Cognition and communication in the relationship process

For the past six years, I have been researching how people communicatively accomplish romantic relationship development, maintenance and repair, and disengagement (Baxter 1979, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, in press; Baxter and Bullis, in press; Baxter and Philpott 1980, 1982; Baxter and Wilmot 1983, 1984, 1985; Bullis and Baxter 1986; Dindia and Baxter 1986; Wilmot and Baxter 1983, 1984; Wilmot, Carbaugh, and Baxter 1985). To a large extent, personal relationships research has mirrored other social scientific work in viewing communication as a mere conduit of more causally forceful psychological and sociological factors (Pearce and Cronen 1980). By contrast, a view of relationships as communicative accomplishments presumes that communication is a central force in its own right. The significant role accorded communication in creating the social order can be traced to the later Wittgenstein’s (1953) focus on language-in-use. However, a view of relationships as communicative accomplishments should not be taken as a deterministic stance toward the power of communication. Rather, communication and the social order relate dialectically with communication constructing people’s conceptions of the social order just as the constructed social order frames our understanding of communication. The dialectic or reflexive relationship between communication and the social order also has its roots in the later Wittgenstein’s (1953) work, in particular his metaphor of “language games.” Language-in-use (i.e. communication) gains its meaning because of the context in which it is framed, and simultaneously such language use enacts the contextual frame. For example, the choice of a given chess move is made in the context of knowing the rules of the game of chess and the move gains its meaning only through that contextual frame; simultaneously, the particular chess move accomplishes and makes real a game of chess. The Wittgensteinian assumptions that frame my research program are evident in several contemporary social theories, including the Coordinated Management of Meaning (Pearce and Cronen 1980), symbolic interaction (Blumer 1969; Mead 1934), language action (Frentz and Farrell 1976), ethogeny (Harre 1980), and structuration (Giddens 1979).