design for a subjective situationism, including conceptual grounds of business information modeling
Pieter Wisse
Especially after Austin and Searle, Mead offers reading more in touch with reality. At least he has his priorities right. Mead does not commit the error of mistaking the structure and rules of a language system for reality. As Chapter 11 shows, it is for different reasons that his assumptions fail to confer relevant variety.
What characterizes a community, Mead argues, is that individuals share a behavioral repository. Each member therefore knows what every other member is capable of qua behavior. Then, through a sign one member calls up a specific behavior by another member. This places meaning squarely in the relationship between members who are equipped, however, with identical behavioral repositories.
Recognizing the relational nature of meaning is a significant advance. However, Mead’s assumptions are one-sidedly social. And they even fail to explain dynamics at the social level. Initially, he presumes that participants in exchange relate a particular sign to identical behavior. Psychology and recognition of individual uniqueness do not enter his grounds. Neither does a change of repository. As a result, Mead’s concept of community is sterile.
Of course he acknowledges idiosyncrasy of individual behavior. But it occurs to him almost as an afterthought and it does not lead him to redesign his grounds. He adds repairs later on, only resulting in contradictions even when questioned against his own assumptions.
The example of Mead demonstrates by default the requirement for reconciling social and psychological perspectives. Participants who meet in (sign) exchange are by definition engaged in a relationship. This reflects the social aspect. But participants are also by definition different (psychological aspect), rather than similar. The most obvious difference is already that one is sign engineer and the other sign observer. Chapter 8 shows the correspondingly different representational structures of the sign.
A community, or society, as Mead has it acquires a strong utopian flavor. Neighborly behavior is the rule. It is especially this ideological flavor that returns in Habermas. They both sketch their perfect society, rather than supplying an explanatory framework for analyzing actual societies. Mead seems unaware of his bias. Habermas at some point openly acknowledges the ideological nature of his theory. Subjective situationism helps to recognize that a paradox is thereby dissolved. The theory of Habermas has subsequently more explanatory relevance than Mead’s. For subjective situationism holds that the bias of individual interests is not only inevitable but predominant.
Chapter 12 comments on Habermas’s theory of communicative action. The review is aimed at gaining a fundamental understanding of why communicative action appears as a concept in some theories of conceptual information modeling. A case is made that Habermas himself would probably find his concepts inappropriately applied, i.e., without regard for his overall scheme.
A reader who is not interested in criticism can skip to Chapter 13, likely after having already skipped Chapters 9, 10 and 11.
2002, web edition 2005 © Pieter Wisse
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