Author Index

In a consideration of ‘insult sequences’, citing a paper by John Dollard called ‘On playing the dozens’. “Dollard’s paper is in a book by Roger Abraham  on that sort of phenomenon, called Down in the Jungle [1964].”

In a consideration of ‘feigning innocence’ as a special task. “In a short story by Conrad Aiken which I forget the title of, some fellow is engaged to some girl who claims that she’s exceedingly innocent. And what bothers him is that her body doesn’t seem innocent...”

Rhetoric, logic, and poetics in Burundi (1964), an “interesting though recurrently confusing (or confused, as you may like) paper” cited here re ‘imitation’ (p.481), and ‘sequencing rules’ (p. 482):“As I’ve mentioned that article, I ought to note further about it (and it’s about one of the only places I’ve seen it so far) she suggests that in apparently very routine conversations among the Burundi, when they are multi-party conversations, i.e., more than two persons, they have a formulated way of coming off. That is to say, there is a ‘first speaker’, ‘second speaker’, ‘third speaker’, given by the social structure. And that order is supposed to recur throughout the conversations.”

Rhetoric, logic, and poetics in Burundi (1964), “a very interesting paper” extensively quoted here re ‘sequencing in conversation’: “The order in which individuals speak in a group is strictly determined by seniority of rank.”

In a consideration of context. “[T]he difference between  Aristotle’s techniques of doing philosophy and Plato’s turn on the fact that the character of a dialogue as a method of doing philosophy has as  one of its central properties that [its] utterances...are not properly to be pulled out and merely, then, treated as what this fellow thinks about a problem that this sentence happens to be about.”

Re.  performatives.  “There are two books, and they’re books you ought to read. In his Philosophical Papers, chapter 10 [1961] there’s a paper called ‘Performative utterances’. Then there is a whole book about these things called How to Do Things With Words” [1962]. They are things like ‘I promise’, “I offer’, ‘I bet’, ‘I assume’, etc....roughly, where something that you say is a formula for doing some activity; it’s done in the saying.”

Cited re.  performatives

Re. ‘say’ as “...a pro-verb for a class of verbs which have been studied in a famous, brilliant series of articles, and the class is called ‘performatives’. There’s a wonderful book entitled How to Do ThingsWith Words [1962] by the British philosopher J.L. Austin, which is about ‘performatives’. Also an article in his Collected Papers, entitled ‘Performatives’.

“There’s a bunch of first person indicative sentences that have been studied by the British philosopher J.L. Austin, which he considers in his book How to Do Things With Words. [1962] He calls them ‘performatives’. ‘I bet’, ‘I promise’, and things like that.”

[Error in text: 'van Neumann' mis-transcribed as 'Bagnanin']

“Most recently, those who have tried to study [human behavior] very closely - for example, Bales in his laboratory work (Interaction Process Analysis, 1950)  - have done something exceedingly foolish, I think. That is, Bales has the notion that you can categorize it as it comes out, so that you sit and watch people as they are talking, and write down categories of what they’re doing as they’re doing it. That makes it into some kind of trick. There’s no reason to suppose that you should be able to see it right then and there.”

Cited re. “terms like ‘you’.” ‘On indexical expression’, in Mind, 63 (1954)

“...this utterly mundane report...from One Boy’s Day by Barker and Wright”(1951). “What they did was to have a bunch of people follow a kid around all day, writing down as best they could, everything that he did.” Shown here, fragment from Raymond: ‘My gosh, son, you have tooth powder all over your cheeks’. (Re “...the phenomenon which I’ll call generically, ‘subversion’.”)

Fragment from One Boy’s Day (pp 379-380), A father to his young son: ‘What are you going to do with that big crate you have?’ re. ‘possessitives’ (someone’s property) and ‘possessables’ ( “If you go down to the beach, pick up a stone, you can make it your own...But...if you turned the stone in at the Lost and found, they might take it that something strange is involved.” (p. 385). (Here, an abandoned crate as a possessitive but one  that “can be acquired, free”.)

A “piece of data from an unpublished book by Barker and Wright, similar to their One Boy’s Day. A little girl in a wagon, ‘getting ready to push herself’; the researcher prompts  her to get going; the little girl retorts ‘“There’s a car coming’.” (Quoted re. the “general relevance of legal-illegal” (p 474).)

Part of Appendix A, On some formal properties of children’s games).  ‘There’s a car coming’ materials, now cited as from the unpublished but copyrighted book,  Margaret Reid by Barker and Wright, p. 95. “It is obvious enough that a central property of game events is that for any given action the set whose members are mutually exclusive (legal-illegal) is of first-order relevance.”

“[T]here’s a thing that can be done in conversation; talking to each other through another. In a conversation I’ve been         working with, from Barker and Wright’s One Boy’s Day, the parents are interrogating the kid about this big crate he found. It seems to me that they are talking to each other through him.”

“Not until 50 to 60 years after [Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals] did people again begin to use photographs. So, for example, Bateson and Meade began to do that some 25 years ago in Balinese Character.”

“One gets theories of psychopathology which turn specifically on the presence of inconsistency; where, for one, the project of some psychotherapy is the production of consistent activities. And these can get very fine. The Bateson ‘double bind’ theory of schizophrenia proposes, for one, that the basis of...that schizophrenia that they study…is that the pre-patient is subjected to at-the-same-time-inconsistent activities. so that, for example, in a statement that the mother makes that’s invitational, she also engages in activities that are rejectional. . . .This, then, is supposed to generate confusion and the rest, and produce schizophrenia. Where what has to be core to that is the effectiveness of consistency or inconsistency - and that, of course, is a historical invention.”

Re. Class 1 (“consequences naturally flow from the act done”) and Class 2 (“things “you can ‘get away with’”) rules. For children, “there’s no principled way...to find out. They have to proceed case by case.”. . . . Bettelheim, for example, reports kids in Chicago who do things  like get into a barrel and roll down a hill onto a main street where there’s fantastic amounts of  traffic, just checking out whether it’s so that you can get hurt.”

In the preface to Excess and Restraint  (1962), p. ix, “We find [Berndt] doing what anthropologists occasionally do, and that is, to formulate what it is that he takes it he was seen as by the natives when he arrived at this place that he went to work in...:                               

We were viewed as returning spirits of the    dead who had forgotten the tongue of our fathers and wanted to relearn it.

Grammatically, that’s perfectly good English. I want to make the case that it’s an asemantic statement. That is, it is not meaningful in English, though it appears to be. . . . . . I introduce this sort of consideration since I want eventually to make the case that one of the core problems for psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies, and the social sciences in general, concerns the relationship between the categories that those disciplines set up and the categories that members of the society otherwise use.”

“[E]ven quite young children go about correcting the language performance of others. There we take it that to some extent some rules of a language are not merely ‘unconsciously followed’(cf. Boas’ introduction to the big volume on American Indian languages, now reprinted by Georgetown University Press) but that they are known in a way  that permits them to be used to determine errors and what it is that for some detected error, a correct action would be.”

Mentioned incidentally in a discussion of the “first speaker pair” question-answer. “There’s a rather lovely book on questions called Interrogative Structures of American English by Dwight Bollinger. It’s publication number 28 of the American Dialect Society”. (1957)

“[T]he way textbooks teach sociology is quite exquisite. I’ll give you a marvelous example of how you come to learn sociology. There’s a line in Broom and Selznick [Sociology: A Text With Adapted Readings, 1963] that goes like this: ‘Roles are more complex than they appear to be at first glance.’ . . . . [W]hat you’re learning is a batch of terms, which you can figure you now know something about, by way of what you already know about everything that could fit into that sentence. But for us, the understanding and use of objects like ‘X are more complex than they appear to be at first glance’ is precisely what we want to be studying. It’s not something that we can employ to give us the feeling that we understand what is going on in the first place.”

Re. ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’. “[I]t may well be so [that] adults do not, and children do, use ‘the mommy’. If adults don’t, then perhaps children ‘construct’ the usage - cf. here, Brown’s papers in which the ‘construction’ phenomenon is examined - in Lenneberg, and in Brown and Bellugi.” (Brown,R. 1973, A First Language: Early Stages; Brown, R. and Bellugi, U. 1964, ‘Three processes in the child’s acquisition of syntax’ in Lenneberg E.H. (ed) New Directions in the Study of Language; and Bellugi, U. and Brown, R., 1964, The acquisition of Language)

Quoted at the start of a consideration of proverbs: “I’ll begin by...read[ing] you a way that proverbs are largely used by social scientists - because it’s quite relevant to the task they seem to have set themselves. The first quotation comes from page 3 of a book called The Study of Thinking by Jerome Bruner and some associates of his [Bruner, J.S., Goodnow, J.J., and Austin, G.A. 1956].”

That there is confusion remaining in the adult world about what constitutes an identity class is testified to by such diverse proverbs as ‘plus ça change, plus la même chose’ and the Hericlitan dictum that we never enter the same river twice.  

“. . . .It’s a very usual use of proverbs among academics...to suppose ...that it goes without saying that the corpus of proverbs is subjectable to the same kind of treatment as, for example, is scientific knowledge.”

Quoted in a discussion of “utterance pairs...examining their implicativeness for extensions into the conversation - before or after”, now focusing on “second-speaker phenomena. In some societies there are rules which say ‘An X should not do Y.’ For example, here’s one I take from a book on some Greek mountain culture by a fellow named Campbell called Honor, Patronage, and Family [Honour, Family and Patronage, 1964]. And there’s a rule in that group that goes ‘Unmarried opposite-sex persons from different families should not speak to each other.’ There are obviously two ways that this could be enforced. Either no such person would start talking to such another, or some such person might start talking to such another but it’s the business of the other not to talk in return. And that’s the way it’s dealt with there. For example, it’s reported that unmarried males, upon passing unmarried females, will greet them. It’s the business of the unmarried female to not reply.”

In a consideration of possessive pronouns. “Rather regularly, at least in the past, attempts have been made to formulate the notions of ownership in some tribe by considering the types, and range of use, of possessive pronouns. A rather classic example...can be found in...an article         by Capell [‘The concept of ownership in the languages of Australia and the Pacific’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 5, 169-189 (1949)].”

(1954) ‘English sentence connectors’, Marquand A (ed) Studies in Language and Literature. Cited in discussions of ‘clausal construction’ and ‘second speaker rules’, respectively.

Letters to Governor Brown during the Chessman case: ‘What would you feel like if that happened to your wife?’ re. what happened to a family could happen in any family.

“If you read Cleckley’s book The Mask of Sanity [1955], the psychopathic personality is reported to be that person who, at any given point in their behavior, you never know what’s going to happen next. . . . And they are taken to be about as painful a person as you can have around you.”

“[I]t’s kind of a marvelous quirk about anthropology that an enormous number of tribal names that anthropologists talk of...are very very regularly non-recognizable to the members of those tribes...because ...they get the name of the tribe in the other tribe’s language. So, for example, Elizabeth Colson, in an absolutely marvelous ethnography called The Makah Indians, traces such a naming. This is from page 76.

‘They received the name Makah in 1855 when they made their treaty with the United States government. The government interpreter was a Klallum who gave the treaty makers the Klallum name for the Cape Flaherty people. This has been the official name for them ever since. Today most people speak of themselves as Makah though some of the older people say they dislike the name because it doesn’t belong to them and they don’t understand its meaning’”

1937: Indicators. Language Monographs, 17

“[F]or a fairly comprehensive review of the literature on [antinomies], see the appendix to chapter 1 of Foundations of         Mathematical Logic [1963] by Haskell Curry.”

“I’ll...quote a piece of data and its analysis from one of the extremely few studies of conversation that have yet been done; a book called The First Five Minutes [1960], by Pittinger, Hockett, and Danehy.”  [For further, see Pittinger, R.E. pp. 302-303, below]

“In a way, most of sociology could have been irrelevant, and what I do could have been done 50 years ago, 100 years from now, etc. . . .[I]t stands in close parallel to classical naturalistic biology or zoology. In fact, if you want to look at something, Darwin was doing this already. He wrote a book, Expression of Emotions in Man and the Animals, where he collected pictures and tried to see if there were, for example, standardized expressions, and if so, how did they operate?”

In a discussion of  “utterance pairs...examining their implicativeness for extensions into the conversation - before or after”,         now focusing on “second-speaker phenomena.”(p. 691) “[T]here’s a rule that goes: ‘Sex relations between married persons who are not married to each other, is improper.’ In a book by Davis and Gardner [Deep South: a social anthropological study of caste and class, 1941], they report such  a rule and then say ‘It’s perfectly ok for men to make advances on other men’s wives; it’s the business of the wives to reject those advances.’ (cf Campbell, J.K., p. 691).

In a consideration of  ‘collaborative sentences’. “I tried to find some literary uses, but it’s so powerful it’s banal. It would just be corny. I heard a musical version of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology [1924] where the device was used[.] . . .He was trying to show a pair of happy lovers, and the happy lovers talked this way, e.g., she would begin a sentence and randomly stop in the middle, and he would continue it. And that way they provided a demon-stration of Freud’s remark that only in love do we feel we are one. And I’m told that in the comic strip Donald Duck, the author puts together three of the characters’ sentences in that fashion.”

In a consideration of ‘insult sequences’. There is a considerable literature which pretty much first emerged...in a paper by John Dollard in 1957 called ‘On playing the dozens,’ which is a Negro kids’ game, and it’s an insult game. The kids engage in sequentially insulting each other. They tend to do it before some audience where the audience, by its reaction, decides that the game is over. . . .Dollard’s paper is in a book by Roger Abraham on that sort of phenomenon, called Down in the Jungle [1964].”

“I would then try to see, is it the case that people in their ordinary affairs do use antinomies. And I haven’t really looked very hard so far, but I found at least one, and it’s a classic one, also. It comes from this book, Style in Language, edited by Thomas Sebeok, a paper called ‘Oral styles of American folk narrators’ by this American folklorist, Dorsen, on page 41. He’s reporting some story he was told:

‘The next supposedly true happening, where Art is asked to tell a lie and says he has no time because so-and-so has just had an accident and he must go to a doctor - which is a lie - is an international folk tale attached to various American yarnspinners.’”

A matter “perhaps relevant to why sociology took the course it did”, which is “intrinsic in Durkheim’s work...is the notion that the order of social events is macroscopic, in the sense that you had to  assemble lots of events to find statistically what it was that was doing the work. I think one can begin to see, in the stuff I’ve been talking about, that it may well be that things are very closely ordered.. And...there may be collections of social objects - like ‘How are you feeling?’- which persons assemble to do their activities. And how they assemble those activities is describable with respect to any one of them they happen to do. That’s a different kind of order to a social world.”

“[T]he way I work has been called ‘microscopic’ with, then, the usual sociology as the ‘macroscopic’ level of investigation. And it’s not a bad distinction. But then it’s proposed that social events are not closely enough ordered so that we can get results at the ‘microscopic’ level of investigation. I take it that we just don’t know whether or not that is so. Certainly there has been an argument, and certainly the statistical position has won out. Durkheim posed the matter - which is the basis for the statistical approach to sociology - that if you take the statistical figures on suicides, you find quite an order. And you can study those. And construct theories. Then he says if, however, you deal with such things as the accounts that accompany each suicide, you don’t find order at all. They’re hastily made up, by low grade officials, etc. But he did not in fact attempt to deal with the accounts. And, in fact, his arguments as to why you shouldn’t do non-statistical work were statistical arguments. And it may well be, for example, that the accounts of suicides are closely ordered phenomena.” [Suicide: a study in sociology, 1951]

Re. a student assignment... “people check out things they’ve noticed with somebody else. . . . Some of you talk about ‘reinforcement’; one reinforces their determination that someone was doing something wrong...by making a checkout with somebody else. And thereby the norms are reinforced. Which is a nice, Durkheimian kind of argument, and it may be true. But there’s something that has to be seen about that claim, and that is the mechanism of the procedure in the first place, which is what I’m interested in.”

“[O]n the matter of...using a Member’s knowledge and access.   

. . . Reading with some care one of the most important books written in the social sciences, Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [1926], I found the following kind of thing going on in it. [In a consideration of aboriginal religions, a ‘they’ is investigated by] “a ‘we’ who are social scientists outside of and with no intuitive access to why ‘they’ do things.” [Then there is a] “tremendously remarkable shift [which] can be found in a single paragraph of the book.  [From] “Why do ‘they’ do it? [to] ‘We know, as members, that society has that power over our minds.’ And that, then, is an invitation to ‘us’, social scientists and whomsoever, to understand ‘their’ way by our knowledge of our ways. Pretty much all conventional social science works in a similar way. . . . [W]hat I want to do is turn that around; to use what ‘we’ know, what any Member knows, to pose us some problems. What activity is being done, for example. And then see whether we can build an apparatus which will give us those results. Where that is not to be decided as to its adequacy by what a Member knows, but may well look quite  non-intuitively (i.e., in terms of our Members’ intuition) strong (or weak, or irrelevant, for that matter).”

“When you start out with a piece of data...the question of what kinds of findings it will give you should not be any consideration  whatsoever with respect to what you do with it. That is to say, it’s a nothing. There’s nothing exciting about it, nothing obviously of direct theoretical interest about it. furthermore, starting a consideration and developing points on it does not require a hypothesis. It just involves sitting down at some point and making a bunch of observations, and seeing where they’ll go.

The things in the world that are going to count theoretically...will not necessarily come with labels on them: ‘Look at me, I’m really important.’ And in that regard, what we are taught in sociology seems to have that character.  That is to say, we are taught that when some phenomenon is presented to you, you will know in the first instance that this is something you’d better damn         well listen about because these phenomena count. We know that politics is important. That’s a very very sneaky way of developing the importance of something.  Now there’s been many attempts in sociology to undercut such a         claim. The work of Durkheimn, for example, had as one of its big attempts - though it completely failed in that attempt - to say that just because something is a problem in the world doesn’t mean that it’s a problem for sociology. Just because it seems to be an important problem doesn’t mean that it’s a problem that’s sociologically important. And the question - what makes a thing sociologically important - is quite a different kind of issue.”

“[F]or a good game it’s of course necessary in the first instance that there be another team and that they be doing things. No opposition, no game. T.S. Eliot’s attack on modern sex in The Wasteland [1962], center section, involves the destruction of opposition. The woman doesn’t oppose, doesn’t do anything, and then it’s a quite different kind of phenomenon. You can’t prove yourself a man that way. You can’t score. Though you could tell your friends you did.”

In a consideration of the pro-verb ‘do’: “And if you’re interested in the historical development of this usage there’s an article called ‘The auxiliary “do”: the establishment and regulation of its         use’, in English’ (which ends about the 14th century for this guy), by Alan Ellegard, in Gothenberg Studies in English, volume 2 (1963).”

[With regard to the question, what are the available means in this society for seeing one’s relevance to others?] “I was reading one of the greatest books in the social sciences, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande by Evans-Pritchard [1937]. And some of his observations can begin to give us a feel for what such a procedure  might look like. [Goes on to describe the Azande Chicken-Oracle.]

In a consideration of ‘pervasive, inexhaustable topics’, citation from The Nuer, 1940, pp. 18-19. “They are always talking about their beasts. . . . [T]his obsession - for such it seems to the outsider - is due not only to the great economic value of cattle, but also to the fact that they are linked in numerous social relationships.” Sacks comments that this sort of explanation is standard in sociology and anthropology: “[O]ne sees that something - like cattle conversation for Nuer - is important, it seems extremely pervasive. And now, before trying to figure out how and why it works as it does, one uses an acceptable explanation as that which the analysis would eventually and inevitably reveal. By ‘acceptable explanation’ I mean one need only invoke what’s known to be such, e.g., ‘social relationships’, as the stable machinery generating conversation, etc. And insofar as investigations end at the point when the explanation is in sight but hasn’t been developed, then the notion that those things are the ultimate explainers can remain in use, and seem even to be confirmed. Whereas it’s at least theoretically conceivable that, having examined the structure and working of these cattle conversations, one consequence might have been a discovery that the supposed explanation didn’t do the job. We can’t suppose that some end, being in sight that way, would inevitably be arrived at.”

In a consideration of ‘ultra-rich topics’, “I’ll start off with a long quote from a wonderful chapter of a nice book. The book is called The Nuer by E.E. Evans-Prichard...chapter 1, pages 18-19...”. [cf above, “They are always talking about their beasts...”]

In a consideration of ‘ultra-rich topics’, now, re. kids discussing cars, “...there are a variety of other terms than just ‘a car’.  ‘Fast car’, ‘gasser’, ‘stocker’, [its] brand name, [its] model, ‘Voodoo’, ‘Roadrunner’, all sorts of things like that. [And that]...may be a partially discriminative feature of a class of objects in general. [T]o indicate this point cross-culturally as well, in [chapter 1] of Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, he points out that the Nuer never talk of ‘a cow’. They talk about a ‘good cow’, they talk in terms of its color, its histories, its type, who owns it, etc. . . [C]attle are perhaps in some ways parallel objects for the Nuer to cars for teenage boys. The feature that one doesn’t talk about ‘a car’ may then be one that has some criteriality for a characterizable class of objects, which furthermore may be a cross-culterally operative class in some fashion or other.”

“[T]he problem of sampling is not separate from some possible large theoretical issues. And it isn’t obvious that the problems that Fisher posed, and his solutions, are simply to be adopted (Fisher being an agronomist who was concerned to build some system of models that would permit him to decide various agricultural facts, and whose results were the considerable foundation for statistics in sociology).” [1950, Contributions to Mathematical Statistics]

Responding to students’ use of  the term ‘infer’. “[I]t’s sort of a pain to intellectualize this stuff such that you already talk about it as though, ‘I see a blob, and then I infer that it’s my mother because she’s a blob like that’, when what you see is not that. And it’s an extraordinary experience when it turns out that you do see somebody in something like that fashion. I just recalled, in Fitgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon [1941], he reports a scene where this girl remarks that walking in New York, seeing a man approaching, finding a whole series of properties of him which she doesn’t especially like, it turned out it’s her father. That is a special sort of experience. But I can understand why you talk that way. You may find that some philosopher has convinced you of this. But ‘inference’ has another kind of use.”

In a consideration of proffering identification by asserting some membership category: “That . . .is quite obviously not restricted to this society but is rather widespread. Here is just one of what I suppose could be an endless string of quotations to that effect. This is from a paper called ‘Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland’ [(1939) Africa, 11, 4 (1958)] by Meyer Fortes. He writes: ‘If one asks a child “who are you?” the answer is invariably “I’m so-and-so’s child”, or “of so-and-so’s family.” The answer to ‘Who are you?’, then, being the naming of some membership categorization device (family) or category (child), etc.

In a consideration of paradoxes: “Persons typically treat the acceptance of an explanation as one grounds for accepting the facts. And over and over again, for good ample reasons, people have refused to accept some fact by virtue of the fact that they wouldn’t accept the explanation. That can hold, say, for flying saucers, but it also can hold for lots of other things. It’s a famous story among anthropologists that when Fortune came back with his manuscript on the Dobu, his professor, Radcliffe-Brown, who had a theory of possible conditions under which a society could exist...saw the manuscript and said ‘It’s impossible. No such society could exist.’ He checked it out further, found that they unfortunately did exist, and said, ‘They don’t deserve to exist.’”

Re. “the notion that you could tell right off whether something was important. So you would start to look at what kings did, or to look at votes, or revolution, for example, because those were obviously important. But, for example, the whole of biology has been revolutionized by the study of one bacteria, though when that bacteria was first being examined, no one had any idea that it would do that work. And it’s possible that some object . . . may give an enormous understanding of the way humans do things and the kinds of objects they use to construct and order their affairs. That has to be seen by attempting to analyze the stuff. And in that regard, a debt is owed to Freud, who did say ‘Now let’s treat patients as sacred phenomena.’ That is, something that you would study in the sort of way that biblical critics  have studied the Bible, where the fact that you were looking at one line wouldn’t mean that you could only write a page on it. You could write 100 pages. You could spend your life studying it. The reason that sociologists haven’t studied a line is that they treat it as something very ephemeral, where if you treat it as a machine itself, and as enormously recurrent, it has quite a different character.”

Re. Victor Tausk’s attempt to solve a problem posed as How is it that schizophrenics come to think that others know their thoughts?  Freud commented: “‘That’s not the problem at all. After all, when you learn at least your first language, you learn it from your parents, from adults. And children must take it that adults, giving them the concepts, know how they’re being used; know how the child is using them. So the problem is not how is it that people come to think that others know their thoughts, but how is it that people come to think so deeply that others don’t know their thoughts?’ Then, in a characteristic type of observation, Freud says that the crucial event is the first successful lie. That event must be traumatic. The kid must have to say, ‘My God, they don’t know what’s going on!’” [1933, comments fn.l. p. 536 of Tausk, V. 1933, On the origin of the ‘influencing machine’ in schizophrenia, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2, 519-556. Reprinted in Fliess, R. (ed) 1948, The Psychoanalytic Reader, pp 52-58 (Freud’s comments at fn 6, p. 68)]

Re. the professionals’ problem, “that somehow Members take it that such categories [as] ‘manic depressive’, etc., are additions to a list of categories that exist already, and can be used in just the same fashion that the old ones are usable. . . . When Freud set out to build a ‘scientific psychology’ as he put it...one of the tasks he felt he faced in the first instance, was to deal with the fact that everybody considered themselves to be an authority in psychology. . . . [I]t wasn’t of course only the case that they had lots of views, which they took to be well warranted, on psychological matters, but those views, and the categories they used, were not morally neutral. That is to say, in part, that any time one of them was asserted as being so about somebody, it was also the case that some assessment of their status was being made - as a good citizen, or whatever else.”

Re. the concern for Members’ treatment of ‘scientific’ categories. “One thing Freud was further concerned about was to somehow prevent persons from using his categories in just the fashion they used the ones they had before. And there’s very good reason for that, which is that if, say, ‘manic depressive’ was a replacement for some lay term like ‘cranky’, then whatever assessments that were made about somebody said to be ‘cranky’ could be made about a person said to be ‘manic depressive’, and that someone who was said to be manic depressive might hear it as a kind of attack. Now, I take it that, probably generically, in the first stage of therapy, anyway, that’s what’s seen as going on. And the term ‘infantile’, for example, is treated as being...the same as the lay term ‘infantile’ when someone says to an apparent adult, ‘You’re behaving like an infant’...”.

In a consideration of  ‘collaborative sentences’. “I tried to find some literary uses, but it’s so powerful it’s banal. It would just be corny. I heard a musical version of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology [1924] where the device was used[.] . . .He was trying to show a         pair of happy lovers, and the happy lovers talked this way, e.g., she would begin a sentence and randomly stop in the middle, and he would continue it.

And that way they provided a demonstration of Freud’s remark that only in love do we feel we are one. And I’m told that in the comic strip Donald Duck, the author puts together three of the characters’ sentences in that fashion.”

Re. Victor Tausk’s attempt to solve a problem posed as How is it that schizophrenics come to think that others know their thoughts? Paper “delivered in about 1917 at one of the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. . . . Freud is at the meeting where Tausk delivered this paper, and with what could be seen as a very characteristic aspect of his genius he says, ‘You posed the problem in completely the wrong way. It’s not the case that what we have to explain is how is it that people come to think others know their thoughts. That’s not the issue at all. The question is, how is it that         nomals come to think that others don’t know their thoughts? . . . [W]hat will be the sort of thing that would lead to the discovery that people don’t generally or in all cases, know what one is thinking? . . . The first successful lie. What a trauma that must be. Or what a discovery that must be. You’re asked a question, you give a lie, and they don’t tell you you’re wrong.’”        [1933, comments fn.l. p. 536 of Tausk, V. 1933, On the origin of the ‘influencing machine’ in schizophrenia, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2, 519-556. Reprinted in Fliess, R. (ed) 1948, The Psychoanalytic Reader, pp 52-58 (Freud’s comments at fn 6, p. 68)]

Mentioned in a consideration of “...the claim that psychoanalysis is a ‘bourgeois discipline’. . . . “Now the fact is that there are tremendous revisions of history involved in psychoanalysis.  One of the most striking is the business of the Oedipus complex. People regularly talk about an Oedipus complex as though what Freud says about the Oedipus plays is perfectly obvious. Whereas if you read them without first starting with Freud’s way of looking at them, it seems to me, at least, that it’s perfectly obvious that they’re just about the exact opposite of what’s proposed. They’re perfectly clearly about infanticide, not patricide. And the patricide theme is, if anything, a rationalization for an institution of infanticide. . . .[‘Oedipus’] is written for adults by adults; when he finally does away with his father he’s already an adult; they know what they’re doing, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Mentioned in a consideration of a ‘misunderstanding’(‘A         green?’) by a new member of a therapy group, where “One doesn’t, for comparative strangers, inquire into their motives for dealing with one. I used the term ‘strangers’...not altogether incidentally. There’s a rather exquisite place in Freud’s article on first therapy sessions. Now, Freud is a tremendous stylist as a writer. And in that article he’s talking about the question of when interpretations should be offered. And he wants to insist that they should not be offered too early. The way he makes his point, stylistically, is, elsewhere he always talks about ‘doctor’ and ‘patient’. At this point he says something like, ‘You shouldn’t tell something very deep to a stranger.’And in the next sentence he gots back to talking about ‘patient’.” [1942, Further recommendations in the technique of psychoanalysis: on beginning the treatment; the question of the first communications..., in Collected Papers, Vol. II, pp 342-365, esp. p. 361]

Mentioned in a consideration of “planned” versus “unplanned” actions (‘I thought I could help him, with supervision’ as an unplanned rebuke ). “Obviously Freud makes large attempts ...to account for ‘slips of the tongue’ as orderly phenomena, really expressing intention. But with respect, say, to situations in which such theories are not employed or are not convincingly employed, there are specific actions that are doable by use of otherwise ‘erroneous’ production. And furthermore, one can’t do the same action by a non-erroneous production.

“If we want to study natural activities in their natural sequences, we have to deal with, for example, the obvious fact that a sentence is not necessarily a ‘complete utterance’. Thus, linguistics is not sufficient, at least so far as it’s by and large done. There is one major exception and it’s extremely close to what I’m trying to do. That is Fries’ book The Structure of English [1952].”

Mentioned in a consideration of GTS ‘In that Bonneville of mine...etc.’ “There are...a set of ways that this thing is constructed which are not exactly consistent with what is proposed to be the way that certain connectors, most particularly ‘and’, get properly used. A consideration of those can be found in Fries’ book The Structure of English [1952]. His grammar is terribly important because I guess it’s the only grammar of English that was constructed by reference to an attempt to handle actual conversation itself. Fries sat down with a bunch of telephone conversations and built his grammar out of that. Quite unique in that way.”

Mentioned in a consideration of the “first-speaker pair...question-answer”. “It’s occasionally or regularly argued that certain criterial features of questions - for example, in intonation, the characteristic rise - are present far less frequently than is regularly supposed. For a discussion on that matter there’s an article by Charles Fries in a book         called Essays in Honor of Daniel Jones [1964, ‘On the intonation of “yes-no” questions in English’]. What Fries did was to listen to the television program ‘What’s My Line’, take all those things which turned out to be treated as questions, and try to write down their intonations, for one. He came up with a finding that only something like only 35 percent of them had the characteristic intonation structure of questions.”

In a consideration of Second Stories: “Now, I have a quotation which I love very dearly, and I’ll give it and we’ll take off from there. It’s from Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy by Freida Fromm-Reichman [1960]. It’s for training therapists, and at some point she says:

‘...To be able to listen, and to gather information from another person, in this other person’s own right, without reacting along the lines of one’s own problems or experience - of which one may be reminded, perhaps in a disturbing way - is an art of interpersonal exchange which few people are able to practice without special training.’

“. . . Is it so, that it’s something you have to teach people? to listen and not be reminded? If so, why should that be? Is it just a matter of ‘human psychology’ or are there other sorts of things involved? It seems that there are other sorts of things involved, and particularly that listening, in non-psychotherapeutic conversation, involves as its appropriate task that one listen         in such a way as to be reminded of one’s own experiences. . . .One routine task of participants to a conversation is to be able to show that they understood something another said. . . . And one large source of things to be used to show that one understands are...things that you are reminded of [by what the other said].”

“I’ll make a parenthetical remark with regard to Fromm-Reichmann’s quotation. [see p.768, above] If it turns out that one is ‘naturally reminded’ in this way, and, furthermore, that being naturally reminded in this way is a way you show you understand, then it’s obvious that you can’t merely teach therapists not to be reminded in this way, but you have to give them other sorts of tools for showing that they understand. Here I refer you to the fact that patients - at least beginning patients - in therapy, have as a routine complaint that their psychiatrist doesn’t understand them. Now one wonders about the relationship between psychiatrists’ ‘not understanding’ and their not doing these kinds of things. Also, certain sorts of troubled people, e.g., the ones I studied at the suicide prevention center, had as a specific aim that they didn’t want psychiatrists, but people who have had similar experiences. The issue seems to be, not that psychiatrists might not have had similar experiences, but that psychiatrists wouldn’t tell them about their similar experiences.”

“[25 to30 years ago detailed ethnographic work] essentially died out in the United States. But in recent years, anthropologists are again returning to [it], and the term ‘ethnographer’ which had fallen into considerable disrepute, has been adopted as an ‘in’ term. The Urban Villagers [1962] by Gans is one recent book which is again attempting to do that sort of work. . . .This recent work is of a new sort, in a way. Where much of the early work was criticized as being impressionistic, casual, not hard; that is, not reproducible, not stating hypotheses, etc., the new ethnographic work - which is calling itself things like ‘ethno-cognitive studies’, ‘ethnocultural studies’, ‘ethnoscience’ and the like - is attempting to proceed without being subject to those criticisms. The concern is to try to describe the categories that members of a society use, but to describe those in a very hard fashion.”

Mentioned in a consideration of problems for observational disciplines, e.g., “employing a notion that some of the things that persons do are somehow talking about their world . . .That is, that they are ‘meta statements’; statements that can literally be seen as ‘about’ something that preceded them, or which follows them, rather than...having just the status that the prior ones had. That is, where one would find it, perhaps in principle, not so obvious how you could say that the statement ‘We’re doing better than he is’ [from the GTS materials; see Handout, p. 273], which uses ‘we’ to characterize the past ten questions, is evidence for your view that those ten questions are properly reported as having been done by that ‘we’.

“If you find that hard to follow, just consider, for example, the following phenomenon. At the beginning of Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters [1951], the hero is looking at some letters which he shouldn’t have been looking at, and then he says something like, ‘Now a step in the passageway should come’, in which what he’s doing is saying something like ‘Were this a play, then at this point I ought to be caught.’ And one might say that the character in a novel is talking to us out of the novel....

“[But] of course [in the GTS materials]  the statement is [simply] another statement in their  world, and so it’s not easy to see how [we could] provide a special status to that particular statement which gives it a possible use for interpreting the prior remarks. . . .Another way we might put it: There would be some statements that [persons] make, which [we take it] analyze other statements and are not themselves things that we [are to] analyze.”

Extensively quoted in a consideration of ‘inferences’, where “it is somehow extremely important that the inferences         [persons] do make can be taken as correct, and thereby that those persons who produce those activities which are described by these sequences so behave as to provide for the fact that these sequences do describe them. In that regard it is interesting to note that the phenomenon of presumptively correct descriptions, and behavior produced to fit those descriptions, can be found by reference to illegitimate as well as legitimate activities. So, for example, in his book Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa [   ], in the chapter ‘The reasonable man in Barotse law’, Gluckman offers us the ‘reasonable wrongdoer’.”

Mentioned after quoting etiquette books re “Fine” in response to “How are you?”. “In his book Behavior in Public Places [1963], Erving Goffman has a discussion of the sociological usefulness of etiquette books, and people who feel that things like etiquette books are laughable, might read it. You wouldn’t laugh at it if it were called ‘Description of interactional requirements among the Ubangi’.”

At the beginning of a general introduction to a course. “I have one suggestion as to what would constitute a helpful background (as compared to no background, which is quite alright), and that is, some book of Goffman’s like Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. What I do has only the following relation to Goffman’s work: He tries to - and with some great success - make sociological points turning on the details of ordinary life, such that when you read a book like The Presentation of Self, on pretty much any page you come across something that’s new to you, which         you hadn’t noticed, which you could notice, which you can thereafter more or less see going on. ( He tries more than that, he tries to put it all together in some sort of package.) . . . What you get from Goffman is that there are a lot of things going on, they’re perhaps studyable, and the study of them can be assimilated to, or assimilate to itself, interests that sociologists have had, or might have.”

“The sorts of things he’s attending and the kinds of points he’s making in no way stand in a one-to-one relationship with the sorts of things that I do. But...[i]f what I’m doing seems strange, then after a couple of days reading in Presentation of         Self, you might be in a position to feel at home with some of the things I’ll try to do.”

Cited in a consideration of proverbs. “Now for proverbs, I take it that one of the core features of their sense and of their use is that they are ‘atopical’ phenomena. So, for example, the sense and relevance of ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ is not found by reference to geological or botanical considerations. Some of the work of the neuropsycholgist Kurt Goldstein and his associates [Language and Language         Disturbances, 1948] may be relevant here. One of the things they’ve found for children, brain-damaged persons, and sometimes among schizophrenics is that a kind of test devised by psychologists indicates that these people cannot handle proverbs - they don’t understand them, they don’t know how to use them. There are many protocols of persons presented with a proverb and asked to interpret it, and they produce long discussions about various features and         behaviors of, for example, stones and moss.

“Goldstein proposes on the basis of those tests and other indicators, that there’s big split between what he calls ‘abstract’ and what he calls ‘concrete’ thinking, and that persons who can’t use proverbs are persons involved in a failure of abstract thinking. But I take it that if you look at the protocols, the persons involved seem to be quite capable of dealing with proverbs ‘abstractly’. . . . they’ll talk about ‘a stone’ and how it might roll, and say this or that about moss, without any insistence that it has to be some particular stone.

“That seems to me to stand in contrast to ‘concrete’ thinking. So, let’s say, when you talk about some kinds of schizophrenics being ‘enmeshed in the concrete’, you might be pointing to certain kinds of strange things they can do that nobody else can do. For example, one day I was sitting having lunch with a friend of mine and she said...‘Last year on this day I had the following for lunch, two years ago this day I had the following for lunch’, and she went through ten years, just spieling out the details of her menus. That, I take it, is a pretty clear example of concrete thinking. But the troubles in dealing with proverbs were not of that sort. Again, if the proverb contained the item ‘cat’, then people would talk about cats and use the plural term ‘cats’. They did not start talking about ‘my cat’.

This suggests that we may not be dealing with inability to do ‘abstract’ thinking, but an inability to do ‘atopical’ thinking. Where, then, proverbs can be seen to constitute a very clear example of whole collections of pieces of knowledge that are organized atopically.”

“I differ from the modern anthropologists, though I would recommend that work very much. . . . [T]here is a collection of these anthropologists’ most recent works called Contributions to Cultural Anthropology edited by Ward Goodenough [Explorations in Cultural Anthropology, 1964]. The trouble with their work is that they’re using informants; that is, they’re asking questions of their subjects. That means that they’re studying the categories that Members use, to be sure, except at this point they are not investigating their categories by attempting to find them in the activities in which they’re employed. And that, of course, is what I’m attempting to do.”

“[I]n a very famous book entitled Property,Kin, and Community on Truk [1951] . . .Goodenough proposes that you have to determine conceptions of property independently of... possessive pronoun uses. (p. 382)  One tendency of his in constructing criteria for deciding that something is a posession is to consider such things as: What use does the object have? Objects used as food are to be seen as possessions.  How is it that the thing is produced? Objects produced by man’s labor are possessions. One can have property rights, etc. Criteria like that. (p. 383)  “In a fairly offhand way, Goodenough, in his treatment of possible ways one can         come to have possessions, suggests something that the analysis I’ll develop could account for. . . .This is from page 35 of Property, Kin, and Community on Truk:

‘If a man discovers goods which another has lost, he acquires full title to them, provided the loser is not a person who is known to him. . . .If the former owner is known to the finder, however, their relationship to each other is presumed to have been established already with respect to the goods lost. And the finder must return them  or be branded a thief...etc.’

“Now there’s a kind of nice thing involved there. And it’s nice in that  it will give us some rather important socialization problems, which we well know to exist. And that is, that we can distinguish between things that can be said to be ‘found’ - and such things are ‘possessables’ - and things...where, what you see when you find it is that somebody lost it.” (p. 384)

Cited in a consideration of ‘the private calendar’. “[A] sense in which the private calendar is causally powerful can be seen in the paradigmatic statement, ‘That was before I met you and I was lonely then.’ There is a class of logical statements which the logician Nelson Goodman named, and pointed to as creating very basic problems for the philosophy and logic of science [Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 1965]. He calls them ‘counterfactual conditionals’, of which an example is, I think, ‘If one had lowered the temperature to such-and-such a degree, then the following would have happened,’ where one hasn’t lowered the temperature and the thing hasn’t happened, but one has done something else and something else has happened. Many scientific statements are made that way, and Goodman argues that there isn’t currently a logic providing for them. But counterfactual conditionals are nonetheless routinely used, and they are, nonetheless, enormously powerful. . . . Many uses of the private calendar are such uses. . . .”

Cited in a consideration of ‘you’. “[L]et me list some references to the extremely large literature on terms like ‘you’; terms such as I, you, he, this, here, now, it, and the like. . . .Some of the literature is at least historically interesting. There’s chapter 7of Russell’s book, Inquiry into the Meaning of Truth [1940], and he calls them ‘egocentric particulars.’ Then there’s Nelson Goodman’s book, The Structure of Appearance, chapter 11 [1966]. He calls them ‘indicator terms’. . . .”

Cited in a consideration of ‘we’. “[Such] terms have been subjected to very considerable discussion by philosophers, and I’ll mention some of the literature on them. Nelson Goodman, in The Structure of Appearance [1966], calls them ‘indicator terms’ Hans Reichenbach, in Elements of Symbolic Logic, chapter 7 [1948], calls them ‘token reflexors.’  Russell has a discussion in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, chapter 7 [1940]. He calls them ‘egocentric particulars. . . .”

In a discussion of ‘settinged activities’. “I wanted...to see         whether it was the case that there was some specific machinery the working of which involved that you could invoke the fact of settings without formulating which setting now.

The reason that the logicians are discussing these issues of different reference, turns on their interest in the ‘truth’ of sentences including them. So, for example, Goodman gives as an instance, a sentence like ‘The Red Sox are in first place now,’ which can be true at some time, he says, and false at another. . . .That is, ‘Ice floats on water’ is true...on any occasion of its use.... For ‘The Red Sox are in first place  now,’ it’s not the same sort of thing.”

“[One] order of issues with respect to the features of single utterances and their discourse relevance...is the use of accent. Where, in an utterance, is the accent - if there is an emphasis in the utterance? I come by this sort of consideration via a paper by Richard Gunter, ‘On accents in dialogue’, Journal of Linguistics, 1966 [2, pp. 159-179]. The dialogue is hypothetical for the most part, but it’s a rather pioneering work in focusing on the possibility that the accents for given utterances serve discourse features - which is... roughly to say that one thing that accents can signal is that an utterance is tied. Which is then to say that the intonation contour of an utterance can be a discourse phenomenon and not only an utterance phenomenon. . . . Which is to say that one can’t account for accents comprehensively without studying more than a single utterance.”

In a consideration of ‘utterance completion’. “If you look at pretty much any study in descriptive linguistics - in, for example, the classic research manual, a book by a guy named Zelig Harris, and pretty much anything else - you’ll find that they propose that the utterance is the basic unit for linguistic research. . . .A first question concerns why the unit ‘utterance’ is key for linguistics. . . . [A] prominent fact is that...even in natural conversation, what you get when you use the usual notion of utterance - and the basic definition is ‘that string of speech that a party produces between silences on his part; from when he begins to when he ends.’ What you get when you use that to locate data to be analyzed are integral-numbered sentences[.] . . .That’s important...for one, because before any such unit as the ‘utterance’ was adopted...the ‘sentence’ had been shown to be a tremendously interesting, if not the basic, unit for linguistic research.  We can say, then, that the use of the notion ‘utterance’ permitted preservation of analytic interest in the sentence while allowing for linguistics to become an empirical field . . . That is to say, you could perhaps take care of complaints that linguistics did  not study ‘real’ language, i.e., talking, while preserving what had been gained from the study of written speech. . ..[However], linguists who used the notion of an ‘utterance’, and used it with respect to ...natural conversation as their data...found that it isn’t exclusively the case that if you use that notion you get integral numbers of sentences occurring.”

In a consideration of proverbs. “There is a literature on oral traditions and how they’re preserved and used, and I’d like to suggest a most extraordinary book on this subject which is misleadingly titled if you’re looking for material on oral traditions, and that’s Preface to Plato by         Eric Havelock [1963]. It is about Plato, but you could have no interest at all in Plato and learn an awful lot from it. Its basic concern is, what is Plato up to in his attack on Homer? Havelock argues that for the Greeks, Homer was an encyclopedia. His poems stored the enormous amount of relevant knowledge that the Greeks had to use, where the Greeks in this period did not, except in very exceptional circumstances, use writing. Homer’s poems were one of a variety of very powerful devices used to store that information. Plato’s concern was to break down that way of preserving knowledge because...he was aware of the ways in which poetry is powerful - and the limits of that kind of power.”

With regards to Plato’s criticism of Homer as a source of knowledge for the Greeks.

“In the Republic, where Plato attempts to reformulate the problem of knowledge for the Greeks, he launches a very concerted attack on Homer, proposing that Homer is the storehouse of knowledge for the Greeks, but it's lousy knowledge. Its effectiveness, however, is given by the fact that it just gets built into everybody's memory via the poetry, and if you're going to have a progressive knowledge, you have to undercut that form. That issue involved in Plato's attack on Homer has been recently dealt with, in some detail, in a book about oral knowledge called A Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock (Harvard University Press), which is much worth looking at.”

From Sacks’ Research Notes. Consideration of a New York Times article of a navy pilot doing duty in Vietnam, when asked about his bombs possibly killing people, answers, ‘I certainly don’t like the idea that I might be killing anybody...but I don’t lose any sleep over it.’ “The fact that he is an authority on what the sorts of things are which cause him to lose sleep...is obviously quite a fundamental fact. But it must be considered in another light as well; and that is that [the] interviewer whom it might be said barely knows him, also knows what sort of thing might do this and is in some position to decide whether the given item would do it.

Now those two facts are terribly relevant to each other. If we were to         say that the fact that he is an authority, and furthermore ought to be an authority, on what it is that causes him to lose sleep, is a...partial criterion of ‘knowing oneself’, then we can see the sort of thing that that maxim meant for the Greeks. Knowing thyself does not mean knowing something very private, it means knowing oneself as a member of a community, knowing, that is, the things that obtain for one, which obtain for persons commonly. Hericlitus’ fragments [1962, The Cosmic Fragments] and Socrates’ certainly had such an intention; and they did not involve knowing something about one which was distinctive, or special, or private.”

In discussion of how biographies are formed with little known information of the person.

“It's not that the idea of a biography was invented whole hog, that nothing like that had ever been thought of before Socrates existed. If that were so then there would be no information about the pre-Socratics. There's a lot of information about them, but it's a quite different order of information. I guess there are still current, books that talk about what kind of a fellow Heraclitus was, etc., by reference to the 'biographies' that existed about him. It turns out that that's nonsense.”

In a consideration of ‘sampling’. “Relatedly to that, there are the locuses of order. Now the question of the sorts of order there are has been one of the basic problems out of which a social science could be said to have emerged - if it could be said to have emerged, or may         eventually emerge - from those things which would historically be called philosophy, for one. And it seems to be the case that the important early         models of the order in society were constructed in a hope of providing for their stability, where that stability was seen as something problematic, in a fairly special sense of ‘problematic’, and that is, under a fear that it may break down, or it has broken down, or it’s tenuous. Where people were concerned - say, Hobbes [Leviathan], for example, or Plato [Republic] - that the world was falling apart and could be put together again if this or that were done.”

From Sacks’ notes for a lecture on the story fragment ‘the baby cried. the mommy picked it up.’ “We leave aside for the moment the possible importance of the possible fact that there is some strong relation between the production unit and the detection unit. On the latter I refer you to Hockett’s paper, ‘Grammar for the hearer’, in Roman Jakobson         (ed.), Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects, vol. 12,  Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics (Providence: American Mathematical Society, 1961), 220-36. We will come back to this sort of convergence problem, though probably not this particular one.”       

“I’ll...quote a piece of data and its analysis from one of the extremely few studies of conversation that have yet been done; a book called The First Five Minutes [1960], by Pittinger, Hockett, and Danehy.” [For further, see Pittinger, R.E. pp. 302-303, below]

In a consideration of ‘you’. “Now the discussion of ‘you’ that I want to work at involves dealing with, in its general character, a problem to which little attention has yet been paid, though it’s quite clear, even for linguistics, that it’s probably going to be a very important problem. The only relevant paper I know of for linguistics is ‘A grammar for the hearer’ by Charles Hockett, in Roman Jakobson (ed.), Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, Vol. 12, Language in its Mathematical Aspects, Vol. 12.

The paper itself is completely theoretical, but it suggests the kind of question I want to address, which is in part: Are there some sequential procedures used to detect which of possible alternative meanings for a word might be intended by its producer; which concerns, then: Is there some sequence in which a sentence is parsed, or comes to be understood?”

Extensively quoted in a consideration of Proverbs, with regard to “...the way that proverbs are largely used by social scientists [being] quite relevant to the task they seem to have set themselves.” This “remark comes from pages 1-2 (these always come in the first several pages of a book) of George Homans’ Social Behavior: Its elementary forms [1961].”

My subject is a familiar chaos. Nothing is more familiar to men than their ordinary, everyday social behavior. . .Every man has thought about it, and mankind through the centuries has embodied the more satisfactory of the generalizations in proverbs and maxims about social behavior. . .What makes the subject of everyday social behavior a chaos is that each of these maxims and proverbs, while telling an important part of the truth, never tells it all, and nobody tries to put them together.

“I don’t intend to make any detailed comments about those remarks, except to note parenthetically that Homans’ procedure for starting a book is one of the most recurrent you’ll find, and in a way it’s enough to tell you about the kind of book you have here. He has to have an excuse to study the phenomenon he wants to study. That it happens is not a sufficient excuse. He has to show some problem. And he starts off with the supposition that persons think they know about the thing he wants to study, so he finds a way to show that they don’t.  Now, to notice that is to notice that in the ordinary world, in everyday life, ‘engaging in inquiries’ is an accountable thing. where, then, the work of sociologists remains constrained by that format.”

In a consideration of Proverbs. “Havelock argues that for the Greeks, Homer was an encyclopedia. His poems stored the enormous amount of relevant knowledge that the Greeks had to use, where the Greeks in this period did not, except in very exceptional circumstances, use writing. Homer’s poems were one of a variety of very powerful devices used to store that information. Plato’s concern was to break down that way of preserving knowledge because...he was aware of the ways in which poetry is powerful - and the limits of that kind of power.”

In a consideration of ‘agreement’ between different statements         vs, e.g., ceremony and the use of poetry as a mnemonic device. “The forms of poetry become the ways that information is captured so as to be reassertable in just the fashion it was first asserted. And that is the basis of Plato’s attack on Homer. In the Republic, where Plato attempts to  reformulate the problem of knowledge for the Greeks, he...propos[es] that Homer is the storehouse of knowledge for the Greeks, but it’s lousy knowledge. Its effectiveness, however, is given by the fact that it just gets built into everybody’s memory via the poetry, and if you’re going to have a progressive knowledge, you have to undercut that form. That issue...has been recently dealt with, in some detail, in a book about oral knowledge called A Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock , Harvard University Press [1963], which is much worth looking at.”

[See Perry, A. p. 755,  below. “And they with high thoughts upon the bridges of war...”]

In a consideration of the utterance ‘Everyone does, don’t they?’. “[It’s ]one of the most fabulous things I’ve ever seen. Where persons are engaged in trying to get an account from somebody, there’s an object that the person who’s being questioned can slip in. This is one of them. And what it does is, it cuts off the basis for the search for an account. I don’t have a terribly elegant name for it. What I called it was, ‘account apparently appropriate, negativer.’ Or A3N.” (p. 23).

In a survey of the literature. “And I differ from the modern anthropologists, though I would recommend that work very much. There is a paper by Hymes called ‘The ethnography of speaking’ [1962] which is quite interesting.”

In consideration of the difficulty of ‘topic.’

“Dell Hymes said something like "It's a curious feature of particularly linguistic history, that at each point where work has been done, what had previously been thought to be content considerations turned out to be formal considerations. But the next area looked like it was pure content consideration." And when we get into it, we find out that it's an area in which the structure was, e.g., invariant to some extent over various sorts of content considerations. So, had we used that sort of a guideline, perhaps 'topic' wouldn't have been such a thing that one tries to avoid.”

“I’ll start off with a quotation from a book entitled Intellectual Growth in Young Children by Susan Isaacs [1945], page 105. This is about a child aged three years, ten months.”

On one occasion [Phineas] and other children had made a ‘ship’ in the schoolroom, with an arrangement of tables and chairs. . . [W]hen a new supply of thread was wanted, and Miss D. said to Phineas “Will you get it out of the drawer?” Phineas replied “I can’t get out of the ship while it’s going, can I?” and called out in a stentorian voice to the ‘captain’, “Stop the ship, I want to get out.” (quoted re the “general relevance of legal-illegal” (p. 474).

With regards to children’s’ games and play.

“On one occasion, he (3: 10) and other children had made a 'ship' in the schoolroom, with an arrangement of tables and chairs. Phineas' part in this was comparatively a passive one, as he was but 'a passenger' on the ship, and was going on with his own pursuits on the voyage, sitting at a table and sewing a canvas bag. Miss D was with him ' in the ship' and all around them, the crew and the captain carried on the business of the voyage. And when presently a new supply of thread was wanted, and Miss D said to Phineas, "Will you get it out of the drawer?" Phineas replied, "I can't get out of the ship while it's going, can I?" and called out in a stentorian voice to the 'captain,' "Stop the ship. I want to get out." After some demur, the ship was brought into a 'landing stage' and Phineas got out, secured his thread, and got in again, saying, 'Now it can go again.' (p. 105, Intellectual Growth in Young Children, by Susan Isaacs)”

In remarks re the tellability of something when one won’t “...be available to tell it. So that, for example, ‘dying like a man’ and things like that are treated as relevant sorts of considerations by reference to the issue of its possibly being a tellable, controlling one when one is assured that one, oneself, won’t be the teller. . . In one of the great books of the century, Paideia by Jaeger [1965], in volume 2 he has a discussion of Socrates and he says something like, it’s hard for us to imagine the impress that Socrates’ personality made on his followers. Perhaps the way to indicate that impression is note that his followers invented the phenomenon of the biography in order to preserve that impact. . . . And of course they preserved considerably the image of his way of dying; where, in his dying he was oriented to that he wasn’t going to die, and could thereby die in a particular way.”

In a manuscript article, ‘On some formal properties of children’s games’. “There are striking similarities between the rules that generate the first words children speak and the first games they play.  Murdock’s paper in Anthropological Linguistics [1959] and Jakobson’s analysis of it (in Heinz Werner (ed.), On Expressive Languge) indicate that the simplest occurrence which is recognizably a word, i.e., rule governedly meaningful, is one that consists of two parts, used in alternation, and reduplicated - for example, Mama, Papa (consonant vowel, consonant vowel).”

Mentioned in a consideration of “...one of the central dilemmas of Western civilization - a person who stands in the position of having some procedure which has a correct basis for use applied to them, stands in the position of having that procedure presumptively correctly applied. And we can give that problem a name: Job’s Problem. . . . Kafka [1956] is dealing with the same kind of issue.”

In a consideration of ‘we’; mentioned re bringing off ‘doing whatever you’re doing, with you’ by “dividing a task which is not easily dividable, and which clearly can be done by either one alone...[w]here neither party can then readily take it that the other is simply being of help . . .Now there’s certainly ambiguity in ‘divisible’ as a term. And what I’m pointing to is not something which is not readily divisible and is also unmanageable by one person, but something which is not readily divisible but which is manageable by any single person. The point can be made by paraphrasing a fantastic aphorism of Kafka’s. He loved to play with the problems of social organization and give them queer formulations. And at one time he’s considering Neptune’s problems. Neptune is the bureaucrat who runs the oceans, according to Kafka. And he has the following kind of problem: How in the world is he supposed to divide up that kind of work? You can’t, after all, assign somebody an ocean. It’s not that sort of non-divisibility that we’re talking about.”

In a consideration of a mis-hearing (‘A green?’), and “hearing or not the correct word where a possible homonym is used.  One of the nice places, I suppose, to investigate the problem, concerns obscenities, and there’s an extremely lovely article by E. R. Leach, ‘Animal categories and verbal abuse,’in Lenneberg (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language [1964]. Among the things that’s pointed out is that one can, in routine talk, use a set of words which are more or less unprintable epithets, and they’re not heard that way at all. Now the tabooing of the hearing of obscene homonyms is an extraordinarily interesting thing. To see how interesting it is, you need only consider occasions when one has opened up the situation of obscenity, and then tried to avoid the hearing of almost anything that could be heard as obscene as not obscene. That’s the way you get a chaining of humor, in that once obscenity has been done it takes rather a while to return to a non-hearing of the obscene possibility of the words used.”

In a consideration of ‘A green?’, and the “operation of context...for the hearing of a single word.” (p. 724)  “A first way to get at it is suggested in a paper called ‘Animal categories in verbal abuse,’by the British anthropologist E.R. Leach, in Lenneberg (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language [1964]. Leach is dealing with the fact that some number of unsayable obscenities of English are homonyms with perfectly ordinarily-used words. Now that doesn’t mean that the perfectly ordinarily-used words are therefore unusable. What is interesting is that in much of speech, that the word uttered may be either the one or the other, is just not heard. There is, in that regard, a kind of taboo on hearing that an obscenity has possibly been uttered.” (further, similar to p. 451)

“[I]n recent years, anthropologists are again returning to detailed ethnographic work, and the term ‘ethnographer’ which had fallen into considerable disrepute, has been adopted as an ‘in’ term.  The Urban Villagers by Gans [1962] is one recent book which is again attempting to do that sort of work. Two other recent books in the same vein are Millways of Kent by John Kenneth Morland [1958] and Blackways of Kent by Harlan Lewis [1955]. This recent work is of a new sort, in a way. Where much of the early work was criticized as being impressionistic, casual, not hard; that is, not reproducible, not stating hypotheses, etc., the new ethnographic work - which is calling itself things like ‘ethno-cognitive         studies’, ‘ethnocultural studies’, ‘ethnoscience’ and the like - is attempting to proceed without being subject to those criticisms. The concern is to try to describe the categories that members of a society use, but to describe those in a very hard fashion.”

In a consideration of inexhaustible topics, “when an object is made into a sacred object - and a quite mundane object can be made into a sacred object. . . . But I don’t really know that automobiles are a first-order object. I t could be, because most of the [GTS] conversations I listened to, I found so terribly boring that it’s only recently that I’ve gotten up enough strength to sit and listen to them again, when they go  on for six hours at a shot, talking about carburators. There’s a classic story about Malinowsky going into the field, wanting to find out about geneology. He would talk to the natives about geneology, and he found out that each native would talk for an hour before giving him any geneology, in just bragging about them, and he’d have to go through a whole big thing. Then at one point he remarks that he really became an anthropologist when he could realize that geneologies were irrelevant, and it was the talk, the bragging, etc., which was crucial. And you have to learn to see that happening. I used to sit and listen through these automobile discussions for the points when they would overtly talk about their troubles, and I just don’t think that was at all right.”

From Sacks’ Research Notes, MCD (2). “It is not always necessary that for some categories which are in one way or another ordered, that the first of the order be the first categorized, or the first category be applied first, but it is regularly done, e.g., regularly the announcement of scores or other contest outcomes are announced winner first. Cf. here, Malkiel on ordered binomials [‘Studies in irreversible binomials’, 1959, Lingua, Vol. 8,no. 2, pp. 113-160. Also in Essays in Linguistic Themes, 1968, pp. 311-355.] For some, however, order of categorizing personnel is crucial to use of categories, e.g., attacker-attacked. . . . Sometimes announcing is done in what is clearly seen as reverse order; though determining is done in proper order; announcing for ‘suspense’.”

In a consideration of category-bound activities. “[I]f, let’s say,  you have two positions that are inconsistent to each other, then it may be...that you can make one position stand by simply removing the other; like providing it’s problematic and explaining it [away]. The other then stands as the only one left. Now then, one of the ways that one goes about making a problematic position accounted for is...to assign some category to its sayer. . . [T]hen you can provide that the thing itself can be explained away.         And that simple operation has been the basis for one quite sophisticated sociology. Mannheim proposes that any sociological assertion can be given that formulation. That is, there are a set of categories in the social structure, all of which are competing in that social structure: Upper class, lower class,  bourgoisie, worker, whatever you want. Take any sociologist’s assertion, and say he says it from one or another of those categories, i.e., assign a sociologist to a category, and you’ve made his statement ‘subjective’.” [Essays on         Sociology  and Social Psychology. pp. 74-164, 1953]

In a consideration of category-bound activities vis-à-vis argument vs. discussion. “One very prominent sociology consists of the systematic exploration of [the possibility of using a category to which some position is category-bound to explain that position] for undercutting all sociologies, including itself, and that is the sociology of Karl Mannheim. What he was engaged in doing was to propose that all sociologies (first he started with conservative sociology) were generated from some position within the social structure, which explains how they came to say what they say, and partially undercuts the objectivity of such positions. It’s another case where some particular resource that Members routinely use, has been turned into a more or less major scientific weapon.” [Essays on         Sociology  and Social Psychology. pp. 74-164, 1953]

In a consideration of the MIR Membership Categorization Device classes. “[L]et me offer something to consider. I have no idea whether it’s so. It sounds altogether too smooth to me, and nonetheless it also looks, on the face of it, to be very descriptive. Many of these classes are, or can be built as, two-set classes. Sex is a two-set class. Race can be formulated as a two-set class; for example, non-whites and whites. And there’s rich and poor, old and young, etc. the question I’m asking is, does it matter, for the kinds of things that can be done with these classes, how many sets they contain? Two-set classes would seem to have certain kinds of attractions. For example, they’re tremendously easy to compare. With a two-set class you can apparently make an observation of comparative lack much more easily than otherwise. And I wonder, for example, whether many kinds of conflict and perhaps most sorts of revolutions occur b y virtue of these two-set classes; as we say, the haves and the don’t haves. Under such a view, you can see all sorts of different things being fitted to the notion of haves and don’t haves. Marx  can be seen to be using it. And the Negro revolution as well.”

In a consideration of  ‘collaborative sentences’. “I tried to find some literary uses, but it’s so powerful it’s banal. It would just be corny. I heard a musical version of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology [1924] where the device was used[.] . . .He was trying to show a         pair of happy lovers, and the happy lovers talked this way, e.g., she would begin a sentence and randomly stop in the middle, and he would continue it.  And that way they provided a demonstration of Freud’s remark that only in love do we feel we are one. And I’m told that in the comic strip Donald Duck, the author puts together three of the characters’ sentences in that fashion.”

In a consideration of ‘tellability’. “[A]n orientation to the tellability of an experience can make it quite a different sort of thing than it might be, lacking such an orientation. In living through, e.g., an experience of pain, one can, by virtue of attending its tellability, make it somehow more bearable, in that, in viewing the occasion of its tellability one can visualize one’s survival at least until then. And...the orientation to the tellability of an experience may help to provide the terms in which it’s experienced, i.e., those terms are selected right then and there by reference to the stories one will tell, and thereby one experiences, say, a more selected set of events than one otherwise might.  A fabulous piece of data on this is a fragment of an account of a first day in a concentration camp: ‘Little by little conversation sprang up from bunk to bunk. The rumors were already beginning to circulate. Luckily the news is good. We’ll be home soon. We’ll have an unusual experience to talk about.’ This is from a book called An Ordinary Camp, by Micheline Maurel [1958].”

In a consideration of the course sociology took. “[T]he American philosopher Meade was a most extraordinary figure who proposed that psychology was the study of that which is not available to observation [Mind, Self, and Society: from the standpoint of a social behaviorist, 1962]. He had an enormous impact on sociology. God knows how or why. It may in part have had to do with the notion that sociology studies ‘society’, which has been a very troublesome idea because then you start out by saying, ‘Well, society isn’t observable, but Meade has shown that you can study things which aren’t observable. So let’s go study things which aren’t observable, like attitudes.’.

But social activities are observable; you can see them all around you, and you can write them down. The tape recorder is important, but a lot of this could be done without a tape recorder. If you think you can see it, that means we can build an observational study, and we can build a natural study.”

In a comparison to the work of other fields. “[W]hat I do...stands in close parallel to classical naturalistic biology or zoology. In fact, if you want to look at something, Darwin was doing this already. He wrote a book, Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, where he collected pictures and tried to see if there were, for example, standardized expressions, and if so, how did they operate? Not until 50 to 60 years after that book was published did people again begin to use photographs. So, for example, Bateson and Meade began to do that some 25 years ago in Balinese Character [Bateson, G and Meade, M. 1942. Balinese Character: a photographic analysis]. But by and large, the direct study of humans and their behavior wasn’t done.”

In a consideration of ‘agreement’. “[I]n the case of  ‘agreement’, certain aspects of its use can be said to have been great discoveries. So, for example, one of the things that’s said in the history of religion is that one of the great contributions of the Jews to the history of Western religions is the fact that they were the first to formulate their relationship to God as a matter of ‘agreement’, where that involved an enormous shift in conceptions of religion.

That matter posed a long bit of historical research into the question of where did they come up with the idea of a covenant binding them and God?  To which, about ten years ago, a proposed solution was offered. A fellow named Mendenhall, a student of the history of religion at Michigan, was working in the Hittite archives. The Hittites were a people who controlled the ancient Near East some 3,000 years ago. And they had massive archives which were discovered toward the end of the 19th century, which people have been working in ever since. And there, Mendenhall found among some of the archives, what turned out to be the Hittite vasselage agreements[;]...those agreements which the Hittites made with the various small tribes that they controlled. And what he found was that essentially nine of the Ten Commandments could be found as parts of the normal Hittite vasselage agreements, which ran to the effect that ‘We are your only ruler’, etc., just as do the Ten Commandments. . . . [M]ore recently [Mendenhall’s solution has] been criticized somewhat. But the possibility of the political derivation of such a phenomenon is of some interest.”

In a consideration of a statement by suicidal persons, ‘I am nothing.’ “Menninger...says about neurotic or psychotic persons in general and about suicidal persons in particular, that they lack a loyalty to reality [1942, The Human Mind]. (Which suggests that ‘reality’ is, for this society, a special category. Some scientists and philosophers might say that whatever happens is ‘real’, and the category ‘reality’ encompasses whatever happens.) A person might use a procedure which is otherwise properly used to make assessments, to arrive at the conclusion ‘I am nothing’ as a warrant for suicide, so as to show that they are committed to what the society holds is important or sacred,  and that it’s out of just this commitment that the project arises: ‘I’m not disloyal, I’m forced to conclude that I’m nothing.’”

In a consideration of ownership of ‘reality’. “From time to time I mention the claim that psychoanalysis is a ‘bourgeois discipline’, and propose ways to see the sense of such a claim. One of the ways one can formulate the sense of that claim turns on the way that psychoanalysis is concerned to defend the fact that adults own reality, against, first, what they call ‘neurotics’. And Menninger has a magnificent phrase - he talks of neurotics as ‘disloyal to reality’ [1942, The Human Mind]. What neurotics are, from the psychoanalysts’ point of view, is children who can pass as adults. . . . And what that involves is, of course, an attempt to refuse to recognize the claims to be dealing with reality on the part of, say, ‘children’.”

In a consideration of deciding that one is driving ‘fast’  or ‘slow’ by reference to ‘traffic’. “[P]ersons can be seen to clump their cars into something that is ‘a traffic’, pretty much wherever, whenever, whoever it is that’s driving. That exists as a social fact, a thing which drivers do, where it’s when that isn’t usable that you have some trouble seeing how you’re driving, i.e., on roads where there are no other cars that can be used as ‘the traffic’. . .And it is in terms of ‘the traffic’ that you see you’re driving fast or slow.

But it’s not the business  of anybody to set themselves up as a kind of a culture hero because they make it their business to be ‘the traffic’ wherever they happen to be, so as to allow others to orient to them. I say that not without some irony, because Robert Merton would have them be a kind of culture hero; they are the people who make it such that everybody else can do deviant activities. That is, you can imagine those people who are driving in a clump as permitting the measurement system to work, taking on the character that they sacrifice themselves to others’ pleasure, etc. Like the middle class would talk about their existence as providing those things which Beatnicks can deviate from; having, then, a kind of heroic status.”

Concluding an impromptu survey of the literature. “Now all of this is background. I don’t want to go through the history of sociology and show why one does this or that, because first of all if you want to do it seriously, you have to know what kind of work theorizing is, and that is an extremely obscure domain if you’re going to take it seriously, at least as I take this stuff seriously. I have no idea why sociologists do what they do, and I don’t want to get into long arguments about matters which really can’t be taken seriously. My arguments can’t be taken seriously, Mills’ arguments [1959, the Sociological Imagination] about the effect of Parson’s proposal to reraise the issue of ‘are ideas important and what kind of resources do we have for asking that question’ can’t be taken seriously. We can talk about it as philosophers in conversation, but to talk about it in any serious way presumes that we have an enormous amount of information about how the animal operates, which we don’t have.”

In a consideration of measuring. “What we want to consider carefully, much more carefully than sociologists have ever considered the matter, is what kind of an object do you have for the purposes of counting? Here is [one] way I came to think about this matter. In about 1956, in the Journal of World Politics, Talcott parsons wrote a review of C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite. I’m not a great fan of Parsons, but there he made what I thought was a really basic kind of point. He said, ‘In this book Mills seems to propose that power is a zero-sum phenomenon.’ And what that means is, if I have it, you don’t. Something adds up to a number that can be divided among the set of persons such that if 90 percent are X, then 10 percent are Y; that is, there can only be 100 percent.

Quite obviously there are lots of things that are not zero-sum phenomena. For example, an economy may not be a zero-sum phenomenon; it can expand. If you put something in you can get more out. And if everybody has a certain amount, that doesn’t mean that that’s all there is. And when you’re considering social phenomena, one thing you want to do is to try to find out what kind of a counting system you need. Is the object zero-sum or non zero-sum, or something quite different? and then, how is it that persons go about counting this or that matter.”

“[25 to30 years ago detailed ethnographic work] essentially died out in the United States. But in recent years, anthropologists are again returning to [it], and the term ‘ethnographer’ which had fallen into considerable disrepute, has been adopted as an ‘in’ term. The Urban Villagers [1962] by Gans is one recent book which is again attempting to do that sort of work. Two other recent books in the same vein are Millways of Kent by John Kenneth Morland [1958] and Blackways of Kent by Harlan Lewis [1955].This recent work is of a new sort, in a way. Where much of the early work was criticized as being impressionistic, casual, not hard; that is, not reproducible, not stating hypotheses, etc., the new ethnographic work - which is calling itself things like ‘ethno-cognitive studies’, ‘ethnocultural studies’, ‘ethnoscience’ and the like - is attempting to proceed without being subject to those criticisms. The concern is to try to describe the categories that members of a society use, but to describe those in a very hard fashion.”

In a manuscript article, ‘On some formal properties of children’s games’. “There are striking similarities between the rules that generate the first words children speak and the first games they play.  Murdock’s paper [‘Cross-language parallels in parental kin terms’]  in Anthropological Linguistics [1959] and Jakobson’s analysis of it (in Heinz Werner (ed.), On Expressive Languge) indicate that the simplest occurrence which is recognizably a word, i.e., rule governedly meaningful, is one that consists of two parts, used in alternation, and reduplicated - for example, Mama, Papa (consonant vowel, consonant vowel).”

In a consideration of ‘agreeing’. “One way we get to open up such a phenomenon as an activity, is to try to get some idea of it as something invented or discovered, i.e., a resource which may not always have been present. Here is a short citation which kind of suggests that about ‘agreement.’ It’s by the classicist Gilbert Murray, in a book of essays entitled Greek Studies [1946], page 175. He says:

‘The early Greeks had, so to speak, discovered the logos. They had discovered that often, instead of fighting, you could say something and the thing said would make both sides agree. If people were bewildered or puzzled they could say something and the thing said would make them understand.’

Presumably what he’s trying to get at there is, for one, that the  resources of a language - what it is that could be done with it - are things that get discovered at some point, and when they are discovered, they may be tremendous news. Where the activities that could be done with a language may well be such kinds of things.”

In a consideration of  the possibility of paradoxes (‘antinomies’) occurring in everyday talk. “First, however, let me give a quotation which depends for its sense on the fact that it’s not heard as a paradox, and the work that’s done in hearing it involves avoiding the possibility of paradox. This is from A Black byzantium by S.F. Nadel [1942], page 71, note 3. He’s talking about a tribe, the Nupe. The tribe was conquered some while back by another bunch of people called the Falani. Now the Falani have been absorbed by the Nupe, but they remain the ruling group in that place. So anybody who is a Falani is also a Nupe, and of course some Nupes are Falanis.

‘The following is a significant anecdote. The Etsu Nupe (Etsu is King) once confided to me his grievance against a certain rather unruly relative of his, whom he believed to have intrigued against him. He added, “all Nupe are bad people, you know.”’

Where the sense of that depends on the fact that he’s treating himself as a Falani for that remark, and not saying it about himself, but about his relative and others. Nadel goes on:

‘The said relative, himself of course as much Falani as the Etsu, retaliated by informing me that “All Falani are liars.”’

For that remark, treating the other as a Falani, not himself.

The sense of that one depends on the avoidance of the possibility of its paradoxical character, where that’s done via the manipulations of the membership categories. Now I want to quote a clear use of the antinomy and perhaps we can get at what’s being done with the use of the antinomy in general...”.[quotes the New York Times article on Marc Chagall and Mané-Katz, ‘All painters are liars’. See pp. 423-424]

[See re. p. 423 above, ‘All Falani are liars’]

Now the interest there is not that it’s a paradox, but it’s perfectly plain from the ingenuity of those exchanges that people who could do things like that could do paradoxes if they needed to. That is to say, it doesn’t seem beyond the capacity of even these savages, to handle such things. [Goes on to quote the New York Times article on March Chagall and Mané-Katz, ‘all painters are liars’. See p. 697].

* See p.395. “[P]erhaps the most famous of the ancient Stoci paradoxes...goes ‘All Cretans are liars,’ uttered by Epimenedes who was a Cretan. the usual interpretation is, if it’s true it’s false.”

Remarking on “what in its way is a very queer fact; that is, the in-principle intelligibility of events for Members. Now, this matter of intelligibility is most extraordinary. . . . It seems that it might be on the one hand a kind of cultural universal - I don’t know of an ethnography that reports of a culture that has Members claiming that they really have no idea of how pretty much anything works for them in their world. and this kind of universality seems to permit a formulation of problems of knowledge, even of science, according to a famous metaphor used by Otto Neurath, who was a philosopher-scientist a while ago; something like, ‘In rebuilding science’ (and in rebuilding knowledge I suppose the same would hold) ‘we’re like persons on a boat who have to rebuild it plank by plank while staying afloat.’ Now that sounds as though you could sink. But what may be more important than that possibility is the fact that intelligibility is retained over all changes in whatever it is that’s known. And what might be involved in that is the fact that there’s some form to intelligibility, which any particular shift in knowledge doesn’t modify.

In a consideration of ‘agreement’. “[W]hat was characteristic of [Socrates’] technique was that he was willing to start with any statement that the person he was talking to held, and then bring him to see that that statement and some other statement that he would make were inconsistent, and therefore that there was something wrong. It seems absolutely obvious to us that if they are inconsistent there is something wrong, but presumably that had to be learned as a complaint. . . . Now Nietzche in his fantastic attack on Socrates - a chapter in, I think, his book on Wagner, called ‘An attack on Socrates’ [the Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, 1967] - sees just what it is that Socrates is up to, and treats him as destroying the Greek ethic; an ethic which didn’t involve people having to know what their views were, they just ‘acted’ as he puts it, and they didn’t have to have answers to questions as to what their opinions were. And when they had to,  the society became sick, and subject to the kind of undermining that Socrates wrought.”

In a consideration of insult sequences. “[T]here’s a big crucial thing on having the last word, for some reason or another. . . And there’s plenty of literature about having the last word. There’s a classic thing to look at, an absolutely fabulous book... The Lore and Language of School Children [1959] by Peter and Iona Opie (Oxford University Press).”

Concluding an impromptu survey of the literature. “Now all of this is background. I don’t want to go through the history of sociology and show why one does this or that, because first of all if you want to do it seriously, you have to know what kind of work theorizing is, and that is an extremely obscure domain if you’re going to take it seriously, at least as I take this stuff seriously. I have no idea why sociologists do what they do, and I don’t want to get into long arguments about matters which really can’t be taken seriously. My arguments can’t be taken seriously, Mills’ arguments [1959, the Sociological Imagination] about the effect of Parson’s proposal to reraise the issue of ‘are ideas important and what kind of resources do we have for asking that question’ can’t be taken seriously. We can talk about it as philosophers in conversation, but to talk about it in any serious way presumes that we have an enormous amount of information about how the animal operates, which we don’t have.”

In a consideration of measuring. “What we want to consider carefully, much more carefully than sociologists have ever considered the matter, is what kind of an object do you have for the purposes of counting? Here is [one] way I came to think about this matter. In about 1956, in the Journal of World Politics, Talcott parsons wrote a review of C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite. I’m not a great fan of Parsons, but there he made what I thought was a really basic kind of point. He said, ‘In this book Mills seems to propose that power is a zero-sum phenomenon.’ And what that means is, if I have it, you don’t. Something adds up to a number that can be divided among the set of persons such that if 90 percent are X, then 10 percent are Y; that is, there can only be 100 percent.

Quite obviously there are lots of things that are not zero-sum phenomena. For example, an economy may not be a zero-sum phenomenon; it can expand. If you put something in you can get more out. And if everybody has a certain amount, that doesn’t mean that that’s all there is. And when you’re considering social phenomena, one thing you want to do is to try to find out what kind of a counting system you need. Is the object zero-sum or non zero-sum, or something quite different? and then, how is it that persons go about counting this or that matter.”

In a consideration of seeing something at a glance. “That A can see what B is, and what B is seeing, may seem the most trivially obvious fact. But it was the economist van Neumann’s seeing that fact that provided for the modern revolution in economics. Until the book A Theory of Games in Economic Behavior, the major theory of economics used the Robinson Crusoe model: A man alone in an environment, and now he has to go about deciding what to do, what things will work, etc. And any other person is to be conceived as a part of the environment. That meant that you could give statistical treatment to the various parts of the environment. Now van Neumann was, among other things, a great poker player. And he saw that economics could not be constructed along the Robinson Crusoe model, and took poker as a model. And in poker you can’t treat the other person as a statistical object, but as somebody who, whatever strategies you might employ to deal with ‘that piece of the environment’, does the same about you. And then, furthermore, knows you do use strategy, etc., etc. If you just read the first chapter of the book, you see that laid out. As I say, it provides for a complete reconstruction of the way of doing economic theorizing.

It’s a very curious bit of history that Parsons, in his Structure of Social Action [1937], posed essentially the same facts - and he left economics because of a similar complaint against economics. But the sociologists apparently didn’t appreciate what Parsons was posing, and have come to this kind of position through van Neumann and Morgenstern, and not through sociology itself.”

In a consideration of ‘tokens’. “[T]he point that I’m going to make is Parson’s; at least he makes the observations, and it’s a matter that he’s attempted to deal with in his inimitable fashion. One of the nice questions that comparative sociologists obviously might want to deal with is: For various types of currencies, what kind of distribution is there across cultures? That is, if you can make a list of things that are doable via tokens in some place, how many of them can you find in any given other place, where those things will tell you a great deal about various kinds of social development. Now there’s no reason at all to restrict that notion to money. You could perhaps find out a great deal by virtue of whether they have, e.g., token complaints, token praises, token etceteras.”

In a consideration of “statistical procedures” versus “singular activities”. [p. 385] “We could tie such alternative conceptions to various other alternative conceptions, like the kind of differences there might be between Catholicism and Protestantism, for example. That difference has been much pointed to, so that, for example, among the American theorists of social life, that one who gets the biggest play from the Catholics is Parsons, with his conception of an enormous massive ordering of institutions necessary to account for even relatively minor matters. And some parts of the school of British anthropology which are like Parsons, are called Anglo-Catholic anthropology, where the notion of a massive institution, the Church, which guarantees certain kinds of order, is to be put into opposition to, say, that sort of church which supposes that everybody can pretty much handle it by themselves, and for which, say, large-scale rituals are not treated as crucial to stability in religion, or stability in other things.”

In a consideration of insult sequences, and the insult-response ‘Yes Mommy’. “The ‘Mommy’ return is extremely classic in such kinds of things. I’ll give you a quotation. This guy Eric Partridge, who writes all these things  up, has a book called The Shaggy Dog Story [1953], and in it he reports what he calls an ancient Greek story: ‘A pert youth meeting an old woman driving a herd, called “Good morning mother of asses.” “Good morning, my son” she returned.’ Apparently that’s one of the classic ways that you handle an insult, i.e.,  if it’s an insult for which the most elegant return would be to make my status a consequence of yours. And kinship obviously is the most powerful way of doing that, like ‘You’re an ass.’  ‘Thanks Dad.’.”

In a consideration of ‘topic’, and the possibility  that “Members suppose that there is some generality to the use of topics for the construction of identifications. Let me give a long quotation which is relevant at this point. This is from an article entitled ‘The language of Achilles’ by Adam Perry in G.S. Kirk (ed.), The Language and Background of Homer.

‘I wish in this paper to explore some of the implications of the formulaic theory of Greek epic verse. . .Let us first consider a famous passage from the end of the eighth book of the Iliad, the one describing the Trojan watchfires . . . .These lines can be shown by an examination of parallel passages, to be almost entirely made up of formulaic elements. That they are so amazingly beautiful is of course the consequence of Homer’s art in arranging these formulae. . . . Here’s a straight English translation:

“And they with high thoughts upon the bridges of war sat all night long. And they had fires burning in great numbers. As when in heaven the stars around the splendid moon shine out clear and brilliant when the upper air is still. And all the lookout places are visible in the steep promontories and the mountain dells. And from heaven downward the infinite air breaks open. And the shepherd is delighted in his heart. So many, between the ships and the streams of Xanthis, were the Troijans burning shining fires before the walls of Ilium. A thousand of them were burning in the plain. And by each one was sitting fifty men, in the light of the blazing fire. And the horses munching white barley and wheat stood by the chariots, awaiting the throne of dawn.”

‘The feeling of this passage is that the multitude of Trojan watchfires  is something marvelous and brilliant, that fills the heart with gladness. But this description, we remember, comes at the point in the story where the situation of the Achaeans is for the first time obviously perilous. . . . The imminent disaster of the Achaeans is embodied in these very fires. Yet Homer pauses in the dramatic trajectory of his narrative to represent, not the horror of the fires, but their glory. I suggest that this is due precisely to the formulaic language he employs. There is a single best way to describe a multitude of shining fires. There are established phrases, each with its special economical purpose, to compose such a description. Homer may arrange these with consummate art, but the nature of his craft does not incline him, or even allow him, to change them or in any way to present the particular dramatic significance of the fires, in the situation. Instead he presents the constant qualities of all such fires.’

Then he has a footnote:

‘A comparison with Alexander Pope’s translation makes this strikingly clear. Mr. Pope turns the bright and beautiful fires into a nightmare. The formulaic lines 562 and 563 for example, become “A thousand piles of dusky horrors gilt, and shoot a shady luster o’er the field. Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend, whose umbered arms by fits thick flashes send.”.’ . . .

That is to say that the difference there is that, given for some  particular noun, some adjective or group of adjectives which invariably go with it by virtue of metrical considerations, one wouldn’t have an adapting of the characterizing phrases....done by virtue of, say, the topic at hand.”

In a consideration of ‘pre-invitation/rejections’. “I’ll...quote a piece of data and its analysis from one of the extremely few studies of conversation that have yet been done; a book called The First Five Minutes [1960], by Pittinger, Hockett, and Danehy. The quotation occurs right at the beginning of this five-minute segment of a psychotherapy session which they are engaged in analyzing. . . .

Therapist:        What brings you here?

Patient:        Everything’s wrong. I get so irritable, tense, depressed. Just                 everything and everybody gets on my nerves.

Therapist:        Yeah.

Patient:        I don’t feel like talking.

The key line is ‘What brings you here?’, and this is what they say about it:

‘This is T’s opening gambit. It would seem about as open-ended and  non-directive as it could be made, and in many ways it is...but in one respect it tips the scales slightly. Three of the four words in the sentence; ‘what’, ‘you’, ‘here’, are what the grammarian calls ‘substitutes’ or ‘shifters’ or ‘pronominal forms’, words the denotation of which in a specific context depends almost wholly on that context. Instead of merely ‘what’, T could have said ‘what troubles’, or ‘what problems’ or ‘what difficulties’. The actual choice is obviously neutral. Instead of ‘here’, he might have said ‘to a psychiatrist’ or ‘to this clinic’ or the like. The neutral ‘here’ allows P to define its reference in accordance with their own perceptions of the surroundings.’

That’s a very casual treatment, and I want to argue that it’s all wrong,  and the fact that it’s wrong operates to prohibit them from seeing how the patient then comes to respond as she does, i.e., to say ‘I don’t feel like talking.’  That is, the doctor says, ‘What brings you here?’ The authors say it’s a very open beginning. I want to propose that it’s a pre-invitational/ rejectional remark, and quite obviously so. Things like ‘what brings you here’ regularly occur. You walk up to somebody’s office, walk in, say ‘Can I see you for a moment?’, they say ‘What do you want?’ That’s not an invitation. You know at that point that now you say something, and they may then use it to decide whether they’ll see you or not.

In a first therapy session, the troublesomeness of ‘What brings you here’ is much larger than the chance of losing whatever it is the interchange was to hold (that is, if the patient takes it that what she says next is going to stand as some sort of grounds...for the therapist to decide whether he’s going to take her or not as a patient...), but, further, what it is that would be good grounds for him to take her is something she may not have any idea about at all. . . .

Now, she accepts the pre-invitation/rejection by offering what could  be good grounds for being accepted . . . .And it’s rejected. that is to say, the doctor’s statement, ‘Yeah’, would then be heard as saying things like ‘Continue’, ‘What else?’, i.e., ‘That isn’t enough.’ Note what I’ve proposed about ‘Yeah’ and its possible equivalents, and compare it with what is being proposed as possible alternatives to the opening ‘What brings you here?’ (e.g., ‘What troubles bring you to this clinic?’). One would like to ask how is it that they go about deciding what the population of possible openings is. Why is it the case that something altogether different from ‘What brings you here?’ is not to be considered as a possible alternative to it? One possible reason might be that, having made no systematic formulation of its properties, they have no way, except in an altogether lay fashion, of providing what are equivalents to it and what are variations on it. And then we get what is a perfectly naively obvious way of talking about variations: Drop one word out, stick another  word in.”

In a consideration of how such a question as ‘why do you want to commit suicide?’ is askable, where “psychiatrists...take it that a person who wants to commit suicide doesn’t know why they want to commit suicide, in the sense that the psychiatrist could say why they want to commit suicide. . . . The notion of ‘opinion’ as contrasted to knowledge (and Plato made a great deal of the difference between them) and the sheer introduction of a notion of ‘opinion’, provides in part for professionals’ talk to laymen. Because one of the characteristics of ‘opinion’ is that it’s something which lay persons are entitled to have when they’re not entitled to have knowledge - in the sense that they can offer it without ever proposing to have to then defend it. Like they say ‘My feeling is such-and-such on that, but I don’t really know,’ as a permissible way of talking....”

In a consideration of proverbs. “There is a literature on oral traditions and how they’re preserved and used, and I’d like to suggest a most extraordinary book on this subject which is misleadingly titled if you’re looking for material on oral traditions, and that’s Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock [1963]. It is about Plato, but you could have no interest at all in Plato and learn an awful lot from it. Its basic concern is, what is Plato up to in his attack on Homer? Havelock argues that for the Greeks, Homer was an encyclopedia. His poems stored the enormous amount of relevant knowledge that the Greeks had to use, where the Greeks in this period did not, except in very exceptional circumstances, use writing. Homer’s poems were one of a variety of very powerful devices used to store that information. Plato’s concern was to break down that way of preserving knowledge because...he was aware of the ways in which poetry is powerful - and the limits of that kind of power.”

In a consideration of ‘disorderability’, understanding statements ‘in context’. “[O]f course there are various consequences to treating properly non-disorderable statements as disorderable. [They are then] apparently excerptable and quotable. And the issue of quotability has been a rather prominent one in many places. One can think simply of such matters as indicting somebody for some statement they made. But there are much larger considerations involved, and, in part, the difference between Aristotle’s techniques of doing philosophy and Plato’s turn on the fact that the character of a dialogue as a method of doing philosophy has as one of its central properties that the utterances of the dialogue are not properly to be pulled out and merely, then, treated as what this fellow things about a problem that this sentence happens to be about.”

In a consideration of ‘seer’s maxims’ and ‘subversion’. “Wherever...Members know how to do subversive activities, we can take it that they have available to them some notion of what seer’s maxims will be used to observe them as problematic phenomena. Where, of course, their subversive activities are directed to satisfying some constraints on how it is that persons are to be seen. In that regard, then, subversion is simply a consequence of seer’s maxims, hearer’s maxims, and the like. If you want a grandiose version of it, this is so in the sense that a poet is subversive according to Plato, since he knows how to produce something that sounds real while not being real. Which is to say he knows how to produce something which will be heard as correct though it isn’t. Plato claims they’re liars  because he takes it that they’re not seen as lying. And successful lies satisfy constraints for producing something that will be heard, according to one of those maxims, as ‘correct description’.”

In a consideration of ‘agreement’ between different statements vs., e.g., ceremony and the use of poetry as a mnemonic device. “The forms of poetry become the ways that information is captured so as to be reassertable in just the fashion it was first asserted. And that is the basis of Plato’s attack on Homer. In the Republic, where Plato attempts to reformulate the problem of knowledge for the Greeks, he...propos[es] that Homer is the storehouse of knowledge for the Greeks, but it’s lousy knowledge. Its effectiveness, however, is given by the fact that it just gets built into everybody’s memory via the poetry, and if you’re going to have a progressive knowledge, you have to undercut that form. That issue...has been recently dealt with, in some detail, in a book about oral knowledge called A Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock , Harvard University Press [1963], which is much worth looking at.”

In a consideration of ‘sampling’. “Relatedly to that, there are the locuses of order. Now the question of the sorts of order there are has been one of the basic problems out of which a social science could be said to have emerged - if it could be said to have emerged, or may eventually emerge - from those things which would historically be called philosophy, for one. And it seems to be the case that the important early models of the order in society were constructed in a hope of providing for their stability, where that stability was seen as something problematic, in a fairly special sense of ‘problematic’, and that is, under a fear that it may break down, or it has broken down, or it’s tenuous. Where people were concerned - say, Hobbes [Leviathan], for example, or Plato [Republic] - that the world was falling apart and could be put together again if this or that were done.”

In remarks re the tellability of something when one won’t “...be available to tell it. So that, for example, ‘dying like a man’ and things like that are treated as relevant sorts of considerations by reference to the issue of its possibly being a tellable, controlling one when one is assured that one, oneself, won’t be the teller. . . In one of the great books of the century, Paideia by Jaeger [1965], in volume 2 he has a discussion of Socrates and he says something like, it’s hard for us to imagine the impress that Socrates’ personality made on his followers. Perhaps the way to indicate that impression is note that his followers invented the phenomenon of the biography in order to preserve that impact. That is to say, before Socrates there was no such thing as ‘biography’. And the biography was invented by Plato and Xenaphon and some others in order to preserve the image of Socrates. And of course they preserved considerably the image of his way of dying; where, in his dying he was oriented to that he wasn’t going to die, and could thereby die in a particular way.”

In a consideration of ‘espousing a rule’. “[I]t is important that if one is attempting to get a set of persons to modify the behavior of some others who would stand in opposition - or who certainly stand in no commitment - to the set of rules you hold, then you want to be able to permit those who are going to espouse those rules to come on as perfectly well understanding the circumstances of those they’re talking to, perhaps even affiliating with them, but in any event, not at all committed to the correctness or the moral rightness of the positions they [themselves] are espousing. In, I believe it was the 6th century, the Catholic missionaries who went to Catholicize England, wrote to the Pope saying, ‘These people already have a religion, and it has all sorts of features to it; for example, they have places where they worship, etc. What do we do about it, do we destroy them? After all, they are heathenish places, and how in the world can they be accepted or acknowledge by us.’ To which the answer came back: ‘Leave them. In fact, encourage them. What you want to do is fit our terminology and our ways to whatever given ways these people have. We’ll be around a lot longer than that one will, and over time they will have forgotten what the other religion was,  and we will nevertheless have maintained whatever power it has over them.’.” [Gregory VII (A.D. 601), quoted in an article in Human Organization, 17 (1) l., 1958]

In a consideration of the statement ‘everyone has to lie’, focusing on ‘Fine’ in response to ‘How are you’. “[T]he dilemmas involved in ‘How are you’ can roughly be gotten by, say, considering the kinds of advice on such matters one finds in etiquette books. Here are a couple of quotations which exhibit that in their fashion Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt were attentive to these kinds of circumstances. . . .Here’s Emily Post from her book called Etiquette [1955], pages 16-17. A section called ‘the answer to “how are you”.’

‘As a matter of fact, “Alright, thank you” is always the correct and conventional answer to “How are you”, unless there is reason to believe that the person asking really wants to know the state of one’s health.’.”

In a consideration of what can be seen in a glance. “”To liven this matter up, I'll read you something from The City of Plains by Proust. And Proust is an incredible sociologist, as you may know if you've read it - and if not you certainly ought to, even if you're not interested in literature. There is a scene where Proust is watching events take place in a courtyard below. He sees a whole sexual confrontation between two guys, which he describes absolutely fabulously.

Then he writes:

From the beginning of this scene an evolution in my unsealed eyes had

occurred in M. Charleaux. As complete, as immediate as if he had been

touched by a magician's wand. Until then, because I had not under-

stood, I had not seen.”

With regards to words like ‘you.’

“Then there's Quine, Word and Object, section 21. He also calls them 'indicator terms. '”

In discussion of singular versus general terms.

“Having made an observation about 'it,' one about 'the' is apposite; consider the use of 'the mommy.' Quine, most particularly in Word and Object, sec. 19, proposes: 'A singular term, e.g., "mama," admits only the singular grammatical form and no article.' intendedly referring to 'our perfected adult usage' (p. 90).”

In discussion of ‘indicator terms.’

“These are 'indicator terms.' For our purposes now, the 'indicator terms' need only be considered things like 'here,' 'now,' 'there,' 'later,' 'soon,' 'this,' 'that,' etc. As an initial source book for consideration of them, there is Quine's Word and Object, in which he cites much of the earlier literature, particularly Goodman, Structure of Appearance and Peirce, volume II of his Collected Papers. Peirce is a modem logician who initially began to talk about those terms.”

In discussion of the specificity of ‘this.’

“And Quine, in his discussion of 'this,' leads us into the way in which it's misleading. He says something like, ‘When somebody says 'this' it can have clear reference by virtue, say, of an object standing out in its environment. So when I point to 'this,' one can find which object I'm talking about.’”

With regards to tribal names and their use by non-members.

“Parenthetically, it's kind of a marvelous quirk about anthropology that an enormous number of tribal names that anthropologists talk of have this character. That is to say, the tribal names that the anthropologists write about are very very regularly non-recognizable to the members of those tribes… You'll find the same kind of reference at page 1 2 of Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders, and it's a very very frequent thing.”

In consideration of how people come to believe what has been told to them.

“And over and over again, for good ample reasons, people have refused to accept some fact by virtue of the fact that they wouldn't accept the explanation. That can hold, say, for flying saucers, but it also can hold for lots of other things. It's a famous story among anthropologists that when Fortune came back with his manuscript on the Dobu, his professor, Radcliffe-Brown, who had a theory of possible conditions under which a society could exist, which turned on issues of the amount of hostility that was around, conflicts, limitations, etc., saw the manuscript and said 'It's impossible. No such society could exist.' He checked it out further, found that they unfortunately did exist, and said 'They don't deserve to exist.'”

In reference to terms like ‘you’ in conversation.

“Then there's Reichenbach's book called Elements of Symbolic Logic. He has a long chapter on the analysis of conversational language, which isn't what it says it is; not at all. It's important to see that it's not - and to see that nonetheless it's pretty unique in saying that it is, anyway. That's chapter 7, and he calls them 'reflexive terms.'”

In consideration of using less specific words, such as ‘one,’ instead of the word ‘you.’

In this case, ". . . if you're hotrodding you're bound to get caught . . . ,'' "You want to try and do it right so you do not get caught," we have what is a very recurrent use of 'you,' and it's what, if Reichenbach were to talk about it, he would immediately translate as 'one,' 'someone,' or something like that. It is not referring to the person being addressed.

In criticism of Reichenbach’s assumption of a person’s logical use of certain terms.

“That's in part the problem with Reichenbach's seventh chapter, where he simply will suppose that when persons use terms that have a known logical sense - like 'and' - then that's the sense they have.”

In consideration of how names are used in identifying objects in conversational talk.

“The fact that that's done by change in name would suggest that whatever generic critique one could make of Russell's notion that names are disguised descriptions, nonetheless in this sort of situation that's the way the names are being used.”

In reference to terms like ‘you’ in conversation.

“There's chapter 7 of Russell's book, Inquiry into the Meaning of Truth, and he calls them 'egocentric particulars.'”

In discussion of names as ‘disguised descriptions.’

“The notion that names are used only as conventions seems unuseful here. Something like a notion that Russell offers - that names are disguised descriptions - would seem to be much more appropriate. That names are doing things, and that the use of a different name than another is criterial, seems clearly to be the case.”

Concerning putting together language in either a conceptual or non-conceptual way.

“Where the activities that could be done with a language may well be such kinds of things. In that regard, then, one might reconsider an extremely famous formulation. It's by Edward Sapir, in his book called Language. This is from page 14.”

Concerning how threats can be made to seem inevitable through language choice.

“It's a natural fact of life. And for that kind of thing to get strengthened, the classic military procedure is, I suppose, the kind of thing that was in the movie, Dr. Strangelove, but can be found in places like Schelling, and that is, to set matters up so that the consequences you propose naturally to happen, will happen as an inevitable consequence of some event.”

In discussion of authority and rule making.

“Another fact about games: We have noted in some other materials that one thing about some rules, one thing that kids learn about rules is this: That when a rule has been announced by someone who has some authority to do such things, then the rule is invokable by others - by those who would lack the right to announce it - in asserting that there is a violator. We noted this in connection with the Schoggen materials on some dinner occasion his observers presented.”

In discussion of the use of antinomies in peoples’ ordinary affairs.

“Given such a possibility, I would then try to see, is it the case that people in their ordinary affairs do use antinomies. And I haven't really looked very hard so far, but I found at least one, and it's a classic one, also. It comes from this book, Style in Language, edited by Thomas Sebeok, a paper called 'Oral styles of American folk narrators' by this American folklorist, Dorsen, on page 41 .”

Concerning the organization of learning about a certain topic.

“I'll give a marvelous example of how you come to learn sociology. There's a line in Broom and Selznick that goes like this: ' 'Roles are more complex than they appear to be at first glance." Now there's a basic sentence that you know as Members without having done any sociology, which goes: "X are more complex than they appear to be at first glance." And 'roles,' which first of all is a concept that couldn't even be looked at 'at first glance,' now becomes something we learn via that basic sentence that provides a blank for it.”

In discussion of the discovery of how to use questions to bring about some activity.

“The fact that you could use questions - like "Why?" - to generate accounts, and then use accounts to control activities, can be marked down as, I think, one of the greatest discoveries in Western civilization. It may well be that that is what Socrates discovered.”

Concerning deeper knowledge of some hidden information.

“That's Socrates' classic problem; that one thing about knowledge is that you know what you don't know, and to the question "Why?" the answer "I don't know" is sort of a deeper answer; that is, it might have an awareness of the character of this knowledge as something only professionals have.”

Concerning who has rights to formulate conclusions from questions that have been asked.

“What we find in these exchanges is that the person who is asking the questions seems to have first rights to perform an operation on the set of answers. You can call it 'draw a conclusion.' Socrates used the phrase 'add them up.' It was very basic to his way of doing dialectic. He would go along and then say at some point, ‘Well, let's see where we are. Let's add up the answers and draw some conclusion.’”

In discussion of distribution of authority regarding certain matters.

“Knowing thyself does not mean knowing something very private, it means knowing oneself as a member of a community, knowing, that is, the things that obtain for one, which obtain for persons commonly. Heraclitus' fragments and Socrates' certainly had such an intention; and they did not involve knowing something about one which was distinctive, or special, or private.”

Concerning the phrase “I don’t know.”

“What's interesting about that is that it may permit us to partially explicate a rather fundamental historical fact in Western civilization. And that is, that "I don't know" as an answer, has played a unique role in the history of Western civilization. It was, of course, Socrates' phrase. And it served for him as a warrant for fundamental reconsideration of knowledge. It also was the programmatic answer he sought to achieve in any given dialogue, i.e., to get his respondent to offer.”

Regarding Socrates’ practice of having people question their beliefs.

“Now the emergence of a notion of ' agreement' as a possible thing that can be sought and dealt with, is, for purposes of available history, to be marked as an invention of Socrates, I suppose, for what was characteristic of his technique was that he was willing to start with any statement that the person he was talking to held, and then bring him to see that that statement and some other statement that he would make were inconsistent, and therefore that there was something wrong.”

In discussion of ‘pronoun phenomena.’

“The first is a problem I got from a fellow, Mathew Spier, who was studying children's interaction with parents, and it seemed to him that this was a peculiar usage - regular for those interactions, but otherwise peculiar.”

On Tyrrany.

In discussion of the asking of an embarrassing question.

“This fact that ifa question could be quite embarrassing to have to answer, then someone sympathetic or someone fearful would not ask it were they not in some way assured that a good answer could be made is of course quite an old observation. The reader may be referred to Strauss' discussion early in On Tyranny, which I shall insert in any event in a while.”

In discussion of antinomies.

“Now, in an article called 'Is everyday language inconsistent?,' Mind (1954)), A. Stroll is concerned to argue that while it's theoretically possible to build antinomies in English, and probably in any other natural language, Members never do it, it's a resource that's unexplored, and it's therefore not to bother philosophers, who can do philosophy, meaningfully, in natural languages.”

In discussion of the question of whether language is inconsistent or not.

“It's in that environment of thinking, that the concern for paradoxes is lodged. Now I'm going to quote a fragment of an article entitled 'Is everyday language inconsistent?' by Professor Avram Stroll of the University of California at San Diego Philosophy Department, published in the British philosophy journal called Mind (1954). His problem is to show that either everyday language - as they talk about a natural language vis-a-vis its 'ordinary use' - is not inconsistent, or if it harbors the possibility of inconsistency, then those possibilities are never actualized and would never be actualized in ordinary uses of English.”

With regards to the uses of information.

“There's a recent book out on dying [Sudnow’s Passing On]. And at some point there's a discussion of the sequence in which persons are informed about the fact that somebody has died. And that's not a random matter.”

In discussion of therapy.

“In some of the American reformulations of classical psychotherapy associated with Harry Stack Sullivan and 'the Washington school,' the so-called 'interactionists,' psychotherapy involves, in part, the notion that what takes place in therapy is not merely just as relevant, but is also a part of the world which can be examined itself for finding what the troubles are.”

In discussion of making evaluations based on categories.

“And the fact that it's not been done has been turned into a tremendous attack on psychiatry, by somebody like Thomas Szasz, who will invoke the fact that the categories are used evaluationally elsewhere, to propose that the phenomenon is that of making an evaluation, and that their isn't anything but that sort of knowledge being used.”

In discussion of how one is able to see lies.

“And Tausk worked at this symptom, that schizophrenics think other persons know their thoughts. The problem had been posed: How is it that schizophrenics come to think that others know their thoughts? And he tries to solve this problem.”

Concerning the notion that others know what one is thinking.

“Tausk reports that he has a patient, a 16-year-old girl, and she has a very characteristic phenomenon which he discovers in her. He's talking to her, and she laughs at his questions. He asks her why is she laughing; she says, "What are you asking me questions like that for? You know what my thoughts are. ' ' And now he tries to formulate a solution to the problem, posed, as I've said, as 'how could somebody think that others know their thoughts?'”

Concerning the use of proverbs in language.

“I want to tum now to a consideration of proverbs as pieces of the language. In Archer Taylor's classical book The Proverb, he mentions in passing one aspect of these things, which got me started on the line I'll be discussing.”

In discussion of questions and control of conversations.

“Let me now focus on the fact that the one who is doing the questions has control of the conversation, in part. There can be a sense in which, while you're asking the questions, you could not be said to be in control. I'll give one of the best examples I've ever seen of this sort of thing. I took a course called Constitutional Litigation with an enormously smart man, a guy named Telford Taylor who was chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.”

Concerning embarrassing questions.

“The fact, then, that the question is asked at all or reported to have been asked may be quite relevant to guessing the sort of answer that is offered, i.e., that it is something that the asker takes as adequate, and takes the other to take as adequate. (The following from Thucydides, book one) For in these early times, as communication by sea became easier, so piracy became a common profession both among the Hellenes and among the Barbarians who lived on the coast and in the islands . . . It is never assumed either that those who were so questioned would shrink from admitting the fact, or that those who were interested in finding out the fact would reproach them with it.”

In discussion of families and children.

“The complaint has been made about Western literature, as about children's stories, though the two may not have been tied together, nor the richness of trouble as a topic and the poverty of normality as a topic much observed; here Tolstoy's observation: happy families are all alike; unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way; that quote not exact - first line of Anna Karenina.”

With regard to paraphrasing and poetry.

“For example, the French poet-philosopher Paul Valery, in his book on the art of poetry, gives a characterization of it which roughly is: You have a poem when nothing that's a paraphrase of it is equivalent to it; when you have go to back to the poem to find out what's in it.”

Regarding polite replies, as opposed to lies.

“In the case that we have at hand, the dilemmas involved in "How are you" can roughly be gotten by, say, considering the kinds of advice on such matters one finds in etiquette books. Here are a couple of quotations which exhibit that in their fashion Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt were attentive to these kinds of circumstances.”

[Error in text: 'van Neumann' mis-transcribed as 'Bagnanin']

In discussion of prejudices.

“That is to say, if you're told something and you know somebody's queer, then anything much they do is understandable. The piece of testimony is from the Oppenheimer hearings and the witness is John Von Neumann; surely someone who goes as among the great giants of our day, intellectually.”

In discussion of a glance becoming an action.

“Let me go at this business of 'inferences' in another way. The problem that I am stuck on at this point, and I don't have anything like a solution to it, is how does a glance become an action? What kind of a world do you have to build to make a glance an action? Let me start offby reading you a quote from an extremely important book, the title ofwhich I also forget. I think it's called Sight and Sense, but you can easily find it given that the author's name, Von Senden, is not that common, and he only has one book translated into English.”

With regards to the ethics of formulating an account about someone or something.

“Here of course one has to consider the possibility that there are ethics for which it would be sufficient to establish the wrongness if one had found or possibly found no more than that it was a case of someone being killed. Weber on the difference between India and the West.”

In discussion of making assertions and their effect.

“Now what we want to notice is not so much that or whether such assertions are correct or not, but that they are the ways of making the point of 'effect' strongestly. And that is presumably a culturally relative fact. (Though some theorists, Weber, for one, I think, might argue, or did argue that things had in the end to get posed in this format if they were to count practically.)”

In discussion of objective social sciences.

“We tend somewhat to be overly taken with the constraints that Weber sets for an objective social science, and that is that, say, a Chinese sociologist could understand our analysis. It may well be that you could build a social science which a Chinese sociologist could examine to see that it's cogent and doesn't at some point for the analysis rely on Members' knowledge, but where he could never do another case and could never see why you came to pose the problems that you did, or how you decided that you thought that some activity was going on which you then could show was going on.”

In discussion of ‘pro-verbs.’

“I'm going to have to first introduce an unfamiliar term which, however, I haven't invented. The term is 'pro-verb.' Following is the statement in which I found reference to at least the existence of such a thing. It's from an article called 'On the semantic structure of language,' by Uriel Wereich in Joseph Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Language (1963) page 126.”

In discussion of the understanding of others’ statements.

“I'm going to quote another passage that refers to this earlier one, and which does draw some consequences from it. This is from a paper, 'The semantic structure        of language'        by Uriel Weinreich, in Joseph Greenberg (ed.), Universals ofLanguage, pages 117-ll8.”

In discussion of pronouns.

“Now I want to expand on the phenomenon of 'pronouns' in a different direction. I'll begin with a quotation from an article by Uriel Weinreich, 'On the semantic structure of language,' in Joseph Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Language, page 126.”

In discussion of ‘buildups.’

“These things have been located; the term that's been applied to them is 'buildups;' they're very characteristic of rather young children, say, two years old. There is a brief discussion of them in a book called Language in the Crib by Ruth Hirsh Weir, pages 81-82 .”

In discussion of pronouns.

“There is a further point I want to make about pronouns, and we can get to it through a quotation I'll read you from Language in the Crib by Ruth Weir, pages 73-74”

In discussion of juvenile delinquency.

“Let me just give a citation while I have it in mind. There's a paper by Carl Werthman, 'Delinquents in schools, a test for the legitimacy of authority,' Berkeley Journal of Sociology (1964), pages 39-60. In there can be found a whole bunch of parallel cases; enormous amounts of data in that paper. There's more data in that 20 pages, than in just about all the publications on juvenile delinquency put together.”

Concerning how people learn that their actions are observable.

“And we could suppose that the following sort of report might be the sort of thing we could use to find out how this learning takes place, and to see where those things may or may not be difficult. I will take this utterly mundane report and suggest some of its relevance. It is a quotation from One Boy's Day by Barker and Wright (1951). What they did was to have a bunch o f people follow a kid around all day, writing down as best they could, everything that he did. They worked in half-hour shifts, and they compiled, then, a record of his day.”

Concerning how ‘possessitives’ come to be learned.

“That is, coming to see 'possessitives' and coming to know how it is that a possessitive can be acquired, free, has got to be learned, that is perfectly plain. And it's quite extraordinary how early that is learned in this society. I can show that by a little piece of data which I'll quote. The data is from a book entitled One Boy's Day by Barker and Wright (195 1), pages 379-380.”

Concerning how people learn that their actions are observable.

“And here is another, similar piece of data from an unpublished book by Barker and Wright, similar to their One Boy's Day. This is a girl, a little under five years old.”

With regards to talking to a person through another person, rather than directly.

“So, for example, there's a thing that can be done in conversation; talking to each other through another. In a conversation I've been working with, from Barker and Wright's One Boy's Day, the parents are interrogating the kid about this big crate he found. It seems to me that they are talking to each other through him.”

In discussion of the invention of the biography.

“That is to say, before Socrates there was no such thing as 'biography.' And the biography was invented by Plato and Xenophon and some others in order to preserve the image of Socrates.”

In discussion of memory.

“Places and memory are really terribly interesting things. Here's a story from a book called The Art of Memory by Frances Yates. The book is interesting for the following sorts of reasons. The art of memory was a major discipline educationally, until writing became the phenomenon it did.”

In discussion of the of the functionality of communication.

“The solution that I offer is an adaptation that I made from a research report on a somewhat affiliated problem, 'Logic, rhetoric and poetics among the Burundi' by Ethel Albert, in the issue of the American Anthropologist called 'The ethnography of communication', 1965 or 1966.”

Concerning usage of pronouns.

“This is a new and epoch-making device in logical technique. It is used for the first time, without explanation, in the second chapter of the Prior Analytics, which deals with conversion, and it seems to be Aristotle's invention.”

In discussion of ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’

“This kind of harkens to a really ancient theme in the construction of things that have storylike form, i.e., Aristotle's notion that for drama or tragedy we engage in a willing suspension of disbelief.”

In discussion regarding the magazine Cosmopolitan and relationships.

“It's a matter about which you have to be really sophisticated because people are vastly smarter than you'd ever imagine about these sorts of things. I offer you a sort of thing I found in my favorite magazine. Cosmopolitan. It's the most extraordinary magazine; it's been taken over by Helen Gurley Brown and turned into an unmarried girls' technical manual.”

In discussion of how people relate isolated incidents of others’ to their own lives.

“This isn't all that current right now, but the story of a famous rape case years ago, that of Caryl Chessman, essentially involved that the way in which Chessman was gotten to be electrocuted eventually was that people across the state were able to be turned to seeing that rape as the rape of anybody's daughter, and to feel that something had to be done to this guy.”

Regarding special topics for certain people.

“There has been a bit of literature about special topics for a culture. In a book called The Nuer by E. E. Pritchard, an anthropologist of a slightly earlier day, he talks about cattle for the Nuer; how cattle for the Nuer are a topic of a very special sort, and how you can't talk about anything with the Nuer without it ending up being about cattle.”

In discussion of topics over which some people have authority.

“There's a place in Freud where he says, "with regard to matters of chemistry or physics or things like that, laymen would not venture an opinion. With regard to psychology it's quite different; anybody feels free to make psychological remarks.' And part of the business he thought he was engaged in was changing that around, i.e., to both develop psychology and educate laymen, co-jointly.”

With regards to one’s experiences with respect to their ‘position.’

“Now, while that's kind of obvious, if the procedure we suggested is kind of generally used in an automatic way, then it presumably takes specific training for it not to happen that a psychoanalyst has occurring to him as he hears some story, how the same thing happened to him. Some systematic revision of how his mind operates has to be done. Now, to not be reminded is an offered rule. I can give a direct quote from a book called Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy by Frieda Fromm-Reichman, used to train therapists…”

In discussion of ‘remedial exchanges.’

“Lots of the imaginable means, however, wouldn't particularly help out the conversation when the problem happens. Now, there are a class of things to which a name has been given by Erving Goffman. Those are things he calls 'remedial exchanges.' And I'll just use that name, although he doesn't apply it with the kind of import that I want to give it.”

In discussion of ‘spareness.’

“Let me say something about spareness. In a beautiful discussion of it having nothing to do with storytelling in actual conversation but having to do with conventions in fiction, particularly in theater, in a book on Gogol by Nabokov, he's talking about one of the things that Gogol did to Western literature.”

In discussion of actions being chained together.

“A simple way to see that is, whereas a first greeting gets a second greeting, a second greeting does not work in the way a first greeting does, to get another greeting in return. The observation that that point plays off, I found in Goodenough's monograph on property among the Truk, where he observed about some phenomenon that it's different than letter writing among Americans where, ifyou write a letter and someone returns a letter then you owe a letter to the person who returned your letter. That is to say, letters are chained in an indefinite fashion.”

In discussion of making observations of small details.

“If one were to pick up the notebooks of writers, poets, novelists, you're likely to find elaborated studies of small real objects. Like in the notebooks of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins there are extended naturalistic observations of a very detailed sort, of, e.g., cloud formations or what a leaf looks like, looking up at it under varying types of light.”

In discussion of imitative play.

“A sort of instance of what I'm talking about, I pull out of a book called Intellectual Growth in Young Children by Susan Isaacs. It's an old psychology book done in the thirties or thereabouts, when people used to sit around in grade schools, kindergartens, and nursery schools, trying to study children's intellectual and social development by just watching them.”

Regarding one’s experiences and how one remembers them.

“Like William James would have supposed that remembering, recognition, and the self are inseparable. And I suppose that turns on an interest in amnesia, in which you get specifically that having lost the sense of who it is you are, then you've lost all the memories that somehow are collected that way.”

In discussion of how people evaluate their experiences based on their storyable possibilities.

“Plainly, people are monitoring scenes for this storyable possibility. I'll give a gruesome instance of it, from a book called An Ordinary Camp by Micheline Maurel. She reports the first day in a concentration camp.”

In discussion of ‘spareness.’

“Let me say something about spareness. In a beautiful discussion of it having nothing to do with storytelling in actual conversation but having to do with conventions in fiction, particularly in theater, in a book on Gogol by Nabokov, he's talking about one of the things that Gogol did to Western literature.”

Regarding the analysis of a single conversation.

“My strategy for suggesting the unpointedness of a comprehensive analysis of a single conversation will be to show the enormous range of disconnected materials that one gets into in studying some single conversation. So, for example, if you thought an analysis of a single conversation in book form would look something like The First Five Minutes, in which you have a running discussion paralleling the conversation, then I would hope to have you see that there might be at some places discussions running to hundreds and hundreds of pages and other places that were thin, and that the connectedness of the parts would only be guaranteed by the way the pages were put together.”

In discussion of generality and use of pronouns.

“In earlier works, generality is indicated by a rather clumsy use of pronouns, or by examples in which it is left to the reader to see the irrelevance of the special material. Both methods are used by Plato and Aristotle.”

In discussion of offering introductions in certain situations.

“And you may decide not to do an introduction, or that an introduction is to be a purely pro-forma thing. So, e.g., Emily Post gives instructions on how to introduce your neighbor to your gardener so as not to set up a conversation, or to set up a conversation of a rather delimited sort, in which she wants to know when she should cut her tulips.”

In discussion of memory.

“And I don't know a thing about stuff that would seem quite relevant; the psychological literature on memory-time, etc., but I once read a paper by David Rappaport, who specialized in things like memory.”

Regarding returning a greeting in conversation.

“So far as I can tell there is a considerable freedom in at least some parts of the culture for what sorts of things you return a greeting with, but it may well be that that's a regulated matter in some places. There's this guy Ross who wrote a famous article called 'U and non-U speech' which is about upper-class and non-upper-class speech in England.”

In discussion of dreams and one’s accounts of them.

“There are reports in the literature on experiences like that. In a paper by Edward Sapir, a very famous anthropologist, he reports that he was sitting and talking to somebody at night and he fell asleep while he was talking, and continued talking. And the talk he then generated turned out to be a report of the dreams he was having.”

In discussion of creating a story.

“A good deal of what I'll say has its obscure intellectual source (I say 'obscure' because if anyone were to read the book it's not likely that they'd find that it says what I say, but with some consideration they might see how it is that I owe what I'm saying to this source) in a novel called Between Life and Death by a French novelist, Nathalie Sarraute. The book is absolutely not assigned; I'm just citing a debt.”

Regarding greeting sequences.

“In fact, that discussion can be made rather more general than just for "Hello"s, and here I'm referring to work that Schegloff has done on greeting sequences in, I think it's the October American Anthropologist. Borrowing on his work I just want to note that it's routinely technically done that first utterances of calls are topically controlling of a conversation, presumptively.”

In discussion of ‘insertion sequences.’

“We call these things 'insertion sequences.' Not any question can follow a question, and the questions that can lawfully follow a question are insertion sequences. And, roughly, an insertion sequence's questions are such questions as propose ‘If you answer this one I will answer yours.’ There's a paper called 'Formulating place' by E. Schegloff which includes a consideration of insertion sequences and has some fairly elaborate ones discussed.”

In discussion of kinship.

“Let me make a parenthetical remark about Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas is an instance of a thing that has been described by an anthropologist named David Schneider who's done a bunch of work on American kinship.”

Regarding ‘completeness’ and conversation topics.

“There are certain sorts of things which one can be quite uninterested in, have no feelings about, and nonetheless know that 'people like you' do. The classical sociologist Simmel introduced a concept which he called 'completeness,' which had to do with the extent to which some group formulated as a group-within-a-group was able to make members of all of those, or only part of those, located as eligible.”

In discussion of parties and creating a reputation for oneself.

“In any event, parties are a great thing to study, and anybody who cared about making themselves a major reputation in, e.g., sociology or anthropology would find that's one ideal thing to pick up, for these reasons: First of all, one of the greatest of all sociologists did a study of parties. It's a rule of course in academic life as in sports, that if you can beat the best you thereby become their equal. So if you could write a better paper on parties than Simmel wrote on parties, that's one way. Also, one of the most famous contemporary sociologists attempted to study parties, and failed.”

In discussion of those things that may have specific ‘beginnings.’

“Instead of going over the reason to say that some things are beginnings, etc., I would recommend a paper that a friend of mine has done, which is about beginnings of such group therapy sessions. It's Roy Turner's paper on therapy beginnings. He deals in some detail with how therapy sessions begin, and that they have specific ways of beginning.”

Regarding the act of mobilizing and peoples’ interest in doing so.

“Max Weber regularly says things like, the big problem for any society is that there are some more or less generalized organizational techniques which it sets up and which people need to be mobilized to behave in the interests of, but - and in this I ' m not clear whether it is one or the other of the following alternatives: Either Weber thinks you cannot mobilize people unless you mobilize them about private interests, or it's that he says that societies 'know' that they cannot organize people unless they are organized about private interests.”