THE IDEA OF THEORY

Turnomo Rahardjo
COMMUNICATION DEPARTMENT
DIPONEGORO UNIVERSITY
THE IDEA OF THEORY
• Theories are the academic foundation of every discipline.
• They are important because they are means by which we codify and we organize
what we know.
• A theory is like a map of a city on which you can view the streets, housing
developments, shopping centers, picnic grounds, and rivers.
• Because there is a key that helps you interpret what you see.
• Theories function as guidebooks that help us understand, explain, interpret,
judge, and act into, in this case, the communication happening around us.
• They help us clarify what we are observing, which helps us understand relationships
among various parts, and help us better interpret and evaluate what is going on
around us.
THE IDEA OF THEORY
• This makes theories valueable observational aids, indicating not only
what to observe but how to observe, as well as enabling us to make
predictions about outcomes and effects in the data.
THE IDEA OF THEORY
• Theory:
• Any organized set of concepts, explanations, and principles that depicts some
aspect of human experience.
• Theories are formulated in order to help explain and understand
phenomena.
• They provide a conceptual framework or foundation from which scholars
develop knowledge.
• Theories serve various roles.
• From providing a means for evaluation of new research data to identifying
new research problems and questions to suggesting solutions to problems.
THE IDEA OF THEORY
• Different theories are different ways of “talking about”
communication.
• Each theory looks at the process communication from a different
angle.
• Communication theory:
• Single theories about communication as well as to collective wisdom found in
the entire body of theories related to communication.
THE IDEA OF THEORY
• Theories are abstractions.
• They reduce experience to a set of categories and, as a result, always leave
something out.
• A theory focuses our attention on certain things – patterns, relationships,
variables – and ignores others.
• This aspect of theory is important because it reveals the basic inadequacy of
any one theory.
• No single theory will ever reveal the whole “truth” or be able to address the
subject of investigation totally.
THE IDEA OF THEORY
• Theories are constructions.
• Theories are created by people, not ordained by some higher people.
• When scholars examine something in the world, they make choices about
• How to categorize what they are observing, what to name the concepts they
identify, how broad or narrow their focus will be, and so on.
• Thus, theories represent various ways observers see their environments.
• Theories do not “capture” reality.
• Abraham Kaplan:
• “The formation of a theory is not just the discovery of a hidden fact; the
theory is a way of looking at the facts, of organizing and representing them”.
THE IDEA OF THEORY
• Stanley Deetz:
• “A theory is a way of seeing and thinking about the world. As such it is better
seen as the ‘lens’ one uses in observation than as a ‘mirror’ of nature.
• Because theories are constructions, questioning a theory’s
usefulness is wiser than questioning its truthfulness.
• Any given truth can be represented in a variety of ways, depending on the
theorist’s orientation.
• Theories are intimately tied to action.
• How we think – our theories – guide how we act; and how we act – our
practices – guide how we think.
THE IDEA OF THEORY
• In the world scholarship, formal theories and intellectual practices are
inseparable.
• James Anderson:
• Theory “contains a set of instructions for reading the world and acting in it”.
• A theory governs how we approach our worlds.
DIMENSIONS OF THEORY
• Theories are typically seen as consisting of four dimensions:
• 1) Philosophical assumptions or basic beliefs that underlie the theory.
• 2) Concepts or building blocks of the theory.
• 3) Expanations or dynamic connections made by the theory.
• 4) Principles or guidelines for action.
PHILOSOPHICAL ASSUMPTIONS
• Philosophical Assumptions:
• The starting point for any theory is the philosophical assumptions underlying
it.
• The assumptions to which a theorist subscribes determine how a particular
theory will play out.
• Knowing the assumptions behind a theory, then, is the fisrt step to
understanding that theory.
• Philosophical assumptions often are divided into three major types:
• Epistemology or questions of knowledge.
• Ontology or questions of existence.
• Axiology or questions of value.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• The branch of philosophy that studies knowledge or how people know what they
claim to know.
• 1) To what extent can knowledge exist before experience?
• Many believe that all knowledge arises from experience.
• We observe the world and thereby come to know about it.
• But perhaps there is something in our basic nature that provides a kind of knowledge even
before we experience the world.
• The capacity to think and to perceive is cited as evidence for such inherent mechanisms.
• For example, strong evidence exists that children do not learn language entirely from hearing it spoken.
• Rather, they may acquire language by using innate models to test what they hear.
• In other words, a capacity for language exists in the brain a priori – before a child begin to
know world through experiencing it.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• 2) To what extent can knowledge be certain?
• Does knowledge exist in the world as an absolute – there for the taking by whoever
can discover it?.
• Or is knowledge relative and changing?.
• Those who take a universal stance – who believe they are seeking absolute
and unchangeable knowledge – will admit to errors in their theories.
• They believe that these errors are merely a result of not yet having discovered the
complete truth.
• Relativists believe that knowledge will never be certain because universal
reality simply does not exist.
• Instead, what we can know is filtered through our experiences and perceptions; thus,
theories evolve and change as well.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• 3) By what process does knowledge arise?
• This question is at the heart of epistemology.
• Because the kind of process selected for discovering knowledge determines
the kind of knowledge that develops from that process.
• There are at least four positions on the issue: rationalism, empiricism,
constructivism, and social constructivism.
• Rationalism:
• Knowledge arises out of the sheer power of the human mind to know the
truth (“I calls them as they is”).
• This position places ultimate faith in human reasoning to ascertain truth.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• Empiricism:
• Knowledge arises in perception.
• We experience the world and literally “see” what is going on (I calls them as I sees
them”).
• Constructivism:
• People create knowledge in order to function pragmatically in the world.
• That phenomena can be fruitfully understood many different ways.
• That knowledge is what the person has made of the world.
• Social constructivism:
• Reality is socially constructed, a product of group and cultural life.
• Knowledge, then, is a product of symbolic interaction within social groups.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• 4) Is knowledge best conceived in parts or wholes?
• Those who take a holistic approach believe that phenomena are highly
interrelated and operate as a system.
• True knowledge, in other words, cannot be divided into parts but consists of
general, indivisible, gestalt understandings.
• Others belive that knowledge consists of understanding how parts operate
separately.
• They are interested in isolating, categorizing, and analysing the various
components that together comprise what can be considered knowledge.
EPISTEMOLOGY
• 5) To what extent is knowledge explicit?
• Many philosophers and scholars believe that you cannot know something unless
you can state it.
• Within this view, knowledge is that which can be articulated explicitly.
• Others claim that much of knowledge is hidden
• That people operate on the basis of sensibilities that are not conscious and that they may be
unable to express.
• Such knowledge is said to be tacit.
• The way scholars conduct inquiry and construct theories depends largely
on their epistemological assumptions.
• Because what they think knowledge is and how they think it is obtained
determines what they find.
ONTOLOGY
• The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of being.
• Epistemology and ontology go hand in hand,
• Because our ideas about knowledge depend in large part on our ideas about
who is doing the knowing.
• In the social sciences, ontology deals largely with the nature of human
existence.
• In communication, ontology centers on the nature of human social
interaction, because the way a theorist conceptualizes interaction depends in
large measure on how the communicator is viewed.
• At least four issues are important.
ONTOLOGY
• 1) To what extent do humans make real choices?
• There is a long-standing philosophical debate on whether real choice is
possible.
• On one side of the issue are determinists who state that behaviour is caused
by a multitude of prior conditions that largely determine human behavior.
• Humans, according to this view, are basically reactive and passive, creatures
who simply respond to the world around them.
• On the other side of the debate are the pragmatists, who claim that people
intentionally plan to meet future goals.
• This group sees people as active, decision-making being who affect their own
destinies.
ONTOLOGY
• 2) Whether human behavior is best understood in terms of states or
traits?
• The state view argues that humans are dynamic and go through numerous
states in the course of a day, year, and lifetime – from feeling elated, being
anxious, being cautious – depending on what is being experienced.
• The trait view believes that people are mostly predictable because the display
more or less consistent characteristics across time.
• Traits, then, do not change easily and define an individual’s way being in the
world.
ONTOLOGY
• 3) Is human experience primarily individual or social?
• The unit of analysis for scholars with an individualistic perspective is the
psychological dimensions of the individual – the thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors that affect how that individual experiences and acts in the world.
• Scholars who focus on the group use social life as the primary unit of analysis.
• Theses social scientists believe that humans cannot be understood apart from
their relationships with others in groups and cultures.
• The ontological question of individual or social is especially important
to communication scholars because of their focus on interaction.
ONTOLOGY
• 4) To what extent is communication contextual?
• The focus of this question is whether behavior is governed by universal
principles or whether it depends on situational factors.
• Some philosophers believe that human life and action are best understood by
looking at universal factors – laws, if you will – that operate generally across
all situation.
• Others believe that behavior is richly contextual and cannot be generalized
beyond the immediate situation – that the spesifics of the particular
interaction must be considered.
• Communication scholars frequently take the middle ground, believing
that behavior is affected by both general and situational factors.
AXIOLOGY
• The branch of philosophy concerned with the study of values.
• The values that guide research and the implications of those values for the
outcome of the research process.
• For communication scholars, three axiological issues are especially
important.
• 1) Can theory be value free?
• Classical science answers this first axiological concern in the affirmative.
• Theories and research are value free, scholarship is neutral, and scholars
attempt to uncover the facts as they are.
• According to this view, when a scientist’s values intrude, the result is bad
science.
AXIOLOGY
• But there is another position on this issue.
• Science is not value free because the researcher’s work is always influenced
by particular ways of viewing the world as well as preferences about what to
study and how to conduct inquiry.
• Furthermore, government and private organizational values as well as larger
political and economic interests and ideologies determine what research is
funded.
• Scientists’choices, then, are affected by personal as well as
institutional values, making value-free inquiry impossible.
AXIOLOGY
• 2) To what extent does the process of inquiry itself affect what is
being seen?.
• The traditional scientific viewpoint is that scientist must observe carefully
without interference so that accuracy can be achieved.
• Critics doubt this is possible, believing that no method of observation is
completely free of distortion.
• 3) Should scholarship be designed to achieve change, or is its
function simply to generate knowledge?.
• Traditional scientists claim that they are not responsible for ways scientific
knowledge is used – that it can be used for good or ill.
AXIOLOGY
• Critics object, saying that scientific knowledge is, by its very nature,
instrumentalist.
• It is control oriented and necessarily reinforces certain power arrangements
in society.
• Therefore, scholars have a responsibility to make conscious efforts to help
society change in positive ways.
CONCEPTS
• Humans are by nature conceptual beings and group things into
conceptual categories according to observed qualities.
• Thomas Kuhn:
• We do not “learn to see the world piecemal or item by item”.
• We “sort out whole areas together from the flux of experience”.
• In our everyday world,
• We learn to consider some things to be trees, some houses, and some cars.
• Those categories are given to us by our experiences within a family, a
community, a culture.
CONCEPTS
• Formulating and articulating a set of concepts is an important first
step in theory building.
• To determine concepts,
• The communication theorist observes many variables in human interaction
and classifies and labels them according to perceived patterns.
• The set of conceptual terms identified become an integral part of the theory –
and is often unique to that theory.
• Expectancy Violation Theory:
• How people react when their expectations about an interaction are somehow
violated.
CONCEPTS
• Some of the most important concepts of this theory are
• Expectancy
• Violation
• Enacted behavior
• Heightened arousal
• Reward valence
• Interpretation
• Evaluation
• Reciprocity
• Credibility
• Attitude change
• Context
CONCEPTS
• These concepts are essential to this particular theory.
• Although they do appear in other theories, no other theory combines
them in exactly the same way as expectancy-violation theory.
• Theories that stop at conceptual level.
• Theories in which goal is to provide a list of categories for something without
explaining how they relate to one another.
• Known as taxonomies.
• Because they do not provide an understanding of how things work.
• Many theorists are reluctant to label them theories.
CONCEPTS
• The best theories, then, go beyond taxonomies to provide
explanations.
• Statements about how the variables relate to one another – to show how
concepts are connected.
• Notice, for example, that the conceptual terms of Expectancy
Violations Theory listed above do not have much meaning in isolation.
• In order to highlight their relevance, the theory must show how one
concept is related to, causes, or explains another concept or
concepts.
EXPLANATIONS
• At the level of explanation, the theorist identifies regularities or
patterns in the relationships among variables.
• Explanation answers the question: Why?.
• An explanation identifies a “logical force” among variables that connect them
in some way.
• A theorist might hyphothesize, for example, that if children see a lot of
television violence, they will develop violent tendencies.
• In the social sciences, the connection is rarely taken as absolute.
• Instead, we can say that one thing is “often” or “usually” associated
with another and that there is a probable relationship.
EXPLANATIONS
• If children see a lot of television violence, they probably will develop violent
tendencies.
• There are many types of explanations involved in theory construction,
but two of the most common are causal and practical.
• In causal explanation, events are seen as connected causally, with one
variable seen as an outcome or result of the other.
• In causal explanation, the consequent event is determined by some
antecedent event, and the researcher seeks to determine what that causal
force is.
EXPLANATIONS
• Practical explanations, on the other hand, explains actions as goal
related, with the actions designed to achieve a future state.
• In practical explanation, actions are chosen because a particular outcome is
desired.
• To clarify this distinction, consider how you might explain to a friend
why you failed a test.
• Using a causal explanation, you might say: “My professor didn’t provide enough
background, so I didn’t have the information I needed to pass the test”.
• On the other hand, if you did well on the test, you would probably use a
practical expalanation: “I want to get an A in this course, so I studied hard for
this test”.
EXPLANATIONS
• The distinction between causal and practical explanation is important in the
debate about what a theory should do.
• Many traditional theorists say that theories should stop at the level explanation.
• These scholars believe that theories depict things as they are by identifying and
explaining the causal mechanisms of events.
• There is no need to go further because they have accurately depicted how a particular
communication phenomenon works.
• Other scholars assume there are many ways to interpret and act in a situation.
• They assume that people are agents who take an intentional and deliberate role in
creating knowledge and meaning,
• and the decisions each individuals makes may vary considerably from how others
might approach that same situation.
EXPLANATIONS
• For practical theorists, then, theories should go beyond depiction of
how the world is;
• They should provide a guide to practical action – principles, the final
dimension of theory.
PRINCIPLES
• A principle is a proposition, precept, or guideline that enables
someone to interpret and evaluate an event and decide how to act in
the situation.
• A principle has three parts:
• 1) It identifies a situation or event
• 2) It includes a set of norms or values
• 3) It asserts a connection between a range of actions and possible
consequences
• For example, in Cross-Cultural Adaptation Theory:
• The first aspect is the move to and need to adapt to an unfamiliar culture.
PRINCIPLES
• The second aspect – values or norms – includes the notion that
communication is critical to adaptation. The connection asserted between
actions and consequences.
• The third aspect of principle, is that as long as the individual remains engaged
to some degree with the host culture, some adaptation will occur.
• The various dimensions of theory: assumptions, concepts,
explanations, and principles
• Combine in different ways to construct different kinds of theories (although
they are not always explicitly identified in each theory).
• Each starts from a different set of philosophical assumptions and makes use
of different concepts and explanations.