x To my mind, excessive citation has become a vice in psychological writing and I would like to make a break with the all to easy insertion of the 'Budweiser and Schlitz, 1982' style of reference.
p.3 Popper was surely right to emphasize that bold conjectures contribute more to the progress of science than cautious inductions. This study is a linked sequence of bold conjectures, and is, of course, accompanied by the invitation - 'Go on, try to prove me wrong!'
p.10 A theory... must be part of the contents of a cognitive system. It must be 'within' a module or structured on some ensemble of modules; it is part of the information processed.
p.20 The fundamental human reality is a conversation, effectively without beginning or end, to which, from time to time, individuals may make contributions. All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us... The structure of our thinking and feeling will reflect, in various ways, the form and content of that conversation. The main thesis of this work is that mind is no sort of entity, but a system of beliefs structured by a cluster of grammatical models. The science of psychology must be reshaped accordingly.
p.20 I hope to show that not only are the acts we as individuals perform and the interpretations we create of the social and physical world prefigured in collective actions and social representations, but also that the very structure of our minds (and perhaps the fact that we have minds at all) is drawn from those social representations. At the centre of the argument will be a treatment of the three central aspects of human psychology, consciousness, agency and identity, and above all their reflexive forms, self-consciousness, self-mastery, and autobiography
p.20-21 For me, a person is not a natural object, but a cultural artifact. A person is a being who has learned a theory, in terms of which his or her experience is ordered. I believe that persons are characterised neither by their having a characteristic kind of experience nor by some specific genetic endowment. They can be identified neither phenomenologically nor biologically, but only by the character of their beliefs.
There are two primary realities in human life: the array of persons and the network of their symbiotic interactions, the most important of which is talk. I begin with the presumption that privatization and personalization of part of that network is thought. These realities are irreducible to one another, but each is the necessary condition for the possibility of the other. The network of symbiotic interactions appears to people in the form of two secondary realities; these are the social systems of material production and of the creation and maintenance of honour and value, both of which are mediated by meanings and stabilized by ritual.
p.21 Given these primary realities, where are the cognitive processes aboriginally located? Are they in the public-collective/social realm of talk or do they belong in the private-individual/personal realms of individual experience? The basic premise of personal psychology is that cognitive activities are primarily public and collective, located in talk. They become personal activities of individual people by developmental processes of the kind Vygotsky in Thought and language called 'appropriation', for example, the process by which we come to learn to talk to ourselves. Personal appropriations occur, I shall try to show, only in the course of the redistribution of demands upon individuals to make contributions to the public performances of thought and feeling put on them by... socially structured groups of people. [JLJ - ok, so cognition comes about by imagining the demands of social groups and redistributing our activities to contribute to "working" the demands/needs/activities/issues of the group, initially at least, through "talk".]
p.21 Personal beings, as I shall try to establish, must be thought of as social productions if we are fully to understand their nature... Our mental life, I shall argue, is the result of the acquisition of a theory. Though personal beings are real, they are the product of theoretical activity... By believing the theories in which concepts like the self have a place, we so structure our experience as to create them: different theories, different mental organization. Everything that appears to each of us as the intimate structure of our personal being, I believe to have its source in a socially sustained and collectively imposed cluster of theories.
p.25 Unlike the natural sciences, in the human sciences the productive process, and in particular the beings involved in it, are themselves products of 'educational' processes in which these very theoretical concepts play an indispensable part. These beings are what they are partly by virtue of holding this or that theory. It is my belief that empirical research built around these ideas will show that that 'partly' is actually 'mostly'.
p.46 Vygotsky in Thought and Language shows that grammar is acquired through first joining in the public - collective conversation, talking 'out loud' so to speak. So my intentions appear first as avowals, as speech acts. Only later do children make these avowals 'in thought', as speech acts in private conversation, whose grammar is at first the same as that of the public conversation.
p.64-65 I take the array of persons as a primary human reality. I take the conversations in which those persons are engaged as completing the primary structure, bringing into being social and psychological reality. Conversation is to be thought of as creating a social world just as causality generates a physical one.
p.65 By 'conversation' I mean not only speech exchanges of all kinds, but any flow of interactions brought about through the use of a public semiotic system... People and their modes of talk are made by and for social orders, and social orders are people in conversation.
p.106 One who is always presented as a person, by taking over the conventions through which this social act is achieved, becomes organized as a self.
p.116 'Nothing in the mind that was not first in the conversation'
p.137 Psychologically speaking, to be a human being is to be the kind of creature who uses theories to order and so create the forms of experience. To be conscious is not to have a special kind of perception, denied to chimpanzees, but to utilize a theory of a kind that chimpanzees have not and, perhaps thanks to their neural organization, can never learn. The study of psychology is not the study of natural phenomenon. It is to do the analytical work of disentangling the theories which, as embedded in our thought-ways, constitute the same.
p.151 According to White:
The significance of 'attending' is that something has been made the centre or object or topic in regard to which we are actively busy or occupied, whether perceptually or intellectually, or even practically... Degrees of attention are not to be explained as more or less intense engagement in one specific activity, but rather as concentrating more or fewer of our activities on one object.
p.151 White argues that 'mere perception of something is not consciousness of it... we are conscious of something... only if it catches or holds our attention'
p.163 For a being to be conscious at all, the relational pencil from the self to the field of various objects of awareness, some of which can be attended to, must be maintained.
p.163-164 Novel aspects of things become objects of attention.
p.172 It is not unreasonable to suppose that persons, animals and some kinds of machines have similar information-processing structures. Ought they to be counted as possibly conscious beings?
p.185 Martin Hollis suggests in Models of man that giving the reasons for what one does is a complete form of explanation since it is the mark of a person as a rational being.
p.186 The problem of human determinism is complex.
p.214 I have argued that what makes a being a person is the possession and use of a certain theory, in terms of which that being constructs and orders its beliefs, plans, feelings and actions.
p.256 Mind is formed on the basis of grammatical models and locally acceptable episode structures.
p.263-264 for a person to work their way around clusters of guiding principles, an obsession has to appear as a guiding principle... there must be linguistic or other semiotic resources available by which the compulsion or impulse can take propositional form... providing oneself with reasons is to create a private discourse in which such speech acts as self-command can be performed. There are two conditions for such a discourse to be possible:
- The actor must be in possession of a theory amongst the concepts of which are devices adequate to set up a dialogue in which he or she, the actor, appears in more than one part.
- There must be a public discourse to serve as a model for the private discourse realizing local conventions of debate, command, reprimand etc.
p.265 I have argued throughout that persons are the product of a certain kind of work done on beings who are merely animate by nature. The work is essentially the teaching of a theory to that being in terms of which it can conceive of itself. The possession of such a theory and the exact form that its self-conception takes is intimately bound up with the language it learns and with the social rights it can conceive of itself as having. Persons can be 'grown' from any kind of being capable of learning such a theory. Some suitable beings may be inanimate, though I have confined my discussion in this work only to the growing of persons on animate beings.
p.265 Animate or inanimate, to be a person is to have certain cognitive linguistic capacities, to be in possession of certain theories by means of which reflexive discourse can be formulated, and to have certain rights to the public display of those skills and knowledge.
p.265 'Reflexivity' is the magic ingredient by which persons are created as self-conscious, self-controlling and autobiographically aware beings. But this is by acquiring a local version of the theoretical concept of 'self'.
p.268 Sloth and procrastination are sins in the cultures to which most of us belong. [JLJ - Possibly interesting, but I am too tired to comment on this now. I might do so later.]
p.270 The gift of reflexivity creates personal being. [JLJ - I see that Margaret Archer got this from Harré]
p.271 To be rational is to display one's actions as being in accord with some socially valued discourse principle... Rational actions are those which can be justified within a certain belief system, and relative to that system a rational being is just one who is seen as acting in that kind of justifiable way.
p.284 Creativity differs from madness... only in the degree to which it can be absorbed into the collective conventions of the primary discourse to become part of the psychological resources taken for granted by ordinary folk. [JLJ - If we absolutely need to distinguish between the two, creativity is the term used if one can make a living from it (or just amusement) and it does not do you in - else, it is madness.]
