Emerging from charter TIPS enrollment lurking with only an occasional
post....
Every time a student or colleague brings up "PC" I am reminded that this
designation is probably not a helpful (i.e., reliable or meaningful)
container for a complicated human interaction. What folks typically mean in
demarcating some instance as "PC" seems to be either,
1. using a particular linguistic reference (e.g., Hispanic-American) instead
of its colloquial equivalent ("Spanish") in a self-conscious, dutiful,
smarmy, and perhaps smugly justifying fashion, or
2. constraining one's conversation or behavior around notions of propriety
or political spin.
I often tell students that we know we are accomplishing something in our
classrooms or supervision sessions when we wind up having a conversation
around a topic that we could NOT have were we elsewhere on campus, or were
we not standing on various giants' shoulders (both popular
post-positivistic, deconstructivist ideas, I assure you); I call this
"talking psychology talk" and it is a challenge. Witness occasional
interactions even on TIPS. So I have thought over the years about how
psychologists might contribute to the important conversation around PC in a
way that even well intentioned historians and columnists cannot (not a jab
at either Louis, whose notions about teaching strike me typically as
provocative, nor at George Will, whose observation I cite frequently that
football, that quintessentially US institution, combines the two worst
elements of its society: violence and committee meetings). What can we say
talking psychology talk that could not be otherwise spoken?
It seems to me that I am most curious about the way that psychology might
speak to the first so-called PC domain above. The second is, perhaps,
better within the purview of sociologists and anthropologists and
sociobiologists culturalists and political scientists (although there are
some elegant social psychological formulations that would apply).
So, to the first. In response to various "little PC spats" over whether a
firefighter is referred to thusly or as a "fireman," or over whether
"homosexual" is still a reasonable covering category for a particularly
fuzzy way of being oriented sexually, I always recall among other notions
the work of Rips, Shoben, Smith, and others on category formation, and the
way that this work has flowed into other fertile fields of inquiry on
semantic nets and cognitive structure and other stuff. They asked
respondents to name a bird, found that they were far more likely to generate
"Robin" than "Penguin," and based on this observation went on to examine the
notion of prototypes, concept formation, and latent organizational
dimensions (such as "bird" living in our experience in a way that flocks
around size, predaticity, and the like).
There are essential and influential differences in what territories of
experience are accessed by various semantic hooks. It is worth being
precise and clear about the semantic hook with respect to which territory of
experience we want to engage. Hand people a collection of pictures,
including some of women and men dressed as firefighters, and ask them to
select one representative of "fireman." Perform the task with another group
asking that they select one for "firefighter." The gender-specificity of
the two response sets varies reliably. Ditto for "colored" vs.
"African-American," for "gay" vs. "homosexual," for "liberal" vs.
"communist," etc. "PC" has nothing to do with it. It's psychology talk.
So we might hear the question as psychologists not as to whether to kowtow
to some imagined notion about how we should speak so as to appear sensitive,
or how we should rebel against this ideal so as to appear iconoclastic, but
rather, which precise categories of cognitive and affective and behavioral
(let alone UCs) experience do we want to hook linguistically?
Best,
Mark Kunkel
U West Ga
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