Dahlias are delightful

Rules, Meaning, and Use (a first stab)

In a section from Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (1990) concerning Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings about “ostensive definitions,” Winch explores a question that Wittgenstein gave considerable attention to in his Philosophical Investigations (1953): how “is a definition of a word connected with the subsequent use of the expression defined? What is it to follow a definition?” (Winch, 1990, 26).

To approach this question he offers the “meaning” of the word Mount Everest for consideration. Does Mount Everest only mean something (and only one something) if it has been defined for a listener? Many theorist and philosophers of language and meaning have argued this to be the case, however Wittgenstein and Winch would argue that one could present a variety of ostensive definitions for the words “Mount Everest,” none of which would be wrong and none of which could completely encompass the many ways in which the words have been used and can be used. For example, Mount Everest could be: 1) the highest peak in the Himalayas, 2) the place where Sherpas receive payment for carry mountaineering equipment, 3) a snow capped mass of land, etc. And so, it seems difficult to say that following the definition of a word is what establishes the meaningfulness of the utterance, since a word can have multiple past definitions and potential future uses: “For what is it to use the word in the same way as that laid down in the definition? How do I decide whether a given proposed use is the same as or different from that laid down in the definition?” (ibid). Bearing this “philosophical puzzlement” in mind, Winch concludes, in line with Wittgenstein, that meaning must depend upon something more than a definition; it must depend upon its context of use. In order to say that we are using a word “in the same way” (and therefore seeming to follow a definition) we must know the context in which the question “are these words the same” arises.

This context is what Wittgenstein calls the “language game” – an inherently social game that is played between interlocutors that has relational repercussions. A language game, like all games, is governed by rules, and these rules are what determine whether or not we can recognize an utterance as being “the same” (or rather, accomplishing a similar effect in the game) as another utterance. For example, if we are playing a language game that we might call 'naming the highest peak on a continent in order to seem very knowledgeable,' then we might say that Everest and Denali are “the same” because they follow the rule of being two of the highest peaks in the world (and we can imagine that there are other answers that resemble these and that could also be said to follow the rule for this game). However, if the game changed a little and we were playing 'name the highest peak in the world in order to seem very knowledgeable,' Everest and Denali would not be “the same” and saying that they are would not make an individual appear to be geographically savvy.

Bearing this in mind, we can conclude, following suit with Wittgenstein and Winch, that in order for an utterance to be “the same” as another, and therefore take on a particular meaning through its relation to the thing that it is “similar” to, it has to follow the rule(s) of the language game being played: “it is only in terms of a given rule that the word ‘same’ acquires definite sense. The use of the word ‘rule’ and the use of the word ‘same’ are interwoven” (ibid, 28). And so, “the question: What is it for a word to have meaning? leads on to the question: what is it for someone to follow a rule?…In what circumstances does it make sense to say of somebody that he is following a rule in what he does?” (ibid).

This seems a hard question to answer, but Wittgenstein says that there is a very simple prerequisite for a circumstance to allow for rule following: the possibility for someone to interpret another as having made a mistake. “If it is possible to say of someone that he is following a rule that means that one can ask whether he is doing what he does correctly or not" (ibid). If an individual can say that another has made an error in following an expected course of action (regardless of whether or not it is connected to any real “intention”), than rule following (or not following) can be said to have taken place (or not taken place).

If evaluation is the prerequisite, then errors must be identifiable and correctable, meaning that someone can point out to another that a rule has been broken. Leading us to a fundamental component of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language: It is only in contact with other individuals that rules can be established and broken – that meaning can be created and recreated. Social life is what makes meaning possible. Meaning is not held within an object itself, nor an unchanging ostensive definition established by the first person to encounter that object; instead, meaning is accomplished by the human use of language to configure themselves in relation to one another. For Wittgenstein and Winch meaning lies in use, with rules, games, and mistakes as its methods.

Work Cited

Winch, P. (1958/1990). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy. Second edition. New York: Routledge.

Fishface

haha

Good times, neat fun.

Markers and Mustaches

Yes.

Language Games

A dog cannot lie.  Neither can he be sincere.  A dog may be expecting his master to come.  Why can't he be expecting him to come next Wednesday?  Is it because he doesn't have language? 

Edutainment

Harvest Moon

Bringin' it back...

The Wide-Brimmed Hat


The Curtsy


The China Collection


The Bow Tie


Thanks for the pictures Rachell!

10ish

scale

I'll trade you Foucault for Weber....

Some of my favorite trading cards:

Hole lotta fun. Most people missed the boat though...(e.g., bad 1990s art still up in doctor's offices).

Card's assessment of Girl Power's weakness is spot on. The "I don't need men, I'm sexy!" attitude that Girl Power promotes only works to encourage a masculinist (that is, self-determined, independent, dominating) mentality in women. Nevertheless, Girl Power rules!


Also add to special skills: somehow convinced all of his followers to dogmatically cling to the terms he made up for the things he observed (e.g., backstage/frontstage, withs, ecological huddle, face-to-face). Amazing. This phenomenon was carried into the Conversation Analytic tradition as well.

Merry Wives of Windsor

FORD
This is strange. Who hath got the right Anne?

PAGE
My heart misgives me: here comes Master Fenton.
(Enter FENTON and ANNE PAGE)
How now, Master Fenton!

ANNE PAGE
Pardon, good father! good my mother, pardon!

PAGE
Now, mistress, how chance you went not with Master Slender?

MISTRESS PAGE
Why went you not with master doctor, maid?

FENTON
You do amaze her: hear the truth of it.
You would have married her most shamefully,
Where there was no proportion held in love.
The truth is, she and I, long since contracted,
Are now so sure that nothing can dissolve us.
The offence is holy that she hath committed;
And this deceit loses the name of craft,
Of disobedience, or unduteous title,
Since therein she doth evitate and shun
A thousand irreligious cursed hours,
Which forced marriage would have brought upon her.

FORD
Stand not amazed; here is no remedy:
In love the heavens themselves do guide the state;
Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.
____________________________________________
The Merry Wives of Windsor, William Shakespeare

False Hope

If I want up, and,
in assuming that's where You are,
try to elevate myself,
I'm bound to burst my balloons:
False hope only falls further from.

What I Do: Part 2

What is the legacy of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, or Karl Marx to the field of communication research? Chose one of these canonical social theorists, identify and define some of his major theoretical concepts and methodological interventions that have had a lasting impact on communication research, and explain in depth how the work of at least two specific communication scholars owes a debt to the work of that social theorist and/or challenges his legacy.

• • • •

In what follows I will describe Durkheim's argument for an empirical approach to social inquiry and how both a positivist and an anti-positivist reading can be drawn from his work. I will then discuss how Durkheim's empiricism was extended along two different lines by his successors: 1) the logical/positivist empirical line, as derived from Suicide (1897) and extended by post-WWI and post-WWII social statistics scholarship and the rise of quantitative approaches to sociological studies and communication research, best exemplified in the work of Lazarsfeld and Schramm; and 2) the phenomenological/anti-positivist line, as initiated by The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915), which was extended through the symbolic, interactive, qualitative inquiries of G. H. Mead (1913) and his followers.

Durkheim's Transition from Logical to Phenomenological Empiricism

Durkheim, coming out of 19th century Comtian positivism and French social realism, was initially concerned with how to make the speculative sciences resemble and speak with the same authority as the natural sciences. Later in his career, however, as he focused his attention more closely on the study of religion and its influence on social order, Durkheim became concerned with human symbolic life and the emergence of "collective representations" (Durkheim, 1915, 262) through collaborative meaning-making and ritualistic practices – an area of inquiry that cannot be approached from a strictly positivist position but must instead consider the world, as his contemporary and phenomenological philosopher Husserl (1913) posited, as being constituted by consciousness. Durkheim argued that there must be a way to engage in an empirically based sociological science, capable of discovering human morality as an emergent means for organizing observably homeostatic social patterns, and so he looked to group ritual activity as the medium through which individuals internalize collective symbolic representations and thereby "come out of themselves" (Durkheim, 1915, 263) and into "real communion" (ibid, 262) with their society. And so, though his early work defined social facts by their exteriority and constraint, Durkheim:

was later moved to change his views significantly. The mature Durkheim stressed that social facts, and more particularly moral rules, become effective guides and controls of conduct only to the extent that they become internalized in the consciousness of individuals, while continuing to exist independently of individuals" (Coser, 1977, 130).

According to such an understanding, "constraint is no longer a simple imposition of outside controls on individual will, but rather a moral obligation to obey a rule. In this sense society is 'something beyond us and something in ourselves'" (ibid). Durkheim's transition from a strict Comtian positivism – as seen in Suicide (1897) and The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) – to a more phenomenological view of sociology – as seen in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915) – sustains a commitment to discovering the "rules" and "moral conformities" (ibid, 18) that serve as homogenizing social forces on individuals, however these social forces have come to be understood not (naively) as "from without" but rather as internally motivating, experientially operative, and emergently manifested.

Early Durkheim and the Positivist, Quantitative Line

In two of his earlier works, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897) and The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Durkheim argued that there is a qualitative difference between social and individual states of mind and that social states of mind are exterior to individuals (1897, 313). From this he develops three claims: 1) the social is something above and beyond the aggregate of individuals' consciousness and therefore can, and should, be studied by a scientific discipline separate from psychology, which is reserved for examining individual states (ibid, 38); 2) there exist sui generis "social facts" (ibid, 37; 46) that can be objectively examined – that is, studied “as things” (1895, xliii) – and in this way sociological inquiry can be understood as akin to the positive sciences (1897, 320) since it is concerned with the observation of such "real laws" (ibid, 299); and 3) social facts influence individual behavior, creating a "collective inclination" to particular actions (ibid, 299), including those previously thought to be completely private, such as suicide. Because the "tendencies of the whole social body, by affecting individuals, cause them to commit suicide" (ibid, 300), which was once considered a personal pathology, suicide could be statistically and sociologically studied in order to gain insight into what social forces were acting – from without – on individuals in order to make them behave in previously incomprehensible ways.

Durkheim’s use and promotion of social statistics as a way to investigate social facts as things was subsequently deployed by future scholars – not simply to understand human behavior, but also with the aim of manipulating it. After WWI, when United States federal bureaucrats discovered the broader utility of social data for ordering, averaging, and quantifying the American public (Igo, 2007, 9) in such a way that aided U.S. nation building and protection, a quantitative, positivist line of social scholarship was developed to help the state’s enumerative and manipulative strategies (Appadurai, 1996). During WWII, the U.S. government increasingly funded early communication scholars, such as Lazarsfeld and Schramm, and their ambitions to initiate Communication institutes so that these institutes might conduct survey research, audience studies, and investigate "mass-media effects" in order to deal with the "problems of communication, public opinion, and democracy that occupied the Commission on the Freedom of the Press…. [This] translated into a postwar appetite for research into how media influence society" (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004, 547) and was most famously answered by Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) when they stated: with limited effects. Interestingly, Katz and Lazarsfeld argued for the importance of interpersonal relations, yet their research relied on statistical, averaging methods for the study of such complex personal influences. Along this quantitative social science trajectory, reaching its peak in the field of communication between the years or 1947-1952 (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004, 557), we see Durkheim’s legacy being lived out as an extreme logical empiricism – the reduction of social relations and communication research to numerical values, content analysis, and statistical probabilities.

Late Durkheim and the Anti-positivist, Qualitative Line

In contrast, Durkheim’s methodology in Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915) is presented as an early anthropological form of ethnography, veering away from the statistical methodology he promoted in Suicide. In Elementary Forms of Religious Life he argued that individual consciousness is derived from collective representations that are internalized by individuals. These collective representations are projected onto material objects (such as totems) making them take symbolic forms, allowing for the creation and passing on of shared understandings that in turn organize human behavior in ways that are collectively relevant. It is in this work that Durkheim develops his theory of religious symbols as collective representations that express collective realities and order an individual's ways of acting so as to maintain or recreate certain mental states shared by the group (ibid, 22). He also claims that "our sensations are actual, they impose themselves upon us as fact" (ibid, 26, emphasis added), which suggests that direct, sensory experience, because it is infused with collective meaning, allows community members to phenomenologically become part of, and get organized by, their social group's symbolic endowment.

Though early American sociology developed more prevalently along the statistical, positivist line, Durkheim's symbolic, phenomenological line was kept alive in the States through the work of Mead and Cooley in the 1920s and 1930s and Goffman and Blumer in the 1960s. Mead, a pragmatic sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher from the Chicago School, argued in his article titled "Self" (1913) that the self, "as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience" (ibid, 204, emphasis added). That is, self-consciousness necessitates an "objective perspective," which can only result when an individual assumes the "attitudes of other individuals toward himself" (ibid, 203). Only by means of social interaction are people capable of, and in fact required to, reflexively look back on themselves and attempt to see their "gestures" (ibid, 211) through the eyes of others. Here we see that Mead, following Durkheim's phenomenological trajectory, understood individuals as constituted experientially through social life and collectively instructed "self" reflection.
Durkheim's anti-positivist line also came to favor in 1960s France when resistance to the import of American logical empiricism grew, encouraging scholars, such as Bourdieu (1980), to reengage with the classics (especially Durkheim and Weber) as a way to distinguish themselves from their positivist peers, particularly those at Sorbonne (Swartz, 1997, 45). During this time, critical communication research was also spreading through northern Europe (Schramm, 1983, 12), simultaneously calling into question logical empiricism and its influences on the administrative model of communication research.

Ironically, social science's positivism seems to have been both initiated by and resisted with Durkheimian scholarship. That is, arguments for both logical empiricism and phenomenal empiricism are present within Durkheim's scholarship, an interesting self-contradiction that has resulted in Durkheim's work being deployed by communication scholars to both support quantitative research – such as demography, criminology, "media effects," etc. – as well as to refute it and instead insist upon qualitative approaches – such as symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and multimodal interaction studies.

Works Cited

Appadura, A. (1996). Number in the colonial imagination. In Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, pp. 114-135.

Bourdieu, P. (1980). Structures, habitus, practices (R. Nice, Trans.). In The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Durkheim, E. (1895/1938). The rules of sociological method (pp. xliii-liii, 1-13, 27-46). NY: Free Press.

Durkheim, E. (1897/1951). Suicide: A study in sociology (J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson, Trans.). New York: Free Press.

Durkheim, Emile. (1912/1995). The elementary forms of the religious life (Fields, Trans.) (pp. 13-33; 235-267). NY: Free Press, pp. 13-33; 235-267.

Husserl, E. (1913/1982). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy -- First book: General introduction to a pure phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans). Nijhoff: The Hague.

Igo, S. E. (2007). The averaged American: Surveys, citizens, and the making of a mass public. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Intro and Epilogue)

Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. (1955). Personal influence. NY: Free Press, pp. 15-42; 116-133; 137-143; 175-186.

Mead, G. H. (1913/1972). Self. In Strauss (Ed.), George Herbert Mead: On social psychology ( pp. 199-246). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schramm, W. (1983). The unique perspective of communication: A retrospective view. In Journal of communication 33, 3, 6-17.

Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2004). How not to found a field: New evidence on the origins of mass communication research. Journal of communication 55, 3, 547-564.

$2,125 in Vegas, baby

Mom won another $1,000 moments later. When you got it, you got it.

What I Do: Part I

:)

"You have to stand by some sort of discourse."

Euro2008

too true

there is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true

Center

Centrifugal Force
and the peaceful, still holding
of our Core;
and I'm with you in wonder
-- the eye of the hurricane --
where all is spinning out,
except us.

Bow to your sensei!

Standing together, in seperation: the state of states.

Abstracting the Abstract

A new window in Cologne Cathedral

Where do you draw the line between a line and a curve?

Here...