The Grammar of Autobiography

A Developmental Account

Jean Quigley

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781135661939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This is the first book to bring together four distinct literatures--functional linguistics, child language, narrative development, and discursive psychology. It is an outgrowth of the historical relationship between psychology and linguistics, especially the post-Wittgensteinian "turn to language." Relevant issues are situated at that interface in a way that should prove accessible to both linguists with little or no psychological knowledge and to psychologists with no linguistics background are addressed. Previously, there have been volumes on the theses of discursive psychology and social constructionism and volumes on the workings and theories of functional linguistics, but none have attempted to link the two as natural bedfellows in this way. While clearly situated within the spirit of the Berkeley school, it goes beyond it by virtue of linking functional linguistics and discursive psychology, and by doing this ontogenetically. Overall, this book is an investigation of the psycholinguistic thesis of the social construction of selfhood and the psychology of everyday life. Featuring the only book-length studies of the use of grammatical analysis as a research strategy in psychology, it integrates issues of human development and child language in a new way. It deals in careful linguistic analyses, examining the role of grammatical forms in constituting context which involves an examination of their functions that are then used to highlight fundamental aspects of development. The linguistic analyses are treated as a testing ground for the ideas and claims made in discursive psychology. The discussion deals with many of the current issues in psychology and related disciplines, including narrative, morality, agency, and responsibility, in order to show the central role of language in human functioning.

1
The Discursive Self

Don’t look for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the theory. Goethe (1983, p. 74)

The task of psychology is to lay bare our system of norms of representation and to compare and contrast the enormous variety of systems: the rest is physiology. Harré (1989, p. 34)

What sort of psychology is being advocated, or more importantly perhaps, what is this psychology against? The short answer is all forms of positivism. As to what this means exactly, “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that all one can reasonably infer from unexplicated usage of the term ‘positivism’ is that the writer disapproves of whatever he or she is referring to” (Hammersley, 1995, p. 2). Somewhat more specifically, this approach opposes what Shanon (1993) has summarized very neatly as the Representational-Computational View of Mind (RCVM). Although this has dominated in psychology since the 1960s or so, that is not to say that it has gone unchallenged for all that time. The seminal critique in relation to the semantic representation of meaning was presented by Wittgenstein as early as 1953 but it is probably fair to say that even now the cognitive science model remains the most important general framework in use in psychology.

The tradition of the person as a central information-processing mechanism has dominated psychology. Initially, the cognitive revolution of the 1960s was greeted with welcome relief after the radical behaviorism that had been in place for so long with such disastrous effects for psychology’s advancement. At last, meaning seemed to be reclaiming its place center stage. However it did not work out exactly like this, surplus baggage along the lines of a Platonic central mechanism that was abstract, fixed, and universal, came too. This occasioned the now familiar research heuristic in psychology that draws a strict line between internal psychological structures and processes and external environmental content, the latter having to be cleared away in order to get at what is “really real”.

If the computational model concentrates on information processing, then discursive psychology is interested in meaning and meaning making (Bruner, 1990¹); where the traditional model treats of the system of already-spoken words, the new paradigm’s aim is to describe words in their speaking (Shotter 1993a). Shanon’s (1993) work is useful here as a backdrop against which to present a description of the basic premises of Discursive Psychology, although his critique of the RCVM model is primarily a cognitive rather than a philosophical one. However, it is not confined to this sphere. There is occasion to refer to his argument in relation to developmental, conceptual, methodological, and empirical considerations throughout this discussion.²

Specifically, Shanon said that semantic representations, defined as exhaustive and determinate, cannot fulfill their stated function. They can neither capture the knowledge that people clearly manifest nor can they account for the relation between cognition and the world. He proposed presentations rather than representations as the important structures.³ The presentational view of the world is of “a matrix of meanings which cannot be separated from the beings who live in the world or from their interactions with it” (1993, p. 294), rather than a collection of things out there, an independent reality. If Shanon’s emphasis still seems quite cognitivistic, it is important to remember that, in what is often referred to as the Second Cognitive Revolution, mental entities have not disappeared from the scene altogether. They have just been relocated in the discursive scheme. Relocation is a theme that is reiterated throughout this discussion. It is worth treating his work here because of his focus on the semantic representation of the meaning of linguistic expressions in particular and also because he is generally in favor of redefining the locus of psychology from the internal realm to the outside. In a similar vein, Harré (1995) moved the origin of the self from the inside of the person outwards, in that the language one learns, and the culture and system in which one learns that language, make possible a distinct type of self. In many ways, Shanon’s arguments encapsulate a lot of the problems discursive psychology has with formalist models of language, for example, those of Fodor and Chomsky.

Shanon’s (1993) argument runs that, rather than being the basis for cognitive activity, representations, if they exist at all, are instead the products of cognitive activity. Whatever it is that underlies cognitive or mental activity, it is not a repertory of well-defined, well-structured abstract symbols. Nor should we be tempted to neatly equate the workings of the mind with the computational manipulation of symbols of this sort. Instead he made some very interesting points about what this substrate should be. Namely, that it should not be fixed by any coding system that has been defined a priori; it should afford maximal sensitivity to unspecified dimensions and distinctions; it should be context sensitive; and it should be embedded in the framework of the organism’s action in the world. There should be no distinction made between medium and message, both the body on the one hand and the ecological environment of the organism on the other must be taken into account.

What this is, is “an ever-active network which can resonate to and thus record whatever stimulation impinges on it” (Damasio, 1994, p. 17), which is both tied to the organism’s being and action in the world and reflects the biological structuring of the brain. A fundamental property is that it can crystallise into “verbal and musical expressions, thought sequences and dreams as well as gestures and bodily expressions” (Shanon, 1993, p. 80). The emphasis on plasticity is interesting. Benson (1993a) said the idea of the brain as plastic in the face of experience is “a particularly helpful conceptual bridge between brain sciences and cultural sciences” (p. 4). There is evidence that the brain’s neurobiological mechanisms can alter as a result of different social environments and discursive practices (Harré & Gillett, 1994).

Although Shanon’s (1993) project is different to mine, there are important points of convergence that provide a good place to start. In his view, the domain of the conscious is not confined to the internal world but also takes in overt behavior in the external world. When discussing language, which he calls the hallmark of representationalist, internal science, he highlights its twofold character.⁴ It is concrete and embodied on the one hand, but we must not forget that it could not exist without there being cognitive agents to produce it. So we think with words, just as we do with tools and instruments (reminiscent of Vygotsky’s work)⁵.

One final point of Shanon’s is mentioned here and developed later: that conscious material is always experienced in terms of narratives.⁶ In the same way, he said we should strive to understand cognitive tasks rather than to model them, that is, to “appreciate the factors involved in the execution of these tasks, the conditions which affect them, the dynamics of their execution and the course of their acquisition. In a nutshell to tell a story, a comprehensible narrative of these tasks” (1993, p. 363). This is what this book sets out to do, through an examination of a small part of language, to tell a story.

Discursive Psychology: An Alternative

According to Shotter (1993b) what is common to all versions of social constructionism⁷ is the assumption that “it is the contingent flow of continuous communicative interaction between human beings which becomes the central focus of concern: a self-other dimension of interaction” (p. 12). This approach assumes that central to an understanding of anything psychological is an understanding of the role of language in human affairs. Cognitive psychology assumes a stable, well-formed and orderly reality independent of language. The newer approach works with the idea of a vague, only partially specified, unstable developing world open to further specification as a result of human communicative activity. The focus is on the dialogic use of words that structures our behavior, the “responsive or directive form of language use” (Shotter 1993b, pp. 162–165) and he quoted Wittgenstein (1969): “Language did not emerge from reasoning, the origin and primitive form of the language-game is a reaction: only from this can more complicated forms grow” (#475). My interest is also in the situated use of words, in this reactive, responsive quality of language, the interpersonal functions of words in context.

What model of (self-)consciousness does this imply? Tugendhat’s (1986) model of self-consciousness and self-determination based on an interpretation of Wittgenstein (1953), Heidegger (1973), and Mead (1934) has many points of contact with the model adopted here and could be useful to discuss. We already find many of the central themes of this work in Tugendhat’s model. He wanted to break away from the traditional notions of consciousness and, like many others, was especially anxious that we finally drop the idea of “privileged access” to self-consciousness. We have no special access to ourselves, not through some sort of inner perception nor through any other channel. Consciousness is not a private, individual affair. Instead, one relates to oneself practically in relating to (i.e., deliberating about) the issue of how one is going to live.

This touches on some of the most important issues raised by the discursive turn in psychology, namely, the issues of personal responsibility, agency and the practical relation of oneself to oneself. Our relation to ourselves as agents is constituted by virtue of the choices we make in relation to “who” we are going to be, what we are going to do with our lives. We see just how important and formative the narrative drive is in the formation of the self.

But it is also important to consider in detail the ways in which our choices are constrained: essentially by the facts that we are embodied beings and that the rules of discourse are not arbitrary. This saves discursive psychology from the frequent criticism that it represents a descent into relativism. Nor is it some sort of freewheeling determinism along the lines of a more sophisticated dressed-up behaviorism. Fox (1994, p. 11) reminds us that behaviorism, although not the only alternative to mentalism, is nonetheless often seen as its flip side and in that respect does not represent an alternative at all.

I want to argue that discursive psychology is, as she puts it, outside the mentalism-behaviorism paradigm altogether. Harré (1995) espoused a version of Wittgenstein’s “moderate foundationalism”⁸ rather then the radical relativism of which he is often accused. He said that “human forms of life must be fitted to the human condition and that includes the material basis for life” (1995, p. 371). So even though it is argued that our use of language in some ways structures our experiences of the world, this does not, and could not, happen in an arbitrary fashion but only in relation to the forms of life that characterize our experiences of the world.

According to Tugendhat (1986), the topic of self-consciousness is not a unitary one but has to do with both a first-person knowledge of one’s own conscious states and a practical relation to oneself that each agent necessarily adopts in deciding how to live one’s life. For instance, in a practical sense, he says we are required to define our identity which we do by deciding what we want to make constitutive of our “existence.” The constructing and presenting of our autobiography, what we include or leave out and the ways in which we choose to structure our life story, is one important way in which we do this. Another way in which we as agents relate to ourselves is by adopting a self-questioning reflective stance in regard to those choices.

An idea of particular interest in this language-analytical philosophy, based on Wittgenstein (1953), is that concepts can be clarified only by studying the rules of use of the corresponding words and that the states of mind to which the phenomena of self-consciousness refer are propositional attitudes. That is, self-consciousness is not about reflecting on some inner sphere but is inextricably linked to the rules of intersubjective speech and also to the social community in which the agent is placed. All phenomena, for instance, wishing, believing, knowing, are initially given in a linguistic form. Their grammatical object is never an expression that designates an ordinary object but is always a nominalized sentence. So we are back to a sense of self that is constituted in, and by, language, rather than one arrived at through a special form of inner perception.

A New Object for Psychology

The poet does not write with thoughts but with words.
Mallarmé (1974, p. 90)

Linking our psychology with our social worlds is hardly novel (Mead, for one, was already doing it in 1934). Proposing language as mediator between the two is new (as outlined, for instance, by Sapir in 1956, also heavily indebted to Vygotsky). Language now is not only representative but is also formative. It functions to construct situations as situations, not just to report on them. Our thoughts are not just the source of our talk but are also constituted or formulated in our talk. The focus of this psychology is on the social and linguistic construction of our reality insofar as it is true that it is language that has us and not the other way round.

But is the move toward social constructionism a genuine paradigm shift? Harré (1992b) would say they are at least enlarging it. What all these approaches have in common, and what unites them against the computational view of mind, is that they break down the individual-social, internal-external dichotomy to set the mind up as intrinsically social. And if psychology is the science of mind, then the object of psychology is not individuals but what goes on in the space between them. This concept is pivotal for theorists like Fox (1996) and Guo (1994) who assert that grammar is ultimately distributed. This means studying the relation between words and world, not between mind and world. It is not cognition but language that gives us the world and therefore it is not the individual thinker but primarily the world of relations that should concern us.

To answer my own question, this psychology operates in an unstable, developing world open to change as a result of our communicative activity, rather than in the independent knowable reality of cognitive psychology. Discourse is the characteristic feature of life and therefore the study of everyday language use or discourse, and of the psychological entities constructed therein, is one of its key tenets.⁹ Language, as a tool and in its active use (to use Budwig’s, 1995b, distinction), is one of the most important discursive activities we engage in to accomplish a number of different ends and will be the main focus of this book.

This constructivist psychology affords language a central and formative role in the child’s developing sense of self, and it similarly affords the child the role of active participant in the process of acquiring a language and developing a sense of self. The development and experience of the sense of self is explored as the most important concept constituted by language and the aim is to outline a vocabulary of self, to extrapolate a set of rules or a grammar for the uses of words and linguistic forms that can be said to express local norms, “to formulate a concept of agency without the myth of the will” (Harré, 1989, p. 22).

What Sort of Linguistics is Required for a Constructivist Account of Self?

There is not a private speaker behind the public speaker. There is just private and public speaking and listening, real and imaginary interlocutors. There is only one speaker per person and there is nothing behind that speaker but linguistic and other semiological powers and abilities and their neurological groundings. This is the foundation of the relation between grammar and self. Harré and Mühlhäusier (1990, p. 30)

The tone of a story or autobiography is largely achieved through the medium of grammar. Story stmcture is of course important, it also builds character but grammar is the poet’s essential tool Capps and Ochs (1995, p. 186)

The theoretical position just outlined vis-à-vis the self presumes that in the act of autobiographical discourse...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 The Discursive Self
• 2 Modal Auxiliaries, Subjectivity and the Self
• 3 The Study: A Developmental Linguistic Investigation of Modal Auxiliaries in Children’s Autobiographical Accounts
• I Modal Grammar in the Construction of the Self
• II The Grammar of Autobiographical Narrative
• III Constructing a Narrative Identity
• Appendix
• References