undisciplining social science: wittgenstein and the art of creating situated practices of social...

Undisciplining Social Science: Wittgenstein andthe Art of Creating Situated Practices ofSocial Inquiry

JOHN SHOTTER

ABSTRACT

There are now countless social scientific disciplineslisted either as the science of. . . X . . . or as an -ology of one kind or anothereach with their own internalcontroversies as to what are their proper objects of their study. This profusionof separate sciences has emerged, and is still emerging, tainted by the classicalCartesian-Newtonian assumption of a mechanistic world. We still seem to assumethat we can begin our inquiries simply by reflecting on the world around us, andby allowing our conceptualizations to guide our actions in our inquiries. Begin-ning our inquiries in this retrospective manner, however, means that our conceptsand conceptualizations are both after-the-fact and beside the point, for something elsealtogether is guiding us in the performance of our situation-sensitive actions thanmerely our conceptualizations. We need before-the-fact, hermeneutically-structuredinquiries that can set out inner landscapes of possibilities, to think-with and toprovide guidance, as we try in our more scientifically organized efforts to achievesocially desired outcomes in particular socially shared situations. Conducting suchpreliminary inquiries is thus an art, requiring not only judgment, but also imagina-tion and poetic forms of expression aimed at creating such shared, inner land-scapes among all concerned.

Keywords: Situated practices; social inquiry; research methods; hermeneuticalunities; shared anticipations; coordinated social action

. . . never to forget as we search for harmony in human life that on the scene of existence weare ourselves actors as well as spectators (Bohr, 1958, p. 81).The point is not simply to put the observer or knower back in the world (as if the world were acontainer and we needed merely to acknowledge our situatedness in it) but to understand and takeaccount of the fact that we too are part of the worlds differential becoming (Barad, 2007, p.91).

In recent years, there has been in the West a radical change in our modes ofinvestigation, a movement of thought unprecedented since our adoption of Greek

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour :DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12080

2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

modes of argumentative inquiry more than 2,000 years ago. Under the influenceof such thinkers and writers as Wittgenstein, Vico, Vygotsky, Bakhtin andVoloshinov, Gadamer, Mead and Dewey, and Merleau-Ponty (among very manyothers), not only have some of us moved away from a concern with the innerworkings of individual peoples subjectivities or mentalities occurring privatelyinside their heads, but we have also ceased to search for ideal forms (static shapes),existing eternally, hidden behind appearances.

Instead, we have turned to a direct focus on the unique concrete details of ourliving, bodily involvementsor participationsout in the world around us. In sodoing, we have become concerned both with what goes on within the differentinner worlds of meaning we create within our different meetings with the others andothernesses around us, along with noticing the ever-present, larger background flowof spontaneously unfolding, reciprocally responsive intra-activity1 occurring withinwhich we are always entwined within which all our meetings occur. In otherwords, we have shifted (or are trying to shift) from seeking to understand anexternal world of static shapes or configurations (forms) by merely observing it, tocoping with our immersion within a dynamic world of meanings in constantmotion, a world that has made us more than we have made it, and which affectsus more than we can affect ita world which is still to a degree indeterminate, stilldeveloping, in which a) nothing is entirely separate from everything else, and inwhich b) nothing is a simply repetition of what has already occurred in the past.

LIVING IN AN UNFINISHED, STILL DEVELOPING WORLD

Although there are now many writers to whom I could turn (and to an extent willturn) in my efforts to bring at least some aspects of this implicit background,explicitly, into the foreground of our thought, in my exploration of what thisradical shift means, not only for our methods of inquiry into how best we mightconduct ourselves in our shared lives together on this planet, but also for our waysof expressing their results, I will refer mostly to Wittgensteins (1953, 1965, 1969)worksfor, as he makes clear, in at least some of the relations of our everydayverbal expressions to the surroundings of their use, we express very precisely whatthose surroundings mean to us, what it is possible for us to do within them, for we showor express or manifest our understandings in our actions. It is the recent acknowl-edgement of the importance of this previously ignored background of sponta-neously responsive, living bodily activity, and its role in shaping our actions, thatis one of the most important features of our new approach.

However, the task of bringing its nature, at least partially, into rational visibilityis not an easy one. Wittgenstein (1980a) expressed his sense of its character thus:Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express)is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning (p.16).It is as participant parts within this flow, considered as a dynamically developing

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complex whole, that we all have our being as members of a common culture, asmembers of a social group, with not only with a shared history of development,but also at any one moment in finding ourselves in shared circumstances, withshared experiences, and with shared judgments as to how our experiences should beexpressed, of them as being of like this rather than like that, of them as calling forthis action rather than that.

Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) noted: If language is to be a means of commu-nication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as thismay sound) in judgments (no.242)not simply that variously different soundscoming out of peoples mouths are variations of the same word, but that somecombinations of verbal sounds are questions and other answers, that some bodilygestures are friendly and others aggressive, and so on and so on. As Wittgenstein(1969) went on later to sayin making it clear that a doubt about existence onlyworks in a language-game (no.24), and If you tried to doubt everything youwould not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presup-poses certainty (no.115)I did not get my picture of the world by satisfyingmyself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness.No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true andfalse (no.94). And without this inheritance, our routine understanding of eachother within a linguistic community would be impossible.

However, although acknowledging it as inherited situates the process involvedwithin the hurly-burly of our everyday lives, it does not clarify the nature of thatprocess any further. For clearly, it is not inherited genetically like blue eyes, but islearnt informally after birthalong with learning our first languagewithin our every-day, spontaneous involvements with the othernesses and others around us. Thusthe teaching and learning process at work here is utterly different from classroomlearning and teaching, for what is learnt here is not facts or information, but, torepeat, what we call correct judgments, that in this particular circumstance, weshould act like this and not like that. . . . To judge things as the others around us do,means that we must learn to relate ourselves to events or things occurring in oursurroundingsthings that can only be seen and heard in the unfolding temporalorganization of our relations to our circumstancesand to talk of them in a distinctivemanner, to describe them being like Xs, rather than like Ys, while still being differentfrom Xs, and thus still amenable to other likenings as well2.

Or, to put it in other words, what we are learning here, spontaneously, inlearning how to linguistically express shared meanings for shared experiences inshared circumstances, are shared anticipations as to how we should respond to eventsoccurring in those circumstances if we are to act as the others around us willrespond to those events. Indeed, if it really is the case that we all occupy a fluid,indeterminate, not-yet-finalized reality, in continually having to step out into anuncertain future, our expectations as to how those around us will react are crucial.For these language-mediated, spontaneously learnt ways of sense making andthinkingthat just happen within us as emergent processes as we explore each

Undisciplining Social Science 3


current situation we occupydetermine the kind of thinking that we, as sociallyaccountable adult thinkers, do deliberately, and know of ourselves as being able todo deliberately.

For, unlike the thinking that just happens within us, our deliberate thinkingrequires an effort on our part to get it right, a kind of inner dialogically-structuredactivity seems to be involved in which we must at first wander around within thesituation, testing possible ways in which to express its nature in words, whilesensing how it talks back to us as to whether our words are fitting or not. Inpicking up a fragment here, and another there, we seem able, gradually, in a kindof hermeneutical process, to arrive at a unique sense of, or feeling for, a particularsituation, prior to going on to use our words in describing that situation in afitting representational fashion. And this something that our body does for us, soto speak, to a greater or lesser extent, according to the training we receive, and thedegree of practice we exert.

This distinction, then, between the language-influenced thinking that we dodeliberately and the language-mediated thinking that just happens within us,without our being conscious of its source, or of the degree to which it is in factshaping and limiting what it makes available for us to think-with, is just one aspect ofwhat crucial to all else I want to explore below. The influence of language in boththese spheres is crucial, for it is not simply a matter of words standing forthingsas is far too easily supposedbut of the specific words we use arousingspecific expectations in those to whom they are addressed, thus enabling them torelate or to coordinate their actions in with ours.

Another distinction of importance is our recognition that, not only our world,but also we ourselves, are of a still indeterminate, unfinished nature, and thatmuch of what is of importance to us exists not only in relation to what else is botharound and us and within us; we thus experience always a something more that liesbeyond it, a lack which, sooner or later, draws us on into further inquiries.

Indeed, the degree to which we, as beings of a still indeterminate natureourselves, manage to live within a still unfinished, still developing world, meansthat we cannot assume that the indeterminacy within which we currently live will,one day, be overcome; it is a pervasive aspect of the being of everything that wemust deal with. Even our own human being does not just happen to us; it is a taskthat we must turn to afresh in each new day; nothing in our living worlds is justa mechanical repetition of a past event.

The extent to which all this places a burden upon us to rethink our thinking, ofour world and our ways of being in it, is immense. Yet the extent to which,currently, we think in favour of an objective world, of a Cartesian world ofGod-created matter composed of different separate parts in motion accordingto his established laws (Descartes, 1968/1637, p.62), is so pervasive amongst allthose of us who consider ourselves to be trained thinkers, i.e., professional think-ers, find it all but impossible to think in any other way if we are to retain theserious attention of our colleagues. It is as ifas we will findthat at the heart of

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the thought collectives (Fleck, 1979) to which we belong, each with their ownthought styles, there is a gravitational field pulling us to direct all our activitiestowards a particular, final outcome3, i.e., to seek a something that we call thetruth. Indeed, as Descartes (1968) put it, it is only in assessing our opinions bythe plumb-line of reason . . . to see if they are true (p.37) that we can order ourlives for the better (see footnote 6).

FROM IDEALIZATIONS WITHIN CLOSED SYSTEMS TO MEETING THE DEMANDS

OF PARTICULAR, EVERYDAY CIRCUMSTANCES

Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.58).

However, in the light of the comments above, to do with our living our lives asparticipants, immersed within an unending background flow of spontaneously respon-sive intra-activities, a new gravitational field is beginning to emerge, calling ouradherence to the Cartesian image (myth) of an already, very largely determinedworld (along with its plumb-line of reason), into question. That Cartesian form ofreasoningbased, as we shall see, on systematic, calculational (geometric) forms ofreasoningcan only work in terms of what we can call after-the-fact thinking:thinking in terms of separate, already finished, well-defined entities that can begiven distinctive names. If we are to rethink our thinking, and to explore is whatis like for us to live and to think in a still undifferentiated, swirling, but qualitativelyunique conditions, in which we need we will need another kind of thinkingaltogether, what could be called before-the-fact thinking, a kind of thinking thatoscillates back-and-forth between our exploratory movements within a circum-stance, and our sense of our progress so far in achieving within it an outcomeacceptable to the others around us. We could say, paradoxically, it is a kind ofthinking in which we only find out what to do in the course of our doing it.

This, of course, is stark contrast to Descartes (1968) approach, in which, inpursuit of absolute certainty, he began with a survey of everything within his currentsurroundings that he could doubt. In his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conductingthe Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1637feeling that previous philosophi-cal writings were proud and magnificent palaces built of nothing but mud andsand (p.31), while being astonished to find that on the firm and solid founda-tions [of mathematics] nothing more exalted had been built (p.31)resolved,because of the certainty and self-evidence of its reasonings (p.31), to conduct hisown reasonings in a similar manner to those in geometry, by basing them also on,seemingly, self-evident, indisputable foundations4.

What is peculiar about Descartes whole approach here, though, is his inten-tional ignoring of our immersion in the many different, flowing strands of com-municative activities constituting the background to our everyday social lives, and itscrucial role in our coming to be the kind of human beings we are. Indeed, so



concerned was he with absolute certainty, with error-free reasoning, with trueresults and with nothing else, that he laid aside all the demands of practicalrationality, and imagined his reasonings as situated in a world quite different fromthat known to its ordinary, everyday inhabitants, from their living within it.Indeed, thinking as a solitary, and wanting to avoid having to locate his claimswithin the disciplinary literature of his day, as we saw above, he resolved to leaveall these people [other philosophers and theologians] to their disputes, and tospeak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were to create, some-where in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, and if he were to agitatediversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that he created achaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine, and afterwards did no morethan to lend his usual preserving action to nature, and to let her act according tohis established laws (p.62).

What, then, I want to do here is completely to reverse this move, to re-situateour inquiries (to do with how best we might live our lives together in social groups)back into the flowing background of living, intertwined, responsive, strands ofcommunicative activities from which Descartes, in his Discours, divorced them. Inparticular, I want to explore the dialogically-structured, back-and-forth, hermeneuticalnature of the relations occurring between these strands of living activities, for,when two of more active agencies are spontaneously responsive to each other intheir meetings, as Bakhtin (1986) suggests, events will emerge that cannot be tracedback to any of the individual agencies involved. In other words, in such meetingssomething that never existed before, something absolutely new andunrepeatable is created, and what is given is completely transformed in what iscreated (pp.119120).

Furthermore, not only are such dialogically-structured meetings creative ofutterly novel, next steps forwards, because they consist in many incommensurable(unmerged) voices, because they occur in a world that is fundamentally irreducibleto a single, well-ordered unity, the different utterances of different people fromtheir own different points of view are not partial, complementary truths, dialogic orpolyphonic truths. As Bakhtin (1984) puts it in discussing what unfolds inDostoevskys novels, is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objec-tive world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality ofconsciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not mergedin the unity of the event[s he depicts] (p.6)in other words, as we shall see, asense that there is a truth to be sought emerges as an aspect of the dialogically-structured, hermeneutical unities we construct in our encounters both with textsand with the world around us.

This move, thenout of an idealized world of already ordered, cause and effectmovements, occurring among separately existing particles in motion (due only totheir kinetic energies and their impacts upon each other) into an indeterminateworld of actually existing, self-moving, responsive, living beings, able to exist assuch only in responsive, living relations to each otherwill change the focus of

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our inquiries radically. Separateness and simultaneity are permanently with us;there is no single meaning to be found in the world, but a vast multitude ofcontesting meanings.

Our acceptance of uncertainty and indeterminacy as such, as intrinsic to ourvery being-in-the-world is, of course utterly inimical to Descartes project, his aimof arriving at well-founded, certain truth. For, in beginning it, he had decided, . . . asfar as all the opinions I had accepted hitherto were concerned, as he put it(Descartes,1968), I could do no better than undertake once and for all to be ridof them in order to replace them afterwards by better ones, or even by the same,once I had adjusted them by the plumb-line of reason (p.37). But what was theplumb-line of his reasoning, his criterion for correct judgments?to include inmy judgements, he said, nothing more than what presented itself so clearly anddistinctly to my mind that I might have no occasion to place it in doubt (p.41).So now we must ask, what kind of things presented themselves to him in this way?In turning to the objects of geometers, and reverting to the examination of theidea I had of a perfect Being, he said, I found that existence was comprised inthe idea in the same way that the equality of the three angles of a triangle to tworight angles is comprised in the idea of a triangle or, as in the idea of a sphere, thefact that all its parts are equidistant from its centre (p.57)5in other words, idealforms or idealizations6 constituted the plumb-line guiding Descartes in his reasoning.

And indeed, in all our more deliberately conducted inquiries, in which we intention-ally set out to explain something (some thing we talk of as being already inexistence7 awaiting our discovery of it), we make certain observations on the basis ofwhat our prior assumptions lead us to expect to see, where our assumptions, moreoften than not, work in terms of purified or perfected events, that is, also interms of idealizations, in terms of events of a general kind that can, in fact, only bebrought into being in the specially prepared conditions of the experimentallaboratorybut which (a) are abstractions in which everything making for theirunique particularity has been stripped away, so that all that is left is a singledistinctive property or set of separate, nameable properties that can be instru-mentally manipulated, and which (b) are hardly ever realized as such in thehurly-burly of everyday social life. And it is terms of idealizations that we still,more often than not, conduct our reasonings todaywhereas, it is to the demandsof circumstances that we need to answer, if we are to do justice to their uniqueand particular nature.

FROM AFTER-THE-FACT TO BEFORE THE FACT UNDERSTANDINGS: FROM

SHARED FORMS TO SHARED FEELINGS

The basic evil of Russells logic, as also of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a proposition is isillustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then pre-supposed in full generality(Wittgenstein, 1980b, I, no.38).



We now come to what is, perhaps, the most pervasive of our inherited Cartesianbackground assumptions: In his Meditations of 1641, Descartes (1968) introducedthe radical distinction between mind and body, subject and object, between twokinds of pre-existing substances in the world, res cogitans and res extensa: . . . on the onehand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself in so far as I am only a thinkingand unextended thing, he said, and because, on the other hand I have a distinctidea of the body in so far as it is only an extended thing but which does not think,it is certain that I, that is to say my mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely andtruly distinct from my body, and may exist with it (p.156). And this pre-established distinction lives on in almost all our forms of inquiry in the Westernworld, for we assume that only what people can be publicly state in an unam-biguous (preferably quantitative) fashion, can be shared with others withoutconfusion.

Otherwise, we are inclined to suggest their claims are merely subjective, a matteronly of a feeling or an opinion, and not worthy of serious consideration. Hence, oururge to begin with shared verbal descriptions (theories) or shared definitions of phe-nomena; for we need to feel that we are all talking about or in relation to the samething. But, if we are to take Barads (2007) claim seriously, that we too are partof the worlds differential becoming (Barad, 2007, p.91), then everythingchanges. The assumption of a pre-existing subject-object split cannot be sustained.In being inextricably immersed in a world still in the making, the fact of ourmerely noticing and responding to an event in our own distinctive fashionwhilealso verbally characterizing it in a particular fashion if requiredis an aspect ofour being a part of the worlds differential becoming; we are a part of the making.

In other words, what initially we experience in our perceptual activities,although we are almost always unaware of it, is not at all a simple inner (pictorial)representation of outer objects, after-the-fact of our having made sense of what isbefore us, but an intricately orchestrated interplay occurring between our ownoutgoing bodily activity toward the indeterminate stuff around us, and the respon-sive activity coming back to us from it as a resultand it is as that interplaydevelops, as we shall see in the next section, that something more determinateemerges8. But what that something is seen asas is well-known from our experi-ence with so-called ambiguous figuresdepends upon the way or ways of looking,upon what we are expecting to see in accord with what is imaginatively available tous in our hermeneutically acquired inner landscape of possibilities (background) tothink-with in our more deliberate thinkings.

Indeed, as a result of our immersion within the fluid movements occurringaround us, we are subjected, whether we like it or not, to the unfolding, distinctivetime-shapes of these movements, and we inevitably take the tense feelings of bewil-derment and disturbance they arouse within us as a part of ourselves9. We do notand cannot observe them as if from the outside. But, before the fact of our activitiesresulting in an outcome, as Dewey (1938/2008) puts it, the peculiar quality ofwhat pervades the given materials, constituting them a situation, is not just

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uncertainty at large; it is a unique doubtfulness which makes that situation to bejust and only the situation it is. It is this unique quality that not only evokes theparticular inquiry engaged in but that exercises control over its special procedures(p.109, my emphases).

Thus for Dewey, it is only as a result of our sensitivity to the quality of asituation as a whole (p. 76) that we can come to a precise grasp of a problem asthe problem it isin short, a problem must be felt before it can be stated (p. 76);it must be uniquely felt as such by all involved in it, before it can be investigatedin an organized fashion within a thought collective.

In the past, talk of feelings and sensings has been thought of, inevitably, as beingutterly unscientific. Investigations into such experiences have been dismissed asmerely introspective, as requiring us to focus on what, in Cartesian terms, wewould quite unsuitably call the merely subjective. But nowperhaps morebecause of Chomskys (1957) emphasis on the importance of what we could callour linguistic intuitions or grammatical sense than because of Wittgensteins(1953) influencea focus on what, linguistically, circumstances demand of us, onwhat we expect to follow from what, has become, at least partially, scientificallyrespectable.

This acceptance, however, should have occurred long ago. For clearly, prior toour opening our mouths to speak, it seems undeniable that we possess an acutelydiscriminative sense guiding us in choosing words fitting to our purposes. We areasked a question, and we, our questioner, and all around us, have a shaped-senseof it which we all use in judging whether our answer is in fact an answer to it. I takethis phrase, of course, from William James (1890) famous chapter on The Streamof Thought, which he began by saying it was the study of the mind from within(p.224, my emphasis).

Like Barad (2007), he saw it as a matter of differential becoming: what strikesus first is [the] different pace of its parts. Like a birds life, it seems to be made ofan alternation of flights and perchings . . . Let us call the resting-places the substantiveparts, and the places of flight the transitive parts, of the stream of thought (p.243). And thenhe goes on to remark that: The truth is that large tracts of human speech arenothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have anacutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part init whatsoever . . . Their function is to lead from one set of images to another . . .Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that tendenciesare not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of thestream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in verylarge measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unableto name them at all (pp.253254).

Thus again, like Barad (2003, 2007), James (1890) also points out that ourexperiences from within the flow are not at all like bounded entities with clearbeginnings and endings, for even as they occur, they are always on the way tosomewhere else. But, in being capable of directing our thought, they have agency;



they can move us, this way and that. Indeed, it is James noting of the fact that wecan have an acutely discriminative sense of the anticipations aroused in us by suchfeelings of tendency, that I particularly want to highlight here. For it is in the courseof performing our actions, in trying to get them right, we are clearly conscious ina very immediate fashion of exercising that discriminative sense in shaping, so tospeak, the direction and movement of the flow of inner mental activity involved,even though we lack any inner representations (definite sensorial images) of thetransitions in which it consists.

And this is why, of course, the others around us can be helpful to us, for they cansense and thus notice inappropriate aspects of our tryings unavailable to us. Forinstance: (a) the mathematics teacher can notice a pupil mistakenly calculating10 2 3 = 8 3 = 24, and remind him or her to do multiplying first and sub-tracting afterwards; (b) the golf coach can look separately at a golfers grip, stance,alignment, backswing, downswing, putting, etc., in a way that golfers themselves,simply intent on hitting the ball hard, cannot; or (c) a psychotherapist can sense(sometimes) the feeling in what a client says, and suggest ways of wording itdifferently, ways that arouse different, and more useful expectations, of what anext possible life-step might be. Again, as Dewey (1929/1958) puts it, to under-stand is to anticipate together, it is to make a cross-reference which, when actedupon, brings about a partaking in a common, inclusive, undertaking (pp.178179).

It is not, then, by seeking after-the-fact patterns, orders, or regularities, etc.,amongst pre-existing objective entities, but by working with before the fact, ephem-eral, transitional things, that we need to focus on in the conduct of our inquiries,if all involved are to coordinate their activities. And we can begin them by makinguse of James (1890) acutely discriminative sense in picking out what Garfinkel(2002) calls (awkwardly) witnessable recognizabilities (p.68), or what I havecalled elsewhere real presences (Shotter, 2003), that is, on the basis of ourhermeneutically based abilities to sense similarities and differences, we can pointout to each other the happening of quite specific thisnesses or thatnesseseventswhich, even when they cannot be specifically named, nonetheless possess quitedistinctive qualities which can, at least, be attended to (i.e., noticed), and alluded tolinguistically as being like something else already well-known amongst us. And it isin terms of such tryings and pointings outperhaps it can be described like thisrather than like that, or done like this rather than like thatthat we can begin toarrive at practices of inquiry in which our activities are, or can be, coordinated inwith those of others.

Thus, as I see it, in working in a after-the-fact manner, we have ignored thecontributions of our already existing bodily capacities that are at work in our waysof making a unified sense of our surroundings. To use Polanyis (1967) terminol-ogy, while being focally aware of the responsive whole resulting from us lookingover what is before us, we have ignored the background structure of anticipations, ofwhich we are only subsidiarily aware, that is guiding us as we actively do the

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relating of ourselves to our surroundings. The purpose of a before-the-fact account,is to arrive at a grasp of what is involved in establishing such a structurewhich,as we shall see in the next section, is utterly different from an abstract generality.

CREATING BOUNDED ARENAS WITHIN WHICH THE MEETINGS WITH THE

OTHERS AND OTHERNESSES INVOLVED IN OUR INQUIRIES CAN TAKE PLACE

The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outsidein the social milieusurrounding the individual being (Voloshinov, 1986, p.93).

What, then, might be the nature of the process in which we learn, i.e., come toembody, an inner mental space or network of expectations as to what is mean-ingfully connected to what in the world around usa spatial sense not too unlikeour experience of being able to move around within the physical space around us,a space within which the things within it hang together, so to speak, in anunbroken continuity10. The trouble is, of course, that such a mental space is notonly invisible, it cannot wholly be captured within a logically ordered system ofexplicit causal propositions (formulated in terms of abstract generalities), for itprovides the very context enabling us to make sense of such propositions (Shotter,2013). So what is it like?

Hermeneutical Unities of Meaning

As I see it, it is like the holistic, unities of meaning we come to construct,hermeneutically, as we read a text. We do not begin such a process with apre-established, theoretical order or set of abstract concepts to which the firstwords we encounter need to be assimilated, hoping to explain them as particularinstances of something more general, with all their uniqueness lost. Nor are weconcerned with arriving at factual knowledge, with finished and finalized things,objective understandings, that can be represented by (pictured in) purely spatial forms.The process begins with our immersion within an indeterminate whole in its fullindividuality, as the unique whole it is, known to us only globally as situated withina particular genre (as a novel, textbook, instruction manual, etc). We then proceedto conduct a step-by-step movement, from part-to-whole and back again, gradu-ally specifying or internally articulating it as a living order adapted to the undistortedaccommodation of all the particular, discernible details in the original globalwhole.

In the process, ones understanding of what something is, i.e., what a particulardetail means, is clarified by placing it within the larger whole within which it playsa part. Essentially the hermeneutical procedure involves a specificatory process inwhich something, which is already partly specified, is specified further as we read



on, thus rendering what was at first strange and unfamiliar, as something familiar,as something that plays a comprehensible part within the whole in which it has itsbeing. But what is very special about a hermeneutical unity, is it functioning as aparticular imaginative universal: a) particular in the sense of being distinct from all othersuch unities, and thus providing a basis for James acutely discriminative sense; b)imaginative in the sense of providing an inexhaustible landscape of possibilities relatedto the unity in question; and c) universal in the sense of our being able to make useof it, as a source of possible likenesses and differences, in our many spheres of oureveryday lifes activitiesfeatures making it quite distinct from an abstract gen-erality or general concept.

Consider, for example, making sense of Wittgensteins (1953) writings: Above,I suggested that, overall, his concern was with trying to make clear that, at leastsometimes in our everyday verbal expressions, we express very precisely whatsomething in our surroundings means to us, by showing our understanding of it inour actions. But, notoriously, his writings consist in an amalgam of disconnectedfragments without, seemingly, having what we might call an overall main point.Indeed, others may pick out quite another main concern than the one I havepicked out above. But clearly, he is not seeking a science of . . .X. . ., nor an -ology;he is not outlining a subject matter, conceptually, even though he is continuallyexamining our conceptualizations.

About his attempts to express his thoughts, he said: The essential thing wasthat the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural orderand without breaks. [But] after several attempts to weld my results together intosuch a whole, I realized that I should never succeed . . . my thoughts were sooncrippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their naturalinclination.And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of theinvestigation . . .. The philosophical remarks in this books are, as it were, anumber of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long andinvolved journeyings (p.ix). Yet, the fact is, we still read these fragments as if theywill in fact constitute such a unitywe read each of them as meaning somethingextremely significant in itself, but as we do, we also gradually come to a sense ofthe larger landscape of which Wittgenstein speaks, within which they each havetheir place, i.e., their use, their function, their meaning.

The unity we constitute here is not at all like an abstract generality, defined interms of a few distinctive features common to many instances; it is a particularunity of unmerged particularities, within which the particularities are inter-linkedwith each other without losing their particularity. To the extent that they consistin peoples expressions within a particular circumstance, they are organized intoa unique structure of particular feelings of expectation which can guide us in ouruttering of meaningful talk in relation to that circumstance. In Bakhtins (1986)terms, they give rise to unfinalized (and in fact, unfinalizable) relationally-responsive,dialogical understandings (Shotter, 2010), not to an understanding of things asself-contained objects, but to them as having particular meanings, as pointing

12 John Shotter


beyond themselves to other things within their surroundings, as having a specificfunction or use in relation to all else around them. Elsewhere (Shotter, 2005a&b;Shotter 2011), I have called the kind of guided-thinking in the face of indetermi-nacy to which such understandings can give rise, withness-thinking.

Thus, such a process thus provides us, not with uniquely new knowledge, got byelaborating what is already well-known to us, but with uniquely new ways oforienting or relating ourselves to our surroundings, thus to respond to themdifferentlywhere such changes in our ways of responding, not only change themeaning of what is happening around us, but change us in our very ways of beingin the world, i.e., in what we anticipate will follow from what, as we respond to eventshappening around us.

On Coming to An Understanding within A Dialogically-StructuredDevelopmental Process

As we have seen, however, in our attempts at describing that space we face adifficulty, for logically it seems to consist in a whole collection of incommensurablefragments, and our task is to array those fragments before ourselvesas in thephysical space around uswithin an unbroken continuity. As Wittgenstein (1953)put it, to repeat, the essential thing was that the thoughts should proceed fromone subject to another in a natural order and without breaks (p.ix). But onewonders now whether his failure to weld [his] results together into such a whole,was because he tried to do it out in the world, in remarks on the pages of a book.Perhaps the urge to produce a single, systematic order of connectedness was stillat work within him. Whereas, as we have seen, another, hermeneutical possibilitynow seems to be available.

Gadamer (2000) initially puts the task in a way similar to Wittgenstein: thesubject matter appears truly significant only when it is properly portrayed for us.But perhaps because of his greater awareness of hermeneutical and dialogicalmatters, he sees the purpose of a proper portrayal differently: Thus we arecertainly interested in the subject matter, he continues, but it acquires its lifeonly from the light in which it is presented to us. We accept the fact that thesubject presents different aspects of itself at different times or from differentstandpoints. We accept the fact that these aspects do not simply cancel oneanother out as research proceeds, but are like mutually exclusive conditions thatexist by themselves and combine only in us (p.284, my emphasis).

Wittgenstein (1980a), of course, expressed similar realizations: Working inphilosophylike work in architecture in many respectsis really more a workingon oneself. On ones own interpretation. On ones way of seeing things. (And whatone expects of them.) (p.16). But he expresses this in a context quite different fromthat in which a subject matter presents different aspects of itself at different times,from different standpoints. Although, clearly, he also realized the importance of



moving around, as it were, so as to experience a subject matter from differentstandpoints at different times, thus to begin ones investigations from within thecircumstance within which a difficulty arises, rather than with an abstractconceptualization of it from outside.

Thus against our assumption that we are always looking for the solution to aproblem, he remarks: the difficultyI might sayis not that of finding thesolution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if itwere only a preliminary to it . . . This is connected, I believe, with our wronglyexpecting an explanation, whereas the solution to the difficulty is a description, ifwe give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not tryto get beyond it (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.314). For in all of these remarks, he iscomparing himself with those who constantly see the method of science beforetheir eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the wayscience does (1965, p.18). For they see in the essence, not something thatalready lies open to view and that becomes surveyable [bersichtlich] by arearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface (1953, no.92).

But the argumentative meaning (Billig, 1987, p.91) of Wittgensteins (1953)remarks in his articulation of these realizationsgiven his working first withinmathematical logic, and only gradually moving away from the idea that inphilosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which havefixed rules (1953, no.81)is clearly quite different from Gadamers (2000), whostraightway assumed that it must be emphasized that language has its true beingonly in dialogue, in coming to an understanding (p.446)11. Thus, as Gadamer (2000) seesit, rather than the meaning of words being determined simply by being placed, assymbolic forms, within a pre-existing logical schematism of general conceptsstructured by fixed rules, their meaning comes to be determined only gradually,within a back-and-forth developmental process (not unlike the hermeneuticalprocess outlined above) occurring between all the others and othernesses involvedwithin a shared, dialogically-structured space of inquiry, that they construct amongstthemselves.

As Voloshinov (1986) puts it: . . . the location of the organizing and formativecenter is not within (i.e., not in the material of inner signs) but outside. It is notexperience that organizes expression, but the other way aroundexpression organ-izes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity(p.85). Our thinking must be structured, and necessarily so, under the influence ofour actually existing social environment, or else, rather than down-on-the-ground, we will end up thinking and talking in up-in-the air ways, utterly irrel-evant to it. And further, it is not enough for an individual to do it, it needs to bedone within a thought collective (Fleck, 1979), a research group with a sharedorientation, sharing a unique structure of particular feelings of expectation guidingthem in their uttering of meaningful talk in relation to each other. And yet further,the group needs a kind of thinking that does justice to the detailed nature of itstopic of study, or else again, we will fail to act in ways appropriate to its demands.

14 John Shotter


In other words, the process of our coming to an understanding within an other-wise bewildering circumstance, is nothing like that involved in our solving aproblem individually, in which an already identified and named circumstance isexplained by being placed within a system of already well-known general concepts,so that the activities resulting in its occurrenceits causescan be described. Forin problem-solving, it is assumed that we already know what the problem is, i.e., wecan identify and name it. Whereas in coming to an understanding of an otherwiseindeterminate situation in which others are involved is the reverse of this process.For here, it is only as we gradually come, imaginatively, to articulate the innerlandscape of a specific circumstance in its more particular detail, in linguisticterms intelligible to all involved, that the precise practical nature of the bewilder-ment we face becomes more clear to us, along with the possible pathwaysavailable to us to move beyond it. For what we need to do, is not just to achievea satisfaction of the tension it arouses in us, individually, but a way of verballyarticulating it that arouses in the others around us anticipations as to possible next steps thatmake it possible for them to coordinate their behaviour with ours.

The Importance of Our Wordings

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: Philosophy ought really to bewritten only as poetic composition (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p.24).

In the Natural Sciences, it perfectly alright to begin our inquiries by reflecting on theworld around us and allowing what we call our conceptualizations to guide usin our inquiries. I put the phrase what we call our conceptualizations in quotesabove because, in natural science-based, theory-first approaches, we assume thatif we are to solve our problems, then we must discover what actually are the entitieshidden behind appearances that are causing the difficulties we face. And we assumethat we can begin to do this by the empirical testing of deliberately proposing verbalformulations of possibilities, whilst ignoring the already socially shared anticipationsinfluencing the structure of our everyday responses to the words used in suchformulations (see footnote 5).

But as William James (1996/1909) points out: When we conceptualize, we cutout and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means athat-and-no-other . . . whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiencescompenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded andwhat not (pp.253254). What we cut out and fix is a confluent aspect, a regionwithin the flowing reality within we all are immersed in which intraminglingstrands of activity have created a dynamic stability (Shotter, 2013) that we all cannotice; but as such, it exists only in relation to what else is around it (and us). Yet wehave an over-riding urge to treat what we can notice, and point out to others, asa self-contained nameable thing that is separate from all other such things. Yet,



if we divorce it from its dynamic embedding in its flowing surroundings, as therelational thing it is, it will cease to exist (Shotter, 2015).

And this is the point, as we saw above, of our beginning our inquiries in the SocialSciences, by first immersing ourselves within a bewildering circumstance in its fullindividuality and proceeding gradually, in a back-and-forth manner, to feel it outand to arrive at an inner sense of the unique landscape of possibilities (along with itsown plumb-lines as what right moves feel like) that it in particular offers us, thatwe can later draw on in formulating inquiries of a much more specific kind. But indoing so, anything, any thing that we might pick out and notice and want to pointout to others, must always be done fromwithin our own immersion within the flowingactivity of the circumstance in question. Why? Because it is only within that flowthat the meaning of the words we use in expressing its nature will be shaped by theinfluences of the flow at work upon us at the time of their expression, and will bemanifested in the specific anticipations they arouse in those to whom they areaddressedwhere their main use will be in arousing specific anticipations in thoseaddressees. For as we saw above, such a shared structure of shared anticipations arecrucial to our coordinating our ordinary everyday activities with each other.

The over-riding tendency, however, in our natural science-based, theory-first,social scientific inquiries, is to treat their topics of inquiry as self-contained name-able things, existing separately from all other such things. Observing the pre-dominant tendency to work in terms of conceptualizations (itself a nominalization)expressed in terms of nominalizations, for instance, massification, andmediatization, Billig (2013) notes that, . . . the big concepts which many socialscientists are usingthe ifications and the izationsare poorly equipped fordescribing what people do. By rolling out the big nouns, social scientists can avoiddescribing people and their actions. They can then write in highly unpopulatedways, creating fictional worlds in which their theoretical things, rather than actualpeople, appear as the major actors (p.7, my itals)and the much needed sharedbackground of shared, specific anticipations that might be aroused by the(naming) use of these words, has been eradicated also.

To regain it, we need a telling, feelingful style of writing, not an after-the-factreporting style, that only recounts events retrospectively, after they have happened.Most written narratives (not narrations) order events in time, in terms of before,after, again, and so on. They aim at appearing true, at according with what we takereality to be like, what it should be like; but more often than not, they fail to give usa before-the-fact sense of what it is like to in the now-moment of acting, facing a stillpartially indeterminate circumstance. Billig (2013) depicts this before and after-the-fact difference by comparing Agatha Christies fiction with Freuds case histories.There is a difference between Freud and Poirot, he says (p.97).

When the fictional detective solves the mystery, the story is finished and its hold over the readeris broken, for there was nothing else to the story but the artificial puzzle: This is not the case withFreuds great case histories Freuds solution is not the solution, but, as he always recognized,other interpretations are possible and possible and further sub-themes should be explored. . . .

16 John Shotter


This is only possible because Freud presents their lives with such warm humanity and with so manydetails that resist being constrained into a single explanation (my itals).

Whatever preferred aspect Freud might pick out as an explanation of the mentaldistress of his clientswhether it is a hidden, shameful love, or what he would liketo call an Oedipus complexthe hermeneutical unity that is created by hishuman curiosity and concern to do justice to the detailed uniqueness of eachpersons so-far-lived-life, is communicated to us in the exuberant excitement of hiswriting (at that time)12.

In the now-moment of acting, there is always much more than can be cap-tured in any after-the-fact narrative account of our activities; and this is why almost allsuch retrospective accounts are of little use to us in our everyday, practical affairs,when we face the task of acting in a new, indeterminate situation not previouslyencountered. And the situation gets worse, as Billig points out, as Freud movedfrom his recounting of case histories to his metapsychological writings: he began togive us medical-sounding terms . . . castration complexes, abreactions, cathexes,defence mechanisms, primal repressions, etc . . . all formal things, marked by formalnames (p.97, my itals). Yet the paradox is, Billig points out, that when itcomes to describing human actions ordinary language can be quite specific,whereas, technical, scientific-sounding language by contrast can be imprecise(102).

The urge to formalize what begins as meaningful, to encase within a closed systemof reasoning what is essentially always indeterminate and open, however, seems tobe unquestioningly pervasive throughout the human and social sciences. EvenBruner (1990), who in his Acts of Meaning, complained that the Cognitive Revo-lution . . . has been technicalized in a manner that even undermines [its] originalimpulse. . . . It was, we thought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as thecentral concept of psychologynot stimuli and responses, not overtly observablebehavior, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning (pp.12)Then went on to say: Its aim was to discover and to describe formally the meaningsthat human beings created out of their encounters with the world, and then topropose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated (p.2,my itals), without seeming to realize that that was the movepeople representingmeanings by forms (distinctively shaped objects)that yet again technicalized(sic) it. What, thus, are we to do?

CONCLUSIONSWORKING IN TERMS OF FELT DISSATISFACTIONS RATHER

THAN DREAMS OF PERFECTION; THE ART OF ACHIEVING LIMITED BUT

SATISFACTORY RESULTS IN PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCES

As we saw above, to get clear as to what, precisely, is the difficulty we face in aparticular situation, we must first arrive at an unified, hermeneutically-organized or



dialogically-structured sense of the field of possibilities its offers us for making moveswithin it. To repeat, as Dewey (1938/2008) put it, a problem must be felt beforeit can be stated (p. 76), and it must be stated in such a way that all involved in itcan gain a feel for it in a similar manner, if it is to be investigated in an organizedfashion within a thought collective. Doing this is an art. Why? Because our arts areto do with bringing novel and unique feelings into existence related to our currentways of being-in-the-world, and there are no pre-established rules, principles, ormethods for doing that.

This is why our first steps in creating situated practices of social inquiry need tobe of an artistic kind. For although the difficulties we face in our social lives arereal, in the sense that they are there as undeniable, persistent facts existingindependently of any of our attitudes or opinions about them, and we cannot wishthem away, they are relational, not objective things (Shotter, 2015). They are uniquedifficulties with their own unique character, not describable in general terms, forthe simple fact is: we never face the same situation twice. Thus, initially, we needan accurate, situated (not a general) understanding of their particular nature, aprecisely felt understanding against which can measure our attempts at expressingtheir nature in a manner communicable to others.

Indeed, if Wittgenstein (1953) is correct, in trying to apply the results of socialscientific inquiries, communicated to us only in general terms, to our everyday psycho-logical and social concerns, we find them somewhat bewildering, because theirmeaning is quite imprecise. While we may bandy-around such terms as inferioritycomplexes, defence mechanisms, and unconscious wishes, we literally do not,in any precise manner, know what we are talking about. It is unclear as to whichspecific aspects of our current circumstances they might refer; for the fact is, in oureveryday circumstances they are being (mis)used outside of the original, academiclanguage-games, or thought-collectives, in which they had their original home.While in our everyday talk, we talk of people as being hesitant and uncertain,of them as protesting too much or of being defensive, and also of saying onething while meaning another or of leaving what they really mean unsaid,without causing too much trouble in misleading our listenersfor we do it on thebasis of what we actually experience as occurring in our dealings with them. And the fact is,our metaphorical or poetic talk, as to what their behaviour is like in this, that, orsome other particular context, can, in the contours of its unfolding, provide us witha much more precise sense of the detailed nature of their behaviour than the use ofgeneral technical terms.

What is crucial here is to accept that when we move back into a world ofmeanings, and out of a world of patterns, forms, and representations, everythingchanges. It does not mean, however, that many of the crucial words we usespontaneously in the conduct of our everyday affairswords like knowledge,being, object, I, proposition, name, and so onneed to be aban-doned. If we use them within the confines of a language-game (no.116) in whichthey are at home, so to speak, then we usually do not cause ourselves too much

18 John Shotter


trouble. As long as the others around us can anticipate what next we are expecting tofollow from our sayings and doings, they can then coordinate their activities in withours. But all this does mean that the classical ideaof a pure science as simplypursuing final certain truths for their own sakecannot be regarded as the goal ofour social scientific inquiries.

For even more than Wittgenstein (1953, 1980a&b), it was C. Wright Mills(1940) who much earlier emphasized that the main function of language in oursocial lives together is not the representation of things in the world, nor the giving ofouter expression to already well-formed inner thoughts, but consists in its use increating and sustaining social orders. It is not so much how I can use languagein itself that matters, as the way in which I must take you into account in my useof it. We must approach linguistic behaviour, said Mills (1940), to quote him,. . . by observing its social function of co-ordinating diverse actions. Rather thanexpressing something which is prior and in the person, language is taken by otherpersons as an indicator of future actions (p.904). Rorty (1999) also sees the issuein a similar manner: We cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry. The purposeof inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, tobring consensus on the end to be achieved and the means to be used to achievethose ends. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behaviour is not inquirybut simply wordplay (p. xxv).

So although we must relinquish the search for general, certain truths, this doesnot mean that there are no uses at all for the word truth: What is remarkableabout the hermeneutical unities that I explored above is that, in theirunfinishedness, they not only provide us with a sense of lack, with a feeling thatthere is always a something more, a feeling that we have still not got it quiteright, but that they can also seem to provide us with an inner compass orplumb-line functioning as a guide towards the kind of rightness needed.While the task of doing justice to what our particular circumstances requireof us, seems in fact to be never ending.

Someone, it seems to me, who has been very clear about adopting what wemight now call a specifically situated form of inquiry, rather than a more generalform, is Amartya Sen (2009) in his book, The Idea of Justice. He begins it by quotingCharles Dickenss who, in Great Expectations, put these words into the mouth of thegrown up Pip: In the little world in which children have their existence, there isnothing so finely perceived and finely felt, as injustice (p.vii)where the grownup Pip is recollecting a humiliating encounter with his sister, Estella. In otherwords, he wants to begin his inquiries, not by asking what a perfectly just societywould look like, but from our felt sensing of a something being unjust, from our disquiets,from our feelings of things being not quite right. Why? Because: What moves us,reasonably enough, he remarks, is not the realization that the world falls shortof being completely justwhich few of us expectbut that there are clearlyremediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate (p.vii). But howmight that eliminating be done?



About theorists attempting to specify what justice actually is, Sen (2009) notesthat all [the] general reasoning they provide, takes us, we are assured to quiteclear-cut rules to follow as unambiguous principles of justice, with singular insti-tutional implications (p.89). Famous in this sphere is Rawls (1971), A Theory ofJustice. But, Sen (2009) asks: Is there too much decisiveness here? If the reasoning[Sen has] presented so far is correct, then this degree of specification requires usto close our eyes to a number of relevant, indeed vitally important, considerations.The nature and context of Rawlsian principles of justice and the process throughwhich they are derived may have the effect of leading to some serious problematicexclusions (pp.8990), of which Sen then goes on to list quite a number. Thus,instead of seeking to implement perfect justice on the basis of questionableidealizations, Sens suggestion is that we can seek to eliminate particular injusticeswith some expectation of success.

Working in this limited, situated manner, then, will be aimed at achievingagreement among human beings about what to do, at bringing about consensus onparticular ends to be achieved in particular circumstances, and the means to beused in achieving those ends. As such, it will give rise to a whole new set ofexpectations, a new horizon of future goals and endeavours, quite different fromour more instrumental, theory-driven, discipline based approaches in the past.For instanceif we want to focus on injustices and the ethics at work in ourrelations to each otherwe end with a new orientation towards inquiries into thenature of the communication process, compared with it as being to do with thetransmission of messages within the context of the communication discipline.

Clearly, what I have set out herein trying to clarify the conditions required forthe members of a thought collective to coordinate their inquires in an unconfusedfashionis a mere sketch of a possibility13, and much more needs to be said andexplored. But in setting out the possibility of this new orientation towards ourinquiries into our social affairs in this fashion, I am reminded of how Thomas Kuhn(1962) ended his account of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; he said: We are alldeeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantlynearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? Ifwe can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of vexing problems may vanish in the process(p.170). And this, of course, is what I am proposing here: that we relinquish the stillunfulfilledand, as I see it, forever unfulfillabledream of gaining the very generalresults we desire in our inquiries, and to be content with the limited, partial, andsituated results we can in fact obtainwhich, in the end, will, I believe, perhapssurprisingly, turn out to be of far greater practical use and value to us.

John ShotterEmeritus Professor of CommunicationDepartment of CommunicationUniversity of New Hampshire

20 John Shotter


DurhamNH 03824-3586U.S.A.

Research AssociateCentre for Philosophy of Natural & Social Science (CPNSS)London School of EconomicsLondonUK

Visiting Professor in Open University Business School and Leeds University Business [email protected]

Acknowledgement. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers of this paperwhose comments have provoked me into making undoubted improvementswithin it.

NOTES

1 Here I am following Barad (2007), in taking seriously her claim that we are of theworld, rather than merely existing in it.

2 Working in terms of likenesses and similarities (and differences) rather than correspondences,i.e. identities, is central, as we will see, to the Wittgensteinian approach I am taking here.

3 In discussing how a true finding can eventually emerge from false assumptions, andfrom many errors and detours, Fleck (1979) suggests the following comparison: How doesit come about that all rivers finally reach the sea, in spite of perhaps initial flowing in a wrongdirection, taking roundabout ways, and generally meandering? There is no such thing as thesea as such. The area at the lowest level, the area where the waters actually collect, is merelycalled the sea! Provided enough water flows in the river and a field of gravity exists, all rivers must finally endup at the sea. The field of gravity corresponds to the dominant and directing disposition, andwater to the work of the entire thought collective. The momentary direction of each drop isnot at all decisive. The result derives from the general direction of gravity (pp.7879)thedominant and directing disposition at work in all our intellectual work at the moment (its telos)is, of course, our urge to arrive at the truth of the matter.

4 Stolzenberg (1978) shows how, as result of what he calls acts of acceptance as such inthe domain of ordinary language use (p. 267), even mathematicians can entrap them-selves in closed systems of thought of their own devising to such an extent that, once insidesuch systems, it is extremely difficult to escape from them. For although an objectivedemonstration that certain of the beliefs [within the system] are incorrect can exist, certainof the attitudes and habits of thought prevent this from being recognized (p.224).Wittgenstein (1953) makes a similar point: How does the philosophical problem aboutmental processes and states and about behaviorism arise?the first step is the one thataltogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided.Sometime perhaps we shall know more about themwe think. But that is just what commitsus to a particular way of looking at the matter . . . (The decisive movement in the conjuringtrick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent) (no.308).

5 ButwhatDescartes is talkingofhereas theplumb-line (betterplumb-lines)ofreason,are, I think,better described as aspects derived from what Bakhtin (1984) describes above as dialogical unities, and



what later I will describe as particularhermeneutical or imaginative universals. Indeed, as an aspect of adialogical unity, they are more like more like what Wittgenstein (1953) means when he speaks of amodel as an object of comparisonas, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea towhich realitymust correspond (no.131).

6 As is well known, friction, air resistance, and other contextual details are usuallyignored in physical theories.

7 In the social and behavioural sciences we study, and in our everyday affairs, of course,we talk of peoples attitudes, their personality, motives, or mental disturbances orother named abnormalities of some kind, while in physics, we study the behaviour ofwaves or particles.

8 It takes a while, for instance, for a shape coming into view on the horizon, or emergingon a foggy day, to be recognized. Horror movies are full of things whose presence is onlynoticed when they move, and so on. Our coming to see something as an identifiable some-thing, is not all that uncommon.

9 Daniel Stern (2004, 2010) calls them vitality affects (p.16), feelings experienced asan unfolding time-shape that are an analogue of the temporal contours of the unfoldingexperience.

10 Ideally, in every sphere of our lives, whether in thought or in practical action, wewould like to possess a comprehensive sense of how things hang together so that we couldmove around within that sphere without becoming confused or disoriented: In the realmof every ideal, suggests William James (1897/1956), we can begin anywhere and roamover the field, each term passing us to its neighbour, each member calling for the next . . .where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong to each other by inward kinship, wherethe whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers of reaction . . . (p.264). Ourordinary, everyday experience of space is thus, for us, a paradigm of such an ideal. Indeed,to go further, in noting that we can zoom in to look at what is around us in minute detail,and zoom out to see it in the large, some feel inclined to follow Bohm (1980) and to arguethat it is organized holographically.

11 Although Wittgenstein (1980a) is clear that he is saying something new, in tryingexpress it he realized that it still has the eggshells of the old view sticking to it (p.44)afate that we all find difficult to avoid. Wittgenstein (1953) does, however, express the socialand bounded nature of language use by suggesting that: We can also think of the wholeprocess of using words . . . as [like] one of those games by means of which children learntheir native language . . . I will call these games language-games . . . Think of much of theuse words in games like ring-a-ring-a-roses. I shall also call the whole, consisting oflanguage and the actions into which it is woven, the language-game (no.7). A word onlyhas a specific meaning (use) within the confines of a language-game.

12 As Billig (2013) goes on to point out, in his later, more formal, theoretical writing,Freud turned the dilemmas of people into a world of things, in which objects like the ego,the id, complexes, cathexes and defence mechanisms were the actors, not people them-selves (p.98).

13 I have in fact ignored, and thus not paid proper attention to a number of closely,kindred spirits; not simply the classic work of enthnomethodologists and conversationanalysts, but also, in particular, the enactive approach of De Jaegher (2009) and Fuchs & DeJaegher (2009), and the still in press work of my friend Kenneth Gergen (in press).

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Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of dostoevskys poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin,Tx: University of Texas Press.

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of howmatter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801831.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter andmeaning. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

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