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Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 19:10:29 -0500 (EST)
From:
"JAMES C. MANCUSO; PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY; UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY; ALBANY, NEW
YORK" <JCM61@ALBNYVMS.BITNET>
Subject: Re: PCP course exercise
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Rue, and other PCP network participants:
< What are the typical alternatives to "to be" when students do this exercise?
Might participants discover that one can effectively say, "He
frequently attacks or attempts to intimidate people whom he encoutners," rather
than, "He IS aggressive." Or, "I made an anger display," rather than "I was
(or I BECAME) angry?" -- focus on actors and observers in context rather than
on THE FORM (Stephen Pepper's category) of the person under observation.
< I have been intrigued with the fact that the classic rep grid seems confined
< to portraying only "to be" type relationships among the respective clusters of
< elements or constructs. It would seem that grid procedures are needed which
< would portray "to have" (territory) . . .
Does TO HAVE convey the same ontological orientation as does TO BE?
For example, "He HAS an aggressive personality." Or "I HAVE a bad temper"
(TEMPER -- does that neatly reflect formism??? Right out of Empedocles!!)
How about, "He HAS a bad case of schizophrenia?""
< But it seems perhaps that you are taking "to be" in another direction. Toward
< subjenctive? From absolutistic to probabilistic/possibilistic? I don't know.
In trying to master a foreing language, a native American/English
speaker undoubtedly will experience considerable difficulty learning the
several varients of TO BE (as in Italian, STARE and ESSERE), and will fare far
worse with the subjunctive conjugations. We simply cannot make the easy
transition from the certainties of IS to the completely different mood MIGHT
BE. "I hope that he HAS arrived," in contrast to the subjunctive, "I hope that
he MIGHT HAVE arrived," where, in the user of the foreign language clearly
distinguishes the two moods by using very different verbs.
If we "think" in constructivist frameworks, we should find ourselves
using language which expresses tentativeness as we frame our observations.
Any comment???
Jim Mancuso
I think there are many issues here which may potentially provide a basis for a
new generation of theory and techology in application of the rep grid paradigm.
At the same time I say that, I feel very much a novice in the linguistics
knowledge and implications.
What I was trying to convey included the following:
I am told that all languages of the world have a finite number of sentence
sttructures, which either directly or in terms of translatable equivalents
resolve in our English as based on verbs of:
to be
to have
transitive subject-[action verb]-object/predicate.
When you ask the question, what does a rep grid protocol (let's say, a
principal components analysis of it) most closely related to among these three
structures, I think the answer may be the verb "to be."
That is, for two constructs "aggressive vs. submissive" and "authority figure
vs. subordinate," a given individual may have a solution which indicates:
to be aggressive is to be an authority figure
to be an authority figure is to be aggressive
to be submissive is to be a subordinate
to be subordinate is to be submissive.
Thus, in a factor analytic structure with a product-moment correlational base,
at least two characteristics of the structure may be described:
association
symmetry.
With this historic base (even in Dr. Kelly's nonparametric factor analysis), I
then proceed to become interested in asymmetric associations, as illustrated by
Gaines & Shaw originally, I believe:
to be a jogger is to be athletic;
but, to be athletic is not necessarily to be a jogger.
This asymmetry, unless I am all wet, provides the essential basis for
abstraction (hierarchical classification).
HICLAS (by DeBoeck & Rosenberg) and other methods to do hierarchical
classification of overlapping clusters in grid matrices provide this
hierarchical structure as an analytic approach to rep grids. So, to be
aggressive and to be an authority figure is linked possibly through some
overarching construct denoted by some other construct label. And, as I have
suggested above, it is necessarily asymmetric. Tis asymmetry is illustrated in
the HICLAS procedure in that (in the grid of binary ratings required for
HICLAS) a hierarchical cluster solution based upon a set theory of one pole
(call it the emergent attribute) is different from a HICLAS solution which uses
the submergent p. This is the same as exchanging voids for checks and checks
for voids. I'm getting garbage on my screen. I'll quit and pick up later.
Cheers.
Rue
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