The "way of the theory" isn't at all bad.
You observe, and see a possible relationship.You make a hypothesis, which you test. If it tests out positively, you might raise it to a theory. If your theory shows invariability, you might well raise it to a law, but that isn't so likely - though to be desired.
As I said, it doesn't seem at all bad to me.
Yet Shotter feels we must throw it out to make room for - actually nothing, not even a theory. In fact, worse, he doesn't seem to climb past that worst of all possible worlds, the untestable hypothesis
He quotes Kitto:
"the universe, both the physical and the moral universe, must not only be rational, and therefore knowable, but also simple; the apparent multiplicity of things is only apparent"
Well, you know the two assumptions I suggested preceded every science. They don't have to stated. They are just assumed, because they must be.
"There is an order in the universe."
"The mind of Man can discover that order."
If the opposite is assumed, there can be no science. In fact, anyone must fear the very next moment, for it might be chaos. So the scientist proceeds as if the assumptions are correct.
He says:
"the way of theory suggests to us that the primary source of all of our human activities is, supposedly, to be found in mental representations inside the heads of individuals"
Manifestly ridiculous. We may hypothesize that is going to rain. But the source of the hypothesis is observational. We see circumstances that lead us to expect rain - from what we already have observed at other times.
He says:
"This leads on to a second point, a worry to do with the forming of human communities: For the way of theory suggests to us that they come into being through the forming of rational agreements - Rousseauian 'social contracts'. In other words, it suggests that new forms of social relations can be argued or administrated into existence. But, as Richard Bernstein (1983) remarks, all attempts to implement 'the idea that we can make, engineer, impose our collective will to form [new] communities... have been disastrous"
Again, rather doubtful, but he sets up a situation then argues against it. Agreements follow the establishment of a community - agreements not to harm each other, for example.
But, in the "collective will" area, utopian communities are plentiful. They fail mostly, but not necessarily, when the charismatic leader dies. Religious communities often last for generations - and longer.
If he refers to the failure of government power to do things, that's another matter.
His "eyes of a stranger" bit is much ado about nothing. The Pollards talk to everyone, at any time, under all conditions. Our lives are enriched by these contacts. Yet, we haven't lately met any Others, or Othernesses up on the mountain recently.
Today, by the water, we passed the time of day with a family we haven't met before. We discussed the paths up the mountain, an alternative trail to the top from Glendale, rain, snow, and whether the little girl took care of the two twin sons.
Then we went on up, and the family presumably went to their car. We enjoyed the meet, but there was nothing darkly significant about it.
I intended to cut him to pieces, but it's wearisome.
I don't think he says very much, but he wraps anything he does say in a torrent of words that obfuscate rather than announce any profundities.
The amusing ting about what he says is that (as I said above) it is couched in the manner of an hypothesis - an untestable hypothesis.
If it were testable, it would perhaps march onward toward "the way of a theory".
Which would no doubt send him into a tizzy.
Harry
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Brian wrote:
At 1:24 PM -0500 12/20/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:Amen, Arthur!"It is theory that decides what can be observed." (Albert Einstein)
And that leads me to suggest a most profound heresy: perhaps 'the way of theory' is the problem!!!
And to support this heresy I offer:
Spoken paper for ISTP Annual Conference, Berlin, 27 April - 2 May, 1997
PROBLEMS WITH 'THE WAY OF THEORY'
John Shotter
'I might say: if the place I want to get to
could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would
give up trying to get there. For the place I
really have to get to is the place I must already
be at now. Anything that might be reached by
climbing a ladder doesn't interest me'
(Wittgenstein, 1980, p.7).
In 1995 at this meeting, I gave a paper on
Wittgenstein's methods, called 'From the way of theory toward a
social poetics.' In it I claimed, that if we are
to gain a clearer view of the complex inter-relations between our
everyday, practical actions and the influences on
them in their surrounding circumstances - if, for instance,
we want to come to a better grasp of why certain
forms of talk work to distance and alienate listeners, while
others energize and involve them; to create, in
conversations with others, new possible relations between
things not previously considered so they can 'go
on' with their lives; or, to help a group of people develop
less violent, more intimate ways relating
themselves to each other - then we must turn away from the way of
theory and espouse Wittgenstein's new 'poetic'
methods of inquiry. For their precise point is to do with
'bringing to our attention' relations between
aspects of our own human activities, previously unnoticed in the
everyday, background 'hurly-burly' to our lives,
here and now.
But I now realize that my celebration of these new
methods was somewhat premature: my claim that we
must turn away from the way of theory if we are
develop both new methods of inquiry and new social
practices more suited to our currently more
diverse and pluralistic social circumstances, simply provoked
incredulity. I was insufficiently critical of the
way of theory to make it clear why a turn away from it is so
necessary. Here, I want to try to put that right,
and to try to say why, if we are to tackle some of the most
pressing problems we currently face, we must make
that turn.
I
Let me begin by acknowledging that there is no
doubt that we all share a feeling that we would like to be
more 'at home' in the world, to know better our
'way around' in every region of it, at every moment. We would
like to have a 'synoptic' sense of it as a
'surveyable' whole - as Wittgenstein (1980a, 1953) puts it - in a way
somewhat similar to the unconfused, familiar, and
intimate way we know how to conduct ourselves inside our
own dwelling places. There is no doubt that we
feel driven to inquire into how 'things hang together', so to
speak.
In the Western world, however, although this
desire has been realized in many practical ways - through
exploration, and the accumulation of many forms of
practical knowledge - it seems to have been primarily
expressed i we feel justified in seeking to apply
our theories in practice. And this is where the
danger lies. But what are the nature of my worries here?
II
For the moment, I will focus just on two
interrelated topics (although it will become clear that a whole
complex of intertwined issues is at stake in this
sphere): First, let me simply remark that the way of theory
suggests to us that the primary source of all of
our human activities is, supposedly, to be found in mental
representations inside the heads of individuals.
We thus take it that, rather than acting in response to
unique and subtle details in their circumstances,
people act from their own inner thoughts or ideas. Little or
no attention is paid to those of our activities
spontaneously 'called out' from us by the Others and
othernesses in our surroundings, due to our
existence in the world as living bodies. Our relations to our
immediate circumstances - and their moment-by-
moment, changing constitution as we consider and
reconsider what is of relevance to us - are ignored.
This leads on to a second point, a worry to do
with the forming of human communities: For the way of theory
suggests to us that they come into being through
the forming of rational agreements - Rousseauian 'social
contracts'. In other words, it suggests that new
forms of social relations can be argued or administrated into
existence. But, as Richard Bernstein (1983)
remarks, all attempts to implement 'the idea that we can make,
engineer, impose our collective will to form [new]
communities... have been disastrous' (p.226). Indeed, as
Sir Isaiah Berlin remarks, while many of our
'great liberating ideas' initially open up a surge of new
opportunities, they 'inevitably turn into
suffocating straitjackets, and so stimulate their own destruction by
new, emancipating, and at the same time,
enslaving, conceptions' (Berlin, 1981, p.159).
Why is this? Because, as Bernstein points out: 'A
community or polis is not something that can be made or
engineered by some form of techne or by the
administration of society. There is something of a circle here,
comparable to the hermeneutical circle. The coming
into being of a type of public life that can strengthen
solidarity, and a commitment to rational
persuasion presupposes the incipient forms of such communal life'
(p.226, my emphasis). In other words - and this is
my central point here today - there is something in the
very nature of human relationships that so far we
have failed to recognize and to acknowledge, something
that is prior to everything we think of as being
of importance to us as individual human beings: Our personal
and social identities, our awareness and
conceptions of the world about us, our forms of rationality, our
ability to theorize, and so on, are all made
possible and emerge out of the fact, that we are spontaneously
responsive to each other, bodily - we cannot not
be, although we may fail to notice and rationally to
acknowledge the fact that we are.
III
It is this failure of acknowledgement that is
crucial. For, as Wittgenstein (1969) brings to our attention:
'Knowledge in the end is based on acknowledgement'
(no.378) - if initially we fail to notice a phenomenon,
clearly, we shall fail to take it into account in
any of our further inquiries. Given our concerns here, this in fact
very deep remark is of importance to us in at
least two ways:
1) For first, it suggests to us that all our
different forms of knowledge, or ways of knowing, emerge from
within our different ways of relating ourselves to
the Others and othernesses in our surroundings - the ethics
and politics of our ways of relating are prior to
all our forms of knowledge, to our knowledges (as Foucault
might say). 2) But second, it raises for us the
complex and unending question of quite what it means for us
to make such acknowledgements - 'What happens in a
person when, for instance, they acknowledge that
what you have just said to them has brought them
to see the error of their ways?' 'What do they now feel
the need to do that they had not done before?'
'How have their relations of obligation to you and to Others
changed?' We encounter a stranger in the Park, our
eyes meet, we acknowledge them, and we now feel
obligated to them in ways quite different had we
just passed them by, unacknowledged - Indeed, Latane
and Darley (19??) are said to have 'empirically
proved' this: although without our prior sense of an obligation
to strangers, our seeing of their studies as
constituting a 'proof' of this would be impossible.
These are deep issues. But let me return to the
one simple point that I want to emphasize here: It is only
from within our relations to the Others and
othernesses around us, that our different knowledges emerge.
And, although there is no requirement or necessity
for us to make any responsive acknowledgements of
new aspects of these relations, nor any guarantees
as to their outcome if we do, it is only on the basic of
such acknowledgements that we can create between
us, possibilities for their further development -
possibilities which, because they build, not on
hypothetical but on actual events, we can call providential
possibilities (Shotter, 1993, Ch.3).
We respond to the stranger's fleeting eye contact
with our's as a vague - but nonetheless clear (!) - sign of
annoyance at us having 'accosted' them (this is
Big City stuff), and we walk on in anxiety lest they go on to
'make something of it'. This is how our relations
begin, in such unique and fleeting moments as these.
Indeed, as Wittgenstein puts it: 'Language did not
emerge from some kind of ratiocination' (1969, no.475).
'The origin and primitive form of the
language-game is a reaction [a response]; only from this can more
complicated forms develop. Language - I want to
say - is a refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'
[Goethe]' (1980, p.31). 'The primitive reaction
may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have
been a word' (p.218). In other words, no
acknowledging responses from others, no emergence of
language.
IV
But if this is the case, if all our relations with
each other (and from within them all our dealings with the world)
only begin in these pre-theoretical, radically
contingent, non-hierarchically ordered forms of activity, why do
we still persist in claiming that our ways of
relating ourselves to each must be a matter of ratiocination, of
rational planning, a matter of fitting our human
relations into hierarchically ordered, calculational schemes?
Why do we still persist, in our attempts to
regulate our social lives, in the few try to devise beliefs,
hypotheses, or principles for implementation by
the many? Why do we remain so blind to the nature of our
basic, living, bodily relations to the Others and
othernesses around us?
As I have already mentioned, Kitto claims that our
sensitivities - the things we notice and acknowledge as
well as the things we fail to notice - have their
roots in forms of life which have been developed from those
of the ancient Greeks: central to which is the
tendency, let me repeat, not to relate one's actions to one's
immediate circumstances, but to a system of
simple, unifying beliefs. Indeed, in discussing the contemporary
style of Thales's thought, Kitto comments: 'Could
Thales have meet a nineteenth century chemist and
heard that the elements are sixty-seven (or
whatever the number is), he would have objected that this was
far too many. Could he have met a
twentieth-century physicist and heard that these are all different
combinations of one thing, he might reply, 'That's
what I always said'' (pp.179-180).
Importantly, Richard Webster (1996) in
psychologizing this urge to ground our actions in simple, systematic
unities - in his book Why Freud was Wrong - notes
its relations to the essentially religious need to reduce
the rich and complex problems of the human soul to
simple matters of belief. He quotes Jung's (1963)
characterization of Freud's following of the way
of theory as reflecting this: 'In place of the jealous God he
had lost,' says Jung of Freud,
'he had substituted another compelling
image, that of sexuality. It was no less insistent,
exacting, domineering, threatening and
morally ambivalent than the original one... The
advantage of the transformation for Freud
was, apparently, that he was able to regard the
new numinous principle as scientifically
irreproachable and free of all religious taint' (p.179,
quoted in Webster, 1996, p.379).
And indeed, Webster goes on to note that Jung
himself, 'instead of dismissing religion as part of the
problem, ...saw it as a potential solution and as
a source of healing' (pp.386-387) - the problem of 'finding a
religious outlook on life' (Jung, 1960, p.264)
was, he claimed, central for all his patients in 'the second half
of life.' Cast into an intellectual environment of
rationalistic positivism that, ostensibly is hostile to all forms of
religious belief, many western intellectuals still
feel themselves, as Webster (1996) puts it, 'under a profound
psychological compulsion to immerse themselves
once more in belief' (p.384). Rorty (1980, 1989) also
notes, and wants to try and cure us, of our
complusive need to try to find a basis for our actions somewhere
'beyond history and institutions' (p.198), and to
'eternalize' or 'divinize' the ideology of the day in our quest
for it - a lesson all those currently indulging in
the triumphalism associated with cognitive science might do
well to note. Religious zealotry and
fundamentalism can be found just as much outside as inside churches.
This compulsive psychological aspect of the way of
theory noted here by Webster and Rorty is, I think, worth
taking seriously (Wittgnestein too talks of our
'cravings' and 'impulses,' and sees his philosophy as
'therapeutic' in its function of 'curing' us of
them). For, if nothing else, it helps to explain why the difficulties
associated with current attempts to move away from
the way of theory - away from forms of life in which the
few with clear convictions and beliefs, are
appointed to devise 'theories' to be 'put into practice' by the more
wayward many - are not all simply intellectual
difficulties. For the way of theory is a part of our social
identities, a part of who we in the West take
ourselves to be.
V
Yet, in committing ourselves to a form of inquiry
that can only be conducted from within the framework of an
intelligibly shared belief or hypothesis, we limit
our inquiries to phenomena that can only appear within such
frameworks - and what is excluded in such
inquiries is, of course, just the very phenomena that are now of
interest to us in these postmodern, social
constructionist times: otherness, diversity, differences,
multiplicity,
duplicity, instability, and the nature of the
complex, joint, creative, disorderly, dialogical processes involved in
socially constructing our frameworks of belief,
and forms of order in the first place. In other words, we
overlook just those events to do with what
Bernstein calls 'the incipient forms of communal life' upon which
the development, of a type of public life in which
all are committed to rational persuasion instead of violence
in settling their affairs, depends.
Thus, if this is our desire, our pursuit of it
through the way of theory is now, as I see it, both beside the point
and after the fact:
1) It is beside the point in the sense that the
way of theory is aimed ultimately at justifying or legitimating a
proposed action by providing it with an already
agreed grounding or basis. Whereas, what we require in our
daily affairs, is not so much legitimation in
terms of an already agreed status quo, as clear guidance in how
to act in unique and novel circumstances: we wish
to know in an unconfused, incontestable sense, in this or
that particular, never-before-occurring situation,
what is the right thing to do. (The practitioner's problem -
and they make us only too well aware that they
find our theories of little help in their daily practices.)
2) The way of theory is thus after the fact in the
sense of that its focus is retrospective: from within it, we look
back on successfully completed events with the aim
of finding an order or pattern in them that can be
instituted mechanically, unthinkingly, according
to rules or recipes. Whereas, in our daily affairs, we need to
focus, not on their final outcome, but on the
particular, moment-by-moment unfolding, constructive details of
our practical activities. We need to come to a
grasp of all the influences that might be at work in any one
moment as we make our way toward such outcomes. To
represent this loose-textured, temporal, disorderly
process - in which many possibilities are
considered but few are chosen - as an already orderly and coherent
process is to hide from ourselves the character of
the social negotiations, navigations, and struggles
productive of its order.
Thus, it is in at least these two senses that
theories are beside the point and after the fact. To orient
ourselves intellectually in relation to such
phenomena, we require another mode of inquiry. But where might
we begin our explorations in the search for it ...
if we cannot begin from assumptions and suppositions?
VI
Classically, in the way of theory, we have thought
of ourselves as being influenced by the objects and
events around us monologically, that is, we have
thought of ourselves as self-contained individuals
(Sampson, 1993), related to our surroundings as if
viewing them from a distance - almost as if viewing them
through a plate-glass window that prevented us
having any actual, living contact with them. And this has led
us to think of the world around us as being an
external world.
However, as I have already noted, as living,
embodied beings, we cannot not be responsive to the world
around us. Unlike computers and other machines, we
must continuously react to our surroundings directly
and immediately, in a 'living' way, without us
first having 'to work it out' as to how to respond; and, in so
doing, of necessity, we relate ourselves to our
surroundings, in one way or another, spontaneously.
But once we allow for this possibility, once we do
notice, do acknowledge the fact that people are
intrinsically in a continuous, living contact with
each other, we can no longer sustain the idea of ourselves as
being separate, self-contained entities, nor that
of our world as being an 'external' world. For as soon as a
second living human being responds to the acts of
a first, that is, as soon as I act in a way that depends on
your acts... then my activities cannot be
accounted as wholly my own: as spontaneous responses to the
activities of an Other, my activities must be
partly shaped by their otherness, by their difference from me.
And this is where all the strangeness of our
dialogically responsive relations to each other begins.
VII
A whole new realm of study can open up to us with
this entirely non-necessary acknowledgement of
people's responsive relations to each other. In
the way of theory, we tend to assume that what explains our
openness to our surroundings, are fore-structures
of pre-understandings we already possess (to use
Gadamer's, 1975, terms); these are what determine
to what we can or cannot be responsive. But this is why
I think the remarks in Wittgenstein's late
philosophy are so important to us: his words can - as a first step -
'call out' new responses from us to our
surrounding circumstances, responses that go way beyond our
current, intellectual, pre- understandings, which
confront us both with new mysteries as well as with hints as
to how to develop our relations to them further.
Like the stranger's responses to us in the Park, they work to
specify a circumstance partially - an annoyance -
but leave it open and still somewhat mysterious as to how
we might 'go on' with them, but yet again, not so
open that we find ourselves hopelessly disoriented. No
wonder that in grappling with these issues,
without the resort to simplifying and limiting theoretical
frameworks of belief, Wittgenstein (1953) groaned
to himself: 'What is most difficult here is to put this
indefiniteness, correctly, and unfalsified, into
words' (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.227). Without a framework of
belief, we at least need an orientational landmark
or two to return to every so often in one's explorations of
the vast landscape now opened up, one would soon
become disoriented and confused.
Such an initial landmark can be found, I believe,
in a focus on our simple, responsive relations to Other's (as
in the stranger across the Park example I have
used here), on what in the past I have called 'joint action'
(Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993, 1995). Indeed, if we
do re-image to ourselves the meeting of the eyes of a
stranger across the Park, if we do acknowledge how
the presence of an Other can 'strike' us and become 'a
presence' in our presence, and we pause there for
a while to dwell on the richness (the 'fractal fullness') of
what can be found in such a fleeting moment, then,
I think, we will be forced to admit that, although we can
formulate what occurs in this way and that
according to one or another of our own schemes of
interpretation, the event still nonetheless has
its own in exhaustible character. Yet, on the other hand, as
both Bakhtin (1986) and Levinas (1969) point out -
and we have seen with the Park stranger example -
once we do acknowledge an Other's presence, we
find ourselves obligated to them in some mysterious way.
And here, I want to add that, it is only from
within this obligation that we can begin to discover the unique
nature of their 'inner world' - that is, we can
only fully experience the complex and rich diversity of reality
through the ethical relations established in our
initial acknowledgements of the Others around us. Ethics is
prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge.
This, I know, is not a place to end this talk.
Indeed, the claim that ethics is prior to, not a consequence, of
knowledge, remains an empty claim, until we can
begin to see how the beginnings of new practices of
inquiry can grow out of the kind of fleeting
acknowledgements I have alluded to here - examples are
provided in Katz and Shotter (1996, 1997) and
Shotter and Katz (1997). But my main point here has been,
that as long as we persist in the way of theory we
will remain blind to this fact, and unaware of the kind of
explorations we in fact require, if we are to
develop our own practices of intellectual inquiry further - and of
especial importance to us, instead of more
democratic forms of relation, we will still persist in the attempt to
organize our social lives in terms of simple
systems of belief imposed on the few by the many.
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Churchill College
Cambridge CB3 0DS
England
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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