WELCOME A CLASS PRESENTATION

PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON

ETHOGENICS

BY- PADAM BAHADUR NEPALI

M.ED (E L T), AUG 2012

MAY 6, 2013

A COURSE OVERVIEW

1. What Ethogenics is(Introduction)

2. Roots of Ethogenics

3. Ethogenic Theories

4. Critique of Mainstream Social Psychology

5 . Key Theorists

What Ethogenics is• Founder of Ethogenics: Rome Harre

Ethogenics is an interdisciplinary social scientific approach that attempts to understand the systems of belief or means through which individuals attach significance to their actions and form their identities by linking these to the larger structure of rules (norms) and cultural resources in society.

It represents a radical innovation in traditional psychology, even a completely "new psychology" that should take its place.

What Ethogenics is: continued…In other words, it is a new paradigm psychology which is developed in contrast to the linguistic tradition in which 'syntax', 'semantics' and 'pragmatics' are used in a way that implies an abstract realm of causally potent entities shaping actual speech.

Moreover, an explicit distinction is drawn between synchronic analysis, that is, the analysis of social practices and institutions as they exist at any one time, and diachronic analysis, the study of the stages and the processes by which social practices and institutions are created and abandoned, change and are changed. Neither type of analysis can be expected to lead directly to the discovery of universal social psychological principles or laws.

Let us predict what might these expression mean…

• Hello

• Waving hand

• Kissing

Let us predict…

• Situations provided…

• The person is at distance

• The person is leaving/ coming towards you

• The person is leaving/has won a prize

Social interactions

• In social interactions, it is assumed that action takes place through endowing inter subjective entities with meaning; the ethogenicapproach therefore concentrates upon the meaning system, that is, the whole sequence by which a social act is achieved in an episode.

• Let us predict meaning for the following conversations;

• Teacher (in the class): What are you doing?

• Student: Sorry sir.

• Teacher( in the class): Can you write it without seeing the textbook or notes?

• Sorry sir, I can’t.

• The teacher has assigned the students with a task to read or write.

• The what question does not mean as ‘what’, instead, it means ‘why’ question. It means why is the student not doing the assigned task.

• Similarly, the teacher is surprised to see the student writing without seeing his textbook or the notes.

• What the student meant with the teacher’s previous expression , that whether he could write blinking his eyes.

• The ethogenic approach is concerned with speech which accompanies action. That speech is intended to make the action intelligible and justifiable in occurring at the time and the place it did in the whole sequence of unfolding and coordinated action. Such speech is accounting. In so far as accounts are socially meaningful, it is possible to derive accounts of accounts.

• The ethogenic approach is founded upon the belief that a human being tends to be the kind of person his language, his traditions, his tacit and explicit knowledge tell him he is.

Roots of Ethogenics

• The origins of ethogenics social science are in micro sociology and symbolic interactionism: in particular, Erving Goffman ‘s dramaturgical sociologyand Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology.BothGoffman and Garfinkel looked at the particular ways in which social actors manage authenticity and construct social order through their performances. Therefore, micro sociologists working in this tradition are concerned with the presentation of self in everyday life.

Ethogenic Theories continued…

Rom Harré states:

• All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed. The structure of our thinking and our feeling will reflect, in various ways, the form and content of that conversation. The main thesis of this work is that mind is no sort of entity, but a system of beliefs structured by a cluster of grammatical models. The science of psychology must be reformed accordingly.

Ethnogenic theories cont…

• Methodologically, ethogenics starts with the social formation as the primary human reality and then shows how the human self exists within it via personally modified 'templates.‘ While Harré makes a distinction between personal and social being, he does not claim that personal being is prior to social being.

Ethogenic theories cont…

• By contrast, John Shotter's approach to ethogenicsanalyzes social action with others (as opposed to individual rule-following and performances), which is said to give individuals 'social powers.' There is no cognitive structure of the social self independent of social context . Therefore, Shotter emphasizes the practical necessities which bring individuals together in moral configurations, which it is necessary to hermeneutically approach. Shotter believes this is a better way to understand the "accounting practices" (and resulting consciousness) of individuals than Harré's methods.

Ethogenic theories cont…

• Kenneth Gergen argues that scientific activity (theories) also play a significant role in constructing the reality and values of individuals. Gergen argues that scientific theories appeal to the common sense within our everyday symbolic world. Societal power relations are affected by groups who try to impose certain frameworks for understanding selfhood, which then guide action .

Critique of Mainstream Social Psychology

• Ethogenics emerged from a period of crisis in social psychology, representing a rejection of experimental methods (Ginsburg 1995). Such methods apply external "treatments" to groups of individuals rather than studying the personal "sense-making" that individuals must engage in in order to live in society.

• The skills that are employed in ethogenicstudies therefore make use of commonsense understandings of the social world. As such the activities of the poet and the playwright offer the ethogenic researcher a better model than those of the physical scientist.

Key Theorists

• The following authors all belong to the ethogenics school:

• Nicola de Carlo

• David D. Clarke

• Kenneth Gergen

• Rom Harré

• Paul F. Secord

• John Shotter

Conclusion

• A central conception in ethogenics is the idea that spoken conversation as discursive practice is action, hence, language is action and action is language.

• Ethogenics or new paradigm psychology allows us to analyze different kinds of discourse and offers new methodological approaches to address and analyze the discourses produced.

Conclusion continued…

• Traditionally, discourse had been viewed as for the syntactic, semantics and pragmatics use but the case is not so at present rather with the emergence of a new paradigm for psychology, or ethogenics, it has introduced new ways of theorizing about people’s thinking and actions – and hence discourse can be analyzed rather different ways.

Reference

Davies,B.,& Harre, R.(n.d). Positioning: the discursive production of selves. Retrieved from messey.nc.nz.Porter, J. (n.d). Discourse analysis and constructionist approaches: theoretical background.

Subedi, D.(2013).Handouts & class notes: Kathmandu: Kathmandu University. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . Lecture 9:crowds1: the ethogenic approaches.(a summary).

• Questions ???????

• Thank you very much

for your active participation.

Feedback is welcomed.

•Feedback from the tutor is highly accepted and

appreciated.