ABSTRACT
Anticipatory summary The phenomena of interest to social psychologists can all be shown to be attributes of the discursive matrices of social interactions, which develop within locally valid normative frameworks. It is our tacit knowledge of these frameworks that makes us fit to be members of a community. The task of the social psychologist is to make this tacit knowledge explicit, and to search amongst the local systems for anything which, at some well-defined level of abstraction, might be a universal feature of interpersonal discourse.
