In 1960-80, (American) linguistic anthropology (e.g., Gumperz and Hymes , ) developed an empirical, ethnographic approach to (the details of) language (use), its social context, and variation across speakers and situations, affinities and differences. It overlapped with (Labovian) sociolinguistics — and was distinct from Chomsky’s formal, ‘universal’ approach. It defined, refined or created ‘units’ of analysis, e.g. speech community/community of practice; speech event (ethnography of communication, the SPEAKING mnemonic); everyday speech and interaction; verbal and non-verbal contextualization cues (interactional sociolinguistics); communicative habits of speakers (e.g., diglossia); indexes/indices connected to the context which help social identity formation. Thus, it defined language as a cultural practice and social resource and linked the details of performance with broader conditions of use.

In 1980-2000 interdisciplinary conversations led to new domains of inquiry: (1) language socialization: language acquisition and full participation in social groups by children and newcomers related to cultural norms, practices, attitudes; (2) language ideologies: ideas about social and linguistic relationships, linked to issues of power, politics, and economics; (3) verbal performance: creative and aesthetic uses of language and other forms of artistic expression.

Language is not a neutral medium of communication; it is embedded in social contexts and is a force that is socio-historically-politically determined.

Introduction

Starting in the late 1980s, a number of developmental psychologists and philosophers (e.g., Astington, Harris, and Olson 1988; Carruthers and Smith 1996) recast the issue of the role of intentions in interpreting people’s actions, words included, in terms of the so-called “theory of mind,” a term originally introduced by David Premack and Guy Woodruff (1978) in their work on primates’ cognition. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, linguistic and cultural anthropologists entered this tradition of studies not so much to claim cross-cultural differences in the capacity to read other minds, which they took to be a human universal, but in the need and willingness that members of different communities express and demonstrate to engage in introspection or in guessing what others might be thinking, wishing, or feeling. As shown in the following quote by Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey, the doubts that Michelle Rosaldo and I, and others, had raised in the 1980s about whether we need to involve individual intentions to interpret human action were reframed as issues of ideological control.

Starting from the observation that, according to existing ethnographic accounts, people in a number of societies in the Pacific have been said to claim – or to imply through their behavior – that it is impossible to know what goes on in another person’s mind, Robbins and Rumsey (2008) put forward the hypothesis that members of these societies subscribed to what they called “doctrine of the opacity of other minds” and that such a doctrine “matter[s] to how people operate socially” (Robbins and Rumsey 2008: 414).

Introduction

In the previous chapters I have reviewed the anthropological critique of the use of intentions in speech act theory and presented some data that further question the universality of a theory of human action mostly, if not exclusively, founded on intentions. My move to reduce or at least contain the role of an individual’s intentions in social theory should not be understood as a return to behaviorism or a flat rejection of cognitive theories that rely on the reconstruction of rational inferential processes. Rather, my intellectual engagement with the literature, on the one hand, and with analysis of spontaneous verbal exchanges, on the other, has been motivated by the need to show that in some situations participants do not seem to invoke intentions as much as a certain type of folk psychology might lead us to expect. Furthermore, a historical and cross-linguistic perspective also shows that the disembodied notion of intention found in the philosophical literature is not a universal. These data raise the issue of whether a rethinking of intentionality in anthropology might affect the ways in which we write about culture. Once we start to examine this issue, we realize that it is difficult to talk about intentionality without also rethinking the notion of truth that is adopted in ethnographic accounts.

Introduction

The anthropological critique of the use of intentions for explaining human action focuses on a small group of authors, who helped establish what could be considered the “Standard Theory” of interpretation in linguistics, the philosophy of language, and the cognitive sciences in the twentieth century. In this chapter, I review the Standard Theory, with special attention to Searle’s use of intentions in his model of linguistic as well as non-linguistic acts, Rosaldo’s criticism, and other authors’ earlier accounts and criticism of intentionality as a key feature of meaning. I also return to the question of the universality of the notion of intention by reviewing the history of the term and then engaging in a cross-linguistic analysis that will reveal hidden aspects of the semantic field covered in English by intention, intent, and intending.

The Standard Theory: Grice, Austin, and Searle

The three major authors associated with the standard theory are: H. P. Grice, for whom it is the reliance on intentions that makes linguistic meanings different from all other kinds of phenomena to which an interpretation can be given; John Austin, who included intentions in the felicity conditions for speech acts; and John Searle, who made intentions a central component of his speech act theory, his theory of mind, and, in combination with the notion of “we-intention” (see Chapter 10), his theory of society.

Is promising a human universal?

In the typology of speech acts proposed by Austin (1962) first and then further developed by Searle (1969, 1976), promising was a key example of a commissive – that is, a type of act whereby we commit to doing something (like the acts expressed by the English verbs commit, threaten, vow, pledge, offer, bid, warrant). Such commissives, as discussed in Chapter 2, have among their “felicity conditions” (for Austin) or “conditions of satisfaction” (for Searle) the speaker’s intention to do a number of things, namely, (a) carry out the act, (b) accept responsibility for such an act, (c) be under the obligation of doing it, and (d) convince the hearer that (a), (b), and (c) will be the case by using conventional language that will allow the hearer to fully understand what the speaker is up to.

The act of promising played an important role in Michelle Rosaldo’s (1982) argument that speech act theorists were Anglo- and Eurocentric. Her claim that among the Ilongots there was no notion of promise, or at least not in the sense of an act whose conditions of satisfaction are in the privacy of people’s mind or in their “psychological orientation” (1982: 212), was part of a more general trend in the anthropology of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Introduction

In this chapter I return to a case study first presented in a paper I delivered at the 1983 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, later distributed as a technical report (Duranti 1984) and then slightly revised as a journal article (Duranti 1988), and as a chapter of an edited book (Duranti 1993b). What I present here is a revision of the original paper that takes advantage of some additional inspection of the Samoan data collected in 1978–1979 and frames the issues in the broader context of this book.

Overall, the data presented in this chapter support previous claims that Samoan interpretive practices are fundamentally non- or even anti-introspective and as such tend to privilege a reading of a person’s actions in terms of their effects on social relations and on the public face of particular institutions, groups, and positional roles. Samoan epistemology, that is, shows similarities with a pragmatist interpretation of human action whereby the truth of a statement tends to be evaluated in terms of its effects. Even when people seem to be searching for causes, reasons, or sources (māfua) of wrongful behavior, discussions about “causes” usually have a brief discourse life as they tend to be quickly dismissed or ignored by the participants in the interaction (see §3.4.1 and Chapter 5). For example, we will see that even though lying is considered by the matai or ‘titled holders’ a violation of trust and something to condemn, it usually does not evoke a discussion about what the liar was trying to achieve by not telling the truth, with the exception of stereotypical explanations such as being under the influence of alcohol regardless of whether there was empirical evidence that alcohol was involved. This suggests that in Samoa, even though there is language that could be used for speculating about one’s emotions and motivations (see Gerber 1985), there is a cultural dispreference for engaging in such discursive practices and a recourse to typifications of standard cause-and-effect connections as opposed to an individual-specific analysis that might reveal unexpected and potentially unsettling results.

Introduction

In this chapter, I examine in some detail Searle’s (1990) notion of “collective intentionality” and the distinction he makes between I-Intentions and we-Intentions to argue that, contrary to what is nonchalantly claimed by Searle himself, collective intentionality is not synomymous with and cannot replace the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity, which is, in turn, a fundamental quality of all kinds of human experiences, including the apparently most individual or private. By reexamining some of Searle’s examples and providing some new ones taken from my own research on jazz instruction and jazz performance, I show that, under closer scrutiny, Searle’s notion of collective intentionality provides a limited and sometimes flawed understanding of how people carry out tasks that involve coordination and collaboration with others, including those tasks that might not seem to qualify as collective. Searle’s realization that the notion of intentionality he presented in his 1983 book needed to be expanded to take into consideration that there is something more than individual actions and individual intentions could be seen as an answer to the anthropological critique of his model (see Chapter 2). But the dichotomy he proposes between individual and collective intentions turns out to be both theoretically and empirically problematic. In the final part of this chapter I suggest that an alternative and better model of both individual and collective action can be built by integrating a phenomenological understanding of intersubjectivity with the empirical study of how people learn to and eventually succeed at coordinating their actions in complex joint activities such as playing in a jazz band.

The theoretical perspective I am favoring in this chapter is built on the assumption that the world of the individual is always a social world. We anticipate the actions of others and need to coordinate with them on a regular basis whether or not we are engaged in activities that are culturally recognized as “collective” or “joint.” Conversely, even those situations that require a high level of coordination and can qualify as collective in Searle’s sense of the term, e.g., playing in a band, require individuals to alternate between attending to their own actions and those of others in situation- and culture-specific ways that can result in smooth interaction.

The discovery of what we mean

In Chapter 3, through a detailed analysis of portions of the discussion of a Samoan fono, readers were introduced to a discursive universe where someone’s intentions are not evoked even when they might seem relevant and needed to defend someone who is blamed for someone else’s lack of fulfillment of a public commitment. In Chapter 5, I reviewed how the ways in which we understand the role of intentions in communication and the criteria for assessing truth claims are affected by the audience, the context, and the medium of interaction, including the specific speech genre used by speakers.

In this chapter I will extend my discussion of speakers’ intentions to contents and contexts that are likely to feel more familiar to many of my readers, namely, public speeches made during a political campaign in 1995–1996. But the point I will make is similar to what I discussed in previous chapters: there are contexts and interactions where it is difficult for speakers to control the meaning of their utterances. Audience members may have interpretations that a speaker cannot predict or change. Speakers, in turn, can “repair” what they just said or modify some of their message the next time they happen to talk about the same topic. By giving us the opportunity to examine speeches that were meant to be the “same” speech, political campaigns make evident what also goes on in everyday life. We often repeat the same story or make the same argument on different occasions. Each time, we make some adjustments to our audience.

Introduction

In this concluding chapter I argue that, rather than discouraging any use of “intentions,” the various cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, and historical analyses presented in the prior chapters have shown the need to formulate a more contextually rich and contextually sensitive notion of intentionality as a pan-human capacity to attend to all kinds of real and imagined entities while giving them meaning. I believe that some notion of intentionality – and thus some notion of “intention” – is needed if we want to make sense of how people orient themselves in the social world, anticipate the actions of others, and follow their own instincts, intuitions, moods, needs, and desires. Rather than just being another “language game” (Wittgenstein 1958), a discussion of “intentions” – which includes a critical stance toward it – is important for an anthropological understanding of human agency as constrained by existing relations of power and yet sometimes resistant to long-established institutional practices. One lesson of our interpretive journey has been that the reliance on intentions and their apparent avoidance must always be contextualized. The notion of “intentional continuum” will be here introduced as a way of making sense of the contextual variability in intentional action that I documented in this book.

The meaning of intentions and their uses

As discussed in Chapter 2, three prominent philosophers of language used the notion of “intention” to explain how people make sense of what someone means in saying something. I called this view the “Standard Theory.” It adopts a commonsense notion of intending to characterize a relationship of agency and (sometimes) responsibility between persons and their acts. Within the “Standard Theory,” there are some differences. Grice (1957) used the verb intend to explain what makes a given utterance meaningful for both speakers and hearers. Austin (1962, 1975) used “intention” in his “felicity conditions” for all kinds of speech acts, including promises. Searle (1983) went beyond speech, extending the use of intentions to provide his own definition of what counts as “action.”

Introduction

In this book I revisit the anthropological critique of analytic philosophers’ theories of meaning and action based on speakers’ intentions. On the basis of the empirical investigation of oral communication, face-to-face interaction, and written texts, I argue that both anthropologists and analytic philosophers overstated their case and that the salience of intentions cannot be decided once and for all because it actually varies across cultural contexts. As we will see, in some cases speakers avoid any kind of discourse about intentions, focusing on the consequences of actions rather than on their alleged original goals. But in other cases, speculation about intentions is present even in societies where people have been said to avoid reading the mind of others. My goal is to support an ethnographic and interactional perspective on intentions as cognitive, emotional, and embodied dispositions always embedded in an intersubjective world of experience. To provide such a perspective, I review previous arguments made by linguistic anthropologists and return to some of the fundamental concepts and claims of speech act theory as elaborated by John Searle over the last half century. In addition to relying on the data from three research projects – one in Samoa and two in the US – I also draw from a number of theoretical perspectives, including Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, in which both intentionality and intersubjectivity play a key role. The transcripts and written texts I analyze in some detail in the chapters to follow will demonstrate that language – broadly defined – is a great resource for us to understand how particular speakers conceptualize, perform, and understand social action. Whether or not they believe or act as if intentions matter, by using language social agents inhabit a world of others that is constraining, empowering, and inevitable. It is our task as analysts of human endeavors to examine which linguistic expressions make a difference in defining actions and assigning responsibility. Sometimes our previously conceived analytical categories provide us with a useful framework to make sense of new information. Other times, the fit is not there. An anthropological perspective must honor the universal without forgetting the particular. This book is an attempt to apply such a principle of investigation to a complex set of issues and a challenging set of data.

Introduction

In this chapter I return to Husserl’s notion of intention, which I briefly introduced in Chapter 2 (§2.4), and combine it with his notion of “modification” to describe the role that directing novices’ attention plays in socialization. I also use Husserl’s conceptual apparatus to hypothesize that, even though children and novices have ways to modify their habitual way of being and the ability to assume what Husserl called a “theoretical attitude,” the accumulation of earlier intentional and phenomenal modifications into a well-established habitus might prevent certain changes and thus certain types of learning from occurring.

Husserl’s intentionality and the relationship with the modification of attention

For Husserl, intentionality covers a wide range of acts that go from transforming raw sensations into a meaningful entity (e.g., a sequence of sounds into a song) to combining several such experiences into more complex meanings (e.g., the remembering of the time when we heard that song for the first time). An important element of Husserl’s phenomenology is the key role of attention.

By bringing some objects to the foreground while leaving others in the background, attention is one of the ways in which the temporality of our being-in-the-world gets realized (Arvidson 2003, 2006; Depraz 2004; Husserl 2004). To better capture the different ways in which the phenomenal world changes for the perceiving, thinking, acting, and interacting Subject, Husserl at times used the notion of “modification” (German Modifikation) – a term that bears a family resemblance with other terms also used by Husserl, including Wandlung, Abwandlung, and Änderung – combined with a number of adjectives that express different experiences as well as different theoretical points of view.

In transcribing Samoan speech, I have tried to use in a consistent way the spelling conventions adopted in the nineteenth century by the members of the London Missionary Society who introduced literacy in the process of translating the Bible into Samoan and making its text available in print (see Chapter 7). Some of the conventions that the missionaries chose at times create some confusion in foreigners and native speakers, partly because they are not used consistently. I have followed G. B. Milner (1966) in trying to be as consistent as possible in my spelling, but I have deviated from his use and from the choice of most students of Samoan, including anthropologists (e.g., Mead, Shore, Freeman), in one thing: I have not altered the sounds of what people said in order to conform to the standards of written Samoan or of the language that is considered to be proper by the general population. In most of the interactions that I recorded (and participated in), including the informal conversations among peers and the highly formal meetings of the village council (fono) discussed in Chapters 3 and 5, Samoans use a phonological register where the opposition between /t/ and /k/ and between /n/ and /ŋ/ are neutralized so that the alveolar segments (/t/ and /n/) disappear (see Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992: 22–24). This means that a word like talitonuga ‘belief’ will often be pronounced [kalikoŋuŋa] instead of [talitonuŋa] and the word for ‘village’ nu`u is pronounced [ŋuʔu] instead of [nuʔu]. Samoans call this pronunciation ‘bad speech’ (tautala leaga) and contrast it with the ‘good speech’ (tautala lelei) that is written, read, and spoken in prayers, songs, and in classroom interactions (see Duranti and Ochs 1986).