Joumal jr the lheoty OJ‘Social Behauiour 253 0021-8308

Everyday Folk-Politics, Sensibleness and the Explanation of Action - An Answer to Cranach

WOLFGANG WAGNER

Mario von Cranach’s reply is a thoughtful critique of my paper on “The Fallacy of Misplaced Intentionality . . .” (Wagner, 1994a). In a brief tour d’horizon he expounds some basic assumptions and methodological details of his and his collaborators’ research on social represent&ons and psychotherapeutic action (Thornmen, Ammann & von Cranach, 1988) in order to correct the over- simplistic view of his work I have conveyed in my article. I admit that I did not do full justice to the complex structure of his research since this was beyond the scope of my paper. I quoted his-and ot$rs’-research not to criticize it but merely as an illustration of a certain research tradition in social psychology which also extends into social representation research. This provided the starting point for a comment on the place of talk and action in social representations.’

As interesting as Cranach‘s reply may be, I regret that he criticizes some of my conclusions without taking the trouble to show that their premises and/or their logical deduction and the arguments leading to the conclusions are incorrect.‘ It is probably true that we depart from different premises, i.e. that we argue within divergent descriptions of the world and of the phenomenon, which we both call social representations. Even if this fact may prohibit our theoretical views to converge on some point, I consider it useful to elaborate on some premises of my position which probably were not made explicit enough in my original paper, and to relate them to Cranach’s critique.

Sensibleness and Everyday Folk-politics

I think everybody will agree that it was impossible to predict the consequences of Henri Dunant’s experiences on the battlefield of Solferino, i.e. the founding of the International Organization of the Red Cross (Cranach, this issue, point 2.1). Dunant’s plans probably appeared as insensible to his contemporaries as similar innovators’ actions appear insensible to many of us today. Such minority thinking and action always is rather idiosyncratic and removed from what the majority of the people is willing to accept. The simple reason is that they do not conform to the collectively validated forms of thinking and acting. This

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realm of everyday sensibleness3, which at a different place I called the space of epi-rationality (Wagner, 1994b), comprises the shared knowledge and belief systems of the group or groups a person belongs to. This background knowledge they have been socialized in and which they have learned to accept, forms the pool of evidence to which an individual can and will refer. It delimits a kind of rationality which is validated by the consensus of a group.

Cranach’s and his co-workers’ research is on representations (be they individual or social) and hence on epi-rational knowledge, i.e. on the ‘folk beliGfs [which] repsent h? world as a given culture reconshucts it” (Cranach, point 2.3 (3)). Besides being knowledge about the world these shared folk-beliefs first and foremost are knowledge for the world by implying certain kinds of action and excluding others. They are supplemented by a system of conceptual instruments which are needed in everyday folk-politics, i.e. the terms necessary to present oneself as a sensible person in contrast to a lunatic, and to succeed in the games of justifLing one’s actions and interactions in a way that appeals to and therefore is accepted by one’s fellow group members.

This conceptual system is basically a system of folk-psychological terms. An important folk-psychological term for presenting oneself as a sensible person is “intention”. One needs to give good reasons when asked why one did X in a given situation and above all one needs to maintain that X was inten&d and not acGidmtul if one wants to be taken seriously as a person. The family of folk- psychological concepts subsumed under the headings of “motivation”, ‘&sire” and “emotion” play similar roles in everyday discourse. “Motive-words are rhetorical devices inserted into our discourse to show ourselves in a good light as rational beings in control of ourselves and our destiny” (Harrk, 1990, p. 116).

The Place of Talk in Theory

This view is implicitly reflected in the work of such social psychologists as Heider (1977) (see Cranach, point 2.3 (2)) and explicitly by Harrt (e.g. 1990) and the discourse analysts among others who acknowledge that such concepts are basically rhetorical figures and that they must best be investigated as such, i.e. as talk. This implies a scientific orientation which takes what people say as expressions of their social and individual existence, as an expression of their insertion in a certain situation within a specific group and history. I argue that the task of the social psychological scientists then consists in explaining why people say or think what in whuh situation and social group. Let me call this orientation a Qfi A appsoach.

Such an understanding is at odds with the scientific understanding of other social psychologists who use the concepts ofqday discourse ofthepeople, i.e. the rhetorical devices of accounting like “intention”, “motives”, etc., as concepts within thkr h r i e s about thosepople (Approach of type B). When a folk-psychological term, for example

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Evqday Folk Politics-An A m e r to Cranach 297

the concept of intention, gets translated into a theoretical term, then it easily transforms into an understanding of intentional causality either explicitly or tacitly in the logical and/or temporal design of experiments but also of non-experimental investigations, also in Cranach’s and his co-workers’ research. Although their overt research procedure followed the sequence: social representations -+ behavior + cognition/emotions + individual social representations, the underlying theoretical model follows the sequence: social representations + individual social representa- tions + cognitiondemotions + behavior (Cranach, Figures 1 and 3). In both, in the empirical and in the theoretical sequence, however, behavior follows represen tation implying that behavior is a consequence, be it causal or other, of the representation. This conforms to our folk-political attitude of justifying and explaining action by foregoing thinking and intentions. How else should one understand the arrows in Cranach’s model of nested circular processes in multi-level social co-evolution (this issue, Figure 2)?

Let me add that one may get the impression that Cranach’s and his co- workers’ empirical research is not too far removed from a type A orientation, i.e. giving a description of the complex web of speaking, thinking, feeling and doing of their subjects. This is possibly indicated by their research sequence. But if this observation was true, paradoxically their results would hardly be interpretable within their underlying theory which maintains a strict separation of thinking, intention and action.

A theory of type A about a person’s talk, on the one hand, takes the talk of the subject explicitly as the object of study, analyzing it and thereby also the person himself in his social and cultural situatedness. Psychology in the vein of type B, on the other hand, translates the folk concepts into theoretical terms (exactly because “it is the folk-model held by the researchers themselves and shared with their subjects” (Wagner, 1994a)) without analyzing why and how this folk-concept is used in everyday practice. The fictive example of beliefs and ghosts in my original paper @. 2550 illustrates this transition from a type A towards a type B orientation. This transition from type A to type B is, of course, a historical process in the development of main stream and non-behaviorist psychology. It was this historical tendency of psychology which bothers cognitive scientists like Stich, Churchland, etc. But their suggested remedy for the problem, i.e. neuro-reductionism, is only one of several possible solutions. Another remedy is a type A orientation in psy~hology.~

I understand social representation theory as being a theory of type A, looking at and analyzing peoples’ talk about the various objects in their local worlds and relating it to the social conditions people live in. Hence, “the study of (social representations) consists of analyzing the regulations carried out by the social metasystem in the cognitive system, as far as their links with specific positions in a set of social relationships are clarified” (Doise, Cltmence, Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1993, p. 2). There is only a small step to link this view of social representations with folk-political discourse (Wagner, 1995).

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298 W i i a n g W W

Note that I do not use the term folk-belief in a pejorative way (Cranach, point 2.3 (3)). Saying that the folk-belief in intentional causality does not lend itself for use in psychological theory does not deny its relevance and correctness in everyday life and discourse. But it is one thing to theorize about the term and its everyday uses (theory type A) and quite a different thing to theorize with the term (theory type B). This is also not to negate the inevitable influence of everyday language and thinking in scientific language and reasoning. However, vernacular plausibility is often prone to undermine scientific reason if not properly controlled (cf. Wolpert, 1993).

In point 2.4 (2) Cranach draws upon the logical/dehitional versus contingent/ empirical relationship issue which is part of my argument in rejecting the plain use of folk-psychological conceptions in theory. This is in fact not an exaggerated philosophical distinction and it has profound implications not only for social psychological but also for biological theorizing and research (contrary to Cranach’s excursion into biology in footnote 2). Folk-psychological objects such as motivation or intention, and biological objects such as lungs or legs, are commonly defined5 and even (circularly) explained @ their functions, i.e. in terms of their beneficial effects on the system thereby giving logical and even ontological priority to the function which needs to be fulfilled for a system to work properly over the entity which finally fulfills this function. The object “motivation”, for example, is defined or explained by its energizing and action directing function (Cranach, point 2.3(2)), as the object “lungs” is explained by its breathing function. From a constructivist and systemic point of view, however, such objects are functions and because of that “they construct networks within which they haw functions. There is no need to assume the latter to be given apriori”, as Fontana, Wagner and Buss (1994, p. 222) show for this problem in biological systems (see also Laubichler, in press).

This fact as well as the existence of “necessarily true cultural psychologies” (Smedslund, 1985) imply the problem of the (everyday) logical versus contingent (causal) relationship between mental and behavioral events in social psychology. If someone said to us “I put this picture on the wall because I wanted it there”, this would be perfectly right. When the same person, however, said “I put this picture on the wall because I did not want it there”, we would suggest him to see a psychiatrist. If the relationship between the mental event (a) “wanting a picture on the wall” and the behavioral event (b) “hanging it on the wall” was a contingent and not a logically necessary relationship, the negation of the mental event (a) should necessmb be thinkable. The second utterance is unthinkable because it violates the logical frame of reference upon which our beliefs about action in this world are based (Wittgenstein, 1984).

In doubting the scientific relevance of the “logical problem” Cranach refers to empirkal rejimts of psychological concepts (point 2.4 (2)). This leads us immediately to the second central argument in my article: what is the empirical referent of the concept “belief‘ or of the concept “social representation”?

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E q & y Folk Polihs-An A w e r to Cranach 299

Is Talk More Valid Than Doing?

I think most of the research concerned with the representation-behavior, or intention-action relationship subscribes to the belief that talk is a more valid means for assessing what people think than observing their behavior. In a first step investigators usually assess their subjects’ thinking by evoking some verbal responses. These data serve to infer the subjects’ representation or thinking relative to an object. The second step is to observe the subjects’ behavior relative to the respective object. The behavior is said to be either consistent or inconsistent with thinking, depending on whether it turns out as expected by the investigator or not. Such procedure supposes not only (a) that the verbal response is somehow a reflection of an underlying belief or representation held by the subject; but also, @) that the overt behavioral response is somehow a reflection of the inferred belief or representation-in the case of consistency-or that it does not correctly reflect the inferred belief or representation-as in the case of inconsistent behavior. The consequence of both presuppositions (a) and (b) is that verbal responses are attributed higher validity with respect to beliefs and representations than are overt behavioral responses.

Cranach argues “that there exist in principle degrees of freedom in the process of the individual’s action organization which makes events unpredictable to a degree” (point 2.1). The question is: unpredictable according to which mhion? The author probably means: unpredictable according to what the researcher thinks that the subject believes; that is according to the criterion of the belief or representation which he assessed by eliciting verbal responses-a different kind of behavior-beforehand. However, I think it is easy to give Cranach’s sentence a twist and add that there ex& in prnGiple degrees ofjeedom in the individual$ verbal 7esponses also, which & hk belief or representation Unpredictable to a degree.

If we treat verbal and overt behavioral responses as two kinds of behaviors related to, or expressing an underlying belief or representation, then we need some theoretical criterion to value one, i.e. the verbal, higher than the overt; i.e. to accept talk as a key to beliefs, while doubting the validity of overt behavior for the same purpose. I doubt that there exists any such criterion, except research tradition and the technically easier access to verbal than to behavioral responses.6

Let us imagine a fictive (!) social psychologist investigating the actions “resulting from” or “implied by” a specific social representation, for example the professional behavior of psychoanalytic therapists. Imagine further that the observer judges behavior A as consistent and behavior B as inconsistent with her assessment of the representation of psychoanalysis. What can this possibly mean? Does it mean that behavior B (a) is wrong by the standards of psychoanalysis; or (b) that her assessment of the representation was incorrect such that her subject is not a psychoanalytic but a behavior therapist; or (c) that the whole situation was interpreted incorrectly such that it was not a therapy session she observed, but, e.g., an informal chat? All of the assumptions (a) to (c) imply an error’, either

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300 wolfgong W W on behalf of the therapist or on the side of his observer: in case (a) the psychoanalyst erred; in cases @) and (c) the observer erred in her categorization of the person or in the assessment of the situation. Neither of them does suggest that a correctly assessed representation of psychoanalysis can possibly include or imply a behavior which is different from psychoanalysis-behavior (if the therapist is competent and in fact draws upon his representation of psychoana- lysis); nor can a correctly assessed representation of psychoanalysis imply talk different from psychoanalysis-talk (given that her sources were correct and honest), since it is the shared representation that renders action and talk intelligible in everyday practice (Duveen, 1994, p. 210). On a conceptual level social representations unite both, talk and behavior, which is what makes them a powerfid theoretical instrument in social psychological analysis. It is a methodological decision to favor verbal data to overt behavior in assessing a representation but this does not j u s w an analytical separation of representation, talk and overt action. As Cranach points out, there is no concept readily available to label the

relationship between representation and behavior. I suspect that it might not be necessary to look for such a term through the very definition of common-sense as uniting thought, talk and action which allow people to insert themselves in the course of social life, account for their doings and sayings in such a way that it appeals to their fellow group members and thereby make themselves appear as sensible persons.

Inrtitut@r Pychohgi? U n k i U t A-4040 A U S h

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NOTES

’ Cranach accuses me of trying to monopolize the field “for one single, namely Wagner’s own, viewpoint and level of analysis” (this issue, first paragraph). I am not sure whether I shall understand this as a scientific or as a personal argument. In any case I think that every author focusses on his or her own viewpoint in writing, also Cranach himself.

See also the comments on other discussions of my paper in Wagner (1994~). I prefer to use the term “sensible” for the inside view, i.e. when a person considers

his or her actions as consensually correct and justifiable and the term “rational” for the outside view, i.e. for the scientific observer’s view of such a behavior.

Cranach rightly points out that I did not refer to action theory or action psychology. But this carelessness is due to my impression that much of action psychology is of type B.

A definition, by the way, is certainly different from the constituents of a composed word as in the word “Siruptiere” (mammals, German) (Cranach, footnote 2).

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Emyday Folk Politics-An Answer to Cranach 30 1 Curiously this tendency of psychologists is in stark contrast to peoples’ reaction to

another person whose behaviour is not consistent with his talk. In everyday life behaviour is taken as a better indicator of the “real” belief than talk. ’ Explanation @) may also be the result of the subject having deceived his observer on purpose. This, however, is a different story.

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