MacKinnon, Neil J. 1994. Symbolic Interactionism as Affect Control. Albany: State University of New York Press. Foreword and Chapter 1
overhead
ACT and Mead
Critique
on Mead:
Mead
sees mind, self and society are purely cognitive phenomena.
o
Mead sees affect as a biological epiphenomenon.
1.
ACT extends Mead by stressing the importance of affect.
2. ACT
integrates the affective and the cognitive
ACT builds upon Mead:
1.
Symbolic interactionist, stress the importance of language
2. ”Conceptualization
of mind as a process of cybernetic feedback control” (p.3).
Cognitive:
·
denotation
·
lexical
categorization
·
language
·
structural
properties
Affective:
·
connotation
·
representation
of sentiments
·
affective reaction in terms of EPA
How does
Osgood use the terms connotation
and denotation?
·
Connotation are sentiments, this
includes affective meaning.
·
Denotation refers to lexical
categorization, language, the cognitive.
Osgood indicates that the connotative, and denotative might be two parts of the same coin (sentiment).
"mother"
evokes affection or warmth (connotation),
"mother"
denotes kinship rules, (Osgood: lexical categorization)
and structural
properties of the family institution.
Example:
According to the
Saphir-Worf theorem, if people speak different languages in different cultures,
they must think differently.
As a result,
there would be more differences of thinking
·
between cultures that
use different languages,
·
than between cultures
using the same language.
Test: Lets
compare cultural differences between
·
French Canadians and
English speaking Canadians,
·
with differences
between the British and the North Americans.
Where do we
expect more differences in worldview (culture)?
·
Between French
Canadians and English speaking Canadians,
·
or between the British
and the North Americans?
According to
linguistic relativism (Sapir-Whorf theorem),
The Brits and
the North Americans should be more similar because they share the same
language.
Overhead
Cybernetic
feedback control
Definition
Cybernetics: Concern with control
mechanisms and their associated communication systems, particularly those that
involve feedback information about its activity
(Engineering, computer sciences, sociology, psychology...).
Cybernetic
feedback control in SI
"Pragmatic
philosophers like Pierce (1960-66) and Mead (1936) developed theories of meaning
imbued with logic and viewed symbolic interaction among humans in ways that we
now call cybernetic (MacKinnon, 1994).
Moreover,
contemporary symbolic interactionists (e.g., McCall and Simmons, 1978; Stryker
and Statham, 1985) see social process as reproducing a sociocultural system that
provides a huge but researchable corpus of identities and actions.
Thus symbolic
interactionism focuses on
people's efforts to experience logically connected meanings
views social
interaction as a feedback process in which people try to control their own and
others' experience
studies how mental
processes link sociocultural information with individuals' thought and actions.
"The potential
for computerization is fairly evident when the field is described this way”
(Schneider and Heise 1995).
Disclaimer: The documents linked to other sources on the WWW, others than http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/Schneider/ and its subdirectories, do not necessarily express the views of Texas Tech University or Dr. Andreas Schneider. @Copyright 2008 Andreas Schneider