The anomalous position of empirical scientists vis-à-vis intersubjective phenomena has been noticed before. Even Mead declared that an ideally refined behaviorism could explain the behavior of the observed subject but not that of the observing behaviorist. The social psychologist, it seems fair to say, sets out to understand social behavior as a species of interaction between organisms.‡ Yet by his own behavior he seems to allow for a kind of interpersonal activity which can be called “interaction” only by the most Pickwickian use of language. For the social psychologist observes, theorizes, and writes papers which he expects his colleagues not merely to respond to but to understand as well.* His behaviorism does not give an account of his own behavior. The awkward fact is that verstehen, that indispensable technique by which the social scientist discovers what another person “means,” is not provided for by neobehavioristic psychology. The anomaly is implicit in social psychology but explicit and acute in psychiatry because of the peculiar nature of the therapist-patient encounter. It is not possible to ignore the role of the scientist when he comprises one half of the social dyad under study. The social psychologist studies the interactions of persons and groups. But the psychiatrist is very largely concerned with the “interaction” between the patient and himself. And so the psychiatrist has come to be called the “participant observer.”
But the term participant observation expresses rather than clarifies a dilemma of the social sciences, and it should be accepted heuristically rather than as an explanation of what the psychiatrist is doing. The persistent ambiguity, however, is not occupationally peculiar to psychiatrists, and is not to be resolved by psychiatric theory. It comes about not as a result of some peculiar exigency of the therapist-patient relation but rather as a result of a fundamental incoherence in the attitude of empirical scientists toward that generic phenomenon of which the therapist-patient encounter is but a special instance: human communication. And it is to communication theory, considered both as the empirical science of symbolic behavior (psycholinguistics) and as a unified theory of signs (semiotic), that one must look for the source of the confusion and its resolution.
The Incoherence of a Behavioristic Theory of Meaning
About thirty-five years ago Edward Sapir called attention to a serious oversight in the then current psychology of language, writing, “…psychologists have perhaps too narrowly concerned themselves with the simple psychophysical bases of speech and have not penetrated very deeply into its symbolic nature.” He called for an empirical study of speech as a mode of symbolic behavior. Ten years later another great linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf, took issue with his colleagues’ practice of “recording hairsplitting distinctions of sound, performing phonetic gymnastics, and writing complex grammars which only grammarians read.” “Linguistics,” he reminded them, “is essentially the quest of meaning.”
The warnings of Sapir and Whorf have not been heeded. On the contrary. The trend of theoretical linguistics in recent years has been in precisely the opposite direction. Linguists are quite frank about their aversion to meaning, to symbolic behavior, as a fit subject for empirical investigation. As Carroll has summed it up, the trend has been away from a psychology of verbal behavior — that is, the empirical investigation of the language event as a natural phenomenon; the trend instead has been toward “communication theory,” which abstracts from the event itself and concerns itself with a statistical analysis of the capacity of various systems of communication, and “discourse analysis,” which is a formal determination of the recurrence of morphemes in connected speech. The upshot has been an incoherent attitude toward symbolic behavior. Language is held to be a kind of sign response and so understandable in behavioristic terms as an interaction between an organism and its environment — which consists, in this case, of other organisms.* At the same time, the peculiar status of symbolic behavior is recognized by treating it formally—there are no formal sciences, as far as I know, devoted to the syntax or semantics of animal utterances. Thus, there is a natural science devoted to the study of reaction times and learning behavior; there are formal sciences which treat the logic and grammar of sentences. But where is the natural science which treats sentence events — not a sentence written on a blackboard, but the happening in which a father, replying to his son’s question, utters the following sounds: “That is a balloon”?
A good example of this incoherence is to be found in the otherwise valuable discipline of semiotic, which seeks to unite the several disciplines of symbolic logic, psychological behaviorism, and semantics into a single organon.* Semiotic is divided into three levels or dimensions: syntactics, pragmatics, and semantics. Syntactics is, as one might expect, a formal science having to do with the logico-grammatical structure of signs and with the formation and transformation rules of language. Pragmatics is the natural science of organisms responding to signs in their environments — psychiatry would be considered a branch of pragmatics. Semantics, which has to do with the relation of signs and their designata, is not a natural science of symbolic behavior, as one might have hoped. It is a formal deductive discipline in which “semantic rules” are proposed, designating the conditions under which a sign is applied to its object or designatum† Thus, in semiotic, symbolic behavior is studied formally in syntactics and semantics, but is disqualified in the natural empirical science of pragmatics — or written off as a refinement of sign-response behavior.
The embarrassing fact is that there does not exist today, as far as I am aware, a natural empirical science of symbolic behavior as such.‡ Yet communication, the language event, is a real happening; it is as proper a subject for a natural science as nuclear fission or sexual reproduction.
Neobehavioristic social psychology is not able to take account of symbolic behavior, let alone provide a heuristically fruitful basis of investigation. To say so is in no wise to challenge the accomplishments of the behavioristic approach. Learning theory is still valid as far as it goes. Reaction times still stand. It is still quite true to say that when a conversation takes place between two people, a stimulus or energy exchange makes its well-known journey as a wave disturbance in the air, through the solids of the middle ear, as an afferent nerve impulse, as an electrocolloidal change in the central nervous system, as an efferent nerve impulse, as a muscle movement in the larynx of the second speaker, as a wave disturbance, and so on. One is still justified in calling the interpersonal process what Mead called it fifty years ago: a conversation of gesture in which my speech stimulus “calls out a response” from you. It is not enough to say this, however. For, as Susanne Langer rather drily observed, to set forth language as a sequence of stimuli and responses overlooks the salient trait of symbolic behavior: Symbols, words, not only call forth responses; they also denote things, name things for both speakers. Furthermore, behavioristic psychology is not able to take account of another universal trait of connected speech: Words are not merely aggregates of sound, however significant; in sentences or in agglutinative forms they also assert a state of affairs (or deny it or question it or command it). No alternative remains to the behaviorist semanticist but to disqualify the phenomenon of symbolization — to call it “an unreal but imputed relation between word and thing” or simply “wrong.” Again one is free to call symbolic behavior wrong or unreal or anything one likes, but such epithets hardly settle its status for the empirical scientist. It remains the task of empirical science to investigate phenomena as they happen, and everyone would agree that symbolic behavior does happen: People talk together, name things, make assertions about states of affairs, and to a degree understand each other.