Scope and Reduction, Excerpts from A Grammar of Motives, in Chapter 10 of On Symbols and Society

10. Excerpts from “Scope and Reduction,” in A Grammar of Motives, 59-61, 77-85, 108-117.

The Representative Anecdote

The first 3 sentences allude to terministic screens. Vocabularies are reflections, selections, and deflections of reality. Terminologies are calculi. A representative anecdote is a part that actually does represent the whole. Like a case study.

The representative anecdote is a dramatistic approach to dramatism (60). The anecdote is “a summation, containing implicitly what the system that is developed from it contains explicitly” (60). Once we have a representative anecdote, we begin to wonder what its paradigm would be, its pure act, or the prototype of acts. The paradigm, whether it is real or not, is the Act of Creation.

Circumference

Like scope, circumference can be expanded and contracted. The bigger it is, the more we can do with it, but the more narrow it is the more it applies to specific situations. [We can expand it to include a creator?] Implicit in terms are circumferences of varying scope. “Motivationally, they involve such relationships as are revealed in the analysis of the scene-act and scene-agent ratios whereby the quality of the context in which a subject is placed will affect the quality of the subject placed in that context” (78). We should pay attention to how circumferences are defined because they are implicit but important. We should pay attention, even when it seems like it’s not a huge deal (like in scientific discourse).

Even behaviorists make circumferences, which change the scope, though they wouldn't admit it. Narrowing the circumference shifts emphasis from final cause to efficient cause. Selecting a circumference is an “Act of Faith” (84), so to speak, because it means choosing a starting point without knowing what is going to come out of it. 

Money as Substitute for God

Temporality and material calls for a reduction of the circumference. Inventing a machine is action. Feeding one is motion. Money is god-term, a summing up of material things.

The Nature of Monetary “Reality”

In one sense, money is an agency, a medium. But that’s not all it is. It’s also a ground for rationalizing action. If there’s no money, people think, there’s no freedom, nothing of anything else. When we owe money, we are in debt, and are guilty. We want credit, not debit. People start to believe that more money means a higher quality of life. Discussion of a loss of real things from a hurricane versus loss of non-real things from stock market crash. The things are gone, whereas the "things" that really weren't "things" are "gone," even though they weren't really "here" in the first place.