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Review of Bernard S. Jackson, Making Sense in Law.
Linguistic, Psychological and Semiotic Perspectives (Liverpool: Deborah
Charles Publications, 1995 hbk., 1996 pbk.), pp.xii + 516.
by
Ted Sarbin
University of California, Santa Cruz
(This review appears in The Psychological Record 47
(1997), 519-20, and is here reproduced with the kind permission of its editor,
Dr. Charles Rice.)
Ostensibly designed to educate lawyers and magistrates
in the fine points of language analysis, psychological concepts, and semiotics,
this contribution to narrative psychology incorporates conceptions drawn
from developmental, cognitive, and social psychology as well as other human
science disciplines. The author, Queen Victoria Professor of Law at the
University of Liverpool, gives in-depth tutorials on cutting edge issues
in linguistics, psychology and semiotics. A sampling of the issues gives
a flavor of the content: negotiable speech acts, the display of power in
language, theories of cognitive competence, the narrative turn in social
psychology, morality and convention, behavioral style and social influence,
witnessing, and personality and emotion. In nearly every discussion, the
author brings to bear--often with apt quotations--the formulations of authoritative
scholars.
In the space of a brief review, I can only touch upon
a few of the ideas that would be of special interest to psychologists. Providing
a central theme is the theoretical framework of Algirdas J. Greimas, known
as the leader of the Paris School that refined the structural linguistics
of de Saussure. The aim of the Greimassian school is to identify basic structures
of signification, to be achieved through sense-making based on the concept
of narrative.
The Greimas model as represented here should give added
impetus to the now well-developed psychological programs of research in
discourse analysis. Two levels of analysis are proposed: the syntagmatic,
in which sense-making is dependent upon underlying patterns of action in
the form of story sequences, and the paradigmatic, in which choices of story
elements are created and employed in story-sequences. To achieve analysis
of any text, three levels of signification are advanced: (1) the manifest
level (roughly corresponding to perception); (2) the thematic level (the
stock of narratives acquired in the course of socialization and used to
make sense of perceptions; and (3) the basic structures of signification
that are claimed to be universal. Unlike Chomsky's conception, the followers
of Greimas lean toward the formulation that such deep structures are derived
from experience in a discursive world.
As I remarked above, the book is a treasure trove of tutorials
of potential value to any one interested in sense-making, whether in law,
in psychology, or any of the social and humanistic studies. For example,
the book contains a lucidly critical digest of Piaget's contributions to
sense making as well as recent developments in the study of moral judgment
and conduct. The Kohlberg and Gilligan views are presented in a balanced
way and are subjected to analysis using the tools of the semiotician.
Of special interest is the chapter "Theories of Cognitive
Competence." The author presents a masterful rendition of Chomsky's
generative linguistics that serves as a backdrop for theories advanced by
other semioticians. There is much grist for the mill and the reader is supplied
with a wealth of information to ponder the question: is language a mental
property of the individual or a social product located in the social group?
The chapter includes a discussion of Bruner's contributions in which narrative
competence is taken to be prior to linguistic competence. Narrative structuring
is seen as an inborn competence that makes possible the organization of
inputs from the world of occurrences. Particular narrative plots are locally
acquired in the course of enculturation. The nature of the inborn competence
is still to be spelled out, a task already begun by evolutionary psychologists.
A brief but incisive section records "the narrative
turn in social psychology." In the last decade, psychologists have
published a score of books that account for human action with constructions
that lean heavily on the narrative as a root metaphor. Breaking out of the
boundaries imposed by traditional positivist thinking, these scholars have
joined the ranks of scholars in the humanities and have promulgated theories
of action and theories of biography that follow from the premise that we
live in a story-shaped world.
One of many applications to legal problems is the interpretation
of emotion in stories of trials. The author offers an up-to-date discourse
on emotion and considers the problems of translating a particular story
of emotional life into discourse patterns that are acceptable in the courtroom.
In "crimes of passion", for example, the defendant commits an
act of violence in a moment of rage following a provocation by the victim.
"What actually happened"--events that necessarily included embodied
features--must be translated into "the story in the trial," a
story the telling of which must conform to the rules and customs of court
procedures. Thus the construction of the emotional life episode in the courtroom
is necessarily a cognitive reconstruction. The judge and jury are confronted
with the problem of making sense of the defendant's deformed story--the
demand for cognitive purity allows a verbal account that portrays only a
part of the story.
Has the author succeeded in the goal implied in the title
Making Sense in Law? The many relevant applications of semiotics and psychology
to the multifaceted problems of lawyers and judges would call for an affirmative
answer. This book, however, is not exclusively for practicing lawyers and
legal scholars. To be sure, it would be an important addition to the working
library of scholars practicing at the interface of psychology and the law.
But it would also be useful to scholars practicing discourse analysis, and
to scholars who may be curious about the central role of semiotics in forming
and reforming the narrative constructions that guide our understandings
and our actions.
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