Adaptation in Evolution and Behavior

Adaptation in Evolution and Behavior: A brief conversation among Descriptive Psychologists. 

Adaptation in evolution and behavior are not the same. One is selective, the other selected. 

A week or so after posting, “ Playing for the Fun of It….”, the italicized paragraph below was added. I argued that play is intrinsic and involves action and personal characteristics not accountable by evolution.  

There is a difference between explanations proper to evolutionary theory and those within the domain of Intentional Action. The difference is whether science accounts for the actual behavior of persons.  

Organisms evolve through selective adaptation. To survive, organisms adapt to the changing circumstances of their worlds. Behavior, as purposeful action, maintains and expands the organism's world. These statements have different implications. Selective adaptation drives a statistical process, a number's game of whom is left standing to reproduce. Behavior involves performances of personal significance, intrinsic and instrumental, selected for their significance. These are very different notions that may not dovetail. The significant might not be adaptive, but then again, it might. 

And then I asked some Descriptive Psychology friends to comment. Here’s their response.

CJ Stone:

Instant reaction: organisms have worlds? Not in the Descriptive Psychology sense. I'd be happier with organisms adapt to their changing circumstances. Behavior maintains and expands the organism's behavior potential.

Aimee Yermish:

I would be very very careful about the word "adapt."  

In biology, the term is understood to mean a process that happens on its own, not as an intentional action on the part of the genetic material.  It's a mathematical process that happens over the course of generations.  

In psychology, it's an intentional action, to adapt to the demands of the environment. It's a cognitive/emotional/behavioral process that happens over the course of seconds to years.

Wynn Schwartz:

As a former zoologist, the way you are using “adapt” is what I meant. Am I being ambiguous?

Aimee Yermish:

I know we're both recovering biologists.  My concern is that many non-biologists don't really grasp that evolution is not an intentional process, and the word "adapt" is precisely a reason for much of the misconception.

Wynn Schwartz:

Hmm, interesting. Help me with some other locutions. Adapt means an active intentional process? I wouldn't have thought it does but I can see your point. Thanks.

Anthony Putman:

Might be reasonable to see biological "adapt" as an ex post facto concept -- if an organism in fact survives, whatever characterized it was an adaptation. It doesn't adapt and then survive -- it survives and thus adapted. This explicitly contrasts with behavioral adaptation in which the action is intended as an adaptation to the situation. The time vector moves in opposite directions.

Aimee Yermish:

That still sounds too teleological for me.  Evolution has no purpose.  It's just a mathematical process.  We impose meaning on it post facto, but that's not what the organism was trying to do or what "evolution" was trying to do.

Anthony Putman:

Aimee, that's what I was suggesting. Although I would say evolution is better thought of as an algorithm than a mathematical process (which may be what you meant….)

C. J. Stone:

I think that's exactly Tony's point. The orgs are just living their lives. Evolution is our concept, not theirs; and we can only see it after their lives are over. "Mathematical process" is our concept, too.

I am reminded of all the shipwrecked people who cried out to the gods to be saved. We never hear from the ones where it didn't work.

Joe Jeffrey:

Tony's point, and Aimee's, are well taken.

One way to talk about evolution is that the entire concept is ex post facto: a reconstruction of how (biological) things came to be the way they are. This included adaptation, all statistical models, evolutionary "trees", and the famed evolutionary "niches": we say a kind of plant or animal (or archeobacteria or whatever) occupies a niche when we see it surviving, and we then re-describe the set of circumstances as a niche. But people in general think of evolution as a process leading to a goal, with humans at the "peak" of evolutionary development, the "end product of millions of years of evolution." Wrong. Only in the sense of, "We here now can now look back and see the chain of events that led to the current state of affairs." But that's all we can say.


As for adaptation: psychological adaptation is, paradigmatically, equally non-intentional. Normally, we look at someone's behaviors and re-describe what we see as the person adapting to their circumstances (physical/social/psychological/whatever). But that's our re-description of what happened, not their intention. Further, there is no such thing as the social practice of adaptation. In the non-paradigm case, a person looks at their circumstances and says, "OK, I now face a change in my circumstances, so I better figure out some new way to live, or some new way to maintain aspect "A" of my life." And if they succeed, an observer may say, "OK, they changed their ways to adapt to their new circumstances." But calling that a "process of adaptation" is misleading.





The various concepts of behavior as Intentional Action are clarified in the posting, A Short Course in Descriptive Psychology.

Playing for the Fun of It: Some notes about our playful universe.

And some limits of evolutionary explanation.

…the fun of playing…. As a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category.  Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Satisfaction accompanies intrinsicness. Anthony Putman

Consciousness is the first example of the selectiveness of enjoyment in the higher animals. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought

A Zilch particle is a person with almost everything left out. Peter Ossorio


Let's play around with some ideas.  I'm going to take steps to build a case that play abounds. That nature teems with it and that it can serve no necessary purpose other than the enjoyment of having fun.

I’m going to start from the top down. 

Play is intrinsic in "higher" animal life. Its adaptive function, if any, is icing on the cake. The capacity for playfulness is not reducible to something genetically selected for its adaptive value. I know this personally. Playfulness may be an attractive quality, but given the trouble I sometimes get in, I suspect some of my playful ways are not adaptive at all. You’d have to bend, twist and wiggle to make the case. 

Remember the maxim: people take it that things are as they seem unless they have sufficient reason to think otherwise.

This is how it seems to me:

The point of play is to have fun. Play counts by not counting. Play is satisfying and fun. This is so intuitively obvious it shouldn't need to be said, but bear with me, I'm going to link some weird stuff together. I'm going to poke around and offer thoughts that concern the overuse of evolutionary explanations in psychology.

(I love the explanatory power of evolution. I have a portrait of Darwin in my office.)

Organisms evolve through selective adaptation. To survive, organisms adapt to the changing of their worlds. Behavior, as purposeful action, maintains and expands an organism's world. These statements have different implications. Selective adaptation drives a statistical process, a number's game of whom is left standing to reproduce. Behavior, on the other hand, involves personal significance, intrinsic and instrumental. These very different notions may not dovetail. The significant might not be adaptive, but then again it might. 

O.K. That was serious, but I'm not just playing around here. 

What I'd like to do is make sense of play as play and not as something else, but first I need to provide some relevant concepts.

Let's start with goal-directed behavior, Intentional Action. Behavior with a purpose. There are varieties of Intentional Action. Some forms of Intentional Action involve choice and self awareness and some do not. I am capitalizing concepts to indicate they are part of the lexicon of Descriptive Psychology but you'll find they are consistent with ordinary usage. 

Intentional Action is the general case of purposeful, goal-directed behavior, whether chosen or not.   One variety is Cognizant Action, where actors know they are acting intentionally. Another is Deliberate Action, where actors choose a behavior from the possible options they recognize. 

Intentional Action is the general case of animal behavior. Deliberate Action is the form of Intentional Action paradigmatic of Persons, and of the type of persons we know best, humans. 

People, while awake and behaving, are not always deliberate or cognizant. Some of our actions are merely intentional. We are not always making choices nor are we always aware of our actions, but Paradigm Case Persons must be, at times, appropriately able to know they are making choices to be one of us in good standing. 

Intentional Action is in contrast to behavior or performance that is a matter of reflex, is accidental, or utterly coerced. 

What sort of action is playful action? What are we doing when we play?

I am not going to define play but instead will appeal to the notion that all play shares some sort of “family resemblance”. There are lots of similar and dissimilar practices that count as play. (A main cause of philosophical diseases—a one sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations). 

I will offer tentative conclusions why play is special based on its improvisational and intrinsic nature. 

As intrinsic action, play satisfies Hedonic and Aesthetic motivation. Hedonics and Aesthetics are intrinsic, along with Prudential and Ethical/Moral reasons for action. But it is easier for me to see the Hedonic and Aesthetic nature of play. Perhaps you will build a case for the other intrinsic reasons? 

Play is intrinsic to life. Play is a natural possibility of Deliberate Action. Humans are deliberate and cognizant players. But other animals play, too. If they can behave deliberately, they can play (I think).

The less evidence that an action is deliberate or cognizant, the less convinced I am that it's play, even though it might be fun to watch. I won't argue that electrons dance. 

Humans have an advantage. Language infinitely explodes our playful possibilities. We get up to our own special monkey business, facilitated by language.  We play with words. We imagine, articulate and share the worlds our words help create. There is no end to this fun. 

If Deliberate Action is enhanced by language, but does not require it, we'll find play abounds. Play is deliberate. It involves choice. Play involves actions, social practices, not reflex or utterly coerced performance (unless I deliberately play with my reflexes). Language makes it easy to represent choices and to create new ones. I might hear you say something funny and goof on it.

It makes me happy that Wittgenstein spoke of a child’s learning its native language as playing a “language game”. 

My dogs play. Sometimes they let me play with them. Social play is easy to identify. People play with people. Dogs play with dogs. Dogs and people play with each other. Dogs and people play with themselves. 

I think I have observed an octopus at play. About worms, I'm not so sure. 

When I play with peers there are more possibilities, and more interesting possibilities, than when I play with small children or infants. But it is all fun. Maybe for you it's different. 

There are more ways I can play with you than with an infant or a dog. We joke around. But that's not saying playing with you, my peer, is more fun. Fun is in the significance, the personal value of the enjoyment. (You point out I sometimes play with you the way I play with kids and dogs. I still laugh at farts, but so do you).

It seems that vertebrates play. (Somehow, that octopus seems to have the spine for it, too.)

Playing also requires mastery, competence or know-how. With practice we get better at games and acquire sophisticated and nuanced ways. Maybe the more skilled the play, the more it's satisfying and fun. But maybe not. Sometimes fun is in the trying and it gets old after we've accomplished it sufficiently. But, then again, with mastery, we might improvise new versions of how to play.

It gets old? Maybe thats just saying it's not so much fun anymore but maybe it says something about novelty. Creative play is especially fun and satisfying. Creative play is improvisation. 

I will later elaborate on satisfaction and fun. 

That fun is reason enough to play is not the claim that fun is all we accomplish. We learn to navigate all sorts of tasks as well, but if play is not for the fun of it, it’s not play. (And while trying to accomplish some serious instrumental task, I might just end up playing around with it, too.)

I like to play with ideas. Here are some thoughts: 

I promised to say something about Evolutionary Psychology. I take issue with the belief that behavioral patterns persist fundamentally because they are adaptive and enhance reproductive fitness. When I argue play is intrinsic I am saying play requires no other reason than it's fun. (Of course, if you have two or more reasons to do something, you have more reasons than if you only had one of them. I love tautologies. They're fun to think. While play is intrinsic, it might also accomplish something instrumental and adaptive.)

Must play have an adaptive function?  Must it offer some sort of selective advantage, some enhancement in reproductive fitness? (Note, I am asking if it must, not if it also might.) I can't speak for you, but playful sex trumps acting in earnest. (I can't speak for Ernest). 

Here's some ideas and finding that inform my thinking. They fit together.

Thomas Nagel seriously pissed off a variety of scientific and philosophical communities when he argued in Mind and Cosmos that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.”  One gist of his case is that qualities that are integral to consciousness are inherent in nature and not simply an emergent quality or one that arises out of adaptive processes. The possibility of cognizant action is inherent in the cosmos.  Of course, this pleased some with a theistic bent, but Nagel argues their claims are also problematic. He is not suggesting deities or supernatural forces. But he does point to a conclusion that there is more to biology than material process, that there is something inherent in material substance that renders it compatible with consciousness from the get go. This makes for a very interesting universe. 

Another bee in my bonnet. Here's from a recent posting in The Baffler by David Graeber, “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun”, that resonates with Nagel’s view and takes play as intrinsic.  A brief passage: 

…. those who do look into the matter are invariably forced to the conclusion that play does exist across the animal universe. And exists not just among such notoriously frivolous creatures as monkeys, dolphins, or puppies, but among such unlikely species as frogs, minnows, salamanders, fiddler crabs, and yes, even ants—which not only engage in frivolous activities as individuals, but also have been observed since the nineteenth century to arrange mock-wars, apparently just for the fun of it.

Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious?

Near the end of his essay Graeber writes:

Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality,

something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.

OK, I am not of the opinion that electrons play, nor do I want to make the case for ants. (At least not yet).  But mice?  Here is part of the abstract from Johanna Meijer and Yuri Robbens’s “Wheel Running in the Wild” (Proc. R. Soc. B 7 July 2014 vol. 281 no. 1786)

The importance of exercise for health and neurogenesis is becoming increasingly clear. Wheel running is often used in the laboratory for triggering enhanced activity levels, despite the common objection that this behaviour is an artefact of captivity and merely signifies neurosis or stereotypy. If wheel running is indeed caused by captive housing, wild mice are not expected to use a running wheel in nature. This however, to our knowledge, has never been tested. Here, we show that when running wheels are placed in nature, they are frequently used by wild mice, also when no extrinsic reward is provided. Bout lengths of running wheel behaviour in the wild match those for captive mice. This finding falsifies one criterion for stereotypic behaviour, and suggests that running wheel activity is an elective behavior. 

They also found that a few frogs got on and off the wheel but they didn't want to make too much of that. Nor do I. But it appears that wild mice got on the wheel just to spin. I'm not surprised. Hart, my dog, likes knocking the tippy sculpture in our living room just, it seems, to make it rock. 

Fun and satisfaction are experience concepts. When we add improvisation to this conceptual mix we get closer to what I think play is about. What is the experience of successful improvisation?  Why is playing with my dog fun for both of us but when I play around with worms, I'm the only one having fun? (I think, as far as I can tell.) 

Satisfaction is the experiential accompaniment of intrinsic behavior or recognizing a good enough connection to something intrinsic. The achievement of intrinsic hedonic, prudent, ethical, and aesthetic aims is pleasurable and/or satisfying.

Improvisation involves the affirmative acceptance and responsive incorporation of one player's moves by another, and back and forth it goes. I say yes to you and then show it. Or I say no to you but you get it as a yes to continue. The paradigm of improvisational acting involves at least two players.  One person can do this alone with their personal props or those on their stage. 

I can engage in creative improvisation with myself, mutually with you, and with my dog. I am pretty sure, however, that improvisation with a worm is one sided. I wouldn't bait a hook if I believed otherwise. 

We seek sensations of all sorts. We stimulate ourselves, alone and with others. Pleasure, satisfaction, and fun accompany the accomplishment of intrinsic activity. (Anxiety and pain may accompany the anticipation of unsuccessful results. And some stimulation is more than we can manage; some too little to bother with). 

Some activities require actions and things to fit together in a pleasing way, the unfolding connections and incorporations have aesthetic value. Improvisation excites and invites novelty. I play with the sensations of my world of objects, processes, and events. I play in and with my World. I play with you and I play by myself.  I play alone with my body, my surrounds and my imagination. I bounce a ball off the wall. I play with companions and engaging strangers.

When the practice is social and mutually incorporative, when I affirm and assimilate your response into mine and you do the same, we’re both probably having fun or at least a good time. 

Improvisation free of need or desperation tends towards fun. Play may work best when unnecessary. If I successfully improvise out of desperation or need, I might be relieved or satisfied but I'm probably not having fun.  We are most authentically playful when we don't have to play along. To see someone playing out of desperation looks pretty un-playful. 

Play is not reducible to a particular performance. Play is the name we give intrinsic practitices done for the fun of it, and that's a matter of its significance, not its performance. The experience of play is fun. Really, I'm being serious.

When improvising, I only more or less know what to expect. That’s part of what's fun since I'm open to surprise. Manageable novelty is fun.  Sometimes when the bottom falls out, we're fine, sometimes not so much. 

When our activity fits together, and all we need is the fit, we might be at play. If the fit is pleasing, a pleasure, play is an aesthetic act. Since play is a deliberate improvisation, its creative and uncertain outcome will follow. Playful improvisation invites novelty. Who knows the game's outcome? This is why play creates and expands culture. This is why play expands the world.

When we successfully perform an intrinsic act, we are satisfied. If the action is both intrinsic and fun, we're at play.

It's nice this morning. I'm going to walk with my dog and see if I can find someone to mess around with.

So let's hang out.

And Support: The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness


 
I'll be lookin' for fun (and feeling groovy). 
Cause all I want to do is have some fun.

Some related postings:  Dreaming as Playtime, and Play and Therapy. And since satisfaction matters and play makes us happy, some notes on what I did during my summer vacation.

And a discussion of Adaptation in Psychology and Evolution.

I'd especially invite you to read Issue 24 of The Baffler, "The Jig is Up!"

And from the NYTimes, 10/11/16  Rats Just Wanna Have Fun!

and apparently so do some wolf pups Intrinsic Ball Retrieving in Wolf Puppies Suggests Standing Ancestral Variation for Human-Directed Play Behavior

and another from the NTTimes, 8/21/20 Where the Wild Things Play

Degradation Ceremonies in Everyday Life

A person will not choose less behavior potential over more. Peter G. Ossorio

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.  Bob Dylan

The Degradation Ceremonies of everyday life don’t look like ceremonies. Instead, they look like how we treat people as not one of us, how we deliberately or inadvertently assign the status that someone is not in good standing with what we believe we represent. 

Social interactions are framed by status assignments that address the place we have in each other's worlds.  Are you good enough, are you worthy of being one of us?  Am I?  

Harold Garfinkel

The ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel, writing about the sociology of moral indignation, described Degradation Ceremonies as rituals that remove people from a valued place and restrict their eligibility within a community.  Social practices that a person could previously perform are now limited or forbidden. After a successful Degradation Ceremony, the degraded person is not one of us. They fail to meet our standards.

What counts as a degradation ceremony?  How do they vary? Let's employ a Paradigm Case Formulation (PCF). PCFs provide a method for capturing a wide range of related content in situations where simple definitions might prove inadequate.  A PCF consists of a description that all competent judges would agree contains all the necessary elements that mark the case in question. The goal is to provide a starting point of agreement.  Generally, it should consist of the most complex case, an indubitable case, or a primary or archetypal case.  It should be a sort of “By God, if there were ever a case of “X”, then that’s it.”  When the complete paradigm of a degradation ceremony is performed, there's little doubt that the degraded has undergone restriction. When less than the full case is employed, the outcome is less clear. I think the less than full case informs everyday engagement. While moving though the day with a welcome greeting or a dismissive glance, we let each other know where we stand. Whether obvious, subtle, intended or not, our stances and actions can degrade or accredit those we encounter.  

The full PCF identifies the "official" degradation ceremony. Altering the paradigm helps us understand other more mundane degradations as well.  

Here's the full paradigm:

Notice that degradations are social practices that involve a community's shared values. To be one of us in a particular role carries the expectation that we value certain states of affairs in a similar way. As fathers, we value our children; as police, we respect and enforce the law; as friends, we trust and go out of our way to engage and play with our buddies; as Boy Scouts, we are trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. And so on.  We all have varied roles and are members of multiple communities. I have a friend who was once a scout and is now a father and a cop. 

Some roles comfortably coexist, and some do not. Conflict is more or less inevitable. Life is complicated this way. I may feel degraded in some roles but not others. 

We play our roles and demonstrate our values through our actions. We take it that true membership requires more than lip service to these values. We walk the talk. Whether or not our performance reflects our true colors, the choices we appear to make define what others see as our character. 

In any community there are people who are obviously the real McCoy, who serve as exemplars of what it takes to be in good standing. They are the ones most eligible to denounce transgression and to witness, acknowledge, or enforce the transgressor's removal from privilege. In the classic ceremony, they perform these roles in public. 

Here's the paradigmatic ceremony:

Garfinkel's full ceremony is deliberately done out loud and in public, but it can be accomplished quietly, discreetly, silently, ambiguously, or perhaps unconsciously. It can be unintentional or performed by mistake. Certainly, two people can do this to each other. 

Since the ceremony involves social roles, a person can play the different parts. People can play this out by themselves and to themselves. I can recognize my transgressions, my own moral failings, denounce myself, and restrict myself accordingly. I might not be good enough for myself regardless of how you see me.

Some Effects of Degradation:

The degraded are prone to anxiety and depression.  They have lost something significant; their world of valued action is now smaller.   This depression corresponds to lost eligibility, the loss in esteem that reflects the restricted ability to do what the community values.  An important role cannot be fully performed. The experience of satisfaction that comes with the successful accomplishment of a valued role cannot be achieved.   Sadness, shame, humiliation, regret, guilt, emptiness, resentment, and other kindred moods and emotions are part of the package. 

Anxiety attends the insecurity of inhabiting an unfortunate place in the social world. This insecurity follows from being seen as incompetent to maintain the values of the community along with the expectation of an absence of support when confronting tasks that only members in good standing are permitted. Members in good standing have each other's back and are expected to be competent players. The degraded no longer have that support or opportunity.

When the degraded find themselves in the company of members of the valued community they often exhibit signs of inferiority and rejection. Encounters become awkward.  The recognition of stiltedness intensifies whatever anxiety is present. Since the rhythm of gesture and speech that flows among peers is broken, engagement is skew. 

The degraded may develop a paranoid expectation of harsh judgment, making social contact even more awkward and defensive.  It is no wonder they end up lonely.

Anger, hostility and rage may also be present and serve as a move to negate the degradation. To the extent I have nothing, I may have nothing to lose. 

Threatened degradation elicits self-affirmation. Attacking the integrity of the denouncer or blinding the witness are reasonable responses to attempted degradation. Excuses that the so-called transgressive performance is misunderstood, not in character, or a result of mitigating or coercing forces are understandably attempted. It is not for you to say, and I had no choice, may counter the threat of being degraded. 

In the paradigm of the degradation ceremony the denouncer describes the act in value laden terms. Appropriation is theft, death is murder, an absence of assertive response is cowardice, and so on. The perpetrator has reason not only to disown the offending act but to re-describe it as something else. It is not what you are calling it. You don't know what you're talking about. You've got it wrong, that's not what I did. 

The Ceremony May Be Taken as The Natural Order of Things (Or As Already Happened).

Degradation can be taken for granted as the moral inferiority inherent in a community or as stigma passed down through generations. The chauvinisms of sexual orientation, physical appearance, gender, age, race, class, ethnicity, and the indoctrinations of virulent religion and nationalism convey status inherited and degraded. Children who see their parents as occupying an unfortunate social place may see themselves as "born to lose".  Or they may be seen as such, regardless of their merit. 
Community chauvinisms establish the additional barrier of some people being inherently ineligible to acquire full good standing. No matter what you do, you are never really one of us.

If people are born into an untouchable condition, a position of shame and degradation can seem the natural order of things with the choices people make reflecting this unjust status assignment. Rarely is the world a level playing field, but for some the rules are unfair from the get-go. 

Some people simply know their place. And some look around and say fuck you. If I start life degraded, maybe I'll rise up and rebel or perhaps I'll accept my degradation and make the best of it, whether you like it or not. I might find a community where I'm welcome while keeping in mind the degradations foisted on me by yours. I need a place where I belong. We both might suffer the consequences. 

What Is The Degraded Left To Do?

If the degradation is accepted by the community and perpetrator, the fundamental problem for the degraded is how to regain status or tolerate the status assigned. Since the paradigm case involves the claim that the transgressive acts were in character, one path for the perpetrator is to show the deplorable deeds were not in character or that the character of the perpetrator has changed. Since we generally hold that character is stable over time, this presents a fundamental barrier to regaining a favorable place. It will take time.  

It is also possible for the degraded to reassign the significance of what is valued. What was once desirable or transgressive no longer matters that way. This can look like sour grapes or gay pride.

One first step in regaining status is to show that the perpetrator's actions may have reflected a transgression of the community's values, but none the less, these values remain important to the perpetrator. Acknowledgments of guilt, through penance and restitution, accompanied by the acceptance of punishment are forms of action that may be required. Non-recidivism is key but may be difficult to demonstrate since the opportunity to continue in the valued role has been restricted. Time will tell. Different judges have different criteria for what passes as sufficient demonstration of dues paid and character changed. 

I've hardly mentioned the varied ways we degrade each other. We treat people as invisible, dismissible, of no consequence; as inferior, not worthy of attention, as sources to an end worth only our desire and use. 

When we treat strangers as already known and pegged, we degrade them by our transferences, typecasts and stereotypes. When we invalidate, we degrade. 

A degradation may be just or unjust, but when it follows from unexamined pre-judgment, it is inherently unjust. Degradation is a natural companion to not treating people, all people, I to Thou. In some social interactions, this hardly matters. While in line at the counter, I only need to be polite, maybe kind. But with people I meet frequently or intimately, where inter-dependence counts, where we share common community, it always matters.  The erosions of degrading encounter grind us down. The fuzzy line that draws a boundary of community should not be taken lightly or for granted. I should be careful not to assume you aren't my brother or sister or peer.

I wish I could claim success in not degrading others, but like kindness and my attention to empathy, it's a work in progress. It takes practice. 

The concept of micro-aggression has meanings similar to the degradation ceremonies of everyday life. Degradation covers a broad terrain not restricted to aggression, but if by aggression we mean the assertion of privilege to put others in their place, the territories are the same. 

Later, I hope to take up accreditation ceremonies and the function of attention, empathy, negotiation and moral dialog in accreditation and affirmation. My earlier thoughts with commentary on the role of these ceremonies in psychotherapy can be found in the essay, Degradation, Accreditation, and Rites of Passage, Psychiatry, 1979.  Also note Harold Garfinkel's Conditions for Successful Degradation Ceremonies, American Journal of Sociology, 1956.  And see, Walter Torres and Raymond Bergner's Humiliation: Its Nature and Consequences, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, 2010.

I have discussed the use of Paradigm Case Formulations in the entry, Empathy and the Problem of Definition.  The Descriptive Psychology concept of "community" is central to an understanding of the context of social roles and gives actions their particular meaning. Anthony Putman's essay, Communities, Advances in Descriptive Psychology, 1981, clarifies this vital concept.

Consider this Harvard Study on Depression and Discrimination: http://hms.harvard.edu/news/depression-and-discrimination?utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_content=s3&utm_campaign=1.05.15.HMS

But here's a song by John Hiatt, asking, is anybody there? Are you good enough?  It resonates.

Dreaming as Playtime

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.  Bob Dylan


I had a funny thought while dreaming.  I don't recall the details, but I was having fun talking with someone I really liked. I don't know what provoked me to say, "if I didn’t dream, I’d be too bored to sleep", but it woke me up. I jotted down some notes, went back to sleep and the conversation continued. 

Sometimes I go back to sleep to continue a dream or to mess around with the story. I like to sleep and dream. Freud suggested that dreams function to preserve sleep and that works for me. 

My experience of dreaming is not typical, nor is it fundamentally different from other people's, just a bit more lucid.  My dreaming has been shaped by my interest and the skills that come from paying careful attention. 

As an experimentalist, I was once part of a group that empirically demonstrated that one's current problems, dilemmas and opportunities are basic units of dream content and connect dream experience to waking life. I think we clarified that the dilemmas and opportunities represented during dreaming are similar to those a person has while awake but less constrained by the realities of the waking world.  This freedom invites dreams to be fleshed out by a person's imaginative capacities and interests. Freud called this a primary process governed by a pleasure principle freed from reality testing. But clearly dreams are more than that. 

Freud also recognized that dreams involve somewhat less deliberate thinking than waking thought and this provides dreams with an impulsive and emotional quality. Deliberation is not so essential when safe in bed. Pleasure and self-interest are prominent in dreams with ethical and moral concerns diminished since there is less consequence to what we do when asleep. The diminished role of ethical considerations may follow from dreams being a less deliberate act. What I do in my dreams doesn't get me in the same sort of trouble that waking action would, and I may be less prone to think about alternatives and consequences. 

More and more as I get older, my dreams provide an opportunity to

play. 

Every dream is personal, shaped by the dreamer's characteristics relevant to the circumstances the dream offers up. I am not someone else when dreaming but I go places and do things not otherwise possible. When asleep I am very skilled at flying. It took some practice but I'm good at it now. As a child, I'd sometimes crash, but now I soar. 

When I say I am not someone else when dreaming, it occurs to me that I have sometimes dreamt I was one of my dogs. But no one who knows me would find that out of character. 

Back to my sleepy wonderings.  Here's the gist of what I wrote down: 

1. Sleep is a necessary restorative. I can’t do without it.
2. Some dreams wake me up because they are too arousing, tedious, frustrating, or frightening. (Fortunately for me, these are rare, but those feelings are also rare in my current waking life.  Knock on wood.) 
3. If I didn’t have something interesting to dream, after “x” amount of sleep, my waking concerns would grab my attention and I'd awaken and be up to my usual mischief. So I get another forty winks, whether I need it or not.

So what I am wondering, and this question woke me up, does playful dreaming help preserve sleep by providing something interesting to stay asleep and think about? Of course, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. (That, in turn, reflects waking life's worries and opportunities).  Not to make too much of this, but most dreaming occurs in the later periods of sleep. 

As far as I know, dreams as a manner of keeping sleep interesting, as a way of playing, is under-explored in the literature. I am not arguing that the function of dreaming is to have a place to play but rather that dreams present an opportunity to play. Dreamplay might be adaptive but is a worthy thing-in-itself apart from any adaptive advantage it offers; a spandrel as Gould and Lewontin might say.

I have been thinking about play, especially creative play, as a fundamental feature of life, always an option when we're free of desperation and need, and maybe even then. Ernest Hartmann describes dreaming as making connections in a safe place. When those connections are fun, there's reason to remain asleep. 

Some references: Schwartz & Godwyn, Action and Representation in Ordinary and Lucid Dreams, 1988. Greenberg, Katz, Schwartz & Pearlman,  A Research Based Reconsideration of the Psychoanalytic Theory of Dreaming, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1992,  and Hartmann, E. The Nature and Function of Dreaming, Oxford 2011.  Gould and Lewontin, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" Proc. Roy. Soc. London B, 1979.

Do certain Fat-Tailed Lemurs hibernate to maximize dreamtime? Do you like interesting animal facts, then check this out: The Mysterious Brain of the Fat-Tailed Dwarf Lemur, the World's Only Hibernating Primate.  Klopfer and his team discovered that when hibernating dwarf lemurs sleep, they exclusively enter REM-sleep and they stay in REM sleep for an unusually long time. This is counter-intuitive since REM sleep involves a higher metabolic output than other states of sleep (at least for humans) : Metabolic rate and fuel utilization during sleep assessed by whole-body indirect calorimetry. ) Do these lemurs live to dream?

 And lizards dream, too.

And maybe the play is the thing:  Playing for the fun of it. Some notes on our playful universe.

Through-Lines, the Dramaturgical Pattern and the Structure of Improvisation: A work in progress.

Through-Lines, the Dramaturgical Pattern and the Structure of Improvisation:  A Descriptive Psychological Account

Abstract

Improvisation creates novel social practices, manners of engagement and meaning, that are  intrinsic to the lives of persons. Unfortunately, most existing systems of psychology, given their commitment to causal explanation and reductionism while attempting to be systematic and scientific, have failed to provide a satisfying account of the creative nature of improvisation. In contrast, those psychologies that do embrace the creative and novel tend to lack sufficient systematic structure required for an intellectually satisfying understanding of persons, let alone an empirical science. An exception to this state of affairs can be found in the discipline of Descriptive Psychology. The Descriptive Psychology concepts of Dramaturgical Pattern and Through-Lines are offered as tools serviceable for a precise and systematic clarification of improvisation in everyday life.

Part 1: Some Descriptive Psychology Concepts

.... All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. ... (109)
.... Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. .... (126) Ludwig Wittgenstein, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

What makes an individual a person is, paradigmatically, to have mastered the concept of a Person. Peter G. Ossorio, PLACE

Improvisation creates novel social practices, manners of engagement and meaning that are an intrinsic feature of the lives of persons. Unfortunately, most existing systems of psychology, given their commitment to causal explanation and reductionism, while attempting to be systematic and scientific, have failed to provide a satisfying account of the creative nature of improvisation. In contrast, those psychologies that do embrace the creative and novel tend to lack sufficient systematic structure required for an intellectually satisfying understanding of persons, let alone an empirical science. An exception to this state of affairs can be found in the discipline of Descriptive Psychology as it has unfolded over the last forty or so years.

Descriptive Psychology is the intellectual discipline that makes explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. It develops conceptual, pre-empirical and theory-neutral formulations identifying the full range of a subject matter. This concern with full inclusion, with clarifying the full set of possibilities, is a hallmark of Descriptive Psychology.

The pre-empirical work is accomplished through identifying and interrelating the essential concepts, the vital distinctions, characterizing all possible instances of a subject matter.  The empirical project, on the other hand, involves finding the specific possibilities and patterns that actually occur. To do this, we use our conceptual tools and go out and look.  Descriptive Psychology separates the conceptual and empirical from the theoretical. The conceptual formulation is logically prior to finding appropriate empirical instances.

Once an adequate conceptualization is achieved, theory may be employed for explaining why, out of the full range of possibility, only certain empirical patterns are found.

What I hope to accomplish here is to provide a very brief introduction to Descriptive Psychology relevant to a systematic exploration of improvisation. So, to set a stage, here is a relevant set of descriptive maxims that identify some of the structure of improvisation. From Ossorio’s Place, (1998/2012):

F5. If C makes the first move in a social practice, that invites Z to continue the enactment of the practice by making the corresponding second move. (Move 1 invites Move 2.)
F6. If C makes the second move in a social practice, it makes it difficult for Z not to have already made the first move. (Move 2 preempts Move 1 ex post facto.)
F7. Z’s positive or negative evaluation of C’s behavior provides reasons for C to continue, discontinue, modify, or elaborate (etc.) such behavior.

For purposes of this essay, I am going to focus on the Descriptive Psychological concept of a person as an individual who is inherently able to improvise.

A Person is an individual who paradigmatically engages in:

1. Deliberate Action (An intentional or goal directed action in which the actor is both cognizant and chooses to do it)
2. Language  (deliberate symbolic verbal behavior)
3. The significance of which reflects the actor’s perspectives and concerns with Hedonics (pleasure, pain, disgust, noxiousness, etc), prudence (self -interest, what is to my advantage or disadvantage, aesthetics (fittingness in the artistic, intellectual and social domains), ethics/morality (right or wrong, fair or unfair, just or unjust, and carries duty or obligation).  
4. Resulting in a Dramaturgical Pattern of intelligible Through-Lines  (i.e. significance patterns).

The concept of behavior employed in Descriptive Psychology involves a Parametric Analysis of Intentional Action allowing an observer to indicate how any particular action is the same or different from any other action. It looks like this:

  Behavior = Intentional Action = < I, W, K, KH, P, A, S, PC >

I: The Identity of the actor.
W:  What the actor wants to accomplish.
K:  What the actor knows, distinguishes, or recognizes in the circumstance that are relevant to what the actor wants. (In Deliberate Action the actor recognizes different options, in Cognizant Action the actor is self aware of the ongoing behavior).
KH:  What the actor knows-how to do given what the actor wants and knows about the relevant circumstance.
P:  The procedural manner or performance of the action in real time.
A:  The achievement of the action.
S:  The significance of the action for the actor.
PC:  The personal characteristics of the actor expressed by the action.

Persons as Deliberate Actors are able to self-regulate or adjust their behavior to fit their changing circumstances in response to their appraisal of how effective they are in achieving their goals. For this, Descriptive Psychology employs the Actor-Observer-Critic feedback loop of self-regulation. A person is an Actor able to Observe and describe his behavior and Critique and adjust his behavior accordingly.  The observer’s role involves engaging in Cognizant Action and the critic role involves Deliberate Action.

Although this feedback could be a process of deliberation, of thinking through the possibilities, it ordinarily isn't. Instead, for the most part, people simply recognize their options and what they take is the "best" course to follow.

The A-O-C model naturally relates to the concepts of Intentional, Cognizant and Deliberate Action. Cognizant and Deliberate Action are types of Intentional Action along with Emotional and Unconscious action. All are intentional but not all involve the same degree of awareness. Emotional actions are cases where a person has a tendency to act intentionally and immediately on their recognition or reality appraisal without deliberation.

I will employ the concepts above in what follows.

Part 2: Through-Lines and the Dramaturgical Pattern

“Dealing with heterogeneous behavior patterns as a single type of behavior does nothing toward elucidating the pattern. And yet the understanding of such full scale patterns in real life is essential for understanding the behavior of persons.”
(Peter G. Ossorio, The Behavior of Persons, 2013, p 293)

Everyone has a place on the stage of the world. Everyone is in the game. The stage has props and actors. The game has rules and boundaries. The players have statuses assigned by themselves and others as they go about their different roles.  Some people are well cast for what they encounter and some are not.  At times people recognize the part they are playing, at times they don’t. How cognizant and well cast is always a matter of “more or less”.

Although there are reality constraints, how the drama or game unfolds is uncertain. The actors are agents who play within and against the constraints.

Living one's life involves improvisation.  There is no “script” except ex post facto; it emerges from the interaction. The actors might be told what they should be doing, they may have plans, but such direction does not determine what actually happens.  The only certainty is that choices will be made and action will ensue.  Actions will follow from the opportunities and dilemmas that accompany each player’s unfolding circumstances given their individual and changing powers and dispositions.  Since it is improvisation, the actors will change each other as they interact, as their response incorporates the other player's moves.

Conceptualization:

What a person finds significant organizes their selection of specific behaviors. Implementation rests on both recognized opportunity and the actor’s competence.  Implementation is the performance. I know what I am doing because I know what I am about. I make choices based on their significance to me. You understand what I am about by observing and thinking about my performances. Performances have achievements and consequences.

Notable patterns of significance implemented over time with their corresponding consequences establish what I am calling a  “through-line”.  This concept bears a family resemblance to Stanislaviski’s (1936/1989) concept of through lines but is adapted for the purposes of precise behavior description rather than actor motivation.

Through-lines identify what it is in character and out of character for an actor. Keep in mind that self-status claims of something being “out of character” may be “in character”.  People can deny responsibility and disown their actions. It takes an observer-critic to point out when this happens.

Through-lines identify not just the organization of patterns of significance, but also the actor’s power and disposition to use what is achieved for corrective feedback. Through-lines are constituent treads of life's dramaturgical patterns.

Identifying through-lines is an observer’s task, subject to all the dilemmas of observation, disagreement and negotiation. Notice that as an observer's task, the identification of through-lines involves an appreciation of the actor’s reckoning with the consequences of implementation.  Implementation, the performance of the intended act, achieves some new state of affairs. Consequences, to the extent known, are part of corrective feedback. Here cognizance matters. The observer can be the actor or someone else.  Corrective feedback can be effective or ineffective. Does the actor learn from his mistakes? Are mistakes even recognized? Does the actor have the know-how or competence to do something differently when similar circumstances recur?

The pattern of through-lines intertwined together over the course of life weaves a dramaturgical pattern of unfolding social practices, performances linked by their achieved consequence and significance.  People simultaneously and sequentially live on many fronts as they go about their lives. Some through-lines may appear consistent with the other ways a person goes about living, while others may not. Some may appear for a time, disappear, later to reemerge. They may end in satisfaction or be abandoned in frustrated disappointment. They may be given up with insight or because of an absence of opportunity for expression. Some may seem to go on forever.

The fundamental coherence of the dramaturgical patterns is that a person's life makes narrative sense. The choices made are not random or arbitrary but follow from opportunity and the significances that a person's values, knowledge and competency allow. But people are complicated. Circumstances are complicated. Even knowing a person's true colors, they still can throw you for a loop.

Part 3: Formulation of "Through-Lines" and "Dramaturgical Pattern"

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Søren Kierkegaard

"The appropriate size of the unit for conceptualizing a person is not a behavior but a life history."
Peter G. Ossorio

"You do not know that your intentions will be carried out but you can suppose that they will be. Then you must have an idea about the rest of your day. Don't you feel that solid line as it stretches out into the future, fraught with cares, responsibilities, joys, and griefs? In looking ahead there is a certain movement, and where there is movement a line begins."  
Constantin Stanislavski

"I spoke of performers and audiences; of routines and parts; of performances coming off or falling flat; of cues, stage settings and backstage; of dramaturgical needs, dramaturgical skills, and dramaturgical strategies. Now it should be admitted that this attempt to press a mere analogy so far was in part a rhetoric and a maneuver." 
Erving Goffman

A Dramaturgical Model

"In the Dramaturgical Model, behavior is intrinsically and fundamentally a matter of creating and realizing personal and social dramas. Human lives are intrinsically and fundamentally dramatic in form."

"... a drama is a structured behavioral episode or series of episodes which makes sense to Us." Peter G. Ossorio


Dramaturgical patterns are the creative improvisation of individuals, of ongoing and overlapping social practices, resulting in the creation of their worlds.

Through-lines are significance-implementation-achievement patterns of social practices. Through-lines are the observed patterns of choice made by a person that reflect what the person finds intrinsic. Significance linked intrinsic social practices are through-lines. A set of temporally co-occurring through-lines, a "bundle", constitute some of the intentional aspects of the overall Dramaturgical Pattern for any meaningful duration up to and including a person's entire life span. (The word "world" derives from an old Anglo-Saxon locution that meant "the course of a man's life").

Nothing necessarily ties a bundle together except that the varied through-lines express a person's significant concerns enacted in the same life-interval. Sequential and co-occurring through-lines may be relatively independent, or have a dynamic relationship of interdependence, conflict, complementarity, inhibition, and so on.

The overall Dramaturgical Pattern with its constituent through-lines involves a person's response to sought-after and unsought circumstances.  Accidents and the passage of time are the not chosen features of life that necessarily shape a person's history. A person's life also includes average expected challenges that follow from age, sex, gender, class, culture, appearance, etc.

The overall Dramaturgical Pattern also involves social practices independent from what an observer classifies as a through-line.  Some challenges and opportunities might happen infrequently resulting in one-off behavior hard to classify. An observer may be noncommittal about assigning such behavior as in or out of character. Some social practices may not be part of a discernible through-line.

A person creates a world in the wake of his progress. In the role of observer-critic, a person notes the quality and significance of how his implementations create, change and maintain this world.

From a observer's perspective, a through-line is a set of social practices, extended over time, that constitute the enactment of a status that is a significant aspect of a person's identity.  The observer can be oneself or another.

A person's self-knowledge of engaging in what she finds intrinsically significant will correspond to what she can acknowledge as in character. Observers may differ about the adequacy or accuracy of such self-status assignments.

Given continued relevance and opportunity, a through-line can appear, disappear and reappear. Significant changes in what a person finds intrinsically significant correspond to where a through-line may start and end.  There are as many through-lines as an observer can potentially identify.

Identification and Knowledge of Through-Lines:

To say that a Person "A" knows one of Person "B's" Through-Lines, she would have observed that

A) "B" engaged in a series of social practices that

B) Share a common significance

C) The specific implementation/performance of the practices

D) What the implementations achieved in "B's" world

E) What "B" knows regarding what the implementations achieved

F) How "B" appraised the consequences of the achievement

G) How "B" did or did not correct his course of action based on his appraisal of the consequences.

And produce

H) A significance description that encompasses A) through G) and names this particular through-line. (Reduce the details and/or increase the abstraction until a workable encompassing significance description can be offered).

The through-line will describe improvisational creative engagements with the circumstances of a person's world in which a person's relevant personal characteristics are identified as making understandable the way the person acts given their opportunities and dilemmas.

To the extent that an observer identifies significance linked intrinsic social practices germane to the actor's identity, she will have identified a through-line.  She could just as well be commenting on the actor's world since she will be offering a commentary that links the actor's personal characteristics to the sort of world he finds, creates and maintains.

The Descriptive Psychological concept "through-lines" resides in an intermediate zone between social practices and ways of life (Ossorio, 2006/2013).  People know how they expect to live their lives; looking back, their observer-critics can understand what they actually did.

Incomplete descriptions of through-lines that lack information regarding their significance and achievement correspond to the standard dispositional descriptions of traits, attitudes, interests and styles.

Part 4: Examples of Through-Lines

The through-line concept refers to a person's history of varied performances that have a common and recurring significance. Any personal characteristic can be an aspect of a through-line description.  Here’s some examples of how they look. When there is opportunity and while doing other things as well:

She heedlessly and perhaps unconsciously goes through life attempting to score competitive victories with women who resemble her mother and does so with an eye toward currying favor with unobtainable men. 

While fearfully avoiding degradation, he manages his affairs in such a way as to offend no one while never stepping outside of what be thinks are his competencies. 



He consciously and unconsciously strives to put people in a helpless position in a manner that keeps him, in his view, on the moral high ground. 



Terrified of being alone and doubting her worth to others, she seeks satisfaction by tolerating the abusive needs of others or in actions that undo and distract her from being aware of her loneliness.

Requiring a sense of specialness, he looks for opportunities to demonstrate his worth by achievement in competitive arenas while making sure not to out-step the values and achievements of those he considers the conventional esteemed judges. 



Notice the multiplicity of similar and dissimilar performances that can be the enactment, performance or implementation of the significance described in any of the examples above.

Further:

There is not always opportunity nor will an opportunity that exists in the ongoing circumstances always be reason enough for something of significance to be enacted. A person's other significant hedonic, prudent, aesthetic and ethical perspectives might prevail. Still, over time, patterns can be observed by self or other defining what is in character for the actor in question.

Some through-lines can coexist with other through-lines. And some implementations may satisfy a variety of through-lines. 



A through-line is a significance driven description that can be built with any and all of the relevant features needed to make a pattern understandable regarding what a person is repeatedly up to in the course of their life.

Some through-lines end in satisfaction, some are out grown or are no longer relevant, some are extended compulsively without satisfaction, while others are extended because the satisfactions remain valued. 

They may look, in some cases, to the psychoanalytic observer as a function of a fixation.

A through-line that has significant unconscious aspects is prone to unsatisfying repetition since the actor is not in a good position to critically modify behavior or reorder priorities.  This is the heart of the repetition compulsion if it involves fundamental and ongoing desire. Sex, trauma and dependency may work this way when the desire for connection, restoration or support remains without a self-aware practicing of alternative serviceable implementations. Without adequate self-critical awareness, a person may repeat a tragic pattern, feeling born to lose unable to learn from misfortune.

Through-lines organize a descriptive narrative in a manner that highlights a status dynamic similar to what Roy Schafer (1976) called psychoanalytic action language.

While writing this I was troubled by the generally negative, restrictive and pathological tone of the examples. To the extent that pathology involves a restriction in behavior potential or ability, it is often easier to identify patterns. Pathological restrictions limits performance in a manner that produces stereotyped behaviors.  This is what allows diagnostic categories to work. Pathology is simpler than health. The through-lines of the healthy are organized in a manner that involves varied and flexible satisfactions with less insistent repetition. A happy and healthy life is less predicable than one restricted by fixation and compulsion. So how's this:

Grabbing all the gusto she can, mindful of the rights and plights of others but careful not to compromise herself, she speaks truth to power while seeking novelty, pleasure and beauty.



Works Cited

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1959

Ossorio, Peter G. Place. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. 1998/2012

Ossorio, Peter G. The Behavior of Persons. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. 2006/2013

Schafer, Roy. A New Language for Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1976

Stanislavski, Constantin.   An Actor Prepares.  New York: Routledge. 1936/1989

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations.  Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 1953/2009



The following is from a May 11th, 2014  exchange between Joe Jeffrey and myself regarding the "through-line" concept:

1) What's the difference between "pattern of significance" and "pattern of behaviors," particularly in light of the fact that the concept of behavior includes that of significance? In other words, is "pattern of significance" saying anything different from "pattern of intrinsic practices"? If so, what?

I am always amazed that although the concept of "intrinsic practices" makes immediate sense to me, rarely do others outside our team get it. Patterns of intrinsic behavior, I think, mean behaviors that are not instrumental, that is, not done for the purposes of doing something else. Instead, intrinsic behaviors are self-contained in purpose, are reason enough without having to refer to another behavior or level of significance to make understandable. So, to the question are "patterns of significance" different from "patterns of behavior,": Yes, I do mean something different. All Intentional Actions (IA) have Significance (S) of some sort and that significance may be intrinsic or instrumental. A through-line identifies a group or pattern of behaviors that over time show the same Significance. The Performance (P) parameter (the implementation) may be the same or different, the S parameter is always the same.

Now, this is where the issue of usefulness appears. At some level of abstraction all of a person's S can be one of, I guess, 4 significances, Hedonic, Prudent, etc. so at the most abstract and not very useful level, at least not descriptively or clinically useful, we could talk about the interplay of hedonic, prudent.... through lines. (But as I will indicate below, even so it is more than that). We'd see individual differences but at too molar, too large a grouping, to really help understand an individual person's status dynamics. It is sort of dealer's choice what degree of abstraction is useful and the examples I have provided get at that intermediate level somewhere between a social practice and a way of life. (I suppose we would find similar difficulties with "ways of life".)

So "pattern of significance" seems clear to me but maybe it creates some ambiguity with all IAs having significance. I mean the IAs that have the same S even through the P may be the same or very different.

2) What is the point of talking about implementation? Is it any different from the existing concepts of personal characteristics, which include the concept of the version of an intrinsic practice the person engages in (e.g., "He much prefers driving in the outside lane," "She put a high priority on esthetic considerations in everything she does," "He's aggressive, but in a passive, low-power style," etc.) Or, to ask it differently, what would be missing if you left out all reference to implementation, and just said, "Patterns of significance" (or, "Patterns if intrinsic practices"?)

And here is where I thought I was using just another ordinary language synonym for performance, i.e. implementation. One of the intellectual powers of Descriptive is an attempt at exact and precise language with a particular attention to nuance. I have learned when talking to members outside the tribe that our repeated use of the same word becomes baseball talk for me but soccer for her. So using a variety of words with the same meaning while anchoring them in the exact formulation of IA parameters seems to help clear up the way I am using our technical language. . I am surprised, at times, when I use the term "Performance" and people take it to mean something different than the P parameter. So I use other words that seem to clear up the nuanced meaning such as Implementation. Seems to work with them but maybe not so much with us.

In any case, there are many ways to perform or implement a behavior, an IA, that has shared significance. I find all sorts of ways to get myself in the same sort of trouble but you might not notice I was up to the same sort of mischief if you only looked at the P or the implementation without knowing that they share the same S.

One other point for now: The S matters but for the observer of a through line, the actors K of A and how that effects subsequent implementations is also key. This feedback is of central clinical/status dynamic significance. So modifiers like, Mindfully, Heedlessly, Recklessly, With-ever-greater focus, are part of a possible through line description.


3) Pete says (Behavior of Persons, p. 290), "At a concrete level of description the behavior pattern in question is a sequence of Versions of multiply overlapping social practices. The larger scale structure will not be a social practice.....The term "drama" is use here to designate such behavior patterns: a drama is a structured behavioral episodes or series of episodes which make sense to Us." So: when you talk about through-lines, are you saying anything different than "dramas" -- i.e., structured series of behavioral episodes that make sense to Us?" If you are, could you help me see what?

Yes and no. I am giving the observer's description of repeated dramas. A person engages in many different overlapping dramas and the dramas that share the same significance are through-lines in a person's life.

4) Your characterization, "through-lines are significance-implementation-achievement patterns of social practices" appears to articulating a particular kind of behavior description, a "through-line description," just as "achievement description" is a form of behavior description. Specifically, it is form of description that identifies a pattern, the intrinsic practices, the versions of those practices, and the specific outcomes of those versions." As I believe have said elsewhere, I think that's an excellent idea, one that is very helpful, particularly in making sense of a person's life. If that is the case, we would have available things like, "Let's give a through-line description of the dramas [the structured series of behavioral episodes] that comprise this guys life, and look carefully at the kind of outcomes he keeps getting." In other words, through-line description would be a tool for helping focus on one aspect or another of a person's life, in an organized, systematic way. We would have immediately a series of questions: 1) OK, it's a pattern; what kind of pattern? Sequential? Scattered over time? Constantly overwhelming all others dramas? Appropriate to the circumstances? Idiosyncratic but not pathological? 2) What intrinsic practices? 3) What kind of versions? 4) What kind of outcomes? So: am I correct or not? Is the concept here that of through-line description?

Yes.