Dramatism

## Dictum

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> All the world’s a stage,[w]
>  And all the men and women merely players;
>  They have their exits and their entrances;
>  And one man in his time plays many parts,
>  . . .

> — William Shakespeare. Jaques (Act II, Scene VII, lines 139-142)

## Prescription

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Dramatism is simply symbolism [1] in the wide sense of the word. Or, the former is a plausible metaphor for the latter. The scenario is not the drama, as "the map is not the territory."[w] Symbolism ranges from textualism to contextualism, from syntactics through semantics to pragmatics, or whatever spectrum you like. Meanwhile, dramatism is prescribed to stand for holist or contextualist beyond textualist symbolism, so as to keep distant from the pitfall of deductive and analytic philosophy, logical atomism, logical positivism, innatism, and the like. Furthermore, Ogden & Richards (1923) explain why such a symbolism should be taken very seriously:

In the establishment of symbolism, drama is the active element; it is also opposed of the parts.

> Throughout almost all our life we are treating things as signs. All experience, using the word in the widest possible sense, is either enjoyed or interpreted (i.e., treated as a sign) or both, and very little of it escapes some degree of interpretation. An account of the process of Interpretation is thus the key to the understanding of the Sign-situation,[2] and therefore the beginning of the wisdom.[3] It is astonishing that although the need for such an account has long been a commonplace in psychology, those concerned with the criticism and organization of our knowledge have with few exceptions entirely ignored the consequences of its neglect. (p. 50-51)

## Interest area

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* Dramatism [w] \- Kenneth Burke [w]
* Dramaturgy [w] \- Erving Goffman [w]
* Storytelling [w]
* Narrative [w]
* Knowledge management [w]
* Mental model [w]
* Mind map [w]
* Metaphor [w]
* Constructed language [w]
* Worldbuilding [w]
* Thick description [w]
* Affordance [w]
* Cognitive biases [w]
* Framing effect [w]
* Frame analysis [w]
* Frame semantics [w]
* General semantics [w]
* Sensemaking [w]
* Situation awareness [w]
* Situation semantics [w]
* Situated cognition [w]
* Situated learning [w]
* Experiential learning [w]
* Community of practice [w]
* Reflective practice [w]
* Behavioral ecology [w]
* Sociobiology [w]
* Sociolinguistics [w]
* Social psychology [w]
* Social constructionism [w]
* Social role [w]
* Legal realism [w]
* Legal interpretivism [w]
* Connectionism [w]
* Contextualism [w]

## References

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* C. K. Ogden[w] & I. A. Richards[w] (1923). The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.
* C. K. Ogden[w] (1930). Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar.
* Jerome Frank[w] (1930). Law and the Modern Mind. [4]
* Alfred Korzybski[w] (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.
* George Herbert Mead[w] (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Ed. by Charles W. Morris.[w] University of Chicago Press.
* I. A. Richards[w] (1936). The Philosophy of Rhetoric.
* Kurt Lewin[w] (1936). Principles of Topological Psychology.
* Kurt Lewin[w] (1946). "Action research and minority problems." Journal of Soc. Issues 2(4): 34-46.
* Robert K. Merton[w] (1957). "The Role Set Problems In Sociological Theory". British Journal of Sociology 8(2): 106–20.
* Erving Goffman[w] (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
* Kenneth Burke[w] (1966). Language As Symbolic Action: Essays On Life, Literature and Method.
* Peter L. Berger[w] & Thomas Luckmann[w] (1966). The Social Construction of Reality.
* Herbert Blumer[w] (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method.
* Gilbert Ryle[w] (1968). "The Thinking of Thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing?" University Lectures, The University of Saskatchewan. [1] [5]
* Clifford Geertz[w] (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays.
* Robert Pirsig[w] (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.[w]
* Dan Sperber[w] (1975). Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge University Press.
* Walker Percy[w] (1975). The Message in the Bottle.[w]
* Jürgen Habermas[w] (1976). Communication and the Evolution of Society.
* Charles J. Fillmore[w] (1976). "Frame semantics and the nature of language." In: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech. Volume 280: 20-32.
* Roger C. Schank[w] & Robert P. Abelson[w] (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures.
* James J. Gibson[w] (1977). The Theory of Affordances.
* Talcott Parsons[w] (1977). Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory.
* Talcott Parsons[w] (1978). Action Theory and the Human Condition.
* Chris Argyris[w] & Donald Schön[w] (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective.
* George Lakoff[w] & Mark Johnson[w] (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
* Erving Goffman[w] (1981). Forms of Talk.
* Fredric Jameson[w] (1981). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
* Donald Schön[w] (1983). The Reflective Practitioner.
* John Seely Brown,[w] Allan M. Collins[w] & Paul Duguid (1989). "Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning." Educational Researcher, vol. 18 no. 1 (Jan-Feb 198), pp. 32-42. [2]
* John Seely Brown[w] & Paul Duguid (1991). "Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation". Organization Science 2(1).
* Jean Lave[w] & Etienne Wenger[w] (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.
* Jerome Bruner[w] (1991). "The Narrative Construction of Reality". Critical Inquiry, 18:1, 1-21.

Further readings

* The Glamour of Motives: Applications of Kenneth Burke within the Sociological Field [3] by Robert Wade Kenny

Footnotes

1. ↑ Refer to the title of Ogden & Richards (1923).
2. ↑ "The study of an object alive more enlightening than that of its dead remains. The 'Sign-situation' of the Authors corresponds to the 'Context of Situation' here introduced." -- Bronislaw Malinowski[w] (1923). "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages." (Supplement I, p. 296-336) In: Ogden & Richards (1923).
3. ↑ Note the subtitle of: Manfred Kochen ed. (1975) Information for Action: From Knowledge to Wisdom that promotes H. G. Wells[w] (1938) World Brain.[w] See also: DIKW.[w]
4. ↑ Jerome Frank is famously credited with the idea that a judicial decision might be determined by what the judge had for breakfast. Cf. w: Textualism, w: Legal formalism, w: Legal interpretivism.
5. ↑ A. C. Grayling[w] (Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988, p.114) is certain that, despite the fact that Wittgenstein’s work might have possibly played some "second or third-hand [part in the promotion of] the philosophical concern for language which was dominant in the mid-century", neither Gilbert Ryle nor any of those in the so-called "Ordinary language philosophy" school that is chiefly associated with J. L. Austin (and, according to Grayling, G. E. Moore, C. D. Broad, Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer) were Wittgensteinians. More significantly, Grayling asserts that "most of them were largely unaffected by Wittgenstein’s later ideas, and some were actively hostile to them".