations, group dynamics, social attitudes, and the like, which constitute the overlapping core of Social Psychology. By arranging for small group meetings, team exercises, and other group projects, and by treating the class-as-a-whole, as a "generation", the topics of Social Psychology are made to come alive and appear real and concrete, directly involving the students' own experiences and observations. |
COMMUNITY CLASSROOM PRINCIPLES AND METHODS
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| The everyday topics of so-called "sexual politics" and "sexism" are instances (among others) of "intergroup relations" since males and females are treated as two distinct groups ("inter-group"). "Transcript analysis" reveals that "conversational management" techniques employed by the two sexes are contrastive. For instance, under many ordinary situations, in talk between couples and cross-sex intimates, the man performs a greater number of interruptions and performs a greater number of minimal or defective answers (e.g. "Mmm." or no answer at all) towards the woman, than is the case the other way round. Other examples include more tentative assertions by women (e.g. "I think...", "I would say that...") and different signaling habits (body and facial gestures). These male-female differences in conduct functions "regulating mechanisms" between the two groups' relations. | MALE-FEMALE CONVERSATIONAL MANAGEMENT
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| It's safe to say that
thinking is as natural for people as eating, walking around, and talking. It's also safe
to say that thinking is influenced by the social setting (q.v.) just as eating, talking
and walking around are thusly influenced. SIGNIFICANCE: Walking pattern or style is clearly influenced by family and community customs. So is eating pattern, (i.e. what you eat, what combinations, when, how much and how fast, etc.). So is talking influenced by community customs (when, what, how, to whom -- you talk, etc.). And so is thinking: what you think about x and how you thinking about it in different circumstances (or, social settings), is similar in some ways (and unique in others) to how others in the community think about it. Those shared, common background thoughts in a community called "standardized imaginings." Attribution Process in Standardized ImaginingsBACKGROUND: "Standardized imaginings" (q.v.)
refer to commonly held thoughts and ideas about the world and shared community life. |
STANDARDIZED IMAGININGS OR "LANGUAGE IN THOUGHT"
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| In order to be able to
evaluate the manner in which learner characteristics, such as aptitude and motivation,
interact with methods of instruction, it is necessary to consider the definitions for
certain terms that will be used in this discussion. These definitions are based on
Carroll (I 963a), and are also discussed in Chapter 3. 5.2.1 Learning: A task to be acquired; performing an act which previously could not be accomplished; understanding a concept previously not understood. 5.2.2 Transfer: When something learned in situation A also manifests itself in situation B because of the inferred commonality between the two situations. (The elements in common are often not specified or even understood.) 5.2.3 Learning Time: Amount of time spent on the act of learning. (Not to be confused with elapsed time which includes such activities as sitting at the desk dreaming, "wasting time" looking for a book or pencil, etc.) 5.2.4 Aptitude: Learning time under best teaching conditions; the shorter the learning time the higher the inferred aptitude. (Note that for a difficult task combined with a low aptitude, learning time may be indefmitely long.) Aptitude is specific to tasks and depends on possession of certain characteristics by the learner. These characteristics may be either genetic (innate) or they may be dependent upon prior learning or exposure to certain situations. 5.2.5 Ability to Understand Instructions: This is conceived of as dependent upon two factors: general intelligence and verbal ability. The first enters into the ability of the learner to infer the concepts and relationships needed for the task especially when these are not carefully spelled out (which, one might add, is the usual situation in any complex learning task). The second comes into play in the understanding of the language used in the instructions. |
MEASURING FOREIGN LANGUAGE APTITUDE
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| It is often stated that full
native language achievement is an impossible goal for FL training in the school. While
such an expectation is undoubtedly unrealistic under present conditions of instruction,
considering the limited time available for FL study for most students in high schools and
colleges, it need not imply that because full communicative competence is impossible
instruction should be geared to merely a knowledge of the mechanical manipulation of the
language. The various levels of speaking proficiency as defined by the Foreign
Service Institute scale (see above) assume the mastery of various levels of communicative
competence before complete mastery of mechanical manipulation is attained. For example,
level S-4 (fluency in the FL) is preceded by S-2 (able to satisfy routine social
requirements), which is short of the proficiency in mechanical manipulation achieved by
many FL students in school courses yet is far ahead of the latter in terms of ability to
use the language in a practical situation. It would appear that the low level of
communicative competence achieved by students in FL courses in school is due more to a
failure in the method of instruction than to lack of sufficient time devoted to FL study. Ferguson (1964) has outlined certain criteria that may be used for evaluating the intrinsic complexity of the grammar of a language (morphophonemic simplicity, number of obligatory categories marked by inflections or concord, extent of symmetry of paradigms, degree of strictness of concord). One might consider preparing rankings of modem languages in terms of difficulty for Americans based on norms of time requirements (such as in Table 1) and counsel the student for a choice on the basis of his aptitude and interest. The level of proficiency to be required may be set in advance on the basis of aptitude test results and either require substitute work to fill in the rest of the time or, award less credit. Another possibility is to set different proficiency requirements for different skiffs. While existing aptitude tests, such as the MLAT, are not quite suitable for this purpose, a try-out course might be: thus, if it is found that a student's audiolingual attainment will be low, he can switch to a reading course where his chances of success might be better. Finally, FL study can be rendered more relevant by making it useful; for example, its requirement for readings in the student's major area of study and its use for communication purposes at an early stage without insisting on prior mastery of mechanical manipulation. |
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This consists of 12 statements designed to index an individual's dissatisfaction with his role in society. The successful development of communicative skills in a second language often involves a prior tendency to "identify" with people who are native representatives of the foreign culture. Such an identification process appears to facilitate the acquisition of communicative skills, but at the same time it can create feelings of dissatisfaction with one's own culture and "ways of doing things." These feelings of dissatisfaction are referred to as "anomie." Frank discussions of anomic reactions by students with themselves and with the teacher can reduce their potentially negative effects (e.g., withdrawing or reducing involvement). |
MEASURING FEELINGS OF
ANOMIE IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY
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This form lists eight reasons for studying a FL. Four of these reflect an "instrumental" orientation (odd numbered questions) and four are indicative of an "integrative" orientation (even numbered questions). Degree of instrumental and integrative orientation can be assessed by summing over the two sets of questions after assigning a numerical value to each alternative (e.g., definitely my feeling = +2, pretty much my feeling = +1, slightly my feeling = 0, not very much my feeling = - 1, definitely not my feeling = -2). An individual thus receives an overall instrumental score as well as an overall integrative score. For certain purposes it might be useful to classify an individual as either an "instrumentalist" or an "integrationist" depending on which of the two over-all scores is higher. There is evidence that under certain conditions an integrative orientation leads to greater success in oral communicative skiffs, although under the conditions that hold in most American schools an instrumental orientation is not necessarily an indication of lower expected achievement. Nevertheless, an integrative orientation is more likely to be predictive of willingness to engage in activities that supplement the regular classroom work (independent study, travel abroad, language camps). This would be particularly important under conditions of compensatory instruction. |
ORIENTATION FOR
STUDYING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
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1 The Dualities of Talk designate the dialectics of constitutive exchanges. Constitutive exchanges are sufficiently characterized by two features which are also necessary: (1) the mutual observance of a common (jointly held) turn taking procedure (Y. "the ritual of talk"), and (2) the mutual adherence to a common (jointly held) dialectics of moves and reply moves (Y. "discourse units", mentioning something, doing something). The dialectics of an exchange of constitutive display moves is characterized by the dualities of talk. 2 The First Duality designates the dialectic movement of topic within a transactional medium. The Second Duality designates the interplay between (general) meaning and (particularistic) reference. The Third Duality designates the reconstruction of a standard reified actuality or the basis of a transactional system of claims performed as mutually recognizable constitutive display features (i.e. moves). The Fourth Duality designates the demarcation of participants as individuals, in terms of the contrastive movement of individual reconstructions (of the on-going exchanges) versus "meaning" of ratified reciprocal recognitions (see "The New Three R's"). 3 Out of these Four Dualities can be derived a four dimensional functional analysis that is of sufficient practical interest to justify the factuality of transactional engineering. |
DUALITIES OF TALK
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| 1 A prominent
dimension of relationship dynamics is intimacy. Relationship dynamics is pursued by
participants of a dyad within two salient modalities: the transactional social modality
and the personalized (individual) modality. 2 The transactional modality of relationship deals with the ritualized face work that establishes and maintains the reputation of an individual that is a necessary component of social identity. 3 The personalized modality of relationship deals with the particular and unique features of the dyadic transactions. 4 The structural characteristics of conversation reflect, in the organization of exchanges, these two modalities of relationship dynamics. |
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1 Examples of Subjectifying
Assertions:
2 Examples of Objectifying Assertions: |
SUBJECTIFYING AND OBJECTIFYING ASSERTIONS AND EDUCATION
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| In psychology there is an
important debate that has not yet been resolved by generations of researchers. This is the
question whether the affective or the cognitive is primary. To say that the
affective is primary is to say that feelings cause thoughts. Or, that feelings direct
thoughts. Or, that thoughts are from feelings. Or, first there is a feeling -- then there
is a thought. Etc. To say that the cognitive is primary is to say that thoughts
cause feelings. Or, that thoughts direct feelings. Or, that feelings are from thoughts .
Or, first there is a thought -- then there is a feeling. Etc. It is easy to see why some psychologists say that feelings are from thoughts. This is exactly what it looks like to external observation. For instance, we can observe ourselves get angry when we recall an unpleasant situation. It seems then that first, the unpleasant thought comes into our awareness, second, we react to it emotionally. Or, in another situation, we ask someone to explain why an action and the person replies "I thought he was picking on me, so I felt bad and left." It seems here that, first the person has a thought or conclusion ("he is picking on me"), and second, an affective reaction ("so I felt bad"). The drama of Jacob scrambling to come out ahead of Esau represents the battle we have in becoming wise and loving adults. As children, we begin life in apparent innocence. We are lovable and attractive affective (right-brained) creatures. Our appeal as infants lies in the fact that we are happy to obey the wisdom (or cognitive) of the adults and authority figures. With an immature cognitive, an infant has no other choice but to obey the rule of authority, and their willingness to do so (affective) makes them irresistible to most parents and adults. The drama of Jacob scrambling to come out ahead of Esau represents the battle we have in becoming wise and loving adults. As children, we begin life in apparent innocence. We are lovable and attractive affective (right-brained) creatures. Our appeal as infants lies in the fact that we are happy to obey the wisdom (or cognitive) of the adults and authority figures. With an immature cognitive, an infant has no other choice but to obey the rule of authority, and their willingness to do so (affective) makes them irresistible to most parents and adults.
Thus, in reality differentiated affective states pre-exist as person variables and these are selectively OCCASIONED under appropriate sensory input. Once these affective states are selected or occasioned, it selects from the available cognitive hierarchies and items that are CONGRUENT with the already existing affective states. These congruent cognnitive interpretations or understandings or meanings (powered from within by the affective state), THEN elicit specific physiological responses that one can sense through feedback and they alos come out into overt action (senorimotor acts) unless inhibited by contrary or ambivalent affective states that are unconsciously occasioned by the same sensory input. These unconscious affective-sensorimotor connections are established as part of the individual's ontogeny and cultural experiences. |
PRIMACY OF AFFECTIVE OVER COGNITIVE
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| The unconscious connections between the affective states and their sensorimotor instantiations are established by two human growth mechanisms where the cognitive is as-if bypassed, and feelings or emotions trigger sensations and acts that remain unconscious to the individual, but is visible to others. One is the formation of basic personality habits, moods, and temperaments in childhood prior to the talking phase or not much further beyond (up to age 4 on the average). The other is from automaticity of habits that were conscious in their formation and early use, but sunk into the unconscious due to cessation of conscious monitoring. Examples are:
As individuals mature over the decades, a series of sensorimotor instantiations are triggered in relation to sequence and biographical teleology or spiritual fate known to God who directs the progression in its least details. without this divine intelligent and purposive management, the teleology would be impossible and the entire scheme would be sytematically downgraded by the second universal law of thermodynamics (chaos). But the opposite actually takes place: less chaos, more order towards an ideal goal or end. This end has been revealed to us by God--see my article on dualism in science. This process of unconscious, sequenced, and ethnic sensorimotor instantiations can be called GENETIC CULTURE. Objective methods of investigating genetic culture include: self-witnessing methods involving
community-classroom methods involving
methods of community cataloguing practices involving |
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| Driving in traffic routinely involves
events and incidents. Events are normal sequential maneuvers such as stopping for lights,
changing lanes, or braking. Incidents are frequent but abnormal events. Some of these are
dangerous and frightening, such as near-misses or violent exchanges, while others are
merely annoying or depressing, such as being insulted by a driver or forgetting to make a
turn. Driving events and incidents are sources of psychological forces capable of
producing powerful feelings and irrational thought sequences. Driving is a dramatic
activity performed by millions on a daily basis. The drama stems from high risk,
interactivity, and unpredictability. Driving has conflicting structural components in
predictability and unpredictability. Predictability creates safety, security, and escape
from disaster. Unpredictability creates danger, stress, and crashes. For many, driving is linked to a value of freedom of locomotion. On one hand, we can get into cars and drive where we please, the very symbol of freedom and independence. But on the other hand, we encounter restrictions and constrictions like regulations, congestion, and the unexpected actions of other motorists that prevent us from driving as we wish. The following list identifies 15 conflicting aspects of driving that act as stressors. The list represents emotional challenges that are common occasions for expressing hostility and aggressiveness on highways and streets:
Three Levels of Emotional Intelligence This chart helps to track your growth in emotional fitness as you try to diagnose the various elements of your driving style and philosophy. For a complete picture, keep track of three aspects of yourself as driver: feelings, thoughts, and actions. Driving more intelligently is the result of positive feelings and right thoughts coming together in effective actions.
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ROAD RAGE AND AGGRESSIVE DRIVING The new book by Leon James and Diane Nahl
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