Operant Subjectivity: The International Journal of Q Methodology

37/3 (2014): 38-56, DOI: 10.15133/j.os.2014.011

Operant Subjectivity

The International Journal of Q Methodology

General Theory of

Communication1

William Stephenson
University of Missouri-Columbia
Abstract: Q methodology makes a science of subjectivity possible and solves the
riddle of mind. An illustration is given of a 4-year-old child sorting postcard
pictures of children under a variety of conditions of instruction, entering into
communication within herself, which is transformed into operant factor structure.
The context is generalized in reference to the objective fact that it is raining, and the
concourse of communicability that it engenders and the factor structure that results,
leading to the conclusion that all such communicative action is transformable in the
same way. The operantcy of factors is objective, as reached through centroid factor
analysis and rotation (judgmental or varimax), with all factors being schematical
(Peirces Law) and representing new understandings reached through feeling rather
than logic, and whose meaning is found a posteriori as new propositions or principles
that are open for all to examine and not for semanticists and professional critics only.
Qs forward movement has been blocked primarily by its being regarded as a branch
of advanced statistics rather than as the basis of a subjective science focused on
behavior with the self as central to it and subject to the study of single cases rather
than large samples. It constitutes an end to Cartesian dualism on evidential grounds
and provides information that is both structural and functional.

Introduction
According to T.S. Kuhn (1962), it is the fate of new paradigms to become known by
their exemplars, and not by the basic paradigms they serve. So it has been with
respect to Q-methodology: Q-technique is widely known, but sight is lost of the
paradigm it serves, to bring science into subjectivity. Since Q-technique is a fairly
simple matter, it is easy to understand why Samuel Johnsons remark about Boswell
has been applied to me: that fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that a
wrong one.
This article is an edited version of a paper presented by William Stephenson at a
symposium on mass communication in Amsterdam in November 1978. It is a precursor of his
Consciring chapter published in the Communication Yearbook 4 in 1980. There are also
affinities with his (1978) Concourse article. This version merits attention as it very
effectively brings together some of the central themes in Stephensons approach to a science
of subjectivity meaning, the operantcy of factors, the study of single cases, concourse and
communication theory, and the centrality of self. A reply to the paper presented by
Stephenson in Amsterdam by H. J. C. Duijker was published in Operant Subjectivity in 1979
(H. J. C. Duijker, Mind and Meaning, 3(1):15-31). [Ed.]
1

2014 The International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity

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39

The real idea, however, began in my days with Charles Spearman and Cyril Burt in
London (1926-1935), and it was that subjective science is possible, and Qmethodology makes it so.
You may sense something, perhaps, of the excitement of 50 years ago. Spearman
thought he had solved the riddle of the mind, with factor analysis as its tool
(Spearman, 1914), an achievement considered by some at the time to be a
Copernican Revolution for systematic psychology. Cyril Burt (1940) was in the
wings, but put logic in the place of psychology, and in the course of my dispute with
Burt about the possibilities (Burt & Stephenson, 1939), Q-methodology was born, but
was regarded as controversial the fate, again, of any paradigm. Meanwhile, the
dilemma has remained. Modern science was already solving the riddle of the
universe (Einsteins theories were familiar to me, since I began my academic life as a
physicist), but was leaving behind another riddle, which the late Alexandre Koyr
(1957) called the tragedy of modern mind the riddle of mind. It is this that, now,
50 years later, the last of Spearmans assistants proposes to solve with a general
theory of communication. Mind, we shall say, is nothing but human communicability,
and we have a theory and methodology for it.

A Sense of Discovery

No science is worth much unless it makes discoveries possible, that is, of what exists
in nature and reality.
Let us begin, then, to see how discoveries are commonplace about communication,
by way of Q-methodology. I chose a child, age 4 years, in an educated family
situation, who attends a play-school and has free access to childrens storybooks and,
of course, pictures of children.
I place before her, randomly, 18 colored postcards, each a painting of a child by a
famous artist (I had collected them from an art gallery), the children ranging in age
from about 2 to 8 years of age. The 4-year-old has never seen these pictures before,
yet shes immediately au fait with them, and begins conversation with me about this
or that of them. She wonders why I am placing them before her and I begin to
experiment.
You will guess that I get her to perform a Q-sort. I ask her to choose one picture
most like her. Then one most unlike her. Then of those left, two most like her. Then
two most unlike her. And so, in a matter of a minute or two, she provides me with a
Q-sort with the frequency distribution in Figure 1. She has no idea that she has in
effect ranked the pictures in this quasi-normal manner, and of course no idea
whatever that I have attached these integer scores to her efforts. No idea, either, of
why I was doing this.
N=18
Score
Frequency

Most Like
+3
+2
1
2

+1
3

0
6

1
3

Most Unlike
2
3
2
1

Fig. 1. Forced-frequency distribution

Shortly after, I get her to perform another Q-sort, with a different condition: this
time it is What does Mummy think you are like?
Later in the day she performs another the postcards always being randomly
placed before her for another condition of instruction.

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William Stephenson

So we continue, and in a short while we have got her to provide seven Q-sorts,
with the following conditions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Most like me
What Mummy thinks Im like.
What my (younger) brother thinks Im like.
What my class-teacher thinks Im like.
What I imagine I could be like when Im grown up.
What Dancy (the family dog) thinks Im like.
What is the very best child.

The seven Q-sorts are thereupon given to the computer, which correlates and factor
analyzes the matrix (centroid method) and rotates them to simple structure. The
results are shown in Table 1.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Condition of Instruction
Most like me
Me according to Mummy
Me according to Brother
Me according to Teacher
Me grown up
Me according to Dandy
The very best child

Operant Factors
A
B
C
X
X
X
X
X
X
X

(X = significant factor loading; all other values

insignificant)

Table 1. Operant Factor Structure

Some familiarity with Q-factor analysis as such is essential, of course, in order to
understand the structure. The factors, A, B, C, are theoretical, but empirical estimates
are possible for them which I shall take for granted. We observe that the childs
feelings are segmented into three sharply-distinguishable (uncorrelated) parts one
herself (A), the others not (B, C).
Where, then, is the communication?
The child, in Q-sorting, is not undergoing a test of her cognitive ability to
distinguish likeness and differences. Instead, she has entered into a special situation
of communicative self-reference. She enters into conversation with the pictures,
sometimes openly for anyone to hear, with such remarks as Id hate to look like
that, or thats silly, or I like her, or Dandy had better not (choose that one),
and so on, with small allusions and dainty disclaimers as becomes a child.
It is as though she can call upon a hundred different statements, all with feeling
and self-reference.
It is a situation of communication within herself though others could hear the
same in principle, and are often able to do so set in motion by Q-sorting, and
transformed into operant factor structure.

Communication in General
It may seem that the above applies only to Q-sorting as such. But consider the
situation for a husband who gets up late for work and learns from his wife at

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41

breakfast that it is raining. Damn it, he swears, I left my umbrella at the office;
and Why in heavens name did you take my raincoat to the cleaners? What fool left
the car windows open? Why does it rain every time Im late? Get the cat out of
my way and so on, with responses from his wife, perhaps adding fuel to fire.
It is clearly a situation involving communicability whether anyone is really
communicating with anyone else or not, some may say. Our concern is merely with
the verbal statements, overt or covert, effulgent in the situation, or its instigation. It
is a mish-mash of subjectivity, really without a beginning or end, or any fixed
sequence of events within it, yet somehow totally interdependent in its parts even
to kicking the cat.
A hundred or more self-referent statements can be collected from such a
situation. We take a sample of say 50 of them, and later, in the evening perhaps, we
entice the husband to look back on the incident, and to represent it in retrospect by
Q-sorts, for example the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

What were your feelings this morning?

What is your more usual reaction to it is raining?
What did you feel your wifes reactions were?
What are her usual reactions on rainy mornings?
Describe yourself, personally, i.e., what you think of yourself.
You kicked the cat: what did that mean?
If you hadnt gotten up late, how do you suppose you would have reacted to it
is raining?
and so on.

Correlated and factored, and rotated to simple structure, all mechanically by

computer, the now-familiar factor structure emerges, for example as show in Table 2.
Note that the husband is describing the situation within its own conditions irate
him, wife, cat, rainy morning, umbrella, car windows left open and all else of the
situation. Not a single researcher-imposed idea is in view, except for the Q-sorting
technique, and this is of perfectly general applicability.
It is apparent, then, that every communicative action of a person is transformable into
operant factor structure the person musing, daydreaming, reading a novel, enjoying a
movie, acting, creating a poem, listening to music, arguing in a bull session, watching
television, praying, quarreling with his wife, loving, hating, all such are subject to such
transformation.

Condition of Instruction
1 My feelings that morning
2 My usual feelings
3 My feelings of wifes reaction
4 My feelings of wifes usual reaction
5 Me, personally
6 Kicking the cat
7 My usual feelings if not late

Operant
Factors
A B C

X
X
X
X
X
X
X

(X = significant factor loading; all other values insignificant)

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William Stephenson

Table 2. Factor Structure for It is raining

Lawfulness
Let me begin to gain your acceptance of these discoveries by attending to the lawful
nature of operant factor structures. Long before professor Skinner gave the name
operant to the reflexes of pigeons, Charles Spearman was searching for factors with
just such operantcy, that is, factors which are independent of the instrumentation
providing them (Spearman, 1927). I showed him that this could not be achieved for
factors in R-methodology (Stephenson, 1939), and I began in 1935 to achieve it by
way of Q-technique. The factor structures in Q-methodology are independent of the
particular Q-sample for a situation, of its size, of the shape of the frequency
distribution, and even of the particular conditions of instruction for a Q-sort I could
have given the 4-year-old any pictures of young children, any number of them, and
used different frequency distributions, as well as different conditions of instruction,
and would have got operant factor structure of the same import. No standard Qsamples, no norms, no standard conditions of instruction, have ever been published
by me, because all such would solidify instrumentation and to that extent reduce
operantcy. You may appreciate, therefore, why Q-technique was scarcely acceptable
to psychometricians for whom standardization is synonymous with science. The
matter is dealt with in Factors as Operant Subjectivity (Stephenson, 1970),
reprinted in Operant Subjectivity (Stephenson, 1977).
Any computer program, for centroid factor analysis and rotation to simple
structure (varimax), is usually adequate to bring operant factors into focus. I say
usually, because on occasion hand rotation serves the purpose better, a matter of
principle about which J. W. Thompson (1962) is in agreement with me.
Operantcy, in short, is objective.
Next, and equally important, is the fact that conditions of instruction for Q-sorts
are in line with modern logic-of-science, put there before the line was clear and
acceptable. The conditions of instruction are not just anything we care to set the Qsorter to do, but carefully-considered statements in hypothetical form. They set the
stage for communicability. The concern, for much of it, is with retrospection; but
prospection also enters, and on occasion there is almost instant replay, as in the 4year-old childs first Q-sort, asking which is most like you?
With respect to lawfulness, laws of course represent regularities in nature, but it is
usually forgotten that they are also conditions of instruction, telling the scientist what
he might expect. Conditions of instruction for Q-sorts are always of this character:
they are hypothetical in form, and there are many known laws in Q-methodology
(Stephenson, 1974), for example Jamess law, Peirces law, Rogerss law, Parloffs law,
Perlins law, etc.
I gave the name Rogerss law to the possibility of idealization in the structure of
subjectivity, in respect for Carl Rogerss humanist position. The law states that we
can expect idealization in subjectivity, and, for the 4-year-old, The very best child
was meant to elicit idealization. Note, indeed, that the child had apparently
internalized it into herself (in factor A), and you begin to realize how theories of
middle range (Merton, 1954) enter into Q-methodology.
The most important of our laws is taken from Charles Peirces law of mind
(Buchler, 1950), and is as follows:
All operant factors in Q are schematical.

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43

By schemata is meant a theme running through a factor. A simple example is

afforded later, when I discuss concourse theory.
Each factor in Q-methodology is itself a Q-sort theoretical but pragmatically it
is an average of the different Q-sorts on a factor. Thus factor A, for the 4-year-old, is
a Q-sort average for her Q-sorts 1, 6, 7. It is a never-ending source of astonishment in
Q-studies to see how averaging a few empirical Q-sorts, to give their theoretical
counterpart, brings a simple schema to light hidden in the separate empirical Qsorts.
One of the most interesting laws is taken from William Jamess distinction between
what is me and what is mine my clothes are mine, though in the case of a hippy or a
fop, they may be much more, an integral part of the persons self as such. Many
different conditions of instruction can bear upon this distinction. The law is to the
effect that operant factor structure may indicate the segmentation into the me and
the mine of the Q-sorter for the given situation.
Thus, factor A for the 4-yer-old is apparently a facet of herself (me) whereas B and
C are set aside, as hers (certainly) but not her. Condition of instruction 1 (most like
me) was directed at just such a possibility.
We venture, therefore, into science: and as we learn to deal with measurement of
time, space and mass, for which there are universal units, so it is for subjective
science. It has a unit for saliency, the same for every Q-sort, for every Q-sample, for
every subjective problem, for every measurement of communication, for everyone.
The unit is called quantsal (for quantity and saliency): it is the familiar definition for
standard scores in psychometry, by which statistical distributions, in whatever units,
are translated into pure number distributions whose mean is zero and standard
deviation 1.00.
The above factor structure, therefore, has a unit of universal applicability: there is
time, mass, space for objective science, and now quantsal numbers for subjective
science.
You can be forgiven for wondering whether I am sponsoring a sort of alchemy, a
numerology of an obsessed mind! But I am sane and serious. It should be apparent
that what is at issue is a profound break between science conceived as essentially a
predictive process, of hypothesis-testing in the manner elaborated upon by Karl
Popper (1959) in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and science which finds a place
for discovery of hypotheses in the first place, something Popper forgot, or called a
myth. I was a very early critic of deductivism, as Rozeboom (1972) indicates; and
the methodology of which the above examples are part is fundamentally inductivism,
as hypothesis-forming. I am the more certain than ever of the matter from the recent
discovery that Newton had suppressed a Fifth Rule, found asleep among his papers
by Alexandre Koyr (1965) in 1965, which was Newtons effort for a Rule to take care
of hypotheses capable neither of proof nor disproof (in objective terms), which are
clearly what we all assume about subjectivity. I have recently reformulated Newtons
Fifth Rule (Stephenson, 1975-1976), and it is no longer true that subjectivity need be
the domain of unprovable hypotheses. It is all subject to operant factor structure.
Q-methodology, then, stands for discovery in subjectivity, of reality in nature, made
possible by technique. We can, so to speak, see the structure, as if by X-ray.

Theory of Concourse

It is not enough, of course, to have discovered operant structure for self-reference

communication for the language we use with feeling and self-reference. There is
need for an explanation of why it is so.

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William Stephenson

For this we begin by distinguishing between information and communication.

Information is always without self-reference. Communication is always with selfreference (Stephenson, 1972a).
Consider, then, it is raining.
The one statement, it is raining, is enough to inform us of a matter of fact in
nature. But not ten thousand can exhaust what it is raining may mean subjectively.
It is beautiful; as warm as tears (Longfellow). It dances down. It is a sign of the
resurrection (the Koran). It is exasperating, a delight, a farmers joy. Has it a father
(Job) who begot the raindrops? Do I have to put something away for a rainy day? Is
kissing in the rain more exciting than kissing in bed? and so on, ad infinitum.
Every such statement has a simple form
I feel (something).
James Ward (1886) called such statements presentations, and for him, as for us,
they are the simplest form of psychical life (p. 41), the elements of communication
as atoms are of physics, molecules of chemistry, and bits are of information theory.
Every concept, idea, feeling, event and experience in common life has about it the
possibility of innumerable presentations.
They are clearly of statistical
proportions:
A collection of presentations for anything is called a concourse.
The phenomenon is astonishing. I could have shown the 4-year-old child a
thousand pictures of children, all different, and she would have been au fait with all.
By the time a child is three or so, it is in some sense communicable with every picture
in the hundreds of picture story-books we could show it, and can talk with them, not
merely to give information (thats a teddy), but to reveal self-reference (that my
teddy said with feeling).
Moreover, there is a certain commonality about all concourses. By the age of
adolescence, every youth in a culture is au fait with every concourse. This is because
concourses are not compilations of facts or information such as we learn
systematically, but because presentations are feelings which are lived through on
an everyday commonplace basis. Formal learning deals with facts and logic, with
algebra, physics, grammar, etc. Presentations fend for themselves in ostensible
learning and imagination, subject to fortuitous experiences, in common conversation,
singing songs, viewing television, reading for fun, etc., in countless situations and
musings, lived at random.
Q-technique began with samples from concourses. They were the populations
and universes of our early studies. And Q-techniques significance lay in the way it
allowed statements from a concourse to jostle one another, ot by logic or reasoning
but basically by feeling, such that new relationships may be fashioned in the process.
Consider, for example, a few statements from a concourse on it is raining:
I watch thunderstorms from a nice safe place its exciting.
If it rains a lot you smell the earth.
Makes me feel sad, if Im alone.
I got to bed and sleep when it rains its boring.
Its sort of romantic to walk in the rain.
I like the taste of kisses in the rain.

General Theory of Communication

In Q-sorting what these statements mean, in the context it is raining, one young
man may put them into poetic form, in effect
Romance is thunder,
A smell of earth.
It end is sadness, boredom
Another may put the statements in quite a different order, with quite different
significance
Rain is sadness, boredom
A smell of earth, it
Makes a mockery
Of romance and kissing.
These are not produced by reason, or by accidental continguity, but by feeling (about
romance as it happens). Each is schematical, i.e., it implies a theme, like the plot of a
story. Yet the young men are not aware, in the Q-sorting, that this has happened.
Such, in minutiae, is the operation of mind (as we say) upon statements of a Q-sample,
jostling together during Q-sorting.
The lawfulness at issue is Peirces law of mind, which we translate as Peirces law,
that operant factors are schematical (ut supra).
Laws tell the investigator what to expect, i.e., what he has to look for. Each
operant factor is a theoretical Q-sort, with the same Q-sample; but it is the
investigators function to find the theme running through it, by interpreting the
schema of the factor (as we say). There is inductive gold in the factor Q-sort, put
there by a creative act, out of feeling, by the subject. The origin of all creative ideas,
we can suppose, is always in the context of concourse. It is a law described long ago
by Charles Peirce as supreme; he didnt know how it worked, adding, however, that
the
amount of arbitrariness in the phenomena of human minds is neither
altogether trifling nor very prominent. (Buchler, 1950, p. 349)
Concourse is therefore central to our theory of communication its most
important principle that every idea has its concourse. There is now a developing
theory of concourse (Stephenson, 1978a). Communication (in our use of the term) is
at the heart of creativeness, not information. An example is given in my paper on the
substructure of science (Stephenson, 1972a). There are strong indications that as an
educational principle it could break down the deadening dependency upon learning
theory and the false attributions of objectivity in much current knowledge
(Stephenson, 1985) indeed, I am completing an astonishing volume called Quiddity
College (Stephenson, 1980b) in which, for two years of college life, undergraduates
approach all knowledge subjectively, leaving facts along for the while! It is perhaps
of particular interest that the Research Program appended by E. S. Toulmin to his
Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972), for which
he had no methodology, fits into our paradigm. Concourse theory absorbs

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William Stephenson

population theories of concepts, and of conceptual change, such as T.S. Kuhn (1962)
and Toulmin discuss.

Meaning

There could scarcely be a theory of communication without a place for meaning.

What, then, does it is raining mean? (to continue with our simple example).
By way of information theory, for example in Donald MacKays Information,
Mechanism and Meaning (1969), meaning becomes a switching and scratching
mechanism of the brain, which triggers the person into action when to put up his
umbrella, put on his overcoat and the like courses of action, the concern being with
states of readiness for goal-directed, adaptive activity: activity with a purpose
(MacKay, 1969, p. 23). In principle this can be made predictive by gathering
probability data, for the likelihood, for example, of using an umbrella for a shower but
an overcoat for a downpour.
MacKay uses the same vector concept, of
multidimensional space, as in factor analysis. His explanations, admittedly only for
illustrative purposes, are simple probabilistic artifacts, involving valuative feedback
on probabilities of excitation (MacKay, 1969, p. 140). All of it is in the objective
framework, and meaning is a fixture to each state of readiness.
The position is much more simple-minded in our theory, in spite of the common
mathematical-statistical foundations of MacKays thesis and ours. For us, what any
communication means is always a matter for discovery:
Meaning, in communication, is always schematical, indicated by operant factors.
It arises from feeling, by way of Peirces law of mind (ut supra), as the law of
schemata, i.e., schemata are always indicative of a new meaning, a new thema, a new
proposition, a new concept, a new meaning out of the bedrock of a concourse.
Meaning, so to say, feeds upon itself! The tiny poem by the young man:
Romance is thunder,
A smell of earth.
Its end is sadness, boredom
is the exemplar for the birth of every meaning in the sphere of communication (again,
communication is always self-referent).
It is clearly a theoretical position.
Meaning is sui generis, always to be found, never assumed. What it is raining
means, therefore, is an empirical matter. This applies to every concept for example
chair, fish, goodness, beauty to all ruminations and retrospection, all dreams, all
prayers, all enjoyment of poetry, art, music, all gossip, all devotional and volitional
experience wherever there is communication.
You will agree that dreams need interpreting. It is now a straightforward matter
to elicit operant factor structure for any dream, precisely as for the make-believe of
the 4-year-old child and the irate husband.
But you leave concepts to semanticists and philosophers, poetry and literature to
the literati, movies and art to the argotese and pedantry of critics. It need no longer
be so much out of control. My mentor, James Ward, remarked that all experience is
experiment, and so it is, to judge by the ease with which one can experiment with
communication. You may wish to look at my prototypical studies on Keatss Ode on a
Grecian Urn (Stephenson, 1972b), on the Immediate Experience of Movies

General Theory of Communication

(Stephenson, 1978b), on Intelligence and Multivalued Choice (Stephenson, 1973),

and on the Conceptualization and Measurement of Operant Effects of Television
Viewing (Stephenson, 1976).
The meaning of any story, movie, or theatrical play can be represented
theoretically, a priori, by factor structure: I have done so, for example, for Eugene
ONeills A Moon for the Misbegotten (Stephenson, 1980a; see also Stephenson, 1985).
The theoretical model can be compared, of course, with the empirical data from a
reader, viewer, or theatre-goer. If you like this kind of experimenting, it is boundless!
Always, however, communication is directly involved in Q-sorting. The conditions
of instruction are in the subjects own terms; the theory is supernumerary and
interferes in no way with the immediate experience of the subject.
Though I appear not to be very kindly to literary critics, R.L. Warshows The
Immediate Experience (1962) was an exception, a reminder then, in 1962, that a
movie-goers experience as such had never really been examined. It is still true. The
psychologist, sociologist, or critic offers his interpretations (as MacKay offers his
explanation) as projections of oneself as hero (Freud), as cultural myth
(Wolfenstein & Leites, 1950) and the like; they point to the social and personal effects
on homosexuality (Reflections in a Golden Eye), racial bigotry (In the Heat of the
Night), marital discord (Two for the Road), youth sexual fantasies (The Graduate),
mindless violence (Bonnie and Clyde). Warshow rejected all such explanation, and
asked for examination instead of the experience of the movie-goer as such:
it must be [he wrote] that I go to the movies for the same reason that the
others go: because I am attracted to Humphrey Bogart or Shelley Winters or
Greta Garbo; because I require the absorbing immediacy of the screen; because
in some way I take all that nonsense seriously. For I must make one more
confession: I have seen a great many bad movies, and I know when a movie is
bad, but I have rarely been bored at the movies; and when I have been bored, it
has usually been at a good movie. (Warshow, 1962, p. 28)
It is precisely in such a context that we study the meaning of anything
communicative: the subjects immediate experience is always in the Q-sorting.
The abortive set of 60 experimental studies undertaken for the U.S. SurgeonGenerals Report on Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Violence (Scientific
Advisory Committee, 1972) is testimony to the obduracy of the objective approach to
this problem all were directed at the social behavior of children, or if a thought was
given to the immediate experience of children, it was with identification categorically
assessed by a questionnaire (Clark, 1972, p. 247). Only Tannenbaum (1980), later,
was getting hot, with babies sucking milk from a bottle while watching television: at
least his categorical concepts couldnt influence a babys operantcy! The studies to
which I make reference in my note to The Centre for Advanced TV Studies
(Stephenson, 1976, ut supra), like a baby sucking a bottle, leave the stage for the
childs own play. The impact of television, I assume, is tangled in the subjectivity of
the child as immediate experience, and this the child can replay for us. A Q-sample is
taken from film, of stills (as small photographs) but from the film; the child sees the
film on television and then performs Q-sorts with the stills under different
conditions of instruction designed to determine whether the child has internalized
the violence actions, or has merely regarded them as make-believe. This in no way
blocks the entrance to theory: all of the constructs of dynamic psychology can find

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their way upon the stage in Q-sorting projection, rationalization, identification,

idealization and the rest but only after the events, after the immediate experience
has been lived through, leaving behind (as it were) its operant factor structure. One
of the most useful of Q-methodologys laws is indeed Freuds law of identification
(Stephenson, 1974, ut supra).
The key to the methodology is to allow the individual to describe what he feels,
within the context he himself provides, in his own language, with not a single
researcher-imposed theoretical matter in his sight.

A Sense of Theory
Enough has been said to introduce a little of our general theory of communication.
There is much more to say. But I would like to feel that you are now asking, why
didnt we know about this before?
Basically, the answer is that methodology has been regarded by social scientists as
synonymous with advanced quantitative procedures rather than as the cornerstone
of scientific inquiry (Blumer, 1969), and our work has so suffered. Q-methodology
was meant to be the foundation for a subjective science. Instead it remains as Qtechnique, Q-analysis, Q-method, alongside multivariate analysis, discriminative
function, variance analysis, R factor analysis and the like tools of statistical minds.
The methodology was meant for a fundamental behaviorism, as the title of The
Study of Behavior: Q-technique and Its Methodology (Stephenson, 1953a) proclaimed.
The behaviorism was radical, as my Postulates of Behaviorism in Philosophy of
Science (Stephenson, 1953b) clearly indicated in 1953. It included all sensation and
experience; and consciousness was merely a categorical concept.
I shall not recite the long list of studies undertaken over the past 50 years to
further this conception of mind as behavior, of a special kind no doubt, since it was
behavior with a self central to it, pursued in terms of the single case methodology,
against the massive resistance of large-sampling doctrine (Stephenson, 1974). It is
only important, at this opportunity, to represent the substantiality of human
communication, more especially in its societal forms. The ramifications are
everywhere, in science, the arts, mass communication, and common life.
Consider, for example, the thesis of the late S. E. Hyman, in his The Tangled Bank:
Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers (1962), in which he points to
the massive metaphorical (i.e., communicative) nature of the great works of these
men Darwins On the Origin of Species, Marxs Capital, Frazers The Golden Bough,
and Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams. These, in societal respects, are probably
the most important works of the past century, and they continue to rattle their
metaphorical bones. That they greatly influenced modern life need not be debated:
but they are not modern science in the frame of Einstein and physics. They were, and
remain, imaginative works, in the context of everyday common conversational
communication, astonishingly in line with the theory of communication of the above
pages. The works are largely non-academic, non-sectarian. Darwins On the Origin of
Species sold out on the first day of its publication. It was scarcely a popular work, in
any sense of writing down to please a less-well-educated public. On the contrary,
his audience was obviously far wider than the few biologists of his time. The theory
of the origin of species served well enough for the immediate scientific purposes; and
indeed it was not until some 80 years later, with R.A. Fishers (1935) work and
modern genetic theory, that solutions have been found to Darwins many
observations. The truth is that his rhetoric was in a concourse common at the time to

General Theory of Communication

all educated people in the West, an entanglement of science and religion, with which
everyone was au fait, as surely as my 4-year-old granddaughter was au fait with
every picture of a child I could show her. Listen, for example, to the sonorous Darwin,
writing of the mountains of South America:
where the metaphor of the coral is of sacrificial dying, here it is a coming to
birth, with the landscapes as a great maternal body. The volcanoes are like
teeming wombs, orifices of eruption.
And what is more modern in the world of advertising slogans than Darwins key
images, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, victory for the battle of
life? Darwin was quite aware that this was metaphorical; but, since he lived inside it,
he was not aware of the concourse upon which he himself depended, and upon which
the success of Origin was assured. There was an audience, as we now say, ready for
him. So it was for Marxs Capital, the full metaphorical fervor of which is emblazoned
in The Communist Manifesto. So it was with psychoanalysis: who indeed has not been
on its bandwagon, au fait with its every wish? Frazers The Golden Bough is more
esoteric, but Occultists, Scientologists, and Psychic Venders batten upon it every day.
That these works were creative, imaginative, culture-indicative is quite certain;
that they were on the right objective lines is also accepted. What they portend for
human communicability is lost sight of completely, however, because of present-day
obeisance to objective science.
What I mean by this is readily illustrated by glancing inside the over 600, doublecolumn pages of the 1977 Communication Yearbook 1 (Ruben, 1977). It shows our
field in considerable disarray. The Yearbook begins with a plea for a whole new
concept of science (Alfred G. Smith) and for new phenomena upon which to focus it
(David Berlo, in Ruben, 1977, p. 11). Neither is forthcoming except in the above
pages. Berlo aspires to organismic principles, such as A. N. Whitehead propounded
50 years ago in his Science and the Modern World (1953), and sees communication as
outside natural laws, with information as a basic concept. Smith wants Newtonian
principles and behavioral science replaced, for his purposes, by ultra-relativistic
science. Meanwhile, in the same Yearbook, Capella (Ruben, 1977, p. 46) points to the
unlikelihood of any methodology ever being found for the complexities of
communication, which has to be studied, he notes, as an ever-changing,
unbounded, unsequenced, and totally interdependent process. We recommend the
above pages to him; and I can assure my friend Berlo that information, by any
definition known to him (of Szilards and Shannons information theory, or of Gabor
and MacKays structural-information) is of no importance whatever in the theory of
communication herein propounded where information is of a new kind altogether,
the functional information of operant factors.
It is Kaarle Nordenstreng, however, in his commentary on European
communication theory (Ruben, 1977, pp. 73-78) who has most to say, and
significantly, about the sorry state of Western communicology. He, too, yearns, for
holism, but within the objectivist framework. He makes reference to Karl Held with
approbation, whose view is that those who overlook the material elements in the
communicative process (i.e., the Marxist-Leninist dialectic), as well as those who are
so fascinated by the concept of communication that they give it supreme place as the
element of human nature both , Karl Held proclaims, are enmeshed in ideology, and
not science:

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William Stephenson

The general tendency to explain everything [as] communication is not

science but ideology. As not a single one of the objects of communication
research is essentially composed of communication, communication becomes a
fetish which explains nothing. (in Ruben, 1977, p. 77)
This apt quotation has the ring of truth about it except that the term
communication, chameleon-like, changes its color with its every use!
Nordenstrengs prescriptions for our field are all in the objective science mode.
Yet everything he prescribes has already had attention from our subjective approach.
I have long been critical of so-called communication theory and research in our field,
as my The Play Theory of Mass Communication (Stephenson, 1967) attests: my
concept is of mass communication in the mass, not as communication of the mass
media just as Nordenstreng might have wished. (The concept was found in Martin
Brouwers [1967] Prolegomena to a Theory of Mass Communication, and its origins
are deep in Georg Simmels and Emile Durkheims principles.) The preoccupation in
the West has largely been with information flow, as reviewed by Paisley (1965), and
which I put aside as of little consequence (1972a, p. 22) for reasons Nordenstreng
would accept. That Western communicology has the failings ascribed to it by
Nordenstreng is easy to support: there is indeed no theoretical work behind it; and
acquiescence in humanistic doctrine is endemic, all platitudinous, and not science at
all. I agree with Nordenstreng, also, that communication theory should enter into
political science and into general sociological theory: but again Q-methodology has
already entered these fields though my first venture, entitled Amelioration of
Political Conflict (1963) was scoffed at by political scientist reviewers, and was never
published. But the work of S. R. Brown (1980) on political science is making amends;
and I have recently completed a chapter on a new theory of political conflict which
will be of interest to Nordenstreng particularly (1980b, Ch. 11). I have also provided
a solution to the problem of Alvin Gouldners reflectiveness, for the future of general
sociological theory (Stephenson, 1975-1976). All of this is within the framework of
our theory of communication. Thus, if I were to give a prize for a contribution with
which I am in most agreement as to theory in our field, it would go to Kaarle
Nordenstrengs commentary in Communication Yearbook 1 (Ruben, 1977).
Yet my theoretical approach is profoundly different from Nordenstrengs poles
apart, as different as objectivity and subjectivity per se. His approach, like that
assumed by those he criticizes, is solidly in the objective framework. Since we come
to the same conclusions, why, it will be asked, all my fuss? Is it not wiser to gain
knowledge objectively, with material elements, than to turn inwards into
subjectivity?
Which is the basic, unhappy contretemps. There is far more about subjectivity that
is left undiscovered than anything so far encountered by the objective approach to
human communication; and it is precisely because of the presumptions of objectivity
that these matters are being ignored. My own work and Nordenstrengs is a mere tip
of the iceberg. It was for this reason that I wrote, recently, The Shame of Science
(Stephenson, 1978c). The shame is not for shameful things done, but for blocking
things that need urgent attention. Some 300 years ago, when Newton and Descartes
were laying down the foundations for modern science, a priest was being burned at
the stake near Paris, for sorcery, with unanimous scholarly support from the legal,
theological and humanist experts of the time. All about them, and within themselves,

General Theory of Communication

was the vast emotional sea of ignorance and cruelty, of demoniacal belief in
witchcraft and sorvery, described with such pity by Aldous Huxley in his The Devils of
Loudun (1952). In spite of the enormous advances in modern science, some such
spectral communicability is still about us, more especially in the West, where half the
American public believes in flying saucers and the like aberrations of psychisms and
the occult.
It is still unfortunately true, it seems, that some thoughts are unthinkable at given
periods in our history, and one of these is the thought that something scientific can be
made of mind. We accepted Freudian unconsciousness but only because it was
modeled on modern science, with determinism at its core. As you can guess,
everything in Freud was on the right lines, except his theories.
But there are other good reasons for my fuss.
In the wake of communication theory, substantial gains have been made in matters
of historical significance.
First, there can be an end to Cartesian dualism, not on mere metaphysical, but on
evidential grounds. There is commonality between the inherent structure of nature
as Einstein talked of it in The World as I See It (1934), and the operant factor
structures of communication the formula for water, H2O, is no longer merely two
atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, but these atoms in a spatial relation to each
other. So it is for operant factors, with as much reason in the physical and so-called
mental forms.
Next, the theory of communication marks an end to the fiction of consciousness as
a substantial existence, as such, of psychical substance. Julian Jaynes, experimental
psychologist like myself, completely misreads the experimental evidence regarding
consciousness, and accepts a substantial psychism, with attributes (e.g.,
spatialization), in his The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind (1976). Consciousness, he argues, only arrived recently on mans historical
scene, some 3,000 years ago. Like any other concept, consciousness is subject to
concourse theory, and it is easy to prove that for citizens in the United States the
bicameral mind is still intact heaven is up there, and divine messages daily
received from God up in the heavens. I am of the opinion that these good citizens
are quite conscious: what has to happen to them is in relation to self, not
consciousness.
The theory of communication conjoins the only genuine (i.e., non-categorical)
theory of self. (It is worth a mention that my first major work was directed at
psychoanalysis and existentialism, to show how they could become operational with
Q-methodology; completed in 1952-1953, with the title Intimations of Self-psychology,
it couldnt find a publisher though some psychoanalysts were sympathetic. It
replaced objective ego principles by operant self; there is a growth of interest in self
in psychoanalytical circles, but it remains, like all others of the humanist
psychologists, purely categorical.)2
In the early 1950s Stephenson actually completed three book-length manuscripts:
Intimations of Self-Psychology, The Study of Behavior: Q-Technique and its Methodology, and
Psychoanalysis and Q-Method: A Scientific Model for Psychoanalytic Doctrine. Here Stephenson
is probably thinking of the Psychoanalysis and Q-Method book. This was submitted to the
University of Chicago Press and it received a favourable response from the Presss reader, a
New York psychoanalyst. Following his departure from the University of Chicago to take up a
position as Director of Research at Nowlands & Co., a market research firm of industrial
consultants in Greenwich, Connecticut, Stephenson was unable to find the time to carry out
2

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William Stephenson

Our theories also mark an end to the myth of inductivism, and to the
predominance of deductivism in logic of science. Finding that philosophers of science
were quite wrong, I had to write my own Scientific Creed (Stephenson, 1961), from
which there has developed a method for general induction, and, most significantly, a
formulation for Newtons Fifth Rule (Stephenson, 1975-1976).
There is, therefore, a new theory of information to contend with, along with that of
Szilard and Shannon, upon which telecommunication, computing and pure physics
depend (Brillouin, 1962), and that of Gabor (1951), Fisher (1935) and MacKay
(1969), which concerns the structural information reached by experiments. The new
form is functional information of Q-methodology. Nor is it merely coincidental that Qtechnique holds in its reins the possibility of both forms of experimental information:
the variance analysis of Fisherian balanced-block designs of Q-samples given
structural information in MacKays formulation, whereas operant factor analysis of
the same Q-sample gives the new functional information. The difference is not just
that the one is a prioristic, but that the one asserts ad hoc categories beforehand,
whereas the other is operant, without categories.
Yet Qs measurements, as quantsal units, are necessarily and essentially subjective
by one person, about his own communication, which is what the general theory is
about. Q-methodology, the broad name for the above, does not apply to information
in any objective sense it applies to communication, defined as self-referent,
commonplace, ostensible, everyday conversational opinion, with feelings and self
ever-present.
The theory of communication could not have been advanced without the above
developments: it is because of these that it seems obligatory to place it as of prior
significance to objectivism, Nordenstrengs or anyone elses.
But the poof of a pudding is in the eating. Notwithstanding Karl Held, everything
subjective can be explained as commonplace communication, conversational at heart.
And with it, by way of concourse theory, new knowledge and innovative pragmatics
lie pregnant in its wake in the physical sciences no less than the social, in the
humanities (English literature) no less than in political science, in the biological
(medicine) no less than the educational.
You will find in future many applications of the general theory of communication
in my Quiddity College (Stephenson, 1980b), where privileged undergraduates, for
two years of old-fashioned Oxford-type education, ignore objective knowledge and
make sport with subjectivity, whose modus operandi is communication, with its roots
in everyday feeling and self-reference.3
Hodie mihi, cras tibi all mine today, but (perhaps) yours tomorrow.

the fairly extensive re-working following the collection of the additional single case material
that the Presss reader had recommended. Unfortunately, no definitive version has been
located of the first manuscript (though several incomplete drafts were found in his study). A
complete version does exist of Psychoanalysis and Q-Method, some excerpts from which will
be published in Operant Subjectivity in due course. [Ed.]
Fortunately, a complete version of this important manuscript is in the Stephenson Archive.
A special issue of Operant Subjectivity is being planned to help make available some of this
material to a wider audience and to explore the significance of this work to which
Stephenson attached much importance. [Ed.]
3

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53

August 1978

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The References have been updated to provide missing bibliographic details and to take into
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Stephenson likely intended. [Ed.]
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