language personality theory: An integrative approach to personality on the basis of its language phenomenology, The

Social Behavior and Personality, 2002 by Golubkov, Sergey V

The paper presents an outline of a new personality theory on the basis of its language phenomenology. The basic assumptions of the new theory are preceded by theoretical analysis of the contemporary "methodological market" of personological formulations. The paper discusses the so-called clinical (deductive) and scientific (inductive) approaches to elaborating personality theories as well as integrative attempts of trait theorists to find "the golden mean" between objectivity and universal structure of personality, among which the basic models are the 16PF, the PEN, and the B5. As analysis shows, although at present some universal personality constructions are revealed, they mostly represent dimensional taxonomies which are hierarchical at best. Such formulations cannot be called personality theories in their proper sense because they can be used basically for descriptive purposes - being incapable of explaining causes of behavior or of predicting the direction of purposeful activity. The language personality theory proposed in the paper is based on theoretical assumptions of a different, nontraditional variant of the fundamental lexical hypothesis, encoded in the language which focuses on the essential similarities of people, not on their dissimilarities. Additional perennial philosophical ground and linguistic conception of semantic primitives allow the theory to have the structure, dimensional taxonomy, and quality of universality.

Any theory represents an explanatory-predictive basis for dealing with an aspect of reality. In this sense a mature theory is not just a sum of mutually related cognitions, but is, rather, a mechanism for producing knowledge. A personality theory is no different from any other. To be efficacious, theories of personality are expected, in the most general sense, to organize, explain and predict facts about personality (Hall & Lindzey, 1970; Hjelle & Ziegler, 1992; George & Cristiani, 1990), which is especially obvious in the context of counseling/psychotherapy, where a personality theory plays the role of a map or a compass (Bramer & Shostrom, 1982; Gilliland, James, & Bowman, 1989; Jung, 1971).

Inductive and deductive approaches to personality theory. Since personality is a most controversial category within psychology, it has received different presentations and appraisals from different authors. And yet, all personality theories can be categorized by the two main approaches to constructing them, which, following Allport (1968), can be called the method of arts and the method of science. In fact, this differentiation is rooted in human history, where psychology is fairly young as a science, but quite old as practitioners' art. Undoubtedly, each of the approaches has its own merits and drawbacks. For example, the representatives of the science approach to personality welcome scientific exactness and are strongly against employing imaginative interpretation. The "scientists" (mostly behaviorists and cognitivists) are more likely to rely on experimental data quantitative in its nature, and often divide the whole personality into impersonal particularities, thus losing its "living tissue". The representatives of the arts approach (mainly psychoanalysts and humanists), on the contrary, maintain that intuition and insights should be used in describing personality as a whole, and look down upon the limitations of experimental psychology. Their theories represent much more integrated personality models, but they present problems too.

Namely, their theories, because they are often metaphorical in nature, are too hard to put to the test with the result they usually become belief systems, and the psychologist sees him/herself and the clients in terms of that particular personality theory "converting" them into the same understanding of man. As a result, there seems to be a contradiction between the integrity of a personality model as a theory and the degree of its scientific verifiability: the more a model describes personality as a whole structure, the more it is based on its author's subjective vision and vice versa.

Integrative attempts of trait theorists. For this reason, there have been various attempts to make personological formulations more integrative - objective, reliable, and taking personality as a whole at the same time. Most of these studies chose to add formalization to the traditional for psychological investigation Q-, L- and T-data types (Cattell, 1978) - trying to make them like experiments.

For example, Allport (1968) was one of the first to use content, individual structural, and then factor analyses to explicate more formalized categories describing personality - traits. Cattell and Eysenck (1970) each in his own way, used a more sophisticated factor analysis that allowed him to investigate on a quantative basis a great amount of psychological data, and to explicate statistically significant groups of traits (factors) considered by these investigators to be necessary and sufficient to describe any personality. The results of their endeavors were two different personality models known today as the 16PF and the PEN.