Group Entry Schema
This schema is merely a ‘take.’
Added later. The take is about a general schema, not a snapshot of a particular group. The attempt here is to characterize easy/difficult entry conditions along two different valuations of variability discoverable as problems of entry.
A schema such as this one is problematicized the more it is reified.
This noted, it is not impossible to imagine, (imagination being what it is!) that real world valences could be attached to the ‘circles’ if there was a means for assessment.
I could write a book about what this schema concerns.
actually, my question would next be (after the obvious ‘why not’ one) is what do we do with this now?
do we locate ourselves within these, ah, ‘abject’ quadrants, and if so, what will that mean for our relationships to each other, and particularly i spose, to ourselves vis a vis the world at large?
where would you locate yourself for example? or, is the ‘flexible’ a denotator of no fixed position at all?
etc.
and/or are you implying that this is a representation of the entry requirements for “our” group (however conceived: you’d need to specify)?
you say you will be constructing more to represent “our” group, so i assume that this one is only a specimen… so far?
…OK, i keep re-reading and looking, and i see some partial answers to questions.
i await further diagrams.
Smith: “One of the things I am aggravated by is being misperceived by other people.”
DrP: “Are you aggravated every time you feel misperceived?”
Smith: “Yes”
DrP: “What do you do about this?”
Smith: “I intervene and try to correct the wrong perception.”
DrP: “Do you do this every time?”
Smith: “Almost always.”
DrP: “Why is this your usual response?”
Smith: “Because it seems to me the whole point of perception is to have correct perceptions.”
DrP: “What then is aggravating?”
Smith: “That people so easily assume their perceptions are correct.”
DrP: “Those errors being misperceptions of you?”
Smith: “Doh. Of course, Aren’t misperceptions aggravating to you?”
DrP: “Some are aggravating. But, being misperceived is not surprising to me.”
Smith: “You almost sound okay with it.”
DrP: “I am often okay with it.”
Smith: “You aren’t aggravated every time you are misperceived?”
DrP: “No. In fact, I live in a world of potentially aggravating misperceptions.”
Smith: “You, I guess, pick and choose when to intervene.”
DrP: “Yes. You and are I different. For me, I have to have a stake in correcting the misperception. And, I don’t have a stake in every perception being correct.”
Smith: “Wait, the world would be much better if people were more accurate in their perceptions about each other.”
DrP: “Yes, but I don’t live in that better world, and don’t seek to intervene on every occasion to improve the world of perceptions.”
Smith: “I don’t understand why you would let mistakes go.”
***
And then we talked about this and the ramifications of both the urge to change something for the better, and, letting go of most such efforts.
The problem territory is inflexibility tending toward fixation, and, not having any, in terms of the schema’s perspective, capability aside from one extreme. It is possible to overlay ‘shadow dynamics’ on this schema once one has established what their habitual operating procedures are with respect to the categories of the schema. For example, hypothetically, the shadow of flexible indifference is fixated moralism.
and, co-incidentally (or not i spose) we have recently been talking about mis-perception, or at least its cousin, misunderstanding.
anyway, i see a diagram, and i see a tool for representing something more abstractly, that is, i see diagrams (in general) as entailing an intention, if you will, to provide a mediating device for perceptions of otherwise perhaps unrelated events.
my questions pertain to the use we might put to the diagram.
like, OK, what can we do with it to help viewers (probably us, here) gain some new insight regarding our actions, behaviour and perceptions – of self, other and self-other even?
i’m guessing at this point that the next instalment will orient to these possibiities? i mean as a demonstration perhaps of its usefulness as an analytic tool? (well, maybe that should be a ‘synthesizing’ tool)
also, as usual, i re-read what you write, and see further information contained, e.g. wrt ‘shadow dynamics’. but then this breaks down, as i do not know what ‘shadow’ + ‘dynamics’ translates to in the everyday world: i’m not sure what it ‘means’… hence i ask questions, and hope for illustrative examples and so on. the ones you have provided already have started to round out the picture for me, indeed – so read these comments as requests for further elaboration, or at least a signal that i am following along.
To bracket these descriptions, it is a key to comprehend that the four square vectors of portraying indifference/moralistic, locate dispositions; this akin to a typology.
Shadow dynamic 1. Unbidden and unwanted ‘sub-rosa’ features (of the disposition)
Shadow dynamic 2. Counter-productive ramifications (of the disposition)
Shadow dynamic 3. Aspects of the disposition or its conditions, not available to another involved party “on the face” of the disposition’s being enacted
A moralist says to a friend, “You’re a thief for stealing mp3 by downloading them.”
The friend responds: “Don’t be so self-righteous.”
Moralist: “I’m not being self-righteous.”
Moralist
SD1. The appearance of self-righteousness was unwanted.
SD2. Charged attribution is unconvincing.
SD3. Somebody made off with the moralist’s favorite CD.
Indifferent(ist)
SD1. “I seem to some to be a thief.”
SD2. Is it stealing?
SD3. “I spend a lot of money on mp3s – more than my accuser.
Carry this to the extreme, indifference can tend toward amoralism, passing immoralism. Whereas, moralism at the extreme tends toward despair, via repeated attempts to enforce morals, and to operate “as if” the world is something it may not always be.
But, these examples noted, my investigation isn’t concerned with simple situational ethics. The repeated conundrum concerns what is impractical or not efficacious (with respect to problem solving) about habitual and inflexible dispositions.
The translation to communication is likely interesting. This has some of the feel of typological or stylistic clashes. I can recall one example, which is when a member of an email group called me out to–basically–demand of me that I write in a style that they could easily comprehend, because, “intentionally writing in a hard-to-understand way insults me.” Hmmm, I’ve evoked this response a number of times!
about the other stuff – still too distant from my usual paths of thinking to accommodate fully just yet, but getting the idea.
[btw, the 'norm' of cutting off the bulk of one's post (where did you originally write this btw?) originates elsewhere in the blogging world i assume, but susan mentioned it in reply to one of my earlier posts, in which i did fill up the whole screen with my longish anecdotal observations. thinking i had indeed broken a common norm, and seeing the usefulness of only putting some of my post when many people might be posting different things, i asked how to do it, to which susan responded. i then began to use this out of habit, and as a 'politeness' thing. no skin off my nose]
[again, not the place to ask, but would like to know how to use 'ping-back' function in posts: anyone with inside info, please to reveal in most appropriate manner you can think of]
Do people read the entirety of long posts? I assume some do and some do not.
The problem of stylistic clash? A conundrum of text-only discussion is that it is difficult, tending to impossible, to ascertain who read, what; how much was read.
As you know, E, I have several ‘voices’ in my toolkit. I opt to reflect the stream of my conscious complex thought close to the terms via which said thought arises. This could be written differently:
I write like I think.
no, well the problem or “issue” may be that people do not read like you think…
i tend to write like i talk.
hence, thinking doesnt necessarily come into it.
but then, in awareness of what this might mean to the casual reader, i often go back and edit some of what i’ve written for supposed ‘clarity’.[now, stop that laughing!]
my aim is twofold:
to actually get something out there – aka snub my nose at the internal editor who tells me i’m writing drivel which no one will want to read
and
to write like i speak, so that there’s a simulcra of the actual eldon persona encrusted there in words on a screen. i find that a hoot. and, if only I get to go abck and read it later and go, hey, yeah, what a dill i was back then, well, no one has been hurt…
hahahaahah except
my ‘reputation’! oh no!
in tatters!
or, as ashleigh brilliant might say:
“wait! come back! there’s a part of my face you havent stepped on yet!”
“There you were, being who you are back then.” yeah, the temporal disassociation is a feature I’m aware of too. Yet, ‘whatever.’
It’s possible to orient to: there are no casual readers. Which is to suggest that the casual audience would be hard to pin down.
What is construed about the ‘other’ from the experience and evidence of text lands in the territory of interpersonal construal rendered via the text-only medium. However, I would assume the conventional vectors of egocentrism and stereotype apply. Those get added to my own rough model, so, for example, a egocentric moralist is somebody who believes other persons are also moralists, even if they are fallen moralists.
(Egocentric here meaning that one’s own theory about other people mostly refers to what the person knows about their own mind/self/personhood.)
Along the line of stereotype, the retrieval of experience about a detached sort of sensibility might pose that such a person, ‘is just like the zen master I chatted with at Starbucks last week.’
(Stereotype here meaning what prior models have been internalized enough to retrieve and apply as a type to a similar person.)
My personal opinion is that I cannot know people well after reading their text, say, for years. This doesn’t mean I do not develop a robust picture and sense. Rather, it means I tend to feel this robust picture is likely very inaccurate.
I have a good friend who is one of three people who listen somewhat like I think. This makes for very efficient communication; gratifying too.
I make my deeper thoughts hard for me, so I am being consistent in making them hard for others.
oh, i wouldn’t have written it in that way, crafted those words together, but i fancy i know what you’re getting at…
now, what does that say about me, and the me-you relationship knowledge?
yes, i write from my ego-centric POV – in both senses! (and so people need to beware: i am not making a comment about YOU, but about me, so please do not jump to the conclusion i am having a dig at you, i am actually having at dig at myself, a person i find quite multi-layered and amusing… and i’d like to find other people who are similary appreciative of my difficult charms, treat this as a warning, etc)
and so what i say to you (out there) makes a statement about my own experiences with other *you*s, as well as what i understand about the world.
but, yep, i get a shock sometimes to discover for example that the person i am hanging around with the most, sometimes indicates that he has not understood what i’ve said: apparently he is expecting me to say something different. ah, so i do not actually think the way he thinks i think… and so on, around and around.
a topic of interest to me, the analyst too, on another level, one who made that framework of ‘tenor dimensions’, about which i want to relate various ‘moves’ in discourse .
for now, i must get ready to go out to a day’s seminar – in vaxjo, sweden. more on the topic of sweden later. and on the topic of interpersonal ‘projections’,
There are two notions of egocentricism floating about in our dialog. First is the writer’s position, and, second is the reader’s position with respect to construal of the author’s personhood. This latter ‘position’ may be more or less egocentric in that the reader’s frame of reference with respect to the what they read an ‘other’ has written is anchored to beliefs (etc.) about other people largely drawn from knowledge about their own self. (It might said this knowledge of self inflects and primes the simulation of the other’s personhood.) This is the egocentric position which can be contrasted with the stereotype simulation, in which case the reader’s construal refers more or less to prior experience of similar types–to the author.
This is all wonderfully complex. So I wonder how writing/reading has been researched using models from social psychology and technical folk psychology. The latter discipline arises from any consideration of knowing other person’s minds; mindreading in folk psychology.
Example. The reader who reads my difficult writing may infer from their reading experience motives of the author that are then ‘stuck’ to their construal of the writer’s personhood. “I am trying to read this person’s pretentious, arcane, unconventional, self-absorbed, unnecessarily complex, and badly written thoughts. This author could make other ‘writerly’ choices and make it easier on me the reader. The author is an egotistical ass with a thoughtless relationship to clear communication.”
Mea culpa?! Lost then would be the construal: “Ahh, this is how the writer thinks.” My guess would be: the actual so-called theory theory about the author is usually secondary to construals built upon estimations of authorial motives. In the example, difficult experience trumps the reader’s thinking about the author’s thinking.
It’s notable that here also are at least two different orders of estimation. One is the explicit archiving of experience of reading and its ramification in real-time and later (via retrieval,) construal. The other order is, drum roll…how researchers view the communicative transaction. Okay, this may be better posed as the meta-order that frames various disciplinary models for grasping a transaction, or series of transactions, or flux of transactivity. (Obviously: my terms…)
Somewhere in such transactions exist the means (?) for the reader’s construal of the author.
but we can say something about a a general principle of seeing certain discursive ploys in writing, which ‘position’ the reader as compliant, aligned, affiliated whathaveyou – or alternatively which position potential readers as not-in-agreement, or as possibly having alternative views. this springs from a bakhtinian view of interaction, which is that nothing is new, that we always say/write things with an eye on what as been previously written (aka, what ‘texts’/experiences we’ve previousy had), and what potential responses to what we write may be ‘out there’.
i can say that i sometimes get frustrated with some of your messages when they seem convoluted, but i just put it down to you writing how you think – i assume that you have been motivated to explain something, since that is how i read you – and so, everything you write is coloured by this assumption i have about your ‘motivation’. also, since i sometimes write quickly and later notcie i have not crafted the argument clearly, but just let my thoughts on the matter run on, i am obviously going to recognise that sometimes one just has to get it out, rather than try to be ‘crafty’ – and then maybe sound pompous, stilted, or sometimes not get round to sending anything at all.
so, i would say, somewhere in there is the writer’s construal of the ‘ideal reader’ – which is a general term for the projected reader, whether that is a general audience of many, or one particular addressee. we can make some observations about this construal, but i do not think we can get inside the writer’s mind – we can only make observations on how the writing can be ‘read’ – as positioning the reader in some way – and even then, this is contingent on reading position.
social psychologists can make observations on what is common in social situations … slightly differently… and their material and approach slightly different to mine too…. of course, more of this later indeed.
back to helsinki tomorrow.
“i don’t think that is open to observation.”
It isn’t. This is the great problem for the commonsense (ie. folk,) psychologist. The entire sub-discipline comes to be rejected by ‘eliminitavistic’ psychologists. But then there is the lesser order: just because intentionality cannot be observed doesn’t require intentional operations to not exist. Something operational does exist even if hidden.
(The extreme eliminativist-material position, of the Churchlands contra Fodor, asserts, that, for example, belief, cannot exist. But, the philosophical argument against propositional cognition would make anthropology and sociology disappear, so I tend to chuckle when thinking about such arguments. ‘That which cannot be spoken of’…whatever.)
If we’re to have, say, an ethnographic or phenomenographic account of communicative transactions, it may be necessary to ask what was experienced. Those kinds of reports are encumbered but not in clear ways, and those reflexive reports can be veracious.
Have we travelled in a circle now, Eldon? I imagine we might have simply because I find myself back wondering how any remarkable component of communication is not also a component of behavior. I note this and must note that behavior does seem to be a manifestation of an ecosemiosocial ‘manifold.’
I guess I sauntered back to my side of the elephant!
oh my!
not necessarily. i mean, you might be on your side of the elephant, or the same side… since we are both slightly blind, it might take a bit more checking to find out…
e.g. you may be reading my aside additives as contra additives.
sometimes i get to reading you as having jumped to a conclusion that i do not agree, simply because i do not respond with the obvious ‘yes, and..’ or ‘yes, but..’
but then, this may be MY reading of your aside additions.
i had more to add to what you wrote in the previous note, but, as you know, writing as one thinks or talks does not lead to well-planned point-by-point discursiveness, and hence i follow a line of my own making, rather than stick to the original thought….
it means that lots of things to add come to mind, and then i just start writing and some of them do not get mentioned – like – they goes without saying.
and, not forgetting, schedules are pushimg me out the door lately, and a gal needs time to compose… herself.
more later…
also, some musements about… what was it this started off as?
entry conditions?
When do you return home?
wherever i hang my hats-ville-wise.
but i am off to the UK again this week for a 10 day duration.
then another 2 weeks here to at least see some sights that arent covered in snow,
then to japan for 3 weeks to revist the scenes of past crimes. well, no, a past life,
and a big chunk of what i am now,
and then back to the land of oz end of june…
to hie P off to sydney within 2 weeks after that.
while i palely loiter wondering which items i should or can move back to sydney.
phew… the head is not so settled, i like my own territory, cat-like i get disturbed by having to move places, i need to inspect every corner before i can settle (note anxiety re new blog arena), and all this moving about leaves me slightly fragmented.
later today i might improve, heh