Cognitive Sociology

Cicourel, Aaron V. 1974. Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press

Status as structure and process. Goode notes that even interaction between strangers involves some minimum normative expectations, and hence some kind of social organization is presumed by participants ignorant of their 'actual' statuses and roles. Thus some set of minimal 'boundary conditions' informs our actors of each other even if their imputations are seen as mistaken during subsequent reflection. The basis for social interaction among strangers therefore, is presumably those properties attached to the most institutionalized activities of everyday life. Thus, 'whether a given relationship can be characterized as a status is a matter of degree. Statuses are, then, the role relationships which are more fully institutionalized or which contain a great number of institutionalized elements' (1960, p. 250). (Cicourel 1974: 13)

References to conformity and nonconformity are not clear because social scientists have not made explicit what they mean by normative and non-normative conditions, and role and non-role behaviour. Presumably the various statuses one occupies cover a wide range of identifying characteristics and conduct, most of which would be subsumed under 'status' categories like 'male', 'female', 'student', 'father', 'husband', 'mother'. 'Non-role' behavior might then refer to scratching one's head, picking one's nose, 'some' laughing or crying (assuming there are no imputations about a 'sick' role). But when would walking 'too fast' or laughing 'too loud' or smiling 'too often' or dressing in 'poor taste' be considered 'normal' features of some set of 'statuses' and corresponding 'roles', taken singly or in some combination, as opposed to the generation of imputations that suggest or demand that the actor be viewed as 'sick' or 'criminal', and so forth? (Cicourel 1974: 15)

I want to underline the necessity of linking the strategies of interaction among actors with the structural framework employed by the social analyst. The observer must make abstractions from complex sequences of social interaction. How does he decide the role-status-norm relevance of the exchanges about which he observes or interviews? To what extent must he take the actor's typifications, stock of knowledge at hand, presumed appearance to others, conception of self, strategies of self-presentation, language and the like, into account in deciding the institutionalized character of status relationships, role relationships, and the normatively based expectations employed or imputed? (Cicourel 1974: 16)

The interpretive procedures enable the actor to sustain a sense of social structure over the course of changing social settings, while surface rules or norms provide a more general institutional or historical validity to the meaning of the action as it passes, in reflective sense. To the Median dialectic of the 'I' and the 'me' is added the explicit requirement that the actor must be conceived as possessing inductive (interpretive) procedures, procedures designed to function as a base structure for generating and comprehending behavioural (verbal and nonverbal) displays that can be observed. An implicit basic or interpretive procedure in Mead's theory would be the notion that participants in social exchanges must assume that their use of verbal and nonverbal signs or symbols are the 'same', or this 'sameness' (in an ideal sense) must at least be assumed to hold (Stone, 1962, p. 88). (Cicourel 1974: 27)

...interpretive procedures are constitutive of the member's sense of social structure or organization. The acquisition of interpretive procedures provide the actor with a basis for assigning meaning to his environment or a sense of social structure, thus orienting him to the relevance of 'surface rules' or norms. This fundamental distrinction between interpretive procedures and surface rules is seldom recognized in conventional sociological theories. The conventional way of suggesting the existence of interpretive procedures is to refer to the notion of the 'definition of the situation'. But in using this phrase, the sociologist does not attempt to specify the structure of norms and attitudes, nor indicate how internalized norms and attitudes enable the actor to assign meaning to his environment nor how such norms and attitudes are developmentally acquired and assume regular usage. The traditional strategy of the sociologist is to endow his model of the actor with the ability to assign meanings, but only after assuming that internalized attitudes and norms provide automatic guides for role-taking. (Cicourel 1974: 45)

The child initially acquires simple properties of interpretive procedures and surface rules which permit him to detect restricted classes of normal forms in voice intonation, physical appearance, facial expressions, cause and effect, story beginnings and endings, simple games, and the like; he finds it difficult if not impossible to understand exceptions and explanations of them which often terminate with 'that's the way it is'. Adult description of the 'why' of everyday life to children provide a rich source of information on adult notions of simplified social structures. (Cicourel 1974: 50)

Hence members are continually giving each other instructions (verbal and nonverbal cues and content) as to their intentions, social character, biographies, and the like. The interpretive procedures and their reflexice features provide continuous instructions to participants such that members can be said to be programming each other's actions as the scene unfolds. Whatever is built into the members as part of their normal socializing is activated by social scenes, but there is no automatic programming; the participants' interpretive procedures and reflexive features become instructions by processing the behavioural scene of appearances, physical movements, objects, gestures, sounds, into inferences that permit action. (Cicourel 1974: 58)

The specification of alternatives and the presumed classes from which they are chosen require generating rules to structure and transform an environment of objects into meanings that 'close' the stream of behaviour into possible alternatives such that choice reflects both the member's and researcher's perspectives. To assume that the only valuable framework is one that imposes denotative structure determined by the researcher and divorced from members' imputed intention and usage, reduces the actor to a rather simple 'dummy'. (Cicourel 1974: 65)

When sociologists propose theories of social interaction, their conceptual apparatuses and research procedures presume that the language used to describe theoretical procedures, obtain, and describe data, is not a problematic feature of claims to knowledge. Language and non-oral elements of communication are always given some passing remarks as to their 'obvious' importance, but these elements are not independently studied and made essential conditions for the study of social interaction. (Cicourel 1974: 74)

...the linguists's preoccupation with a bounded sentence often means that he will ignore false starts and knowledge presumed by participants about in-group intonation patterns, visual cues relating to facial expressions, gestures and body movements, physical distance, dress, physical appearance, poorly formed sentence or utterance fragments, presumed social relationships, idioms, and in-group codes. (Cicourel 1974: 75)

Members use interpretive procedures for generating context-sensitive measurement sets consisting of identifiable normative lexical items, grunts, gestures, conversational chunks, body movements and intonational shifts which have indexical constraints throughout the exchange, but which nevertheless produce 'clear, understandable, and relevant' meanings for the participants' practical goals in the interaction. The choice of words, phrases, gestures, intonation and so on, provides the speaker-hearer with a basis for justifying the interpretation of what is happening, and what is to be done next or at some future time. The member's choice of surface representations for communicating his experiences can never convey the ramified thoughts which reflexively give him feedback about unfolding objects and events, and thus endow all communication with an 'openness' of meaning. (Cicourel 1974: 93)

...grammatical structures of speech acts is merely one part of indexical activity or the production process, and no more 'natural' than raising or lowering the voice, stepping closer to or farther from someone during a conversation, or relying on facial expressions and body movements to communicate the intent of one's thinking. (Cicourel 1974: 111)

There are many activities accomplished each day that do not have to be described verbally. Our experiences of the everyday world are not always mapped into verbal constructions, yet we may assume that speaker-hearer proficient in the normative use of language probably incorporate normative rules of language use into their thinking and thus are able to describe experiences as if the verbal categories were constitutive of the experiences. (Cicourel 1974: 119)

Participants in group interaction (as in the perceptual experiments descibed by Haber) receive more information than they are aware of or can possibly verbalize. It is not clear how selective particulars (ignored, stored, or available only by prodding or by verbal associations) are utilized to construct accounts, nor how perceptual, somaesthetic, kinaesthetic, and auditory information become selectively processed by a reflexive self. The speaker-hearer must proess information so as always to be 'seeing' the meaning or intentions of his own actions, as well as the actions of others, in a retrospective and prospective way that is situated and is contingent on an open horizon of unfolding possibilities (Schutz, 1964; Garfinkel, 1967; Cicourel, 1968b). (Cicourel 1974: 127)

Much of the creative activity of the everyday social interaction of hearing persons is hidden from us because it is tempered by selective attention, constrained by the sequential production of oral expressions, informed by and dependent on short- and long-term memory and grammatical and conversational systems which organize information normatively. (Cicourel 1974: 141)

As I review the tape over and over again, I find it difficult to describe what I think I 'see' and 'hear'. I think I 'understand' many kinesic-visual (Birdwhistell, 1970; Ekman and Friesen, 1969) and auditory non-verbal activities that are 'happening', but find it difficult to represent them verbally for the reader. As I notice the children communicating to one another with glances, one word statements, pointing gestures, nonverbal auditory outbursts, touching each other, and the like, I assume that various kinds of information are being exchanged but I cannot be explicit about the presumed content. (Cicourel 1974: 143-144)

Sociologists use the term normative to signify tacit and explicit rules which are prescriptive and proscriptive for some group. The reference to such rules is similar to a linguist's notion of grammatical rules; they are idealized instructions for recognizing or producing some state of affairs which others can implement or accept as 'normal' or 'correct' or 'appropriate'. Grammatical structures in oral languages are powerful but learned rules for representing cognitive activities necessary for attributing and creating order and meaning from everyday experiences. Normative categories are necessary for the assumption that intersubjective communication exists regardless of the differences of meaning, or distortions or assumed or imputed 'errors' which can be delineated by particular observers or participants of some communicational exchange. When linguists engage in semantic analysis, or when students of artificial intelligence construct programmes for various kinds of normative categories in the data base used to describe segments of speech. A similar tacit use is made of normative categories that index semantic information contained in a lexicon or dictionary. The cultural meanings employed by the researcher trade on his intuitive knowledge of some native language. (Cicourel 1974: 149)