John David Shotter

Central to the paper below, is an emphasis on the spontaneously responsive nature of our living bodies, and on the special intertwined, dialogic, or chiasmic nature of events that can occur only in our meetings with others and otherness around us. As participants in such meetings, immediately responsive 'withness-understandings' become available to us that are quite different to the 'aboutness-understandings' we arrive at as disengaged, intellectual spectators. I argue that Goethe's "delicate empiricism", far from being an arcane form of understanding, is a deliberately extended version of this kind of withness-understanding — an anticipatory form of practical understanding that gives us a direct sense of how, in Wittgenstein's (1953) terms, to 'go on' with the others and othernesses around us in our daily lives.

There are now countless social scientific disciplines—listed either as the science of … X … or as an -ology of one kind or another—each with their own internal controversies as to what are their “proper objects of their study.” This profusion of separate sciences has emerged, and is still emerging, tainted by the classical Cartesian-Newtonian assumption of a mechanistic world. We still seem to assume that we can begin our inquiries simply by reflecting on the world around us, and by allowing our conceptualizations to guide our actions in our inquiries. Beginning our inquiries in this retrospective manner, however, means that our concepts and conceptualizations are both after-the-fact and beside the point, for ‘something else’ altogether is guiding us in the performance of our situation-sensitive actions than merely our conceptualizations. We need before-the-fact, hermeneutically-structured inquiries that can ‘set out’ inner ‘landscapes of possibilities’, to think-with and to provide guidance, as we try in our more scientifically organized efforts to achieve socially desired outcomes in particular socially shared situations. Conducting such preliminary inquiries is thus an art, requiring not only judgment, but also imagination and poetic forms of expression aimed at creating such shared, inner landscapes among all concerned

Open peer commentary on the target article “From Objects to Processes: A Proposal to Rewrite Radical Constructivism” by Siegfried J. Schmidt. Upshot: Schmidt suggests a resolution to what he calls “the reality problem” by claiming that we can take processes as “the basis for the emergence of realities.” Schmidt’s resolution, however, seems to me to be merely a theoretical resolution – a re-conceptualization – whereas I think a more practical reorientation is required: we need to relate ourselves directly to our surroundings in terms of our living, bodily responsiveness, instead of indirectly in terms of a theoretical framework

Does all understanding consist in our using concepts to relate to the things around us, or do we also possess a more direct, spontaneous, bodily way of doing so? I explore this second possibility via Bateson's notion of “double description.” These phenomena are dynamic phenomena, in that they have their existence only in our embodied relations to the temporal unfolding of events in the two or more relevant sources. As such, as Bateson put it, they are of a different “logical type” to their source events. Bateson did not, however, extend this important insight out into the ways in which can make ourselves ready to relate to the others and othernesses around us, not only in such a way as to intertwine our outgoing activities towards them in with the incoming activities from them in a subtlety responsive manner, but also come to use the relational understandings created in such dynamic interplays in an anticipatory fashion—thus to provide us with embodied, perceptual skills that enable us to go out to meet familiar circumstances with appropriate kinds of response “at the ready”, so to speak. Below, following Todes and Merleau-Ponty , I outline the kind of preparing activities required if we are to acquire new embodied “readinesses” that enable us to become more “at home” in surroundings which are in fact in continual change—a process that connects with Bateson's account of abduction, the process in which we can sense the existence of a “pattern that connects.” Overall, my purpose in all of this is to bring to the fore the ineradicable role of our bodies in spontaneously arriving at what counts as real for us, and which although unnamable by us, determines that of “which knowledge always speaks”