Page 66 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 41

as a system, this system being its support and condition of
possibility;
2. an appropriation or re-interpretation of language: an operation
upon the latter by the speaker who makes its own use of the
supportive language system and its given idioms;
3. an allocution: the constitution of a relation with the one who is
addressed; and
4. the institution of a present by a subject who says ‘I’.

A Dialectical Methodology

The difficulty of identifying ‘change’ from the actors’ perspective points
at a cognitive ‘dialectical’ methodology in which models are constructed
and evaluated with the participation of informants. This goes beyond
the usual opposition between ‘objectivity’ (focussing on the sole data
and ignoring the observer as if the data itself did not exist) only through
the presence of the observer and ‘subjectivity’ (putting the observer,
an alien human being, in the central place). Analysts contribute to the
information process, introducing their ‘folk views’ at the same level
as informants.
In our experience, the dialectical approach has been effective when
it has involved various analysts with diverse degrees of acquaintance
with the culture under investigation. In this set-up each participant
is, to some degree, both an informant and an analyst, ‘a community of
inquiry within a community of practice’, to quote Aygyris.
At the extreme end of the scale this comprises ‘mechanical ana-
lysts’ (computer programmes) with no initial competence and high
performance skills. At the other end, knowledge holders may turn to
analysts if motivated by a model construction that does not remain
an academic exercise. Models of this kind are therefore goal-oriented.
They are expected to induce social or cultural change, in a very broad
sense, rather than to stand as objects of contemplation. Their evalu-
ation, in this context, is that of their ability to achieve the results for
which their elaboration has been undertaken.
In the process of cognitive modelling—a trade-off between gen-
erality, accuracy and relevance—the dialectical approach gives more
importance to descriptive aspects, accuracy and relevance, to the det-
riment of generality, which provides models with predictive abilities.