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A Pragmatic Theory of Discourse About the Self / by Ted THE EXPRESSION OF THE SELF AND CONVERSATIONAL CONTEXT: A PRAGMATIC THEORY OF DISCOURSE ABOUT THE SELF Ted Wayne Altar M.A., University of Regina, 1983 THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of PSYCHOLOGY Ted Wayne Altar 1993 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY July 1993 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL Name: Ted Wayne Altar Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Title of ~hesis: The Expression of the Self and Conversational Context: A Pragmatic Theory of Discourse about the Self Examining Committee: Chair: Dr. James Marcia Profegsar 7 Dr. Anand Paranjpe, Professor Sdor Superwkmr - Dr. Bar- ~e~erstein, Associate Professor - Dr. Vito Modigliani, Professor. Dr,, Ti+0. alli ins on, Professor Emeritus Internal External Examiner - - Dr. Anthony Greenwald, Professor Department of Psychology University of Washington External Examiner Date Approved: PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis, project or extended essay (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Title of Thesis/Project/Extended Essay The Expression of the Self and Conversational Context: A Pragmatic Theory of Discourse about the Self Author: - - (s i gnature) Ted Wayne Altar (name) ABSTRACT The first half of this dissertation provides a broad review and analysis of the concept of the self, the phenomenon of self-reference, and the use of metaphors in theorectical accounts of the self. The second half of the dissertation explores the role of the conversational context upon people's self-presentations of themselves, particularly the proportion of self-evaluative statements as elicited by open-ended probes for self- disquisition. Although the resurgence of interest in the study of the self has made for a greater awareness of the interpretative importance of context on a person's self- description, the implicit contextual effects of the experimenters' own choice of open- ended questions and enquiry into people's notions of themselves has not rece!.-ed due attention as part of a "collaborative interaction." The articulation of a person's self- concept as elicited by self-report instruments like the "Who are you?YWAY) or "tell us about yourself' open-ended questionnaires was here found to be highly variable with respect to minor re-wording of those questions or to the imagined situation in which those same questions are asked. A key finding of this study is that one can practically reverse previous research claims that at most only 10% of the "spontaneous self' is explicitly self-evaluative. From the perspective of a Gricean or pragmatic model of discourse interpretation, it is proposed that a person's self-related constructs are always interactive and guided by prototypic scenarios of discourse relevancy. Results were supportive of the prediction that in order to determine how the experimental question should be relevantly answered, participants in a psychology experiment must resort to the inference-making strategy of drawing upon situational prototypes of comparable questions found in everyday conversations. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to convey deep thanks, and also acknowledge my considerable debt to, my supervisor Dr. hand Paranjpe, whose breadth of knowledge, scholarship and deep passion for interpersonal tolerance and understanding has been an inspiration to a great many students including me. Earnest gratitude also goes to my patient and forgiving committee members, Dr. Barry Beyerstein and Dr. Vito Modigliani whose support and exemplary qualities as outstanding teachers were much appreciated and needed. I am very grateful to the external members of the examining committee, Dr. Anthony Greenwald and Dr. Tom Mallinson, for their careful reading and thoughtful criticism of the dissertation. Dr. Greenwald was particularly helpful with crucial points of analysis. I wish also to thank Dr. Marian Scholtmeijer, Gira Bhatt, Cindy Letts and .i ,A1n McDonald who served during some stages of the research as my indispensable research assistants. Specifically, Gira Bhatt, Cindy Letts and John MacDonald helped with some of the collection of the data and Marian Sholtmeijer and Gira Bhatt both generously served as tireless judges for the content analysis of a substantial amount of data. I also wish to make known my appreciation of the collegial friendship and debates with such capable and outstanding fellow students as Brian Grady, Chris Green, Gira Bhatt, Randy Tonks, Dave Eveleigh, Ross Powell, and many others. Of course, gratitude is owed to the Simon Fraser Department of Psychology and the Faculty of Graduate Studies for their financial and moral support. Finally, my deepest appreciation and love go to my companion, Marian Scholtmeijer, for her reading of the dissertation and thoughtful comments as a reader unfamiliar with this kind of research. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. THE CONCEPT OF THE RELATIONAL SELF 1 A. PREAMBLE 1 B. SELF-REFERENCE AND THE CONCEIT OF THE SELF 10 1. The Construction of Self-Reference in Folk Psychology 10 a. Descriptive import 15 b. Explanatory import 16 c. Ontic significations 17 d. Evaluative import 18 2. The Self in Academic Psychology and the Plurality of Self-concepts 20 11. METAPHOR AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE SELF 31 A. Previous Metaphors of the Self 37 1. Between the ape and the computer 37 2. Metaphors of the mirror, property, schema and text 4 3 111. CONVERSATION AS ACTION IN CONTEXT 52 A. THE APPROACH OF GRICEAN PRAGMATICS 55 IV. THE CONCEPTUAL SELF AS SUBJECT FOR DISCLOSURE 63 A. ASSUMITIONS OF THE WAY QUESTIONNAIRES AND THE ESSENTIALIST NOTION OF THE SELF 65 1. An Open-ended Measure of the Conceptual Self 65 2. The Assumptions of the WAY 66 3. McGuire's Notion of the Spontaneous Self 70 B. METHODOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF THE WAY 7 1 C. THE RELEVANCY HYPOTHESIS 74 V. EXPERIMENT 1 78 A. METHOD 81 1. Materials and design 81 2. Coding scheme 83 3. Subjects 84 B. RESULTS 85 1. Discussion 88 VI. EXPERIMENT 2 89 A. METHOD 89 1. Materials and design 89 2. Procedure and Participants 92 B. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 93 VII. EXPERIMENT 3 99 A. MATERIALS AND DESIGN 99 B. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 99 VIII. EXPERIMENT 4 102 B. METHOD 103 1. Materials and Procedure 103 C. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 104 IX. CONCLUSION 106 X. References 122 XI. Appendix: Questionnaires 142 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES table 1: key characteristics of self-discourse table 2: type of way question and corresponding situation where such a question is appropriate table 3: percentage of participants matching requests with situations table 4: mean inter-judge proportions of self-evaluations per person table 5: mean ranks of commonplaceness of requests & mean total responses table 6: experimental design: version of the question over situations table 7: mean proportion of evaluative/total responses within situations and way variants figure 1: mean proportion of evaluative responses per question over situations table 8: mean proportion of evaluative remarks I. THE CONCEPT OF THE RELATIONAL SELF A. PREAMBLE Not only do we experience ourselves in the world, we also endeavor to understand and give account of ourselves. The word self--either alone or as the first stem in over 200 hyphenated expressions like "self-abandonment," "self-abasing," "self-abhorrence," etc.--is a much-used word in the composing of such accounts and has come to stand for something we place great stock in and for the most part value highly. The established use of this word, as designating something of essential importance about ourselves, proves to be all the more singular when we are told that this same word became the kind of substantive it is today through a solecism arising from the use of the word "self' in print. "Selfes," as, for example, in the Old English "his selfes" or "as they wished for themselves" (Davis, 1974), was simply a pronominal adjective to indicate emphatically that the reference is to "him" and not, or not merely, to some other. In talking to another, one makes reference to oneself by this interlocutionary emphasis upon the speaker being the bearer, locus, or source of what is being said. This use survives in rare and ironic oblique cases, such as "Himself wants his tea." Possession or nominal identity was all that was indicated by this emphatic or reflexive function of selfe, as it is in today's compounds myselfj yourselfj and itself. But, as Peggy Rosenthal (1984) argues, "since the spelling was the same as if selfes were a genitive noun modified by his, selfes came to be seen in this case as a noun" (p. 9). What semantic weight this "spelling accident," as Rosenthal calls it, has come to possess since the 12th and 13th centuries! Critics like Mayo (1952) point to this curious history of the word in the English-speaking world and suggest that nothing substantial but only bad grammar and logic is being designated by any reference to a self. We have fallen into a Rylean "category mistake" in believing there to be reference to some private substantive when only a nominal or emphatic reference to the visible person is being made. We have made a false leap from intensives like itself, oneself, myself, etc., to the idea of a substantive Self.
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