(1) Scripts as mental constructs used to organize knowledge about sequences
of events in the world, and to generate expectations for interpreting
those sequences as they unfold or are narrated.
(2) Theories of how sequences of events in the world actually unfold.
My view is that Schank and Abelson's theory is (1) and not (2). I think it's
pretty clear that people bring some kind of culturally specific schemata of
expectations to bear in interpreting what goes on around them. Certainly this
phenomenon is vividly on display whenever academics from different disciplines
or "schools" try to communicate. And it's also a way to understand the classic
reconstructive memory phenomena and much else. I think that the script theory
is reasonable, therefore, as far as it goes. Schank develops it further in
one direction, as the motivation for a substantive theory of memory that I
regard as the most important contribution of artificial intelligence to
psychology. But he does not develop it in the direction of a theory of
activity, and the lack of a theory of activity leaves the theory open to a
whole variety of misinterpretations (e.g., (2) above) and does indeed limit
the extent to which it connects with anybody's actual experience of the world.
It's certainly interesting to imagine how one might employ intermediation to
ground the script theory in reality. Intermediation is about noticing events
-- things that happen in activity. These "things" are not "behavior" -- that
is, they're not the outwardly observable phenomena that could be described by
a laboratory experimenter, transcribed from videotape, etc. Rather, they're
much more on the order of phenomenologically described experiences of concrete
activity. They include both the "thoughts" and the "actions", the "meanings"
as well as the "forms". So in the case of script theory, we'd want to look
for the occasions on which scripts are applied -- that is, we'd want to set
ourselves up to notice ourselves actually applying scripts. Now, as you might
expect, "applying a script" is too abstract a category to provoke very much
noticing. So one might be able to start with a particular occasion, noticed
somehow, or one might try defining a more specific category -- e.g., applying
a particular type of script, or applying a script in a particular type of
situation, or for a particular purpose. I think a good place to start would
be with the sorts of phenomena that Rick Alterman studies: carrying over one's
experience with one kind of appliance (e.g., a credit-card-operated gasoline
pump) to another, novel kind of appliance (e.g., a credit-card-operated
telephone on an airplane). The method would be to write out in one's notebook
what this would involve, and how the specific category is subsumed by the
general category. Then start noticing, and keeping lists, and writing out in
detail the experiences that came up in particular cases. Then pick out various
aspects of those experiences that seem interesting and generate intermediate
categories for *them*. Then keep going, and see where it goes. My experience
is that you could get a long way by this procedure in about three weeks. The
first week might be uneventful. On the other hand, when I was proselytizing
this method in the mid 1980's, several people were utterly shocked and amazed
the first time it worked for them. They realized that they had always been
doing their psychology or robotics or whatever in a completely abstract haze,
with absolutely no connection to their own experience of life.
Phil