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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: September 5, 2003
Latest Update: October 4, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Concepts Included in
Fall 2003 Readings and Lectures

General Theory for Class Discussions, All Classes

• answerability: Briefly, answerability is the recognition and consideration of the fact that every utterance (or act) in which we engage for communication is received by an Other who has the same human power of utterance that we do and is in this sense free to answer us. Bakhtin uses the term in the sense of What shall I say, when there is an Other who may answer me? This implies that we are not free of the consequences of utterances that neglect to consider that question and the Other's possible answers.

  The Aesthetics of Answerability and Dialogical Answerability in Hierarchical Institutions give more complex readings of answerability. You might also want to look for some advanced theory at The Other, Otherness, and Alterity On the Postcolonial Web.

  riskiness of answering: It is risky to answer someone with decision-making power over you when your are not sure that that answerability will be taken as simple communication and a communicative act. It is risky because communication is normatively expected to go from the higher status rank to the lower, not from the lower status rank to the higher. Street Corner Society, William Foote Whyte. "Whyte's study of urban young men in "Cornerville," an Italian neighborhood in Boston, conducted between 1937 and 1940 ..." Classic sociological dissertation from the '30s.

• discretionary time: Time left over for you to decide how to spend, after the essentials, food, house, clothes, child care, family obligations, work are out of the way. For most of us there's not much of this kind of time today. We are more used to seeing this as "discretionary income," what's left over for you to spend after the essentials, housing, food, clothing, family needs, have been taken care of. Notice that the greater you income, the greater the discretion you will have, for more time and more money will be left over for your discretionary choices.

• dominant discourse: Dominant discourse is very similar to "les idees dans l'air." It's what you would expect to hear people saying in the grocery market checkout line. It's the discourse that accepts and reflects the position of people in power who make most of the country's decisions in legislatures and courts. But our schools and our institutions generally socialize to reflect and accept the decisions of the decision-makers, including war.

  See Idees dans l'Air or Dominant Discourse Sample Submissions.

• normative expectations: The French used to refer to normative expectations as "les idees dans l'air." Things that everybody knows. We expect that people will come to work on time, pay for the things they buy, study if they go to school, vote democratic if they believe that government should provide a safety net for everyone. Normative here refers to what the average person would do or expect. Important to remember that there is considerable affect attached to a violation of normative expectations. Imagine the result if you were to wear a bikini to class.

  And, more importantly, there is no such thing as normative. Normative implies that there is some neutral position out there that all other positions deviate from a little or a lot. Kind of like a correlation line with all the scores sprinkled around it. Not so. The line is a social construct, and it's made up of all the different possibilities out there. Categories into which our expectations usually fall are simply convenient stereotypical ways for making a quick analysis of our world. Male and female are not real. They represent a mathematical model that time has shown doesn't work too well. The model failed to account for the whole gay community, never mind other differences in sex and sexuality that won't fit into such a dichotomy. To force the real world into the pigeon-hole we imagine as its model is cruel and hurts many. To accept the models we have imagined as "truth" is to delude ourselves, and lock ourselves off from a creative understanding of our world and our own humanity.

  Be sure you take into account the difference between "truth" in a scientific "knowingness" sense and "belief." All science, all "knowingness" is open to further learning, further experience, further authority whose existence we may not yet know. Look at how the understanding of the "unconscious" opened up new avenues of understanding. Look at the new theories of science that suggest that the earth may be flat after all, and gravity slithering over the edge. (Honest, I'm not making this up.) "Truth" is open to the future. Belief is more personal; no need to "prove" it or subject it to future knowledge. It is the ontological animus we each hold on to. But none of us can "know" the cosmos and its future.

  That's not a terrible limitation. The cosmos and our future, if we don't blow ourselves up, are already more than we can grasp in terms of concrete data. Sagan reminded us that we could never read all that's been written. We can never see all there is to see. We can never experience all there is to do and feel. We've got enough to leave the cosmos and the future to the other side of the divide we cannot know.

Agencies Class:

• answerability: When the agency "expert" neglects the social construction of poverty or need for a safety net, the expert is acting as though a complex social situation were a simple fact. Answerability in this instance means that we take the ontological need to understand other humans and accord them the respect of that humanity by hearing their voices, which will eventually lead us to a better understanding of how we can most effectively help them back to solvency, functionality, and control of their own lives. The certainty that we "know" anything about them as persons is fatal to the interdependent social construction of interpersonal relationships.

Knowingness Class: The certainty that we "know" anything about others as persons without making a good faith effort to hear them is fatal to the interdependent social construction of interpersonal relationships.

Statistics Class:

• nominal data: Nominal data are data that can be named only, with no hierarchical indication in the measurement.
  Samples:
  • Democrats, Greens, Independents, Republicans
    Variable: political party
  • Black, White, Brown, Other
    Variable: race
  • Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, Buddhists, Hindus, Others
    Variable: religious preference

• ordinal data: Ordinal data are data that can be ranked, with no certain distance between the rankings, but at least one is higher or greater than the other.
  Samples:
  • Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree
    Variable: Agreement with some statement
  • Below $20,000, $20,001 - $50,000, Above $50,000
    Variable: Family Income
  • High, Medium, Low
    Variable: Negative affect attached to testing

• interval data: Interval data are data that you can count in actual numbers. The intervals are equal, so that the interval between 4 and 5 is the same as the interval between 19 and 20.

  Graduate Theory Class

  • communicative act: An act for which the ultimate aim is understanding of the argumentation that should lead to consensus and to solution of the problems being discussed. In other words the communicative act is not an attempt to convince someone to side with you, but to arrive collectively and rationally at the best solution. (Habermas)