Writing social psychology: fictional things and unpopulated texts.
Writing social psychology: fictional things and unpopulated texts.
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撰写社会心理学：虚构的事物和无人居住的文本。
DOI：
10.1111/j.2044-8309.2010.02003.x
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发表时间：
2011
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
M. Billig
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
M. Billig
本文就如何写社会心理学这一问题提出了自己的看法。它反映了作者对修辞学的长期兴趣，以及他最近对社会科学家写作的关注。作者认为，社会心理学家倾向于写出无人参与的文本，写的是“虚构的事物”，而不是人。社会心理学家认为他们的专业术语比普通语言术语更精确。作者对这种假设提出了质疑。他认为，在描述人类行为时，普通语言总体上更精确。本文从语言学和维辛格的小说概念出发，分析了为什么会出现这种情况。作者列举了一些例子来说明心理学作家是如何通过使用被动语态和名词来省略关于行为主体和他们正在进行的行为的性质的信息的。尽管他们的文本可能看起来非常专业，但实际上，它们可能非常不精确。此外，社会心理学家通过使用这种名义上的写作风格，倾向于把过程当作事物来写，然后把行为归因于这些事物。在这样做的过程中，他们创造了“虚构的东西”，他们把这些东西当作真实的东西来对待。作者提供了六条建议，以更简单、更清晰的方式写作。
This paper presents the author's position on the question how to write social psychology. It reflects the author's long-term interest in rhetoric and his more recent concerns about the writing of social scientists. The author argues that social psychologists tend to produce unpopulated texts, writing about 'fictional things' rather than people. Social psychologists assume that their technical terms are more precise than ordinary language terms. The author contests this assumption. He suggests that when it comes to describing human actions, ordinary language on the whole tends to be more precise. The paper analyses why this should be the case, drawing on ideas from linguistics and Vaihinger's notion of fictions. The author presents examples to show how psychological writers, by using passives and nominals, can omit information about the agents of action and the nature of the actions that they are performing. Although their texts may appear impressively technical, they can, in fact, be highly imprecise. Moreover, social psychologists, by using this nominal style of writing, tend to write about processes as if they were things and then attribute actions to these things. In so doing, they create 'fictional things', which they treat as if they were real things. The author offers six recommendations for writing in simpler, clearer ways.