The Social Construction of Mind: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Linguistic Philosophy

197 Pages·1979·9.883 MB·English

by  Jeff Coulter

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MIND
By the same author
APPROACHES TO INSANITY
THE SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTION OF
MIND
Studies in Ethnomethodology and
Linguistic Philosophy
JEFF COULTER
ROWMAN AND LITTLEFIELD
Totowa, New Jersey
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1979 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
First published in the United States I979
by Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, N.J.
ISBN o--84 76-6 I 3 I --8
Printed in Great Britain
FOR LENA
Contents
Introduction
THE NORMATIVE ACCOUNTA BILITY OF HUMAN
I
ACTION
9
2 TRANSPARENCY OF MIND: THE AVAILABILITY
OF SUBJECTIVE PHENOMENA
35
3 DELETING THE SUBJECT 63
4 BASIC EXPERIENTIAL EXPRESSIONS 76
5 SOME THOUGHTS ON THINKING go
6 PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESIDUA 107
7 AFFECT AND SOCIAL CONTEXT 125
8 THE METAPHYSICS OF MENTAL ILLNESS 140
Concluding Remarks 153
Notes 159
Subject Index 185
Name Index 188
vii
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Ms. Joan Nashawaty of Boston University for
her generous help in the preparation of this manuscript for publica
tion. I am also grateful to the Editors of PHILOSOPHY OF
THE SOCIAL SCIENCES for their kind permission to reproduce,
with minor modifications, my paper 'Transparency of Mind' which
appears here as Chapter Two. (Phil. Soc. Sci., December 1977).
Unless otherwise stated, the data extracts are taken from research
with mental welfare officers and patients, and I am deeply grateful
to them for allowing me to tape-record, and reproduce, episodes
from their naturally-occurring social interaction. For the patients
especially, these were episodes of serious moment in their lives.
Sociological inquiry is made possible only by such generous co-oper
ation and trust.
jEFF CouLTER
Boston, USA
ix
Introduction
This book comprises a collection of essays organized around the
theme of subjectivity. The aim of the collection is to undermine
the empty dualism of behaviorism and mentalism as it has tradi
tionally, up to this time, been applied to problems in conceptualizing
and studying 'psychological' phenomena. I believe that the Cartesian
'subject/object' dichotomy has wrought conceptual havoc in sociologi
cal and psychological thinking, and has even influenced some of
the formulations of scholars whose basic purpose has been to transcend
it (e.g. Schutz). In its place, I want to propose a different account
of the 'mental' concepts, drawing heavily on the Wittgensteinian
tradition in the philosophy of mind. I shall try to show that,
when taken together, currents in both linguistic philosophy and
ethnomethodology provide for the possibility of making genuinely
sociological propositions about subjective phenomena in ways which
demystify and dereify the latter.
I had hoped in this work to lay out some principles for the
construction of a sociology of mind; that ambition has not been
fulfilled, but I believe that in the ensuing arguments and analytical
essays the reader can locate various general directions in which
further work could be done. Much of the present book has been
devoted to theoretical and illustrative issues which are intertwined
with each other; it turned out that establishing some foundations
was to be more than a modest attempt. However, I think that
the research value of the anti-psychologistic stance defended here
is clear.
The basic problems addressed include the following. Is it necessary
to postulate or to impute determinate mental contents to persons
The Social Construction of Mind
2
as a part of studying action sociologically? What are the relationships
between social circumstances and 'mental' states and processes as
these are elucidated? Is there anything essentially private about
minds? At what analytical level can inquiry into subjective pheno
mena best proceed?
Since a good deal of what I have to say turns on the use
of logico-grammatical analysis, I want to outline this method briefly
before inviting the reader to proceed to the essays themselves.
Logical Gram111ar and Mind
The analysis of the mental-conduct concepts and predicates to be
discussed derives from inspecting reasoned, linguistic uses in ordinary
sorts of circumstances; the aim of logico-grammatical analysis is
to show how various concepts relate meaningfully, or intelligibly,
to some particular other concepts whilst not to yet other ones.
Logical grammar does not connect a name to an object by setting
out the 'distinctive', 'necessary-and-sufficient' or 'essential' features
of the object, but by relating
... various concepts to the concept [in question-JC]. Here
the test of your possession of a concept (e.g. of a chair, or
a bird; of the meaning of a word; of what it is to know something)
would be your ability to use the concept in conjunction with
other concepts, your knowledge of which concepts are relevant
to the one in question and which are not; your knowledge of
how various relevant concepts, used in conjunction with the con
cepts of different kinds of objects, require different kinds of contexts
for their competent employment.1
For instance, grasping the concept of 'chair' (knowing what a
chair is) involves knowing how it can be related to concepts like
'wood', 'legs', 'sitting', 'broken', 'repaired', 'furniture' and so on,
in distinctive ways and in different sorts of contexts. Grasping
the concept of 'broken' would involve knowing how it signals different
states of affairs when related to 'chair', 'promise' and 'marriage'.
Many of our conceptual errors consist in making the wrong connec
tions, or the wrong sorts of inferences to states of affairs on the
basis of given connections, between concepts. Although there are
always latitudes in usages found intelligible, there are normatively
enforceable limits to such latitudes. Cavell notes a simple case
in point: 'If someone says we haven't played all of the Brahms
concerto on the ground that we only played the violin part, then