Tilt you head and look at the world

The way we interpret the world around us is a pretty interesting topic.  Our good friend Garfinkel states that we have a documentary method of interpretation, which “consists of treating an actual appearance as ‘the document of’, as ‘pointing to’, as ‘standing on behalf of’ a presupposed underlying pattern. Not only is the underlying pattern derived from its individual documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are interpreted on the basis of what is known about the underlying pattern. Each is used to elaborate the other” (2002, p. 78). 

This was a little bit difficult to wrap your head around, so I went trawling through some blogs to see who could explain it.  I found that Mitch SOC250’s blogpost The Social and MoralOrder in Talk used a helpful analogy to explain this concept.  He says that the people we know can be thought of as draws in the filing cabinet that is the brain. When we think about a person e know, that draw is opened and we view the file associated with that person.  These files might be memories, ideas or labels we connect with this person and are based on our experiences with them.

I think that is easy enough to understand.  We build up a repository of information about people (or things) we know, but it is the next part of the analogy that gets interesting.

The documenting system works in a cyclic fashion, yes that’s right.  We develop an image of who people are, and so this image dictates how we perceive that person.  For example if we think that someone is an intelligent person, if we see them silent when faced with a question we might assume they are pondering an eloquent answer or giving silence as a clever response rather than not knowing the answer.  We try to fit things into to our understanding of the world rather than change it. So essentially individual evidences are interpreted on the basis of what is already known about the underlying pattern (Heritage 1984, p. 86). 

To illustrate this I thought it would be fun to fill this post with as many duck-rabbits as I could find.  If what is known about the following images is that they are ducks, then all information that does not support their duckness is treated as irrelevant.  Now watch what happens when you think they’re rabbits…

http://emscheffel.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/turbulent-times-and-wittgensteins-duckrabbit/

http://neurochannels.blogspot.com.au/2009_09_01_archive.html

http://www.bunnylicious.org/2009/01/perceptual-interpretation/

http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/wittgenstein-in-a-duckrabbit-47554.html

http://duckrabbit.blogspot.com.au/

Reference List:

Garfinkel 2002, Studies  in  Ethnomethodology , Polity Press, Cambridge.

Heritage, J. 1984, ‘The Morality of Cognition’, in Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp75-102.