Page 109 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

86 Communication and Evolution of Society

in the face of incompatible role expectations and in the passage
through a sequence of contradictory periods of life. Role iden-
tity is replaced by ego identity; actors meet as individuals across,
so to speak, the objective contexts of their lives.
Up to this point we have directed our attention to the com-
ponents of the symbolic universe that acquire reality in stages
for the growing child. If now, in a psychological attitude, we
turn our attention to the abilities that the acting subjects must
acquire in order to be able to move about in these structures, we
come upon the general qualifications for role behavior that to-
gether form interactive competence. To the increasing mastery
of the general structures of communicative action and the corre-
lative growth of the acting subject’s context-independence, there
correspond graduated interactive competences that can be ar-
ranged in three dimensions (as shown on the right side of
Schema 3). Our burden of proof will have been sufficiently dis-
charged if the determinations introduced in each of these di-
mensions, regarded from a formal point of view, form a hierarchy
such that the assertion of a developmental-logical nexus among
the three levels of interaction can be justified.
The first dimension grasps the perception of the cognitive
components of role qualifications: the actor must be able to
understand and to follow the individual behavioral expectations
of another (level I); he must be able to understand and to
follow (or to deviate from) reflexive behavioral expectations—
roles and norms (level II); finally he must be able to understand
and apply reflexive norms (level III). The three levels are dis-
tinguished by degrees of reflexivity: the simple behavioral ex-
pectation of the first level becomes reflexive at the next level—
expectations can be reciprocally expected; and the reflexive be-
havioral expectation of the second level again becomes reflexive
at the third level—norms can be normed.
The second dimension relates to the perception of the motiva-
tional components of general role qualifications. At first the
causality of nature is not distinguished from the causality of
freedom—imperatives are understood in nature as well as in
society as the expression of concrete wishes (level I); later the
actor must be able to distinguish obligatory from merely desired