Preface to Meaning and Symbolism
Peter G. Ossorio began the work that became Descriptive Psychology in the early 1960s. In 1964 the first major work appeared, the monograph Persons. On the first page of that monograph, Ossorio identifies it as the precursor to a more systematic presentation of the substance of what we now know as Descriptive Psychology: the rigorous articulation of the subject matter of psychology, namely, persons, their behavior, and the real world in which persons exist and their behavior takes place. Meaning and Symbolism, originally published 5 years later, is that systematic presentation.
The book will appeal to people with a wide range of interests. Readers familiar to some extent with Descriptive Psychology will find here a complete and self-contained presentation of the foundations of the field, and a discussion of a number of related issues, such as the necessity for a complete and systematic formulation of the concept of person and behavior if there is to be a science of psychology. Those who have encountered Descriptive Psychology or Descriptive Psychologists in some context and want a better understanding of what it is and how it differs from sorts of psychology will find a thorough discussion of those questions. And if you are one of the many people who have long felt that while the traditional approaches to psychology might be “scientific,” they somehow aren’t about people, you will find here a unique approach, one designed from the outset to be scientific but also to talk about human lives, not only those of animals, organisms and brains.
Section 1 of the volume is a discussion of the need for a rigorous articulation of psychology’s subject matter. To some, accustomed to the sort of formulation of concepts found in the hard sciences, such a need will seem obvious. To others it may seem peculiar. When a physicist studies, say, the behavior of an electron in a field, the concepts of electron, field, and a wide range of other related concepts (e.g., magnetism and gravity) are well-defined, and the relationships between them precisely articulated. Much of physics depends on that articulation. By contrast, when it comes to studying people and what they do, we have nothing like that, and the issues are rarely even raised. It is frequently said that the reason psychology is not a true science is the difficulty of doing experiments. One cannot, after all, treat a person in arbitrary ways and see what happens. Ossorio points out that the problem is much more profound: we have no way to even state the hypotheses in terms of precisely defined concepts of persons and behavior. Certainly a large number of social scientists do things they call studying behavior, but the only available system of concepts and relationships between them is ordinary discourse, and even this system is commonly dismissed by traditional psychologists as naïve, “pre-scientific,” and otherwise unsuitable for doing science.
In the following four sections, Ossorio presents a conceptualization that is in some sense the “core” of Descriptive Psychology: a precise, comprehensive, and systematic presentation of the concepts of world, person, behavior, and verbal behavior and the relationships among these concepts. Or, less technically: a way to talk about everything people do and say, but that has the precision and rigor normally found only in the hardest of the hard sciences. Thus, when a Descriptive Psychologist says, “She served him dinner at 8:30 because she was angry,” the concepts of anger, emotion, and even “because” are as precise as those of the physicist saying, “The acceleration of the electron at point P in the field of strength G will be A.”
The discipline of Descriptive Psychology has flourished since this volume was originally published, with new conceptual work and applications in a number of areas. The concepts here are thus not the entire body of Descriptive Psychology’s concepts. In particular Putman’s work on Communities and Organizations followed 11 and 14 years later, respectively. Historically, it is interesting to see an early treatment of the concept of status as a long-term state, a formulation later replaced by that of position in a Community.
Section 2 presents the State of Affairs System, which formulates the concept of a world in a way that is unique in Western intellectual history. It may seem surprising that such a traditionally philosophical subject is part of the presentation of a discipline of psychology, but as Ossorio points out, it is done because it is necessary. Behavior takes place in the world, and persons act in light of their circumstances. Without a formulation of what we mean by “circumstance,” the conceptual formulation of behavior would be seriously incomplete. A complete formulation of the concept of behavior must include formulation of all aspects of behavior; simply importing the concept of world from a discipline such as physics would not serve, for such an importation would be acting as though the circumstances persons act on could always be represented in terms of arrangements of physical objects. While some may claim that this is the case, and others the opposite, there can be little disagreement that the issue is not one to be settled by simply making an assumption.
Section 3 uses the formulations from the preceding section to discuss two important kinds of things in the world: behaving individuals and behavior. The section begins, “Among the concepts which may be distinguished within the system are the concepts of type H objects and IA processes. Basically, these are the concepts of persons and behavior (mnemonically, Human objects, and Intentional Action processes).” Ossorio’s use of “type H objects” and “IA processes” emphasizes that what he is doing is not describing or theorizing about persons, but rather is laying out the concepts of person and behavior and their inter-relationships. When a mathematician says, “The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is π,” he is not describing something one can draw in the dirt with a stick; he is stating a logical relationship between two aspects of the concept of a circle. Similarly, when Ossorio writes, “If a person is called upon to do something he can’t do, he will do something else that he can do instead,” he is stating a logical relationship between the concepts of person, reasons and behaviors.
This distinction is perhaps the most fundamental difference between Descriptive Psychology and all other accounts of persons and their actions, and one of the most frequently misunderstood, especially by those less familiar with the discipline. Meaning and Symbolism is an articulation of a single, large, complex concept as the foundation for a discipline. Since one rarely encounters such an enterprise, it is not surprising that it is often confused with something else, and “type H object” and “IA process” serve as useful reminders of what is being done, much as a zebra’s stripes provide a hard-to-miss reminder that we are not looking at a horse.
Section 4 is the presentation of the IA formulation of behavior: <I, W, K, KH, P, A, ID>. W (the parameter that identifies the intention) and A (the achievement of the behavior) range over the possible states of affairs, and so we can see directly the logical necessity for the work in Section 2: without it, there would be no formal way to specify these values. Somewhat similarly, the K parameter identifies the distinctions on which the individual I is acting, and the values of this parameter are the set of possible states of affairs. Part of the value of a formalism is the ease and simplicity with which it captures the phenomena at the heart of matter, and we can see the power of the IA formulation here: a unique formulation of two of the historically most fundamental but problematical (logical) facts about human behavior, namely that people act on concepts and they act “with intention.” (The “Significance” parameter was added to the IA formulation after the writing of Meaning and Symbolism. This is an interesting illustration of the continuing refinement of the conceptualization. “Significance” was added when use of the original formulation, both in thought experiment and in describing actual behaviors of persons, showed that something was missing that was required to encompass the full range of facts about behavior.)
Section 5 addresses several relationships between the SA system, Individual differences, and the IA formulation. One of the more striking examples of the power of the IA formulation is the case of deliberate action. Deliberate action, the case in which you know what you are doing and choose to do it, is captured with startling simplicity: by having the values for the W and K parameters include the behavior itself.
The concept of a social practice, one of the concepts at the heart of the later formulation of Communities, is introduced as a “pattern of actions engaged in by one or more” type-H objects. In an interesting reversal of customary practice in psychology, also introduced here are intrinsic social practices: practices “which need not be part of any other practice but are intelligible in themselves” – that is, done for their own sake. Thus Sir Edmund Hillary’s famous answer to why he climbed Mt. Everest: “Because it was there.”
By Section 6 Ossorio has developed the concepts sufficiently that he is ready to address one of the prime original foci of the work: the study of verbal behavior. In this section he integrates verbal behavior as a special case of IA, with the formula V = <C, L, B>, in which C is the concept, L the locution, and B the set of all behaviors that are instances of acting on C. This integrates what are customarily called the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic aspect of language, but because he is using the developed system of Intentional Action and the State of Affairs System, the integration, while similar in form, is an integration into a far richer conceptual structure. In particular, he uses this structure to uniquely address the first of the issues of the volume title: meaning.
Section 7 addresses the second of the title issues: symbolism. The basic conceptual system of IA is used to articulate the logic of symbolic action without having to resort to devices like hypothesized but unobservable processes, such as displacement, or thinly disguised metaphors from mechanical engineering, such as pressure forcing action.
The final Sections of the work discuss experimental work based on the formulations that have been presented. Sections 8 and 9 present empirical work in the study of verbal behavior based on the formulations of the preceding sections. Here we begin to see some of the “payoff” of having a single system to encompass all behavior, including verbal behavior: the formulations are unlike those found in experimental psychology and linguistics, the experimental procedures are different, and the results usable in unique ways.
Section 10 presents experimental work of a different kind. Here Ossorio presents the foundation and experimental verification of techniques for quantitative measurement of meaning and language use that remain, four decades after the publication of the volume, beyond the state of the art in information retrieval and other areas of computer science.
In a Foreword added in 1978, Ossorio said of Meaning and Symbolism, “In toto, it is a conservative specification of the range of possible behavioral facts and it leads directly to a substantially novel conceptualization of meaningful verbal behavior and symbolic behavior and their empirical investigation.” I invite you, whether you are an experienced practitioner of Descriptive Psychology, a curious onlooker, or just someone interested in having a better understanding of people, to dive in and enjoy a unique intellectual experience.
H. Joel Jeffrey, Ph.D.
2008
