Instrumental Variations II: Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism

We now turn to an interpretive approach which does not stress rationality in quite the same way, although a notion of instrumental rationality underlies it. Pragmatism is a philosophy which developed in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, and is most often associated with names of C.

There is a limited resemblance here to the instrumentalism espoused by positivists, who have problems with the status of ‘theoretical' entities that cannot be seen or measured. Such concepts are seen as useful fictions which enable us to achieve our purpose and organize our perceptions and knowledge. Peirce defined our conception of an object as the total of the practical bearings that the object has on our actions. Our knowledge of objects arises in the practical relationship we have to those objects, and it follows that as our practical relationship changes so our knowledge changes. This is not necessarily a theory of truth - in fact it tends towards a relativism, as we will see when we look at pragmatism in the social sciences, but it can easily be seen as involving the notion that what is true is what works. Clearly this is not a very helpful epistemological criterion - the theory that the earth is flat works perfectly well for me in my day-to-day actions.

We can already see the similarity between Weber's ontological individualism and pragmatic notions of truth - there is no such thing as a society, but if the people we are studying think there is and take it into account in their everyday actions, then we can take it as existing - it is real in its effects, and these effects are achieved through individual actions. Paul Rock, in his philosophical exploration of symbolic interactionism, states the same point emphatically: ‘The character of society is so obscure that scientific attempts to discuss it are generally absurd' (Rock 1979: 227).

Rock traces the development of pragmatism through the American interpretation of Hegel, and although the details of this interpretation need not concern us here, the end point is very close to that of the neo-Kantians: that knowledge in social science is based on the shared culture of a community. However, this culture is not a structure of fixed components; it is an ongoing process. Interactionism concentrates on process. Knowledge of external objects is also a process: my knowledge of the computer I am working on at the moment grows and changes as I employ it for different and more complex purposes. My knowledge of the social world also changes as I do different things in relation to other people. The difference is that other people also have their own meaning contexts, their own knowledge of the social world and the development of that knowledge becomes a joint enterprise.

Pragmatism deploys a combination of evolutionary theory and Hegelian idealism, the view that reason, or rationality, creates the world to claim or assume that the division between knower and known has been bridged - not just in the human sciences but also in the natural sciences. Sociology and social psychology students will recognize here another source of the approach which now goes under the name of social constructionism. What happens in the course of our action, and our interaction, is that we negotiate (or construct) the meanings of the objects in our world. As we abstract from this negotiating process, our knowledge becomes, in Paul Rock's word, less ‘authentic'. Notice that he uses the word ‘authentic', not ‘objective' or ‘true'. For the interactionist there is no knowledge apart from that known by the people studied by the social scientist. And the work of the social scientist is again to elaborate and make intelligible the meanings negotiated and constructed by the people he or she is studying. Blumer's classic formulation sums it up well: people act on the basis of the meaning that objects have for them; these meanings are developed through social interaction, and modified through interpretive processes employed in further interaction (Blumer 1969).

Interactionist social psychology developed through Mead (1938) conceptualizes the self in pragmatic terms: the self is a process, not an entity - an internal conversation between what those around me tell me about myself and my interpretation of that information as I go about my practical purposes in the world; in the work of Goffman (see, for example, Goffman 1968) the instrumentalism of the approach becomes clearer: I use myself as a tool in my relationship with others, doing my best to manage the impressions I make on others in order to achieve my purposes. In both cases, however, the self arises in action, in doing rather than in being. Pragmatism draws neither explicitly on the common-sense notion of means-end rationality of Max Weber nor on the more rigorous conception of rational choice theory, but talks more about the different rationalities that exist in different situations. There are many different means­end chains, varying from situation to situation. The fundamental premiss, however, is the same as that for the other approaches: the job of the social sciences is to understand meaningful human action, and society - if it exists - consists of individual actions in relation to each other; the meanings and relations can be understood in the context of pursuing practical purposes in the world.