Handout 4

Introduction to Block 4:

Interpretive Explanation Part I

Explanation in terms of the

Social Accomplishments of Practical Activity

It will be helpful as you begin thinking about the material and topics we will cover in this Block, Block 4, to compare them with those of Block 2 and Block 3. Block 4 can be seen as a move from the study and analysis of what people say, to the study of what they do by saying.  It can also been seen as drawing on a very different view of causation than that of Block 3.  Next, this Block can be seen as studying people when they are in a different mode of engagement: acting rather than reflecting.  We'll study everyday interaction, rather than interviewing people. Finally, Block 4 aims for explanation in the form of an interpretation, the product of a hermeneutic inquiry that seeks to articulate the accomplishments of everyday interaction: how people make things happen. In particular, the ontological work that they do.

1.  From What Is Said to What Is Done

In Block 2 we practiced interviewing and the analysis of interviews. In other words, we paid close attention to what people talk about, and we were particularly interested in the way they talked about their topic: the cultural categories (to use McCracken's term) that structured or organized their talk. We searched for these categories by paying attention to the two major forms in which discourse is structured: narrative and argument.

In Block 4, in contrast, we will be paying attention to what people do by talking. This shift in our attention reflects a recognition, first by philosophers and subsequently by linguists and other social scientists, that speech doesn't just convey information (its content, what is sometimes called its "propositional content"), it also accomplishes something socially.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) was one of the first people to reflect upon this. Wittgenstein realised that one of the fundamental uses of speech is to accomplish practical activities. He imagined people building a house calling to one another "Block!," in order to request more building material.

Speech act theory was originally formulated by Oxford philosopher John Austin (1975) and made famous by his student John Searle (1969). Austin distinguished three different acts that are part of every spoken utterance. In fact Austin's distinctions can be applied to non-verbal actions too: Nofsinger (in the coursepack) uses the example of a successful field-goal kicker in football. The kicker has accomplished three things: he has kicked the ball (when we look at his action one way), he has made a field goal (looking at it a second way) and he has made the fans happy (looking at it a third way).

People talking in a conversation are also doing several things at once. For example:

1 M Would you like to visit the zoo today?

2 B Oh! That would be great!

M here has accomplished several things. First, she has uttered a linguistically meaningful message: one with the grammatical character of a question, or interrogative. Second, she has made an offer to B. And third, she has produced some kind of effect on B. She may have made B pleased, feel appreciated, etc.

In speech act theory, these three acts are, first, the locutionary act of uttering or vocalizing; second, the illocutionary act of offering and, third, the perlocutionary effect of pleasing. Speech act theory runs into considerable difficulties when one tries to use it to analyse real discourse, but the three-way distinction is still important to keep in mind. In looking at what people say, and what they do in saying it, it is important to consider not just their speaking, but also the action that is performed in speaking, and the consequences of that action on the other people involved.

A branch of linguistics called pragmatics has arisen to study language use. Syntax, the study of grammar, was for a long time considered the sovereign area of linguistcs, especially when Noam Chomsky (1957) published his ground-breaking work on transformational grammar. But since then there has been growing recognition that syntax can only be understood in conjunction with semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics, the study of use.

One way of thinking about the ways that speech uses language to accomplish things is to imagine that different ways of speaking are like moves in a game. Wittgenstein talked of the many different "language games" that make up our society. If we think of speech this way, the researcher's task is to figure out the kind of game that people are playing, and the rules of that game. This task is made more complex by the fact that two people talking together may be playing different games; philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre expresses this well when he says: "the problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB3 may always be replied to with a lob across the net" [1984, p. 98]). People can also invent new games; in fact the game metaphor is misleading if it makes one start to think that people are following rules. They do not; the "rules" of language games are better thought of as "techniques" (or "methods," as Garfinkel would have it - remember Garfinkel, 1967?), and the rules don't determine exactly what people do, they just define a framework within people can do what they choose. Think of the rules of chess: they tell you which moves are permitted and which are not, and they define the different chesspieces, but they don't determine how a chess game is played. There are millions of different ways to play a chess game, and someone playing chess has total freedom in choosing what to do, so long as they don't break the rules.

The rules of language games are even weaker than this, though: a person can break them without being penalized or forfeiting the game. Breaking the rules of language games is itself a kind of move (as we shall see in week 2). For this reason (as we discussed in Block 2) some researchers have suggested that talking is more like improvisation in, for example, jazz. (Courtney Cazen suggest this, in her article in the coursepack, and cf. Sundow, 1974).
 

2.  Different Views of Causation

So the first difference between Block 2 and Block 4 is the shift in our focus from what people say to what they do. In the empirical-analytic paradigm, explanation is a matter of determining whether there is a significant difference in an effect or outcome-variable that can be attributed to a causal variable. Identification of the cause-effect relationship is a matter of inference, since it is considered impossible to observe such a relationship directly. (This belief can be traced back to David Hume's argument in 1888 that although we can observe a "conjunction" of events, such as one billiard ball striking a second and the second then moving, we do not in fact really observe the first ball "causing" the second to move. Causes do not operate on the observable level, because they involve "necessary" relationships which would require an infinite number of observations to ensure. The modern statement that "correlation is not causation" amounts to the same thing.)

Even within the empirical-analytic paradigm there have been some moves among educational researchers to open up the black box of the classroom and look inside, rather than being content just measuring "input" and "outcome" variables. One such approach has been called "process-product" study; here the "process" of teaching in a classroom is quantified by means of category and coding scales, and treated as an intervening variable.

In the interpretive paradigm there is also a belief that the process of teaching can be studied, but without the need for coding. The social exchanges of teaching, the verbal behavior of teacher and students, can be studied by means of observation and recorded for more detailed analysis if one wishes. In other words, the process whereby an outcome is achieved is an appropriate phenomenon for interpretive analysis. The assumption here is that so far as the social world and human events is concerned, causal influences are not invisible and do not have to be inferred. This is not to say that no interpretation is needed to figure out what is going on. Furthermore, those researchers who practice a critical interpretive approach suggest that there are still some causal influences that can only be identified indirectly, and we shall consider their position in Block 3. But much of what happens in a social setting like the classroom can be directly observed and recorded by anyone who cares to visit, and even by the participants themselves.

A second emphasis of Block 4 will be on the details of this kind of observation. We shall call it ethnographic in the simple sense that one is concerned with describing (-graphe) what folk (ethno-) are up to. The term ethnography tends to be associated with the discipline of anthropology, but the methodological issues we shall be discussing in class are not unique to any single discipline in the social or human sciences. The approach we take here will be cross-disciplinary, or even anti-disciplinary in the sense used in the new area of cultural studies, where researchers have argued that they are concerned with a level of analysis that blurs or even dissolves the boundaries between sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and even philosophy and literature (cf. Grossberg et al., 1992).

So we will be concered with what Cazden calls "sociolinguistic" studies of classroom interaction. (Of course this approach need not be restricted to classrooms, though for simplicity it is classrooms on which we shall focus - including our own, by the way!)
 

3   Watching a Touchstones Discussion

Our main example will be a discussion from the Touchstones program that we have used as a source of data and material in previous blocks. An empirical-analytic researcher would consider discussion as a "treatment": as a categorical difference between two groups of students, and two sets of outcome scores. In Block 4 we will take a look at the process of discussion itself. We will try to figure out what kind of language game is being played, and what the strategies or techniques for playing it are. In an approch very different from the sampling employed in the empirical-analytic paradigm, we will do a case-study: a detailed examination of a single discussion. You may be surprised how much detail we will get into at times.

As was the case in Block 2, we will employ a specialized kind of analytical approach to the Touchstones discussion: an approach called Conversation Analysis (known as CA for short.) This is a particular way of studying verbal interaction that has become highly influential throughout the social sciences. For many people it has replaced Speech Act analysis. It suits our purposes because it is not highly technical, and it is quite compatible in its underlying assumptions with the interpretive paradigm, largely because conversational analysis had its origins in the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel. Good introductory texts on CA are available, too. It is, however, only one of several possible approaches, and so we it here as an example.

Just as was the case with the analytical approaches (argument analysis and narrative analysis) in Block 2, we should look and listen carefully to the material before trying to analyze it formally. An analytical approach like conversation analysis should not be carried out for its own sake; it is a means to an end. It cannot and should not replace your own attentive and unassisted reading, listening and watching of the material you are trying to understand. Such an approach can facilitate your understanding, however.

Any analytic approach requires an objectification of the phenomenon being studied: that is to say, it turns that phenomenon into an object, something one examines in a more detached and reflective manner (though never in a fully neutral or disinterested manner). Objectification brings with it both benefits and costs. The costs can be minimized by repeatedly returning to the phenomenon -- viewing the videotape, in the case of the Touchstones discussion -- in a more engaged manner. For this reason we will begintoday by watching the Touchstones discussion before we start to employ the terminology and the analytical perspective of CA.

4.  Modes of Engagement

If Block 2 dealt with what people say, and how the say it (cultural categories), while Block 4 deals with what they do, and how they do it (techniques and methods), then one might ask how these two are related. How is the kind of discourse that we obtain from an interview related to the kind of discourse of a conversation? Well, an interview is a conversation too, of course, but it is generally a special kind of conversation in that it asks the interviewee to be more reflective than they would ordinarily be. If we ask them to tell us about some kind of social activity they were involved in (a Touchstones discussion, say), they will be more reflective that the way they were at the time of that event.

We can express this by saying that a social activity and reflection on that activity are different modes. People can of course move back and forth between these modes, between unreflective, even habitual action and reflection, and they sometimes make this move with speed and frequency, but the two are distinct, nonetheless. In week 4 we will discuss the two modes and their differences, and compare what the teacher says about Touchstones with what she does.
 

5.  Description and Explanation: Understanding and Interpretation

We've just contrasted the different views of causation in the empirical-analytic and the interpretive paradigms, and the different views of explanation that result. Now we should consider the relationship between description in the interpretive paradigm -- the broad focus of Block 2 -- and explanation in this paradigm, as we shall approach it in Block 4. (Remember we shall return to explanation in Block 6.)

To do this we need to make some more comparisons with the empirical-analytic paradigm. In the empirical-analytic paradigm, description amounts to quantification by means of appropriate instruments, which measures relevant variables. Explanation amounts to identification of causal relationships among these variables. The earliest proponents of the interpretive paradigm proposed a quite different kind of description, as we have seen: they proposed a search for understanding rather than explanation -- for verstehen rather than eklaren, to employ the German terms of the time, which are still often bandied about in English and American discussions of the issue.

Verstehen can be viewed as a psychological process of empathy, putting oneself in the other's shoes, being objective about subjectivity by "bracketing" ones own perspective and presuppositions. We can certainly proceed in a manner where this seems to be what we are doing, but we started to see at the end of Block 2 that this cannot be the whole story. If people are active constructive agents in the world, and for this reason we need to understand how they see the world and what they are trying to do, isn't the researcher active and constructive too? But if so, how can she or he simply "become objective"?

The debates over this point are still going on (the article by Geertz in the coursepack deals with some of the argumentation in anthropology), but one approach to thinking about the researcher's role in understanding social phenomena is a hermeneutic one. "Hermeneutics" means the theory and practice of interpretation, originally interpretation of texts (religious texts initially), but now interpretation of text-analogs, of text-like material like speech and even people's behavior. Freud practiced hermeneutics (cf. Ricoeur, 1970), though it was the variety known as depth hermeneutics. In this Block we shall be concerned not with depth hermeneutics, but with a more straightforward approach called the hermeneutics of everydayness.

Hermeneutics does not replace phenomenology, it supplements it, in a manner which we shall consider in more detail on week 4. Hermeneutics draws our attention to the fore-structure that always guides and informs the way a researcher understands and interprets any phenomenon. A researcher's understanding is always organized by tacit knowledge that they draw upon without being aware of doing so, and by the kind of involvement and concern that motivates them.

In appreciating this, we have turned around and applied to ourselves the insight that the people we study actively construct a way of understanding the world. Understanding another person is not just a matter of putting oneself in their shoes in order to see the world they do and grasp what they say and do from their perspective: it requires a shuttling movement back and forth between their framework and the researcher's framework (Geertz calls this a "dialectical tacking between experience-near and experience-distant concepts", Gadamer, 1960, calls it the attempt at a "fusion of horizons"). And it requires the locating of what they say and do in its place in the dynamic structure of the social world and the history of that world.

Perhaps that sounds grandiose, but all it means is that we need to look at what people say and do, and interpret it in the light of its social and historical context. This is what conversation analysis does, if with a somewhat narrow spatial and temporal scope.

And this is to say that explanation in the interpretive paradigm amounts to interpretation; specifically, to a hermeneutics of everydayness: an articulation of the structures in which people's talk and action is situated, and of their involvement in those structures. We'll consider the general character of these structures on week 4.

It follows that the task of writing an ethnographic account is the task of laying out these structures for people to understand and appreciate. This is the general tack we shall take in discussing report writing, on week 5.

References