Ossorio: "What do you think about community being the fifth major piece of the Person Concept or subsuming the language concept?" I’m not sure whether the reference to language is a separate question or a redo of the first. Let me just deal with the first. "What do you think about community being the fifth major piece of the Person Concept?"

That has potential. As I’ve organized things in the book, there’s the four major pieces and then from those pieces, we either derive or introduce a number of subsidiary concepts. But the second major section is "Introducing the Real World Context", and that’s where you bring in communities, world views, Actor-Observer-Critic, and a whole bunch of things like that.

Well, if you took that whole section, you say "Yeah. If language, person, reality, and behavior are the first four components, then maybe this whole extra section is a fifth component." But it doesn’t fit right. It doesn’t feel right because you got there via those first four. So I’d handle them as a derivation rather than a coordinate fifth piece. But as you can see, it’s a close cry and if you really want to work it that way, you could probably carry it off.

As I say, what’s this about "subsuming the language concept"? Do you mean in place of language?

Audience: Language is a parameter of community, so you could just put the parametric analysis of language into community and have four basic concepts, the fourth of which is community instead of language. Language would be a parameter of community.

Ossorio: I think you’ll find that all four of the basic concepts are going to be parameters of community. Remember: Community has a world; that’s reality. Community has members; that’s people. Community has social practices; that’s behavior. So you’ve got those basic components in the notion of community.

Audience: As it is, it tends not to suggest that whole range of study, for instance, that the social sciences cover, which presumably Descriptive Psychology can encompass, where you’re always dealing with things at a combined level. As a matter of public relations...[laughter]

Ossorio: One of the reasons why I say that you could probably carry it off somehow, even though I doubt that it’s optimum, is that you deal with the four basic concepts. They don’t somehow add up to community. You need to introduce the notion of community, even though it’s a community of individual people. So you can say "Yeah. There’s an irreducible something that’s contributed by community. It isn’t just derivative from these four." And then work it that way.

A lot of this stuff is simply "This is how I feel like doing it." You need to be sensitive to that because it could have been done a different way.

Audience: Pete, I hear you clarifying those distinctions right now. Would you say that what you’re drawing upon is the use of those concepts? In other words... Let me just put it more basic. What is it you’re drawing upon as you make those sets of distinctions right now?

Ossorio: I’m a competent baseball player. [laughter]

Audience: And those concepts have a place in the Person Concept?

Ossorio: Yeah.

Audience: And you are clarifying that place?

Ossorio: Yeah. This is how the thing works.

Audience: Isn’t it more than that? It’s not just that you’re a competent baseball player, because not any competent baseball player could do that at all. It’s that you know how to write the rules.

Ossorio: I’m a good grammarian, too.

Audience: To me, that’s the whole point. Anybody can recognize that "That’s a competent baseball player." "Yeah, that makes sense." But only a few people can actually write the grammar.

Ossorio: You know, a lot of it is what I call craftsmanship. No different from being a carpenter and building something where everything fits and everything is tight, etc. When you’re trying to represent a system and it isn’t already there, that everybody knows it, craftsmanship is one of the standards. Can you get all of the pieces into the picture that you need? Can you get them to fit together in the way that they need to in order to work the way we know that have to work?

So when I say "Yeah. You could carry it off somehow", essentially I’m saying "Yeah. But you’d probably pay a price aesthetically in how the whole thing was put together, in how tight it was." But it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to work.