On Sun, 7 Oct 2001, Diane Hodges wrote:
> again, from having studied it, although, gosh, understanding others surely
> depends upon a capacity
> for psychological evaluation - BUT
>
> psychology has never been designed as a judgement call, to me,
I'd like to quibble, Diane, although this quibble actually supports your
argument, it seems to me, by drawing your exception back under the cover
of your argument.
"Understanding others depends upon a capacity for psychological
evaluation" is true only in a particular mode of discourse, both
professional and everyday, about the human condition. There are societies
in the world, it is claimed, such as Samoa (see the work of Alessandro
Duranti and Elinor Ochs), where speculation on what is going on in
someone's mind is not valued and has no means of linguistic expression.
What happens instead is that one presents a judgment that, say, so-and-so
is behaving badly, which is then responded to by whoever is listening by
encouraging the telling of the story, and the action is then described
without any form of speculation about internal states -- the action and
its judgment are both social and not psychological facts. (It seems to me
that even in societies like our own where judgments of psychological
states are vastly dominant, we often go the same route, at least partway,
when we claim/acknowledge that an action is bad in itself for its social
consequences, no matter who the perpetrator is or what their intentions --
as in bureaucratic institutions, for example.)
So if psychologizing, both professional and everyday, is just one way of
talking about the human condition, perhaps we should be careful of
privileging it and at least be aware of how any discourse can be used for
ideological purposes that we might not want to support.
SURELY I am preaching to the choir, right?
--Alena
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