In Geoffrey Underwood (ed) Aspects of Consciousness: Awareness and Self-consciousness. London: Academic Press, 1982

Chap 2: Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Inner Games, and Alternative Realities

JOHN SHOTTER

“... using that am awareness of what one is saying to determine what one is going to say thereafter - that is a process with which we arc all familiar” (George Herbert Mead: Mind, Self and Society 1934, p.140).

1 Introduction

Although we lack clear formulations of the actual nature of consciousness and of other mental phenomena, we are, evidently not wholly ignorant as to their character. We reveal our knowledge of them to ourselves continually in our own actions in our daily lives. From our position "in the middle" of them, so to speak, we both take into account and express their various modalities and modifications in everything we do. Without quite knowing how it is that we can do it, it is undeniable that we can and do make some very subtle distinctions in how we act, in what we say or do in response to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. For instance, we know what it is like to act from a belief or an expectation, or from an unquestioned (and sometimes unquestionable) certainty; we know what it is like to be driven by a motive, to be surprised or disappointed, to be unsure, confused, or bewildered, or to be sure, clear, or well-coordinated, or whether we are convinced or unconvinced by, say, an argument, or whether we are correct or mistaken in, say. our predictions, we know what it is like to have an intention, to have successfully fulfilled it or not, what it is like to be in (or out) of control of one's own behaviour, or even to be unsure as to the extent of one's control, and so on. We may not be very articulate about the differences between such experiences, nor about the relations and affinities between there, but clearly, without an ability to sense and express them one way or another, daily life as we know it would be [end p.27] impossible. In what follows, I want to make explicit some of the actual intuitions and "embodied presuppositions" (as I shall call them) which are implicit in our daily conduct and inform what we do.

2 Descriptive psychology in the social context of everyday life

2.1 Descriptive psychology

In attempting to formulate an explicit account of the nature of consciousness there are seemingly two distinct approaches available to us (although logically the one I shall discuss first is dependent, as we shall see, upon the latter). In an empirical approach, as in other areas of the natural science, we adopt the position of the uninvolved external observer, and attempt to understand things by theorizing about those aspects of their nature seemingly hidden from us. We attempt in our theories to construct visible resemblances, and we test to discover whether such resemblances appropriately depict the essential nature of the hidden phenomena or not-or at least, a theory is thought adequate if we can use it to predict consequences from antecedent conditions.

              However, in the human sciences another method is available to us, a way dependent upon the fact that we already know what it is like to be a human being in a way quite different from knowing what it is like to be a star or a stone, a monkey, a cat, or a dog. To repeat: we already know from the inside what it is like to act from a belief, etc., or what is involved in behaving in certain ways-at least to some extent. Thus we have available to us a process, not of inner observation (i.e. introspection), but of "inner perception" (Brentano, 1973) in which may sense the nature of our own mental states. As Brentano points out, we direct our attention quite differently in this process from in introspection. In introspection our attention is directed directly upon our own mental states, while in inner perception our attention is directed upon whatever is the object of our action, and the nature of our mental states can only be noticed indirectly, as something only implicitly present in the action, as something used in its direction.

              But we not only know what it is like to be a human being, to the extent that we are competent, socially autonomous members of our society, we also know what it is like to be a person within it. Thus (in many circumstances at least) we know that all other members of it must also be able to make the same distinctions in their experience as we can-or else intelligible and sensible daily discourse would he impossible. 'faking such shared experiences for granted means that, when we [end p.28] attempt to construct an explicit account of what we already implicitly know about our own modes of consciousness, we do not need to construct explicit resemblances of them; models, such as information processing models, are unnecessary. We all already know, at least implicitly, what such experiences are like. Hence we may articulate our account in terms of the likenesses and disparities, the similarities and differences, the affinities and incompatibilities between them; what they are in themselves need not be fully articulated as we may take it for granted that we all already know, intuitively, their nature. We may take them, in fact, as givens in our experience.

              It is worth remarking in this respect that what are called data in empirical investigations are not phenomena immediately given in our experience but are, as Laing (1967, pp. 52-53) puts it, taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. Their selection as such is determined by the hypothesis currently under test. Thus, he suggests, we should more properly call them capta (takens) rather than data (givens). Although the facts of our mental life may also appear at first sight to be a matter of our own arbitrary choice, and thus capta, this is actually not so. Such facts, as I have argued elsewhere (Gauld and Shotter, 1977) and shall argue here, are in some sense absolutely determined by the fundamental nature of our human and social being. What has concealed this fact from us, as both Brentano (1973, p. 38) and James (1890, p. 254) have pointed out, is the intrinsic indefiniteness or vagueness of our intuitions. An order is not immediately apparent in them; it is only made clear upon investigation, as a product of the investigatory process.

              The kind of investigatory process meant here, however, is not one of an empirical kind, concerned with gathering more and fresh facts. Its aim is descriptive (Brentano, 1973; Davis, 1981): it is the task of putting what we already know into appropriate orders or systems, into explicit schematisms which do not obscure, distort, or otherwise ignore the actual classes of mental phenomena given us in our experience. "The goal is," says Davis (1981):

“to make it possible to represent the range of possible facts-to provide a way of representing what can happen – so that the business of understanding and predicting what actually happens can proceed without the arbitrary and unrecognised exclusion of possibilities. The force of this difference lies in the difference between informally or intuitively knowing what can happen versus formally making a place for all genuine possibilities within the system” (p.4).

And, as Brentano (1973, pp. 44-45) recognized, this task is logically [end p.29] prior to all others in psychology; we must first determine “the fundamental classes of mental phenomena on the basis of their natural affinities”. For:

“What would be the outcome of the researches of the physicist experimenting upon heat, light and sound if these phenomena were not divided into natural groups for him by a patently obvious classification? By the same token, without having distinguished the different fundamental classes of mental phenomena, psychologists would endeavour in vain to establish the laws of their succession” pp.44-45).

The discovery of such a classification is the task of a ‘descriptive psychology” (Brentano, 1973; Davis, 1981); rather than a factual task it is to do with constructing concepts—with making things rather than with finding them.

2.2       A non-reductive and non-emergentist approach

In the account of consciousness constructed below, I shall work within two self-imposed limitations—if, that is, they are limitations imposed by me rather than, as I suspect, by the actual nature of consciousness itself—for I shall take both a non-reductionist and a non-emergentist approach. Furthermore, I shall take the practical as primary, and start by just considering ordinary activities in everyday social life.

              My approach will be non-reductive to the extent that I shall assume that consciousness cannot be analysed into a set of non-conscious component parts; that it cannot be described by stating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for its existence without it being necessary to refer in those conditions to some aspects of consciousness itself. My approach will also be non-emergentist, for, I shall presume that although consciousness may become localized and accumulate, so to speak, in specific regions or centres, it cannot evolve, develop, or emerge out of something which is not itself, in some sense, already conscious. In other words, I shall work only within what might be called the circle of consciousness, taking it to be the case that, as consciousness is a fundamental and irreducible feature of our world, it cannot as such be further defined or described (as both such activities implicitly presuppose it). All we can do is to notice or grasp it or not, as the case may be. However, our grasp of it may be transformed from a vague, global, and implicit grasp into one of a precise, detailed, and explicit kind (in essentially a hermeneutical process—see Gauld and Shotter, 1977). This is possible because, to the extent that we are all as adults walking, talking, living instantiations of most of what we wish to know about consciousness, we can, if only we can find the appropriate way in which to [end p.30] do it, interrogate and question ourselves. This is, of course, to propose a quite different kind of psychological research from that currently practiced, with quite a different aim and with a quite different method. For example, it may be possible to explain the conditions determining people̓s change from one state or mode of consciousness to another, thus to discover how they might learn to make such changes under their own self-direction; or how conscious processes which become localized within people might originate and develop from conscious activities going on between them, spread out in a non-localizable fashion in their social world generally—very largely as Vygotsky (1962; 1978) and Mead (1934) suggest.

              In investigating the different modes of consciousness available to us in our daily lives, I first want to sketch that aspect of daily life for which we require a quite special mode of consciousness: self-consciousness. For if we are to perform competently as socially autonomous beings, besides a sense of our immediate surroundings, we also require a sense of our momentary place or position in our society at large (if these two kinds of circumstances in which we find ourselves “placed” can be spoken of as separate at all). In such a mode, we have to be able to account for our actions in terms which render them intelligible and legitimate to others. A sense of who or what we are, of our selves, is thus an important determinant in many of our actions. Next, however, I want to go on to suggest that our social selves are not always at stake in all our actions; such self-consciousness as such is not always appropriate. In fact, to direct one̓s attention inwards upon one̓s sense of one̓s self instead of outwards upon one̓s actual circumstances is often irrelevant and distracting; insufficient attention is given to other appropriate factors. Such unselfconscious modes of conduct are not easy to achieve, however. They only seem possible if people are in possession of a certain kind of knowledge: practical or embodied knowledge gained in the course of a certain kind of practical instruction or training. Then, like animals embedded in their ecological niches, environmental “stimuli” and people̓s “responses” may seem to key into one another directly and immediately.

              However, in such highly skilled or routinized activity, although people act appropriately they are unable to account for why they act as they do. It is as if one̓s social, self-conscious self is not in control, as if another self, an impersonal self were active in one̓s body producing results at which one̓s social self was a spectator. But to talk of ourselves as “split” in this way seems odd. However, as I shall go on to show, given our ordinary usage of language in other aspects of our lives, we seem to be driven to such a description. Literally, we do not know how [end p.31] to doubt it, for we possess no way of formulating linguistically expressible doubts except from within the same categorical reality as that in which such odd descriptions of ourselves arise. Given the nature of our “reality”, and the linguistic way in which we render it “visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes” (Garfinkel, 1967, p. vii), we are “entrapped”; there is no other way in which we can intelligibly describe ourselves—bewildering though it is. A language serves to constitute the very reality it is then used to describe. Stolzenberg (1978) has described and discussed this process of entrapment, and I end my chapter with both a brief exposition of his account and some examples of “realities” clearly very different from our own.

2.3       Consciousness and self-consciousness: the duality of social being

I suggested above that we already know a great deal about consciousness but only vaguely, so let me begin to sketch out the properties of consciousness I wish to explicate in my account—properties which give us few problems in practice but which present great problems in theory. Vaguely, we feel, consciousness is something to do with entities being related to one another in a more than merely causal way. Conscious entities seem, we say, to have both an “inside” and an “outside” to them. Rather than simply being related to their environment passively, in terms of their outer or external nature, they seem actively to relate themselves to it in terms of an inner nature. For their behaviour is as if it were directed towards a goal, a purpose, or an end of some kind, and their surroundings are relevant only to the extent that, in the attempt to attain it, they must overcome them. Thus rather than just mechanical, geometrical, or merely formal relations, they seem to be involved in, we say, intelligible relations, relations of appropriateness or fittingness ... it is as if meanings or understandings are always involved.

              Yet clearly, to say that much is to go too far. For such “inner” relations may, as we know, hold between living things, between animals say, without those animals themselves ever being conscious that such relations are in fact the relations between them. They are not, we might say, conscious of being conscious; they do not seem to be aware of themselves as loci or centres of self-determined activity. They do not discriminate among possible standpoints, roles, or perspectives and choose what relation to take up with the things they encounter. They do not seem to act in terms of any knowledge of the part their action might play in maintaining (or changing) their social group̓s way of life. Its maintenance does not seem to be up to them; consequently, they seem [end p.32] untroubled by moral dilemmas. They simply act as they must, as their own bodily states demand, trapped, so to speak, within sequences of activity characteristic of their species. In short, their inner awareness never seems to he self referential in the human sense. They may be "conscious" but they never seem to be what we would call self-conscious, aware of themselves as controlling their own actions,^-and thus being concerned to take responsibility for correcting their mistakes and suchlike.

              To begin to locate the properties of consciousness I wish to discuss in their proper context, let me turn to a description of some of the mutual or reciprocal relations between people, seemingly constitutive of everyday social life-relations which I shall call, because of their interlocking, reciprocally determining nature in maintaining the structure of everyday social life, ecological relations (Gibson, 1979; Shotter and Newson, 1982). Central to the ecology of people's daily life is a social order in which they are embedded as uniquely indentifiable individuals, as persons, as beings with (when adult) an autonomous status, able to act as they themselves desire. Two points here require further discussion: (1) the relation between a human social order and the "individuals" constituting it; and (2) what it is for such individuals to accord one another a socially autonomous status within it.

1. Individuals and the social order.

Almost paradoxically it would seem, a human social order both requires everyone within it to be the same and to be uniquely different individuals. This follows from the fact that although human beings do not seem to possess any innately determined species-specific way of life, they nonetheless live, when in groups, within the confines of a rational social order. And if such an order is to endure-as it is not maintained instinctively-it has to be reproduced intentionally, by people themselves being concerned to maintain it continually in their actions. To do this, they must be able to recognize transgressions of the order established, to identify the transgressors (if other than themselves), and to be able to have them make restitution and help to reinstitute and thus continue to maintain the order. Without entities able to relate themselves to such an order, to their place or position within it; without entities able to sense in their actions the appropriateness of what they are doing to a social scheme of things held in common with other members of their society; in short, without self-conscious persons, a modern social order like ours would fall apart - although the case might be different in, as jaynes (1979) calls them, bicameral societies, as we shall sec. But our kind of society requires human beings to be constituted as persons, as beings able to account for [end p.33]

their actions to one another, to justify, acquit, and redeem themselves, to be responsible to one another and to be able “to answer for” what they do. Hence, the very special status of persons within a social order like ours, and also the necessity for it to contain processes (of socialization) within which persons may be “manufactured” out of its newborns—if the order is to be maintained from one generation to the next.

              While uniquely identifiable individuals, able to take personal responsibility for at least some of their actions, are necessary to the maintenance of such a social order, they can never sensibly act in a completely idiosyncratic manner. They must conform to what might be called the general conception of reality “presupposed” in all their society̓s practices—if, that is, they are to be accounted normal persons within it. So, although people̓s actions may be shaped and informed by just their own motives and their own beliefs, the only motives and beliefs available to them to sensibly and legitimately express are limited—if, that is, they are to act as responsible members of their society. Their motives and beliefs must in fact be drawn from what is for them a fully interlocking system, such that, given certain acts, thoughts, percepts, or values, others necessarily follow from them or are necessarily excluded (Smedslund, 1978); thus, no matter what might happen in a person̓s world, it will be dealt with and understood in terms of such an interlocking system, in the terms already “presupposed” in the communally acceptable ways of doing things in the person̓s society, in that society̓s ways of perceiving, acting, speaking, thinking, and valuing. As a self-conscious individual, as a social self, it is very difficult for one sensibly to go beyond such a system, for it decrees not just the way or ways of thought in one̓s society, but literally, the only possible ways of being also—for in determining one̓s available modes of consciousness, it determines also one̓s embodied ways of relating oneself to one̓s surroundings. For individuals, such systems are reflexive, or as Piaget (1971, p. 14) calls them, “self-regulating”, that is,

“the transformations inherent in a structure never lead beyond the system but always engender elements that belong to it and preserve its laws.”

Individuals may sensibly challenge the norms and standards, the currently explicit schematisms in terms of which their society operates and reflects upon itself they may do so by appealing (as I am doing here) to intuitions which they claim are present in fact to everyone, but are as yet unexplicated. But they cannot intelligibly transcend the (intuitive) reality “presupposed” in their society̓s general form of life, in the particular communal way of living in which they are all reflexively embedded. [end p.34]

              This reflexive embeddedness, we shall find, seems to be true of human beings in a social world in a very deep way. Although not trapped like animals in species-specific ways of life—for people may change their communually determined ways of life communally, if not individually (Shotter, 1980, 1981a—people may nonetheless be as if trapped within a reality which literally they do not know how to doubt. For the very practice of formulating questions in their society is itself conducted in relation to such a reality; and it is impossible to formulate a doubt except in terms grounded in such a reality. Stolzenberg (1978) has studied issues such as these in detail, as already mentioned, and as they are of great importance we shall return to his findings below—for instance, people may be trapped within, say, a reality in which the use of magical practices is central to their lives. And although the beliefs engendered by such practices may be demonstrably incorrect to those outside their systems, to them they are indubitable; they lack the means for expressing intelligible alternatives to them. Here, however, I would now like to turn to the second of my ecological points: people̓s rights and duties in the maintenance of a social order.

2. Autonomous status. To be not just a unique individual, but a socially autonomous person is not something one can just be on one̓s own by virtue of one̓s biological make-up. It is a status assigned to one, something one can only possess if so regarded as possessing it by others; his a mark of achievement accorded to one by others as one̓s right upon meeting certain criteria, on being able to fulfil certain duties. To achieve such a status is to be accorded the right to make “non-observational self-ascriptions” (Abelson, 1977), like saying “I think so-and-so”, “I feel such-and-such”, “I want this”, “I like that”, and so on. And to have such assertions taken seriously and responded to without question—it being normal only to request explanations or justifications of people̓s conduct if it is suspicious, enigmatic, puzzling, or abnormal in some way (Mills, 1940; Peters, 1958; Scott and Lyman, (1968)). Such self-ascriptions may be expressed non-verbally too, in looks, nods, smiles, and in bodily postures, etc. Their function is not to report upon some state of mind or body which existed in the past; their function is not retrospective but prospective, to tell or to indicate something in the future: namely, what people are committed to then by what they do now (Winch, 1958; Shotter, 1981b). For example, someone claiming really to believe computers are just like people is committed to treating them as such, to being careful not to hurt their feelings, to greeting them personally, to observing ethical precepts when “disembowelling” them for servicing, and so on; clearly, few people would go so far in practice— [end p.35] but to that extent they can be said not “really” to believe what they claim.

              In everyday social life, however, such commitments are real and taken seriously; for a social order is not maintained accidentally, by what people just happen to do. It is maintained by what people are responsible themselves for doing, actions in which they are aware of what they are committing themselves to, and can thus justify if necessary. Thus observational evidence is irrelevant in backing up such prospective actions or expressions; the “truth” or (strictly) the sincerity of my saying “I love you” to someone, for instance, is not established by looking for data to confirm it as being indeed an accurate description of my state of mind (or body), but by whether I go on to honour what it commits me to or not—hence the designation of such self-ascriptions as “non-observational.”

              To qualify for their status as autonomous individuals, people must be able, as they attempt to satisfy their own desires, to fulfil a certain duty: they must be able to monitor and evaluate their own actions as they perform them in terms they share with others in their society. Even when all alone, they must be able to act intelligibly and responsibly, aware to an extent of how they and their actions fit into the larger scheme of social things of which they are a part. Only if individuals can do this can they control themselves appropriately in relation to their society or their group—even when out of immediate contact with other members. Other methods of social control are no doubt possible; but clearly, as we move from shall groups of human beings living in face-to-face contact to larger and larger groups, a greater and greater number of different modes of interdependence and balances of power become available. And currently, at our stage in the evolution of consciousness, a self-referential mode of control seems to be required, human beings must now be self-conscious — the case might have been different in earlier times as we shall see (Jaynes, 1979). However, in order to fulfil our duties and to qualify as competent members of our society, we must be able to grasp, when acting, where and how we ourselves are placed in the social scheme of things to which we belong; while at the same time thinking of ourselves as an entity no different in kind from many of the other entities we encounter in our world. But, Mead (1934, p. 138) asks,

“How can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself? This is the essential psychological problem of selfhood or self-consciousness; and its solution is to be found by referring to the process of social conduct or activity in which the given person or individual is implicated. The apparatus of reason would not be complete unless it swept [end p.36] itself into its own analysis of the field of experience; or unless the individual brought himself into the same experiential field as that of the other individual selves in relation to whom he acts in any given social situation. Reason cannot become impersonal unless it takes an objective, non-affective attitude towards itself; otherwise we have just consciousness, not self-consciousness.”

              As members of a modern human society we possess now, a very special mode of being in the world: we are conscious in our actions of not only our environment, but also of our selves.

              To sum up: human beings developing while embedded within the ecology of a human social order, come to act, not just with a certain awareness of their surroundings but they also become self-aware, aware of being aware (or of not being sufficiently aware, and so on, as the case may be). In effect, this means that people̓s actions and perceptions may be directed not only both outwards Onto the world or inwards upon themselves, but also, most importantly, directed both by influences “outside” themselves as well as from “within” their selves— with modes of control at first external, becoming localized seemingly within them during the course of their social development.

              The process of development involved is one I have discussed extensively elsewhere (Shotter, 1974, 1978; Shotter and Newson, 1982), and it would be redundant to repeat that account in detail here. Briefly, it is best outlined in Vygotsky̓s (1978, p. 57) words, where he suggests that in such a developmental process,

“... an interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one. Every [higher mental] function in the child̓s cultural development appears twice: first on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (inter-psychologically), and then inside the child (intrapsychologically).”

Things which are at first spread out in the spontaneous, unintended relations, non-localizable, between people, become something localized within them, something they can then themselves intend to do. Consciousness thus seems to develop in a gradual passage from the less to the more realized, from the intensive to the extensive, from the reciprocal implication of parts to their juxtaposition (Bergson, 1920); rather than developing out of nothing, or non-consciousness, it seems to develop by a process of unfolding, a process in which what already exists, but which is diffusely intermingled in with everything else, is separated out into individually locatable centres.

              Thus people not only consciously act in and upon the world around them (relating themselves to it in an “inner”, intelligible kind of way), but as they develop they seem to embody both the responses of other [end p.37] people to what they do, as well as the more direct and immediate results of their own actions upon the world around them. Having embodied such results, they may go on to use what they have experienced so far as a basis for determining what next they might do. Thus, for instance, in directing my attention inwards upon myself, I can sense aspects of myself as a “tool” or “instrument” available for use as a means in executing my next action. I may also “see” myself as an entity like other entities, requiring, like them, the same kind of effort in attempting to understand my meaning—for who or, what I am is never completely known to me. My knowledge of myself in these two modes is quite distinct.

              In what we have encountered so far then, when embedded in a social order, human consciousness seems to have at least a double directionality to it: (1) People not only can but must be able both to direct themselves outwards towards the world, as well as inwards towards themselves, and to be able to distinguish those things they themselves do from those which just happen to, in, or around them, outside of their agency to control. (2) They may also direct themselves towards something (either “inner” or “outer”) directly, or indirectly through something else as a means, tool, or instrument, often using an aspect of themselves for such a purpose. Mead (1934, p. 140) gives an example of what is meant here; he says:

“[The] process... of responding to one̓s self as another responds to it, being aware of what one is saying and using that awareness to determine what one is going to say thereafter—that is a process with which we are all familiar. We are continually following up our own address to other persons by an understanding of what we are saying, and using that understanding in the direction of our continued speech. We are finding out what we are going to say, what we are going to do, by saying and doing, and in the process we are continually controlling the process itself.”

The process, of acting through one̓s own previous experience as a means in structuring one̓s own further actions, is of crucial importance in everything that follows, for it has to do with how “mere ideas” become the “presuppositions for action” embodied within us.

              Both logically and phenomenologically, the fact seems to be that we can experience something, which is clearly “other than” ourselves, as being nonetheless a-part-of-us, so to speak, in an

{ agent <—> thing (as means)} <—> world

relationship. We may come “to dwell in it” (Polanyi, 1967), embodying it as an instrumental means through which to achieve our ends (e.g. not [end p.38] only as the blind man uses his stick, but as we use words in issuing commands to others). We can experience the world through such things: mainly, as we shall see, through our language, which both enables and constrains us in the experiences it affords us.

              Clearly other mediational relations arc possible than just the one diagramed above, and it will be worthwhile to spend a few moments exploring some of them. In contrast to the relation above, we may experience the mediational instrument as being, so to speak, on-the-side-of-the-world in an

agent <—> {thing (as a meaning) <—> world)

relationship. Here, instead of it being somewhat “transparent” as when it is used as a means—remember, for instance, that the blind man does not experience his stick vibrating in the palm of his hand but experiences through it the roughness of the terrain at its tip—the mediational instrument becomes in these circumstances to an extent “opaque”. We then confront it as something which requires interpretation as to its meaning, or for what it indicates (e.g. as with the pointer on the dial of a petrol gauge, or as with an utterance depicting a state of affairs)—it exists then as a text to be penetrated rather than an instrument to be used. As a means we may say that it exists in an “embodiment” relationship with the agent, while as a meaning we may say that its relation to the agent is a “hermeneutical” one.

              We can substitute for the mediational instrument another agency (or a “split” agency with one aspect of it set over against another) as in an

agency 1 <----> agency 2 <----> world

relationship. Such an intermediary may function both as a means or as a source of meanings, and as such have duality of structure (see Section 3.1).

              There is not space to explore the versatility of this schematism further here; suffice it to add one final comment. While telescopes and microscopes, say, work to reveal features invisible to the naked eye, they do so at the cost of restricting one̓s field of view; the global relations between things become somewhat concealed, all enablements are also constraints. All intermediaries it would seem are equivocal in this respect, especially and not excluding language-users. In particular it is the way in which the use of a language works to conceal rather than reveal which will concern me in later sections, how it is difficult in a language to formulate any intelligible doubts about the basic categories of existence constituted by it. But I will not explore this issue further here. [end p.39]

2.4       Unselfconscious activities

In the Vygotskian process outlined above, people come to act increasingly “from out of their heads”, so to speak; to act less and less as their circumstances demand or require, and more and more as they themselves desire. They learn to take notice of their environment only to the extent required for them to overcome it. Socially, they come to experience themselves as autonomous, as able themselves to complete and give meaning to their actions, and as not being reliant like a child upon others to guide them in what they may do. In being able to include themselves in their own processes of reasoning, they may thus plan activities for themselves in theory before executing them in practice, and thus come to experience themselves as masters of their own fates rather than as slaves to fortune.

              Yet evidently, in many situations in fact, it is inappropriate for individuals always to act in such a self-conscious fashion. As societies evolve and the activities within them become more separate in their functions, it becomes clear that not all activities are a part of what might be called mundane reality—not all are activities within which the reproduction of the social order is at stake. Some evidently serve quite different functions (e.g. see Huizinga, 1949). Games are just such an activity: although very like ceremonials and rituals in outward form, games and dramas do not implicate the selves of the participants in the same way at all. In the former, people̓s social selves are “renewed”, so to speak, people are re-minded in ritual acts of the order in their world and of their place within it; in the latter, their actual social selves are irrelevant, new non-mundane selves or no selves at all must inform their immediate action. One cannot understand the whole ecology of social life at large on an analogy with only a part of it.

              Later, I want to discuss in some detail the idea of “the inner game” introduced into tennis by Gallwey (1974), in which people discover how to stop trying to direct their own play, and how to let circumstances do it for them; but here it will be useful just to more or less list activities in which an objective self-consciousness as such is not required—and indeed may even be detrimental. Such a list can be found in Jaynes (1979, ch. 1), in which he lays the ground for his argument that “a civilization without consciousness is possible”. However, in it he does not make the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness, which I make above; by “consciousness”, as far as I can gather, he seems to mean what I have called objective self-consciousness; this, however, does not detract from the usefulness of his list of non-conscious (or non-selfconscious) activities which I shall follow below. [end p.40]

              Jaynes points out that it (objective self-consciousness) is unnecessary or detrimental in the performance of many skills, and is not involved in many perceptual phenomena. Pianists suddenly conscious of their fingers as objects which they must self-consciously direct in their every movement, would have to stop playing. To be conscious of the separate elements in speech as objects, which one must direct oneself to piece together as a larger meaningful whole, would destroy its intention and make its meaning impossible to grasp. Although one may make no mistakes going about one̓s daily life in a familiar room, say, one̓s memory ofit does not consist in a storing up of objective images; little, as Jaynes shows, can be recalled of its objective nature. Similarly, in one̓s experience of oneself: remember, suggests Jaynes, when you last went swimming; little can be recalled of your actual and particular cutaneous and kinesthetic experiences. Yet one sees oneself swimming, something one has never observed. Looking back into memory, it would seem, involves a great deal of invention, a re-creation in objective terms of events experienced originally in another mode of consciousness; an objective self-consciousness seems to be more a product of the process of remembering than necessary to the process of memory itself.

              In thinking too, such a mode of consciousness seems unnecessary. As Jaynes points out, the Würtzburgers studied the situation where one must judge which is the heaviest of two weights: the very act of directing oneself (as a result of the experimenter’s instruction) seems to lead directly to the result, no further self-consciously directed inner activity, no objectively self-conscious thought is necessary. Any thought which goes on in such an activity is not thinking which we ourselves do; we as speaking or as social selves are merely presented with the result. Similarly in reasoning, we remain unconscious of the processes by which we arrive at particular conclusions from the amalgam of our previous experiences; there is no collecting together of past instances in a self-conscious manner, no apparent process of ordering or arranging them to suit the kind of conclusion one requires. It is again something seemingly done for us by processes working in us, the details of which we do not ourselves as such direct—we as self-conscious selves may only set their goals, while determining generally to concentrate upon the task in hand. Similarly too in concept formation, we remain unconscious of the process by which we arrive at the classes of things which, literally, we find ourselves counting as being the same as one another (even when we can see that they are all still actually different). Also in learning: like Gallwey, Jaynes emphasizes as well that, although one̓s self-conscious self is active in directing oneself as to the actual goals to be achieved, from then on, he says, “it is as if the learning is done for you” (ibid.,[end p.41] p. 33). And he quotes in this respect Book’s (1925) account of people learning to typewrite:

“....all adaptations and short cuts in methods were unconsciously made, that is, fallen into by the learners quite unintentionally. The learners suddenly noticed that they were doing certain parts of the work in a new and better way.”

It is as if one̓s self, one’s speaking “I” were a spectator at events being done “for one” by agencies in, but other than oneself.

              To add another item to Jayne’s list, to reinforce that point: it is clear that one cannot plan creative acts in one̓s objective self-consciousness. One can as a writer bring oneself to confront the blank paper, as a painter to a bank canvas, as a musician to the piano keyboard, one can vaguely formulate for oneself the goal to be achieved, but one cannot then simply proceed (as if painting by numbers) to progress deliberately, step-by-step, towards it. Genuine creativity is something which happens to one, though not without a great deal of self-consciously directed effort first; namely, effort actively to embed oneself in, and thus too embody or internalize important features of the appropriate materials, so that they rather than one̓s social self may come to inform one̓s actions. Sudnow (1978), for example, describes his arduous efforts to learn to play “jazz-piano”, to learn to genuinely improvise to such an extent that, as he says:

“[Although] for a long while, I guided my hands through the terrain of the keyboard by moving my fingers along various routes and scales I had conceived... I am not [now] using [such] pathways. Now I find places to go in the course of going to them, each particular place at a time, doing improvisation” (ibid., p. xii).

              In his account, he provides, not introspections, but a finely detailed descriptive “examination of concrete problems posed by the task of sustaining an orderly activity, which ‘improvisation̓ certainty is” (ibid., p. xiii), an account of the exercises, hints, images, attitudes, the circumstances in which he placed himself, the ways in which he tried to compose his very being, such that—after many years—he found himself able to do it. But in so doing, he attained a quite different view of himself:

“From an upright posture I look down and see my fingers, and my looking is so differently related to the work of my fingers, in contrast to former modes of “hookup”, that I see things I never saw before, because these happenings never occurred before. I see my hands for the first time now as “jazz piano player̓s hands”, and at times, when I expressly think about it, one sense I have from my [end p.42] vantage point looking down is that the fingers are making the music all by themselves” (ibid., p. xiii).

It is a view that leaves him puzzled as to the nature of his self, for in genuine improvisation,

“I choose places to go, in what this speaking I finds as miraculous ways, miraculous merely against the background of my history with the piano, and a history of other speakings that seem to leave little room for a conception that would not partionalize “my” body in some way” (ibid., p. 152).

For it is as if, so to speak (and one̓s manner of speaking is everything here), he is inhabited by a new “I”, a “jazz-making-I”, which performs while his “speaking-I”, so to speak, looks on as a spectator.

              Our ways of speaking—both about things in the world as well as ourselves—are such that, given Sudnow̓s experiences, he is “entrapped” (Stolzenberg, 1978) not just into conceiving of himself as at least two selves in the same body—one which plays and another which watches and talks about it—but into actually being for all practical intents and purposes two such selves, for one is seemingly not in communication with the other. Given that our language is not just for us a system within which to describe things, but is a medium of actually “doing” things through communication with others, the linguistic reality in which Sudnow is embedded (along with ourselves) is such that he (his speaking-self) knows of no practical or socially intelligible way of formulating any doubt about such a conclusion—even though it leaves him (and us) bewildered. We want to say that it cannot be like that, we cannot be two selves in the same body, but that is what he must say if he is to be a competent member of his (our) society, and use his (our) language intelligibly. However, as Stolzenberg (1978) points out, even an apparently irrefutable, non-doubtable system of “presuppositions” may still nonetheless be demonstrably incorrect, as we shall see—or if not exactly incorrect, at least demonstrably misleading.

              A further example: elsewhere (Shotter, 1973, 1974), in discussing issues such as these, I introduced a distinction between a person̓s personal powers and their natural powers, to distinguish between things people themselves did, so to speak, and things which something in them seemed to do for them. Our natural powers form both our inner and outer perceptions for us. They work, influenced no doubt by the past situations in which we have actively been immersed, to constitute the socially meaningful situations in which we, as personal beings, find ourselves, and with which we must deal; they also work reflexively to [end p.43] produce for us our sense of what we ourselves are doing. in introducing this distinction, I was concerned with whether we speak by doing anything like referring “by a process of inner observation” to anything like rules as we talk. I suggested that we did not, for,

“It is just not the case, empirically, that we turn our eyes inward, shut ourselves off from our environment, and refer to some pre-established inner plan to determine what we say... Rather, what seems to be the case is that we continually monitor the construction of our expressions in relation to our intended purpose ... We can say that our natural powers present us with possible forms of expression... while our personal powers allow us to select among them the expressions whose meanings are appropriate to our purposes” (Shotter, 1974, p. 239).

So while our perception of the sense of what we have so far expressed by an utterance need not be a self-directed activity, but is something done for us, the use of that sense is, or at least it can be something which is up to us (see Mead, 1934, p. 140, quoted earlier). And the developmental problem here is, of course, to describe (like Sudnow) the appropriate form of active embedding in a social context required for people̓s “natural powers” of language to be, so to speak, “programmed” into them, for them to come to embody their society̓s ways of perceiving and doing things through communication with others.

              Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 215) also makes the same distinction, between natural and personal powers, in a similar manner. He suggests:

“Every perception takes place in an atmosphere of generality and is presented to us anonymously. I cannot say that I see the blue of the sky in the sense in which I say that I understand a book or again in which I decide to devote my life to mathematics. My perception, even when seen from the inside, expresses a given situation: I can see blue because I am sensitive to colours, whereas personal acts create a situation: I am a mathematician because I have decided to be one. So, if I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, not that I perceive.”

In other words, it is as if there is in us another self, an impersonal or general self (Mead̓s “generalized other”) which, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, has already sided with the world, and which is already open to certain of its aspects and is synchronized with them. And it is this self which constitutes for us, as self-conscious personal selves, our own unique situation; as such it is the situation in which we find ourselves whether we like it or not, and in which we alone must decide what to do.

              There is one final example that I want to mention in this list of activities in which an objective self-consciousness seems unnecessary:[end p.44] Jaynes (1979) has raised the possibility of a “bicameral society”, a whole social mode of being in which self-conscious ‘I̓s” as such play no part. Politically, the phrase “bicameral system” means a legislature consisting of two houses: usually because there are two interests to be represented—e.g. the nobility and the common people. On the English model, a large first chamber is chosen by popular vote and a smaller second chamber contains members appointed by other means. Theoretically the system is politically justified as an application of the principle of checks and balances. It is just this mode of”split-control” which Jaynes suggests was present in individuals at a stage in the evolution of consciousness, between the unselfconscious relations of members of an early face-to-face group, and the self-consciously managed relations of people now, in a very large modern society. Different modes of social control are what is at issue here.

              In a small face-to-face group (of around 30) to the extent that members can stay in “personal” contact with one another and always be involved “in” group affairs, all communications can call out, Jaynes suggests, a response appropriate to the group context; members are hardly ever “outside” of it. Around 9000 B.C., however, instead of small nomadic tribes of hunters, towns of at least 200 persons begin to appear, presenting new problems for the production of socially intelligible behaviour. The “preposterous” hypothesis Jaynes proposes for the solution of such problems is,

“that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was [self]-conscious” (ibid., p. 84).

Such a human being would, in many of his or her activities, be as we might be when playing “the inner game;” namely, letting their actions just happen to them, simply acting as their circumstances required, and not themselves as such directing their own actions. They were not conscious of their selves as such. But what when their actions were blocked, or they found themselves in brand-new situations? Then—and this is why, of course, Jaynes labels his hypothesis as “preposterous”— he suggests that people heard voices, said to be the voices of gods, telling them what to do, voices which expressed the stored-up admonitory wisdom of their lives, embedded in the “doings” of their society. They were not just like “inner” voices, but were genuine, full-blown auditory hallucinations, which people heard then (and not uncommonly now) as if coming from other beings “outside” themselves, commanding them to follow a particular course of action.

              It would not be relevant here to ask whether Jayne̓s “preposterous” [end p.45] hypothesis is actually true—although he certainly cites a good deal of evidence in its support. I mention it as it raises the issue of people̓s duality of social being in an acute form: (1) Why is it that people can only themselves act in terms of what they must already know by first talking to themselves (by ordinary or bicameral means)? (2) What is it that people actually gain from developing while embedded in a culture?

3 Practical activity in a social context

3.1       Intentionality and duality of structure

The answer to the first question can be found, I believe, in studying more deeply the different directionalities of consciousness, or what is traditionally called its intentionality—the way in which it is always “directed upon”, “contains”, or “specifies” an object or state of affairs. Space precludes a full treatment of this matter here. Further accounts can be found in Searle (1979a, b, and c), in Shotter (1980), and in Gauld and Shotter (1977). Here I want to mention only an aspect: it has been pointed out that all human action has what can be called duality of structure (Giddens, 1976; Bhaskar, 1979). It is simultaneously both structured and structuring (Piaget, 1971). Or to put it another way, it is doubly specifying (Shotter, 1980): that is, any action in progress both specifies (1) its content or object so far, as well as (2) the kind of further specification still open to it. It can be thought of, for instance, as being just like a seedling in growth: at any point in time, the seedling is both the structure that the seed has produced so far, as well as being the structured means through which further growth may take place— growth of an already specified kind. Formative causation (one of Aristotle̓s four cases) is at work here. On this analogy we can say that what people embody when they develop embedded in a culture, are ways of acting which may function, in their very expression, as the structured means, as the “tools” or “instruments” through which certain goals may be obtained. For it is in its expression that what is implicit is given one or another explicit order which we can then use in the direction of our further activity.

              What thus is the part played by language in our practical intelligence? As Vygotsky (1962, 1978) notes, the beginnings of practical intelligence in children (as in all primates) is independent of speech. But as children become involved in language use, in relating themselves practically to their surroundings in linguistically mediated terms, what at first is an instrument or medium of communication becomes a tool or [end p.46] medium for their own use. “The greatest change in children’s capacity to use language as a problem-solving tool takes place”, says Vygotsky (1978, p. 27),

“...when socialized speech (which has previously been used to address an adult) is turned inward. Instead of appealing to the adult, children appeal to themselves; language thus takes on an intrapersonal function in addition to its interpersonal use.”

Hence our need to actually talk to ourselves, aloud when children, and in an inner dialogue when adult—and perhaps through auditory hallucinations abnormally or in a bicameral society—for the explicit form of our linguistic expressions can serve to structure our own further action: it can serve to provide an ordered means for our own self-direction. Without it, our thoughts would remain implicit, vague, and indeterminate.

3.2       Knowing in action: inner games and practical knowledge

In turning to the second question—of what it is people gain from growing up while living embedded in a culture—we can consider Sudnow̓s example again. In his learning to play jazz-piano, he did not learn to move his hands according to prior plans, but he learned to find places to go on the key-board “in the course of going to them”. Linguistically formulated plans were distracting and irrelevant for him at this stage. In order to achieve such a mode of expression he had to spend many years attempting to “programme” himself, so to speak, by embedding himself in what he hoped would prove to be the appropriate circumstances. And it is of course difficult to say at present which of all the activities he tried were the most effective. Such a transformation of oneself in an activity—from a being who must first plan an action in thought before executing it in practice into someone who knows what to do in the course of doing it—often requires such a deliberate embedding of oneself in the appropriate circumstances.

              Occasionally, though, it may happen in a flash of insight. David Bohm (1980), a theoretical physicist, gives the following example:

“I had [at the age of 11 or 12 years old] developed a habit of always wanting to be able to map out my actions beforehand... I remember once when I was with some other boys and we had to cross a stream by leaping from rock to rock. I couldn̓t map this out, but started to follow the others with great trepidation. Suddenly in the middle of the stream I had a flash of insight that what I am is to be in a state of movement from one rock to the next, and that as [end p.47] long as I didn̓t try to map out what I will do, I can cross safely, but that if I try to proceed from such a map, I will fall.”

And Bohm goes on to recount how in fact that flash of insight— occurring under stress, i.e. under the conditions Jaynes thinks necessary for the occurrence of a bicameral voice—influenced the rest of his life thereafter, especially in his concern later with the whole nature and problem of movement as such in physics. While playing games it is not uncommon for people to have such experiences, if only briefly; they simply become momentarily a game-playing thing, describing the experience as that of “losing themselves in the game”, or of playing “out of their minds”. In such a state, players are clearly not unconscious as such, but they do not have to try to do what is required of them, they seem simply to know it in the course of doing it. Yet as soon as they recognize their state and start to think about it in an effort to prolong their “hot streak”, they lose it. Why?

              Gallwey (1974), a tennis coach, has proposed the following theory and devised new coaching procedures on the basis of it. Briefly, in his terminology, he suggests that in each player it is as if there were two selves, Self 1, a speaking social self which gives instructions and makes social evaluations, and Self 2, a non-verbal practical self which seems to perform the required actions, with Self1 being able to account (i.e. give reasons) for its actions while Self 2 cannot. It is Self 2 which he claims as his new discovery; it has been ignored in the past as it does not seem to operate within a socially accountable realm at all. The major difficulty people face in playing tennis, as Gallwey sees it, is a consequence of not appreciating this “split” self: Self 1 is continually attempting to give Self 2 instructions, judgements, and evaluations which Self 2 is unable to use or cope with at the point of action. At just the moment when one should be directing one̓s attention outwards, towards the actual circumstances on the court, one̓s attention is being directed inwards, towards Self l̓s concerns, one̓s personal concern to make one̓s actions socially accountable. Such directions from one̓s social self are irrelevant and distracting when one is actively playing. The trouble is, Gallwey suggests, Self1 does not know how to trust Self 2 nor how to gain proper access to it, even though the unconscious, automatic self, as he calls it, is extremely competent and is the means by which we learn most of our practical skills. We feel that unless we “try hard” at every moment of the game, we will not play well—such an attitude permeates the whole of our socialization into the skills of our culture. But what exactly is it to try to do something; how, properly, in each skill is trying as such done?

              In Gallwey̓s approach to tennis, to what he calls its “inner game,” [end p.48] one does have to try hard, but not at all during the actual course of the game. During the game itself, one has to learn to let Self 2 do the hitting, to learn to act simply as the situation on court requires; just to let one’s shots happen without continually telling oneself what they ought to be. This cannot be done, of course, without concentration, without the determination only to allow oneself to be influenced by very limited and selected circumstances. Players must learn (and this is most important) not to let Self 1 be continually judging and evaluating Self 2; they must learn the “inner or ontological skill” of manipulating their own states of̓ being so as to suspend their tendency to socially monitor and evaluate their performance on court. In this respect, Gallwey notes, players need to aim for the same state of being as the umpire̓s: a player who makes a winning shot may call it “good” and smile, while the loser may call his own shot “bad” and frown; the umpire, however, merely calls the balls as he sees them, “in” or “out”, and this, Gallwey claims, is just the kind of socially non-evaluative attitude players require also. The social evaluations “good” and “bad” are, in fact, irrelevant in the effective playing of the game itself.

              To “let go” of such judgements is not an easy task though, especially as the original learning of a skill at making them is a central part of people learning how to become socially autonomous individuals. Gallwey, however, gives some hints as to how a skill at refraining from such a judgemental activity might be acquired. Where Self 1 can try hard and give Self 2 some appropriate and useful instruction is in devising proper training programmes; we can self-consciously select the circumstances which to place ourselves and the demands we should attempt to meet. Understanding how to compose, direct, or aim ourselves is what is what is crucial. “The primary role of Self 1”, suggests Gallwey (1974), “is to get goals for Self 2, then to let Self 2 perform”. And he goes on to suggest ways such goals may be set: (1) by taking time to construct a mental image of the result one requires, an image of the actual trajectory of the served-ball over the net, for example; (2) another is just to spend time learning to recognize particular bodily feelings, the feeling at the final in the “follow-through” with one̓s raquet, for instance; or (3) yet another is “programming” oneself to play a role, to play through in one’s imagination what it might be like to be a professional on court, or acquire one̓s role-image by watching good players at play. Gallwey on to give even more detailed hints on many other aspects of “inner skills” Essentially, all amount to hints and indications about how to me, not just someone who plays tennis, but when on court a total tennis-playing entity; the problem is how to direct one̓s trying properly, to state clearly (or to show in some way) what one should direct [end p.49] oneself towards.

              As a tennis coach, Gallwey has an “inner game of teaching” to offer also. Bearing in mind his comments above, it is not surprising to find him suggesting that teachers must accept that telling their pupils what to do is not necessarily to teach them it. As long as pupils are directed or instructed as to where to “look” for the appropriate experiences, pupils will learn all on their own. To teach people skills, neither learner nor instructor need know anything about people̓s “inner mechanisms” of learning; people will learn the skills “naturally”, as long as the appropriate conditions for their acquisitions are established, Gallwey suggests. But this is, of course, the state of affairs obtaining ordinarily in everyday life: children learn their language, for instance, without any special efforts, without having to try overall to do it; they learn it, and many other social and moral skills, by simply living immersed in the appropriate circumstances. And furthermore, in lacking early on a well-formed social self, a Self 1, they are disturbed little by being “right” or “wrong”, their primary aim is to communicate, to be understood, to perform effectively; their ability to socially evaluate their performances comes later, in their growth towards autonomy (Shotter, 1974, 1978). Though I cannot pursue them here, important issues are clearly raised by Gallwey’s account of “inner games”, especially for the whole nature of educational practices: for the “ontological skills” acquired in learning “inner games” (e.g. in learning how to be a tennis-playing being) are acquired directly, with verbal instruction (theory) playing very little part. Also, besides providing yet another example of unselfconscious activity, such an approach raises interesting problems about the nature of practical or embodied knowledge, so it is to that which I turn next.

3.3       Practical or embodied knowledge

Have we been mistaken about the nature of knowledge, mistaking objective or theoretical knowledge (i.e. something encoded in a written language) with practical knowledge (something expressed by an actor in a performance)? Actual knowledge, real knowledge is something, we feel, which is judged as such by being in accordance with the facts. The facts, reality, are prior and dictate what can be said, if it is to be language... or so it seems. But as Winch (1958, pp. 55—57) shows, using Lewis Carroll̓s story “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”, making sense of logical formulae, of expressions of objective knowledge (which are after all just ink-marks on paper), and understanding how to use them in inferring conclusions from a set of premises, is actually to [end p.50] have learnt how to do something. It involves being socialized into a certain, socially shared way of doing things using such marks, a special skill. Where, it must be added, such marks are only intelligible in relation to the practical context within which their use arose; that is, the context of practical reasoning, in which people reasoned long before such rules of logic were written down and in which they continue to reason now, without any reference to such rules (Ryle, 1949).

              So clearly, our knowledge goes much deeper than merely “objective knowledge”, for it includes skills—skills which we in growing up in our culture come to embody—without which objective knowledge as such would lack all significance. This means that what these skills are, the nature of this practical knowledge, cannot itself be stated objectively; such skills cannot themselves be wholly represented in logical formulae. Their use is known only practically. Such practical knowledge does not have to be characterized and justified objectively before conclusions arrived at using it can be said to be justified. For, as Winch says,

“... a sufficient justification for inferring a conclusion from a set of premises is to see that the conclusion does in fact follow. To insist on any further justification is not to be extra cautious; it is to display a misunderstanding of what inference is” (ibid., p. 57).

It is, in fact, to doubt the very practice of drawing inferences itself. For after all, in ordinary practical reasoning in daily life, unaided by any reference to objective formulae, we “see” each other̓s reasons and reasonings; if we were unable to do this, and did not at some point simply accept one another̓s explanations and justifications without further questioning, everyday life would not work as it evidently does— in terms of people having a right to have what they say accepted at some point without further questioning. Indeed, as I have already claimed, there must come a point where, literally, we do not know how to question them further, for the formulation of an intelligible doubt would draw upon the very practices (of explanation and justification) we wished to question. Ultimately, within a society̓s reality, it is what people have a right to do or to say which is crucial, both for them and for the maintenance of the social order and the currency of the devices used within it.

              This should not be taken as meaning, though, that the “embodied presuppositions” people acquire, the practical knowledge they internalize in becoming socialized into their culture, is necessarily “correct” knowledge. Indeed, while irrefutable to them (for they do not know how to doubt it), outsiders may see their actions in a very different light, as [end p.51] demonstrably incorrect in fact. For example, see Evans-Pritchard̓s (1935) account of how the Azande of Africa transform apparent “failures” of their magical practices, by use of “secondary elaborations of belief̓, into events which ultimately appear to support those practices; they say the oracle failed, as they did not prepare themselves properly (failed to wash, etc.), or an enemy practiced revenge magic, and so on. However, whether correct or not, such “embodied presuppositions” clearly determine people̓s being in their world in a very deep way, for in determining the actual modes of relationship available between them and their world at large, they determine not just ways of seeing and talking, but how their surroundings may influence them also. In other words, modes of communication utterly unintelligible to us may be available to other people socialized into other cultures; they may be able to influence one another in ways we simply cannot understand and cannot practise.

4 Alternative realities

4.1       Entrapment: not knowing how to formulate a doubt

As an example of the point above, consider Levi-Strauss̓s (1968, ch. 10) case of the song used by the shamen of the Cuna tribe (who live in the Panama Republic) to aid a difficult childbirth. It is a song of an epic quest to restore Muu, the power responsible for the formation of the fetus, the “soul” of the uterus, to her rightful place in relation to all the other “souls” belonging to other parts of the body. The sick woman becomes enthralled in the story of how, after many vicissitudes and the overcoming of great obstacles, order is restored, and in the course of listening to the story she gets well. “The song constitutes”, Levi-Strauss suggests,

“a purely psychological treatment, for the shaman does not touch the body of the sick woman and administers no remedy... In our view, the song constitutes a psychological manipulation of the sick organ, and it is precisely from this manipulation that a cure is expected” (op cit., pp. 191-192).

Her very being is constituted in such a way that, due to the “embodied presuppositions” she acquired in her socialization, she can be affected in a way that is (probably) unavailable to us. “Once the sick woman understands [the song]”, claims Levi-Strauss,

“...she gets well. But no such thing happens to our sick when the causes of their diseases have been explained to them in terms of secretions, germs or viruses. We shall perhaps be accused of paradox if we answer that the reason lies in the fact that microbes exist and monsters do not. And yet, the relationship between germ and disease is external to the mind of the patient, for it is a cause-and-effect relationship; whereas the relationship between monster and disease is internal to his mind, whether conscious or unconscious... The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed” (op cit., p.197).

It is as if the shaman̓s song works to instruct the woman in the “inner game” of childbirth, as to how she can compose herself psychologically, to re-direct her consciousness such as to be in a state of childbirthing.

              In such circumstances, it is almost as if people are “trapped” like animals into ways of acting called out in them by their circumstances. This process of “entrapment”, as he calls it, has been studied in detail by Stolzenberg (1978), in relation to the controversy in mathematics as to whether mathematical “things” (statements, answers, proofs, etc.) are “made” or “found”—and we shall find (sic) what he has to say relevant here. In particular, he focuses upon the consequences produced by what he calls “certain unwittingly performed acts of acceptance as such in the domain of ordinary language use” (ibid., p. 267). What he means by “acts of acceptance as such” are those occasions when we simply take something for what it appears, or is purported to be, and proceeds on that basis to some further action. In other words, initial appearances may serve to structure a whole system of not only behaviour but of further experiences based upon accepting them as what initially they appear to be.

              Accepting something as such, as being simply what it appears to be, is basic attitude to things in everyday life of course. As such, it is an attitude quite distinct from a scientific attitude, in which one explores the assumption that something is what it appears to be (explores it as a theory to be tested, not simply as something to be taken-for-granted as a supposition). For instance, on finding that the sun is shining (i.e. accepting that it is the case) I dress in lightweight clothes. I do not begin test my eyesight, look at the clock, or check the Street lamps in my vicinity—part of what would be required if I were testing to see if I were possibly mistaken. Are, or can scientists always be truly scientific in this respect? In particular, Stolzenberg is concerned with how in pure mathematics, when beginning merely with talk “about statements” and “about answers” and so on, we soon get drawn into, or we fall into [end p.53] the trap of talking about things which, literally, seem already to exist somewhere, in some Platonic realm of ideal forms, perhaps.

              Yet we need not fall into such a trap, he points out; we could simply accept that when we carry out a certain mathematical procedure, we simply “make” a certain result. However, ordinary language usage is such that it would seem odd to say it. It would seem odd in the same way as it seems odd to say, for instance, that the actual act of finding (or just seeing) an old pair of shoes in the closet (Stolzenberg̓s example) is what “made” those shoes “be” in the closet: whatever way they got there, we know it could not have been by any act of finding them there on our part. Our world is just not constituted for us in that way. For us to have been able to find them there, they must already have been there, available for anyone to find, at any time before. It seems odd to mathematicians in exactly the same way, Stolzenberg suggests, to say that a certain mathematical procedure “makes” an answer exist. For, by an act of acceptance as such in the domain of ordinary language, they have been drawn into talking about a whole realm of objects, “special nonphysical objects” which exist seemingly “independently of them” before they come on the scene with their proofs, and discovery procedures, etc. Indeed, suggests Stolzenberg, a mathematician would find it just as wrong-headed to say that pure mathematics was not about such already existing “objects” but about acts of counting and so on, as would an astronomer to say that astronomy was not about what one saw when looking through a telescope, but was about acts of looking.

              However, he argues, as a result of regarding their own activities with an everyday attitude rather than a properly scientific one, mathematicians feel unable to talk a “language of making” rather than a “language of finding”; to do so would seem to Them to be inappropriate and unrepresentative of the “reality” with which they must deal. To them it is a reality that exists independently of them, one which they seem to have found not made. As a result of their failure though to recognize its proper origins (i.e. the nature of their own part in its making), Stolzenberg claims, mathematicians lack any proper account of what, if anything, pure mathematical, statements are about (see Kline, 1980, also in this respect). Although, due to the very way in which they are educated as mathematicians and come to understand what mathematics is, they are prevented from recognizing this from within the system of pure mathematics itself. Like Zande reality to the Azande, their reality is to them irrefutable; it is self-regulating in Piaget̓s sense mentioned earlier. Mathematically, mathematicians do not know how to doubt it. “To someone who starts off inside the [end p.54] contemporary mathematician’s belief system”, says Stolzenberg,

“the discovery that an entire component of the “reality” of one̓s experience is produced by acts of acceptance as such in the domain of language use is not merely illuminating. In a literal sense, it is shattering..” (op cit., p.268).

A reality which was once thought to exist independently of human subjectivity has to be recognized as being to an extent a product of it. Such a recognition is shattering in the sense that that “reality” can never be the same again. For one becomes aware of how language and mind (or what we call “language” and “mind”!) interact to produce a world-view within which one lives and is seemingly entrapped: a world-view which leads us to talk, for instance, not only of abstract mathematical objects as if they existed somewhere, but also as if we possessed two selves, a “speaking-I” and a “doing-I”, or as if “inner mental processes” produce the “outer” behaviour of our bodies, and so on. Only by paying attention, not to theories of what we think might be or ought to be the case, but to what we actually do say or do in the effective living of our daily lives, can we become aware of the ways in which we trap and limit ourselves by our own ways of speaking, by our own acts of acceptance as such in the domain of ordinary language use.

4.2       Other “realities”

Let us explore briefly some other different “realities”. In his novel “G: a Novel”, Berger (1973, p. 166) described the different social realities of men and women thus:

“Up till [now] the social presence of a woman [has been] different in kind from that of a man. A man̓s presence was dependent upon the promise of power which he embodied... A man̓s presence suggested what he was capable of doing to you. By contrast, a woman̓s presence expressed her own attitude to herself, and defined what could or could not be done to her.”

Stated here are not just the ideas men and women have of themselves, but the “embodied presuppositions” which determine their behaviour and experience in relation to one another. If these “presuppositions” change, not just our ideas and behaviour, but our experience will change as well. Events which currently pass us by will come to touch and move us in ways presently difficult even to imagine. Our consciousness as men and women will be transformed; the inner game of gender, our ontological skills in composing and deploying our sexual [end p.55] modes of being in the world will change. How different might they become? Could we ever, for instance, come to an extreme Vygotskian view, and instead of experiencing sexuality as something within a person, see sexuality as such spread out between people, everywhere in the world at large?

              Certainly, regarding mind or mentality, there are people with, it would seem, such a view. The Dinka, an African tribe living around the central Nile basin in Southern Sudan, have, claims Lienhardt,

“no conception which at all closely corresponds to our popular conception of “mind”, as mediating and, as it were, storing up experiences of the self. There is for them no such interior entit to appear, on reflection, to stand between them the experiencing self at any given moment and what is or has been an exterior influence on the self. So it seems that what we should call in some cases the “memories” of experiences, and regard therefore as in some way intrinsic and interior to the remembering person... appear to the Dinka as exteriorly acting upon him” (1961, p.149).

Rather than experiencing themselves as being like us, and as thus “remembering” something from within, they experience themselves as happening to be haunted by a ghost or a spirit from without. To them, their surroundings are almost as if consisting of fields of consciousness. To us, such surroundings would seem strange, impossibly bizarre even; our psychology is a psychology of interior events. Yet consider an experience related by Hudson (1972, p. 95), an experience while walking along a street soon after completing his PhD in fact, a time no doubt of high arousal:

“... it occurred to me that the figures coming towards me were not walking objects, but fields or foci of perception. Just as they were elements in my perceptual field, so was I in theirs... Welbeck Street was full, suddenly, not of clusters of flesh and bone in motion, but of sensation. A belated discovery to be sure; but it arrived at the time with the force of revelation.”

Ordinarily speaking, such an experience is abnormal; how can a street be full of sensation? Certainly not full of it like a drink filling a cup. We blankly fail to understand; no sensible action seems to follow from such an account. Yet for Hudson, like Bohm earlier, a new reality was revealed in a flash of insight which did in fact influence his subsequent behaviour. Their linguistic oddness does not prevent such perceptions from informing our subsequent behaviour as individuals, although we may have difficulty in justifying conduct based upon such experiences to others. [end. P.56]

5 Conclusions

I have offered an account of consciousness and self-consciousness not in terms of processes said to model them in some way, but instead I have offered a descriptive account. I have taken it for granted that we all implicitly already know their character, and that what is required is to give explicit expression to this knowledge in an orderly manner—in such a manner in fact that we can, in Mead̓s words, use it in the direction of our own further activities. The aim being to use it in attaining a greater self-determination of our own mental activities. Central to my account has been the idea that language, with its intentional nature and duality of structure, can be used not only to express meanings, but can be used also as an orderly means in us directing our own further conduct in a socially intelligible manner. In making this point I have only been following a path already shown essentially by Vygotsky and Mead; it is a point, however, which does not as yet seem to have been fully appreciated, and it is crucial in at least the following two respects.

              It means (1) that our knowledge of our language is available to us not just as an object of thought, an abstract object, but as a structured means, instrument, or organ through which we can act to attain our ends. Thus we do not need to “look at” our knowledge of language, as if observing an object with a special inner eye; we can sense the guidance it offers in a process of “inner perception” (Brentano). Such an entity, affording us as it does such a form of guidance, must be an entity of a very peculiar kind, something sui generis with no analogue in the external world. But nonetheless that does seem to be its nature. Also (2) if the account of consciousness and self-consciousness I have offered above is correct, then the actions which we as social selves, as speaking-I̓s, can initiate and understand are limited; they must occur within the circle of our own self-consciousness, so to speak. As a socially responsible individual, I can only act in accord with the general conception of reality current in my society, in accord with what linguistically I can justify and explain to others. In this sphere of activity, the role of actual linguistic formulations becomes crucial, for, in their duality of structure, they provide a means through which people can structure their own further actions; they may provide one with “plans” prior to one̓s performance of them—”plans”, however, of a tool-like rather than a picture-like nature. However, before the knowledge informing an action can work to structure further action, it must first be expressed in some way, i.e. made explicit and given a definite order if only (as Vygotsky suggests) in “inner speech”. Hence the possibility, if it remains implicit [end p.57] and unexpressed linguistically, of us having knowledge of which (to put it cryptically) we remain ignorant.

              But we only remain ignorant of it as self-conscious individuals. As such, the limits of our language do seem to determine, as Wittgenstein (1961) suggested, the limits of our world. As autonomous social selves, that is our sphere of action; but such is not our only mode of conscious being. The variable directionality of consciousness is such that our actions may be informed by many influences emanating from sources outside of our social or speaking selves. Individuals may act, so to speak, unselfconsciously or even unconsciously in the Freudian sense: that is, they may act, not according to any of their own prior plans, wishes or desires, but directly just as their immediate (but nonetheless personally constructed) circumstances seem to require. And although they are unable to explain or justify their actions, they nonetheless have to admit that what they experienced themselves as doing, they experienced as an action of theirs; it was something which seemed appropriate at the time. Yet it was beyond their own self control, or at least, beyond the control of the socially accountable self they feel they really ought to be. In such an unselfconscious mode of being, people may act according to “embodied presuppositions” acquired in non-verbal or other pre-linguistic involvements. In other words, knowledge acquired in special circumstances (outside the circle of our self-consciously activity) may on occasions inform our actions without us, as social selves, being able to place or recognize its nature (Groddeck, 1949). Here quite clearly, people̓s worlds are not limited by their language; they may embody vague and indeterminate intimations and intuitions systematically inexpressible without distortion—aspects of their being beyond orderly linguistic expression. As self-conscious individuals, a grasp upon such processes is achieved by fashioning a language in which these unformulated (and otherwise unformulable) experiences can be expressed by the individual concerned. This is essentially the character of therapy in psychoanalysis: the construction of a language in which otherwise inexpressible mental states may be expressed in a socially intelligible manner; the rendering of the implicit explicit—poetic expression sometimes being more effective (and available) than more systematic forms.

              Crucial in understanding different modes of consciousness and their development is what I have called the different directionalities or the intentionality of consciousness. Just as Newton explained how both apples fall and planets stay in their orbits (but not why) by reference to the “occult quantity” gravity, so intentionality is introduced here as such an occult quantity, as something sui generis which as a general process of formative causation can serve to unify a large number of disparate [end p.58] psychological phenomena. Rather than just structured human activity seems to be structuring. An action just performed works as an enabling constraint upon actions yet to come. The structuring structured nature of action is such that at any given moment, it is constrained by both having to fit into its immediate surroundings (which include the results of what went before) as well as by having to lead towards a desired goal in the future. It is as if a “grammar” were intrinsic to its very nature. The intentionality of action is, then, something to do with a principle of meaningful connectivity between events in both space and time (that is, in what we call “space” and “time”; although their “reality” is up for reconsideration also—see Sacks (1976) for accounts of realities ver\̓ different in this respect to ours). And it is in terms of such a principle of connectivity that I have tried to explain the different aspects of consciousness manifested in the phenomena mentioned above.

              As such, intentionality is an entirely new principle or process, one not reducible or explainable in terms of any causal principles currently known. Brentano “discovered” (or made!) it in l874—it is untrue to say that psychology has not yet made any discoveries comparable to Newton̓s. At the practical level, the approach I have outlined above, suggests research programmes to do with discovering how people do in fact succeed in aiming, composing, or directing themselves appropriately in performing a skill. The practical goal here being to make more explicit the teaching of the “inner game” appropriate to the skill, the specification of the appropriate social process. Theoretically, however, it seems to me that descriptions of distinctions in the nature of consciousness at this level must function in setting the goals for a deeper task—the construction of an account of the fundamental nature of the material world such that conscious, and self-conscious personal existence arises as a natural possibility of the workings of”intentionality” with it. The “material” of such a material world having in such an account, properties far beyond those currently being attributed to it.

References 

Abelson, R. (1977). “Persons: A Study in Philosophical Psychology”. Macmillan, Basingstokc.

Berger, J. (1973). “G: a Novel.” Penguin Books, Hardmondsworth.

Bergson, H. (1920). “Mind-Energy”. Macmillan, London.

Bhaskar, R. (1979). “The Possibility of Naturalism”. Harvester Press, Sussex.

Bohm, D. (1980). Insight, knowledge, science, and human values. In “Education and Human Values” (Ed. D. Sloan). Teachcrs College Press, Columbia.

Book, W. F. (1925). “The Psychology of Skill”. Gregg, New York. Brentano, F. (1973). “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint” (trans. A.C.Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister). Routlcdge & Kcgan Pau, London. (Originally published 1874.)

Davis, K. E. (1981). “Advances in Descriptive Psychology”, vol. 1 JAI Press, Connecticut.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937). “Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande”. Oxford University Press, London.

Gallwey, T. (1974). “The Inner Game of Tennis”. Cape, London. Garfinkel, H. (1967). “Studies in Ethnomethodology”. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.

Gauld, A. and Shotter, J. (1977). “Human Action and its Psychological Investigation”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Gibson, j. j. (1979). “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”. Houghton Muffin, London.

Giddens, A. (1976). “New Rules of Sociological Method". Heinemann, London.

Groddcck, G. W. (1949). “The Book of the It”. Vision Press, London. (Originally published 1923).

Hudson, L. (1972). “The Cult of the Fact”. Cape, London.

Huizinga,J. (1949). “Homo Ludens”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

James, W. (1890). “Principles of Psychology”. Henry Holt, New York.

Jaynes, J. (1979). “The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. Allen Lane, London.

Kline, M.(1980). ‘‘Mathematics: the Loss of Certainty”. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Laing, R. D. (1962). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). “Structural Anthropology”. Basic Books, New York. Licnhardt, G. (1961). “Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka”. Clarendon, Oxford.

Mead, G. H. (1934). “Mind. Self and Society”. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). “Phenomenologv of Perception” (trans. C. Smith). Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated actions and vocabularies of motive. Amer. Socio. Review 5, 904—13.

Peters, R. S. (1958). “The Concept of Motivation”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Piaget,J. (1971). “Structuralism”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Polanyi. M. (1967). “The Tactit Dimension”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Ryle, G. (1949). “The Concept of Mind”. Hutchinson, London.

Sacks, 0. (1976). “Awakenings”, 2nd ed. Penguin Books, Hardmondsworth.

Scott, NI. I). and Lyman. 5. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review 33, 46—62.

Searle, J. R. (1979a). The intcntionalitv of intention and action. Inquin 22. 253—280.

Searle, J. R. (1979b). Intentionalitv and the use of Language. in “Meaning and Use” (Ed. A. Margalit). Reidel, Dordrecht.

Searle,J. R. (1979c). What is an intentional state? Mind, 88, 74—92.

Shotter,J. (1973). Acquired powers: the transformation of natural into personal powers. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 3, 141— 56.

Shotter, J. (1974). The development of personal powers. In “The Integration of the Child into a Social World” (Ed. M. P. M. Richards). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Shotter, J. (1978). The cultural context of communication studies: methodological and theoretical issues. in “Action, Gesture and Symbol” (Ed. A. Lock). Academic Press, London and New York.

Shotter,J. (1980). Action,joint action, and intentionalitv. In "The Structure of Action” (Ed. M. Brenner). Blackwell, Oxford.

Shottcr,J. (1981a). Vico, moral worlds, accountability, arid personhood. In “Indigenous Psychologies: the Anthropology of the Self” (Eds P. Heclas and A. Lock). Academic Press, London and New York.

Shotter,J. (1981b). Telling and reporting: prospective and retrospective uses of self-ascriptions. in “The Psychology of Ordinary Explanations of Social Behaviour” (Ed. C. Antaki). Academic Press, London and New York.

Shotter, J. and Newson, .J. (1982). An ecological approach to cognitive development: implicate orders, joint action, and intentionality. in “Social Cognition: Studies in the Development of Understanding” (Eds C. Butter-worth and P. Light). Harvester, Sussex.

Smedslund,.J. (1978). Bandura̓s theory of self-efficacy: a set of common sense theorems, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 19, 1—14.

Stolzenberg, G. (1978). Can an inquiry into the foundations of mathematics tell us anything interesting about mind? In “Psychology arid Biology of Language and Thought: Essays in Honour of Eric Lenneberg” (Eds G. A. Miller and E. Lenneberg). Academic Press, London and New York.

Sudnow, D. (1978). “Ways of the Hand”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). “Thought and Language”. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Vygotsky, K. S. (1978). “Mind in Society: the Development of Higher Psychological Processes”. Harvard University Press, Boston, Massachusetts.

Winch, P. (1958). "The Idea of a Social Science and its Relations to Philosophy”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Wittgenstein, L. (1961). “Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.