Values

Values are multiple, heterarchical, dynamical, and legitimating constraints on actions. Any action—reaching for a glass, driving a car, asking a question of a friend—is necessarily guided by multiple values, a fact easily overlooked by researchers. Consider, for example, what constitutes good driving. One criterion that many researchers have evaluated in isolation is accuracy (e.g., how precise is the perception of time-to-arrival of another vehicle?). Researchers were surprised to learn that drivers were not as accurate as time-to-arrival laws suggested they should be: Actions occurred “too soon” (e.g., Caird & Hancock, 1994). This is an example of an enigmatic finding, made clearer by the realization that multiple values mutually constrain each other. What appears to be an error turns out to be the operation of other values, notably safety. Stopping sooner rather than later is nearly always the right thing to do. The ecosystem of good driving is defined by many values--accuracy, safety, efficiency (e.g., speed), kindness (i.e., tolerance for others), among them.

What makes the relationships among these various values all the more interesting is that they are in tension with each other. The closer the car comes to other vehicles, the more accurate the driving, but the less tolerant and safe it is (Hodges, 1995). Good driving works to maximize all the values, not just one or a few of them. This may lead to tradeoffs, but they are temporary and reversible. Hodges and Baron (1992) referred to this as the heterarchical nature of values to contrast them with a fixed hierarchy or a simple equality. In driving, sometimes safety takes the lead and other values “follow,” while speed or kindness might predominate in other situations. Thelen and Smith (1994) refer to such dynamical constraints as being “softly assembled.” These multiple constraints that work together in heterarchical fashion to define and guide action might be thought of as the social dimension of values.

Values have an intrinsic developmental dimension that is both directed and open-ended. Any given value is itself revealed over time through attempts at realizing it. We become clearer about what clarity is through our attempts at realizing it. The mutually constraining, heterarchical relations among values are intrinsically dynamic, motivating continuing developmental change. For example, what it means to be a good driver is something that changes over time. While first learning to drive accuracy of steering and stopping increases, as well as the ability to coordinate multiple activities at once (comprehensiveness). As drivers mature and age, continued adjustments are necessary to realize values: As reflexes become slower and eyesight dimmer, drivers may decrease accuracy (e.g., leaving larger gaps between themselves and other vehicles) and comprehensiveness (e.g., driving only in daylight). Similarly, various values that constrain linguistic utterances—being clear, being brief, being newsworthy, being interesting (Slobin, 1979)—lead to the evolution of languages over time and the variation of an individual’s utterances across situations. The open-ended, developing character of values is sometimes seen as a weakness by researchers who prize specificity, fixity, and determinate goals and rules. However, the play in values is what allows action to function intentionally and adaptively. This play is a kind of juggling, an activity which has been found to be best “on the edge” of law-governed cycles of activity (Beek, Turvey, & Schmidt, 1992); Hodges, in press). Perhaps, as Bakhtin (1993) has suggested, skilled human activity is “all and always on the boundary” (p. 287).

Values are essential to legitimate the epistemic, aesthetic, and ethical activities of humans. Accounts of human activities framed only in terms of laws and rules are inadequate (Harré & Secord, 1972; Hodges & Baron, 1992; Martin & Kleindorfer, 1991; Shanon, 1993). For example, we not only have a need to talk and a desire to speak articulately, grammatically, and meaningfully, but to say something of worth. Values, the criteria of worth, have often been ignored by psychologists or treated as needs (i.e., laws) or desires (i.e., rules). For example, language studies have paid far more attention to phonology, syntax, and semantics than to pragmatics, and researchers in pragmatics have often treated values (e.g., clarity, coherence) as non-moral and rule-governed (e.g., Mey, 1993).

If we are to address values in our scientific work—and we have no choice— they should not be framed only in terms of laws and/or rules. Claims of linguistic universals (e.g., Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002; Pinker & Jackendorff, 2005) illustrate attempts to provide law-governed scientific accounts, while accounts that stress the conventional, arbitrary, and local stabilities of phonology, syntax, or semantics illustrate rule-following accounts. The difficulty with lawful and rule-following accounts of action and cognition is that they are incomplete, inconsistent, or enigmatic (e.g., Harré & Secord, 1972; Martin & Kleindorfer, 1991; Kugler, Shaw, Vicente, & Kinsella-Shaw, 1991). Laws and rules are better understood if they are nested within values-realizing dynamics. Conversely, values themselves cannot be treated as a species of laws or rules.

The claims I have made about values are not meant to undermine the existence or importance of laws and rules, but to put them in a larger context, if action is to be coordinated, directed, and worthwhile. Stabilities are necessary but insufficient; without a set of dynamics within which they can operate, laws and rules would be inadequate.

Values, Science, and Action

Does looking tell us what we ought to do? Most psychologists do not believe (at least when they are speaking as psychologists) that looking can even inform us of what our present circumstances are. It is even more preposterous, they believe, that perceiving can indicate anything reliable about the future or about what it would be good to do. In fact, it is widely believed that it is a logical mistake, a “naturalistic fallacy,” to try to move from a descriptive claim to a prescriptive one (Brinkmann, 2009). By contrast, an ecological account makes the outrageous, but perfectly defensible claim (Brinkmann, 2005, 2009; Hodges, 2007a, 2007b; Hodges & Baron, 1992) that every psychological activity, embodies a movement from is to ought. Whenever we act, including perceptual acts, we act prospectively: We orient and move toward what we take to be good. We can and do fail sometimes to realize the goods we perceive, and often we can and do fail to perceive those goods in the first place. But if perceiving, acting, and conversing were as dicey and dangerous as many cognitive accounts presume, we would not be here to argue the point.

The possibility that we can perceive directly, through conversing, the character of our surroundings, so that we can know better and worse directions in which to move, suggests that we might want to think of language itself, the activities of listening and speaking with each other over time, as a perceptual system.

Recommended reading:

Hodges, B. H., & Baron, R. M. (1992). Values as constraints on affordances: Perceiving and acting properly. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 22, 263-294.

Hodges, B. H. (2009). Ecological pragmatics: Values, dialogical arrays, complexity, and caring. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17, 628–652.