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29Power on the margins: A new place for intellectuals to be (review)Argumentation 9 (1): 95-113. 1995.This paper is concerned with rethinking the nature of social life in terms of how it appears — not to us academics at the centre of it, as consisting in a system, or a plurality of systems -but how it might appear from a position more in on the margins, at those moments when ordinary people must relate themselves to each other, unsystematically and practically. To do this, we must also rethink the nature of language and thought as possessing within these moments, a formative or creative characte…Read more
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84 history of the human sciences vol. 7 no. 1 3 this development in social psychology can be seen both here (Gergen, 1985) and in a large number of subsequent publications and collections, too numerous to cite, in which Gergen has played a major role. That he is not alone can be seen in the work of (review)History of the Human Sciences 7 (1). 1994.
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8Wittgenstein and Psychology: on our ‘Hook Up’ to RealityRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 28 193-208. 1990.We must do away with explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from … philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have already known. Phi…Read more
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130Underlabourers for science or toolmakers for society? (review)History of the Human Sciences 3 (3): 443-457. 1990.Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: a Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, London: Verso, 1989, £24.95, paper £8.95, ix + 218 pp
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23Making Sense on the Boundaries: On Moving Between Philosophy and PsychotherapyRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 37 55-. 1994.The philosopher is the man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding before he can arrive at the notions of the sound human understanding.
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24From minds hidden in the heads of individuals to the use of mind-talk between us: Wittgensteinian developmental investigationsJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36 (3). 2006.I criticize Carpendale and Lewis's attempt to produce a Wittgensteinian theory, as an alternative to work in the “theory of mind” tradition, not because I disagree with it as theory, but because Wittgenstein would be critical of any attempt to make such a use of his work. Theories are concerned with discovering rules, principles, of lawful regularities hidden behind appearances. Wittgenstein's whole latter philosophy is inimical to such an aim. His concern is not with theories but with descripti…Read more
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23The dialogical nature of our inner livesPhilosophical Explorations 1 (3). 1998.Classically, we have treated talk of such things as meaning, understanding, and thinking, etc., as raising problems about mental states assumed to exist inside people's heads. And in our philosophical inquiries, we have sought determinate in-principle solutions to these problems. In the dialogical, relational-responsive view of language use presented here — influenced by Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov — a very different view of such talk is presented. Our 'inner lives' are not hidden 'ins…Read more
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33Performing phronesis: on the way to engaged judgmentManagement Learning 45 (4): 377-396. 2014.Practical wisdom and judgment, rather than seen as ‘things’ hidden inside the mind, are best talked of, we suggest, as emerging developmentally within an unceasing flow of activities, in which practitioners are inextricably immersed. Following a performative line of thinking, we argue that when practitioners (namely, individuals immersed in a practice, experiencing their tasks through the emotions, standards of excellence and moral values the practice engenders or enacts) face a bewildering situ…Read more
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29Harré, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Vico, Wittgenstein: Academic Discourses and Conversational RealitiesJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 23 (4): 459-482. 1993.
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14Complex thought, simple talk: An ecological approach to language-based change in organizationsIn Peter Allen, Steve Maguire & Bill McKelvey (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Complexity and Management, Sage Publications. pp. 333. 2011.
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36Agentive Spaces, the “Background”, and Other Not Well Articulated Influences in Shaping our LivesJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43 (2): 133-154. 2013.What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter-action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, alre…Read more
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26Why being dialogical must come before being logical: the need for a hermeneutical–dialogical approach to robotic activitiesAI and Society 34 (1): 29-35. 2019.Currently, our official rationality is still of a Cartesian kind; we are still embedded in a mechanistic order that takes it that separate, countable entities (spatial forms), related logically to each other, are the only ‘things’ that matter to us—an order clearly suited to advances in robotics. Unfortunately, it is an order that renders invisible ‘relational things’, non-objective things that exist in time, in the transitions from one state of affairs to another, things that ‘point’ toward pos…Read more
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218Reviews : Theodore R. Sarbin (ed.), Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct, London: Praeger Press, 1986, £34.50, xviii+303 pp (review)History of the Human Sciences 2 (2): 279-282. 1989.
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90‘Now I can go on:’ Wittgenstein and our embodied embeddedness in the ‘Hurly-Burly’ of life (review)Human Studies 19 (4). 1996.Wittgenstein is not primarily concerned with anything mysterious going on inside people's heads, but with us simply going on with each other; that is, with us being able to inter-relate our everyday, bodily activities in unproblematic ways in with those of others, in practice. Learning to communicate with clear and unequivocal meanings; to send messages; to fully understand each other; to be able to reach out, so to speak, from within language-game entwined forms of life, and to talk in theoreti…Read more
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42Goethe and the Refiguring of Intellectual InquiryJanus Head 8 (1): 132-158. 2005.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 em…Read more
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Causalità e grammatica: Wittgenstein, Bachtin e il terzo regno dell’ordinarioDiscipline Filosofiche 8 (2). 1998.
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29Perceiving “Things” and “Objects” from Within Processes: Resolutions Situated in PracticesConstructivist Foundations 7 (1): 24-26. 2011.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…Read more
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92Is Bhaskar's critical realism only a theoretical realism ?History of the Human Sciences 5 (3): 157-173. 1992.
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39"Duality of structure" and "intentionality" in an ecological psychologyJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 13 (1). 1983.
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28Bateson, Double Description, Todes, and Embodiment: Preparing Activities and Their Relation to AbductionJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 39 (2): 219-245. 2009.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 sourc…Read more
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21Wittgensteinian developmental investigationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (1): 121-122. 2004.I criticize Carpendale & Lewis's (C&L) attempt to produce a Wittgensteinian theory, as an alternative to work in the “theory of mind” tradition, not because I disagree with it as theory, but because Wittgenstein would be critical of any attempt to make such a use of his work. His concern is with descriptions, not theories.
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41On A Different Ground: From Contests Between Monologues To Dialogical ContestArgumentation 11 (1): 95-112. 1997.Feeling that they must aim for certainty in their claims, each side presents its version of reality, monologically, simply for acceptance or rejection by the other. In this form of argumentation, one individualistically formulated, systematic, finished version is pitted (in an essentially Neo-Darwinian struggle) against another. By its very nature, such a form of rational argumentation prevents the construction of a shared version of things; it is not dialogical. In attempting to recover what ha…Read more
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1Cognitive psychology,“Taylorism”, and the manufacture of unemploymentIn Alan Costall (ed.), Cognitive Psychology In Question, St Martin's Press. pp. 44--54. 1987.
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University of New Hampshire, DurhamRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Continental Philosophy |