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School of Psychology
In partnership with the Family Centre
Lower Hutt, Wellington, and the Taos Institute
Post-Graduate
Diploma in Discursive Therapies
M.Phil in Psychology
Rom Harré
Much contemporary psychology is written in causal language
... However, a close look at the methods adopted in many research programs
shows that this is an inappropriate grammar. It must be interpreted
... as a rhetorical device adopted to give a certain air of prestige
to the report. Why can I say this with such certainty? Because the actual
method of research involves the participants giving commentaries on
the narratives with which the `experimenter' presents them. It may also
involve a participant trying to find the right words to describe him
or herself, and so on. These are all narrative matters, of how a story
should be told. They are then analysed by the researcher, usually along
with other discursive materials. Despite the fact that questionnaires
and check-lists and so on are called 'instruments', and the answers
that are given to them are called 'data', and the results of analyzing
these discourses are called 'measurements', they are nothing of the
sort, if these words mean what they mean in physics. If they do not
mean what they mean in physics it would be well for the researchers
who use them to enlighten us as to what they do mean.
It can hardly fail to turn out [that these] terms are names
for discourse categories. [Psychological reports] describe what people
did or were required to do in a certain context, not what they were
caused to do. Any necessity in the pattern of action of the participants
can have only two sources: the social set-up of the experiment and/or
the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic rules for creating discourses
of the presumed sort. While these psychologists think they are doing
mainstream psychology and conforming to the scientistic paradigm,
they are actually doing something different but quite respectable,
namely some small scale discourse analysis. What they present as causal
laws are none other than discourse conventions. They are narratologists,
despite themselves. [Harré draft of 2002: 175]
Rom Harré is a New Zealander by birth, and he gained his first degrees from the then University of New Zealand in mathematics, which he subseqently taught, along with physics, at King's College, Auckland and later at the University of the Punjab. He then became a student in Oxford under J. L. Austin [a pupil of Wittgenstein's], the founder of Speech Act philosophy. After teaching in the philosophy of science at the Universities of Birmingham and Leicester, he was appointed as a fellow of Linacre College, and the University Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Oxford. He later held this post concurrently with his present position of Professor of Social Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington D.C..
He has written, co-written, edited and co-edited over 40 books on the philosophy of science and the foundations of social psychology in the past 40 years. His 1972 book, co-authored with P.F. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behaviour, became a `Citation Classic', and is the foundation source of much modern social psychology. At the same time, and again with Secord, he was the co-founder of The Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Such a vast body of work makes an adequate summary nigh on impossible. Here we try and pull out some of the features the 'trademark' features of his recent formulation of what he refers to as 'discursive psychology', and which he also talks of as 'the second cognitive revolution'. Now, for someone who is regarded as a major figure in arguing for a social constructionist form of psychology, and for someone coming from a Wittgensteinian background, the juxtaposition of these two phrases might appear a little odd. So let us begin to unpack what Rom means here, and so provide a context for subsequently looking at his insights in more detail.
First, where does this notion of a 'second cognitive revolution' have its roots?
We need to turn here to one of the original founders of cognitive psychology, Jermoe Bruner, who, during the 1970s, was also at Oxford as Watts Professor of Developmental Psychology. Bruner had, in 1962, written the introduction to the first English appearance of Vygotsky's work, Thought and Language. This introduced Bruner to a line of thinking that moved him away from the direction that came to be seen as the mainstraem of the cognitive revolution he had ushered in. We can see this shift in his thinking in Bruner's classic 1966 book, Studies on Cognitive Growth, tucked away in a footnote on page 320
'it is always difficult for the psychologist to think of anything 'existing' in a culture... We are, alas, wedded to the idea that human reality exists within the limiting boundary of the human skin!'
This seed of doubt grew during Bruner's time at Oxford, where he gained a greater familiarity with Austin's Speech Act philosophy, and he turned his attention to studying the processes whereby an infant comes to use language. A major plank in Bruner's approach was to investigate
how the linguistic community arranges speech encounters so that the young aspirant speaker can get a hold on how to make his own communicative intentions clear and how to penetrate the intentions of others. The principle vehicle of this assistance is the format, the patterned situations that enable adult and child to cooperate in the 'passing on' of a language.
(Bruner, 1983: 10)
Games between mother and child, for example, are a 'format' in which learning occurs: but these 'formats' are not 'things' pre-existing outside of the boundaries of social interaction: they are constituted in the act of interacting
. Thus Bruner comes to find himself concerned with
the constitutive role of language ... in 'creating' the world into which the child enters (1983: 127).
Note the shift that is occurring in his thinking is taking Bruner across that boundary that earlier he had commented ruefully on, the shift into culture, outside of the skin of the individual, and thus somewhat away from the individualized site in which lie 'representations or models of the world' - the stock-in-trade focus of mainstream cognitive psychology. About which Bruner later observes:
There is no question that cognitive science has made a contribution to our understanding of how information is moved about and processed. Nor can there be much doubt on reflection that it has left largely unexplained and even somewhat obscurred the very large issues that inspired the cognitive revolution n the first place. So let us return to the question of how to construct a mental science around the concept of meaning and the processes by which meanings are created and negotiated within a community
(Bruner, 1990: 6)
It is this return to constructing a mental science anew that Rom dubbed the 'second cognitive revolution' when he guest edited a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist in 1991.
Second, it is useful to keep in mind Rom's background, and extensive professional writngs, in the philosophy of science. It is this that makes his position as an early mover of social constructionist work in psychology a very distinctive one, for one of his aims has been, and remains, to put psychology on a proper scientific footing. By and large, many of the early debates on the social constructionist perspective in psychology (Gergen,1973, Brewster Smith,1976,
Gergen,1985&1986a; Gergen,1986b and Jahoda,1986a&1986b; Gergen,1988 and Terwee,1988) tended to generate more
heat than light, mainly because the social constructionist view of science appears to offer no alternative criteria for the
acceptance of a scientific theory, nor any account of how scientific successes ever come about. Rom, on the other hand, is very much concerned to reconstruct psychology as the properly scientific study of human activities. And this concern has had the potential to again, in debate, generate more heat than light, since a science might be thought to be foundational in its claims to establishing universal truths, a view that many in the social constructionist camp might be expected to have little empathy with, given their post-modern leanings. We will go on and look at this issue in more detail later. Let us just note a little of his perspective here.
In his classic text that put the original first-generation of cognitive psychology on the map, Ulrich Neisser noted that 'The basic reason for studying cognitive processes has become as clear as the reason for studying anything else: because they are there. ... Cognitive processes surely exist, so it can hardly be unscientific to study them' (1967: 5). But Harré, along with most social constructionists, takes Wittgenstein's criticisms of 'double process metaphysics' on board with respect to mentalistic versions of cognitivism - the notion that there is some unobservable mental activity going on in the head behind peoples' activities. Thus,
If the abstract cognitive processing mechanism cannot be found behind much that we do, then Ockham's razor had better be wielded and the thing amputated. But if we do that, aren't we in danger of slipping back into behaviorism again? Not if we have understood Wittgenstein correctly. Of course, there are cognitive processes, but they are immanent in the discusive practices that are right in front of our noses, so to speak. ... What, then, should psychologists do if the second cognitive revolution is on the right track? Why, study cognition where it lives, in discourse, considered in a broad sense to include all sorts of symbolic manipulations according to rules (Harré, 1991: 6-7).
And how might we study cognition in this way? What can we say about the 'nature' of human beings if we make this move? What is this form of psychology like? We move on to such issues in the following sections.
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