UPDATE: GLOSSING IS REAL AFTER ALL IT JUST ISNT A SOCIOLOGY THEORY AND ISN'T BY TALCOTT PARSONS
I am sooooo happy about that because it sounded like exactly what I want to read about and now it's real!!!
Original post below:
Something that drives me crazy as a librarian is how often I find claims that interest me, locate the primary source through my librarian skills even when the links are troublesome to track down, and discover that the source said no such thing.
The big dramatic end to my ML phase was using interlibrary loan to acquire a copy of Grover Furr's "Bloodlies" and compare it next to my copy of Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. It took months to acquire this book but I had seen it cited by MLs online over and over again to back up so many claims that radically differed from common understandings of WWII so I wanted to read it for myself. And upon acquiring it (and it was a hefty boy) I discovered that it was totally crap. It could not be used to substantiate all of the claims that were being made by all these people online and acquiring access to the text was so tremendously difficult I doubted any of them had actually read it. If they had read it, they'd have to be on something to perceive it as a reputable text. It felt like reading House of Leaves. I unsubscribed from Proles of the Round Table. Clearly their information was shit.
A particularly surreal example today was pertaining to the concept of a "Gloss," seemingly coined by famous sociologist Talcott Parsons. I first encountered this concept on the wikipedia page for "Reality Tunnel" which is a useful concept that comes from unhinged New Age writer Robert Anton Wilson referring to how you construct your understanding of reality based on selective intake of information. Under "Similar Ideas" was the following paragraph:
Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons used the word "gloss" to describe how the mind perceives reality.[5] We are taught, he theorised, how to "put the world together" by others who subscribe to a consensus reality. "The curious world of Talcott Parsons was where society was a system, comprised of interactive subsystems adhering to a certain set of unwritten rules."[6][7]
The main citation, [5], for this quote is this interview supposedly from Psychology Today, but I can't find any sources saying what issue it was in nor does Psychology Today mention this article anywhere. Within the interview, the concept of a "gloss" comes up in this paragraph, citing famous sociologist Talcott Parsons.
CASTANEDA: Exactly. I have come to understand sorcery in terms of Talcott Parsons'
idea of glosses. A gloss is a total system of perception and language. For instance,
this room is a gloss. We have lumped together a series of isolated
perceptions--floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc.--to make a totality. But we
had to be taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoiters the
world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in a way that
corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on. The world is an agreement. The
system of glossing seems to be somewhat like walking. We have to learn to walk, but
once we learn we are subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it
contains.
No specific text is cited here. I searched far and wide for anywhere stating in what text Talcott Parsons writes about and develops this theory of glossing and everywhere I found using the concept at all was machine-created web pages copy-pasting either exactly the same wording and definitions as used in this interview, or from wikipedia. And, of course, either no citations are given, or it cites this interview with Castaneda. It is worth noting at this point that Carlos Castaneda's entire body of work as an anthropologist has been called into question and his writings about shamanism are now considered to have been entirely fictional. This man makes stuff up.
Citation [7] is The Social System by Talcott Parsons. So I acquired an old dusty copy of it from special off-site storage through my library. Once again, getting the primary source was a tad difficult. I acquired the text. It is on my desk right now. I have been perusing it.
The word "gloss" appears only twice in the entire book and it is not to develop a theory or concept called "glossing" it is literally just being used colloquially in referencing to "glossing over something." There is no such theory by Talcott Parsons called "glossing." There is no definition of "a gloss." There is no "total system of perception and language." It is simply not in this text at all. There are a couple chapters on belief systems and instutionalization of ideologies which I found interesting. But the concept of "a gloss as a total system of perception and language" is fictional. It's not here.
And so ironically this misinformation about the contents of this book has created an entire theoretical concept being references on tens and tens of web pages with very little human involvement and none of which are actual creative or new texts utilizing this theoretical concept. They're just phony encyclopedias claiming this is a notable theory of Talcott Parsons' that he simply never created, as far as I can tell, doing the research I can.
The concept of an idea, even when "cited" can still lead to a dead end. It's not real.
I want to emphasize this:
The theoretical concept I was searching for that discusses how societies determine what is and is not real turned out to not be real
My search for knowledge continues.
I might have something helpful for this, but it's gonna take some... er... glossed intellectual history. Namely, that I have a guess as to where Castaneda came up with the idea that Parsons had said something about glossing. My guess is this: Castaneda heard Harold Garfinkel (the founder of Ethnomethodology) say something about Talcott Parsons (one of Garfinkel's advisor and the foil for a lot of Garfinkel's early writings). Castaneda studied at UCLA with Garfinkel and was greatly influenced by him - amongst other sources for that, Castaneda prominently thanks Garfinkel in the acknowledgements for The Teachings of Don Juan.
Ethnomethodologists have plenty to say about glossing as a practice that people use in the everyday construction of social reality. A foundational citation is "On Formal Structures and Practical Actions" (Garfinkel & Sacks), which is included in the collection Ethnomethodological Studies of Work. It was originally published in John C. McKinney and Edward A. Tiryakian, eds., Theoretical Sociology : Perspectives and Developments, New York I970. According to Google Scholar, that piece has almost 3000 citations. To your point, though, I doubt many of the people who have cited it have actually read it or considered what the authors were truly after.
The relevant thing to your deal is that ethnomethodologists documented "glossing" as a practice that is done constantly, pragmatically, and in situated action. People use glossing because, practically speaking, explanations have to come to an end somewhere (hey look, I'm getting Wittgenstein into this explanation, too). This sounds minimal, but it's a crucial bit of interaction: glossing is an everyday practice that is done precisely so that people aren't constantly thinking and processing everything, or explaining everything, because there is SO MUCH going on all the time that we could spend our lives drawing Borgesian maps of every unfolding interaction. That's what I think Castaneda is describing in that quote: an example of all that is indexed under "room," with an invitation to think about how social reality and interactional convention build up a person's awareness of the shape of the world.
Why the obscurity? That's another story, and one that has a lot to do with ethnomethodologists' criticism of the social sciences in general and sociology in particular in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Sociologists in general (including, prominently, one president of the American Sociological Association) had a conservative reaction to the field of study, its methods, and its criticisms. The reaction from dominant figures in the field was to bury it, the literature, and anyone doing ethnomethodological research. Ethnomethodology largely survived as either an influence on science and technology studies, a prominent citation in gender and sexuality studies, or as a cousin in the shape of conversation analysis in applied linguistics and pragmatics. It can still be found in some shape and form in some sociology departments, but mostly in the shape of someone appointed to a different specialty who happens to be an ethnomethodologist.
So you're right - "gloss" doesn't belong to either Parsons or to Castaneda. But it's not as simple as a concept that doesn't exist. This is actually a better case of ML and LLM information than it seems, because the repeated bad xeroxing has both blurred out the original concept AND obscured the original source. What a technology!
Because "gloss" is an academic term using a common word for a different definition (hate when they do this) I did not have the word "ethnomethodology" to find texts on this theory. My only lead was Talcott Parsons and Castaneda saying it was Talcogt Parsons so I kept just running into the same machine generated circular pages and nothing was pointing back to what I am so very pleased to learn is actually a real theory that was misattributed to both the wrong source and the wrong field of study.
Now that you have connected this term back to the correct field and origin I can now find texts about the thing I wanted to read about originally!! Thank you so much!!!!
