One way of thinking about our enterprise is this: we are attempting a description, in a very limited area, of the principles that lie behind the construction of social behaviour. There can be no doubt that one reason that social theory has never come to ground level is the notable lack of a satisfactory theory of action. The major social theorists (for instance Durkheim, Parsons, Weber), and indeed analytical philosophers, have only made crude attempts at the analysis of the single act. Only cog
nitive anthropologists (inspired initially by Miller, Galanter and Pribram 1960), cognitive psychologists, and workers in artificial intelligence (e.g.
in Schank and Colby 1973) have looked at actions in the context of hierarchical plans which may specify sequences of actions. But how does one generate plans? How does one mentally check their validity? What kinds of reasoning lie behind them? These are questions which, com
pared to the study devoted to deductive reasoning, have received scant attention since Aristotle (but see for instance Korner 1974). Above all, a satisfactory account of action in an interactional setting
grossly neglected, despite evidence that very special properties of coor
dination arise in such settings (Grice 1971, 1975; Lewis 1969; Schelling 1960). Indeed, here our own analysis must be found wanting, dominated as it is by the act-by-act analysis of contemporary philosophy and linguistics; we try to make amends in section 6.3.
It is in this context, then, that we propose a general schema for deriving actions from goals. It is tempting to capitalize on the fascina
tion that anthropologists have found in the new linguistics, with its talk of rule-bound creativity, its explicit goals and precise methods. Part of the glamour probably derives from a misunderstanding of the linguist’s concept ‘generative’, which non-linguists (aided by Chomsky’s own invocation of Humboldtian and Goethean parallels) have tended to
1
construe more in the image of the dynamo than in the intended quasi- mathematical sense (of precise and explicit description: Bach 1973:27).
Unlike transformational generative grammar, the^ysJl^mJ^e^pr^seat in TaHTETnds Both senses of ‘generative applicable. ItJsL a formal system
that has closer parallels in deductive logic, with its axioms andTuTes~bf inference, than in transformational grammar. Qiven a set of goals (parallel to the premises of a deductive argument) ajid rules of inference (parallel but distinct from rules of deductive inference), one can derive in this system means that will achieve those goals. The system that produces these~mferences could be said to be generative in an uninterest
ing but similar way to transformational grammar. But |n addition, an element of the image of the dynamo is indeed appropriate, for the goals, the things desired, are what constrain the inferences made (just as the premises in a deductive argument do). It is a system driven by inten
tions and (more remotely) motives. The output of the system is not then parallel to the output of a generative grammar (the well-formed sentences of a language) so much as to a model of the process from thought to sentence. Such a system is much more appropriate for socio
logical applications than weak metaphors drawn from transformational grammar. It has indeed very general applications.22
A short note is in order on our use of the word ‘strategy’. We do not mean to imply that what we dub ‘strategies’ are necessarily conscious.
For the most part they do not seem to be, jiut when interactional mistakes occur, or actors try to manipulate others, they may very well emerge into awareness. And they are open to introspection, at least in part. But the,general unconscious nature of such strategies raises funda
mental methodological problems that we simply skirt. We cannot pretend, to have any special insight into what is probably the biggest single stumbling block to theory throughout the social sciences: the nature of the unconscious and preconscious where all the most important determi
nants of action seem to lie.23 We continue to use the word ‘strategy’, despite its connotations of conscious deliberation, because we can think of no other word that will imply a rational element while covering both (a) in n o v a te which may still be (but need not be) unconscious, and (b) routines — that is, previously constructed plans whose original rational origin is still preserved in their construction, despite their,present automatic application as ready-made programmes.
Let us now briefly turn to possible alternatives to the explanation of the cross-cultural parallels thaFwe present7Qne such-alternative migET * in fact be phrased in terms of norms or rules. This is the way that, for instance, workers in the ‘ethnography of speaking’ have talked about precisely similar kinds of fact: patterns of speaking whose description
cross-cuts the levels of a grammar. Even intraculturally there are prob
lems, for the kinds of norms envisaged by such workers are extremely specific, in some cases being strict applications of (possibly recursive) rules specifying ritual formulae (as for example in Irvine 1974). But this will not produce the flexible and indefinitely productive strategic usage we here describe, unless the norms are as abstract as our face wants (or at least our four major strategies) and are related to behaviour by the same practical reasoning. However, this possibility has no attrac
tion in a cross-cultural perspective. For norms, being specific to particu
lar social populations, have a severely limited explanatory role in com
parative (cross-cultural) research. Moreover, as has been persuasively argued by Lewis (1969), conventions — and therefore also norms — may have rational origins. This suggests that the notion ‘norm’ may not have the utility as a sociological primitive that it has usually been accorded.
I Elementary though this point is, it is worth emphasizing because j there is a tendency, especially among linguists, to think of pragmatic j I (language-usage) principles as rules (as in for example the treatment of j | Grice’s Maxims by R. Lakoff (1973a, 1974a, 1975)). But to posit highly 1 I specific and diverse universal rules is to invent a problem to be ex-
\j plained, rather than to explain it. ;J^
The Scylla to the normative Charybdis is the presumption of highly detailed innate prejdisftQsitions.-.Qf a specific sort. The problem with such a whole-hearted ethological approach is that the parallels observed across cultures are not formal but functional in nature, and yet the functions are rationally linked to form; what is done by high pitch in one culture may be done by indirect uses of language in another. Moreover, the details of linguistic and kinesic realizations of our politeness strategies are so specific, so rationally constructed and non-arbitrary, that the degree and nature of the preprogramming would be absurd. For instance, there would have to be an innate predisposition to use the ‘polite sub
junctive’ in just those circumstances where it is (apparently optionally) employed — and this disposition would not hold for speakers of a language not having such a subjunctival option. There may indeed be a handful of preprogrammed signals (deference kinesics, for example) in the enormous open-ended inventory of means for realizing politeness strategies, but their ethological explanation will not explain the rest. We can allow that at the abstract level of face wants we may be dealing
pnmtiyes (indeed, we have no other explanation there), but any more detailed suggestion seems untenable.
A middle way is to allow that rational adjustments to various simple cdnstraints (the face wants), presumably of an ethological origin, can
produce extraordinarily elaborate and detailed parallelisms. These may then become normatively stabilized within cultures. And this is the tack we take.