Paper give at International Society for Theoretical Psychology Conference, Istanbul, 22-27 June, 2003, Symposium on “Refiguring mainstream concepts in Social Constructionist terms.”
“ATTITUDES”:
FROM STATIC “INNER STATES” TO DYNAMIC “STYLES OF ADDRESS”
John Shotter
Department of Communication
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH 03824-3586
ABSTRACT: To approach our relations to our surroundings dialogically (Bakhtin, 1986) is to begin to conduct our psychological inquiries into our own human affairs with a whole new and changed attitude toward them. Central to it is a move away from “classical” modes of thought, in which separately existing individual elements of reality make up a “rational” world, and to move toward a dynamic world in which “things” owe their character to their relations, both to their surroundings at any moment in time, as well as in and through time. A crucial feature of this changed attitude, is – instead of a focus on the search for repetitions and regularities – a respect for the differences between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us. However, if we are to sustain this emphasis on differences and to prevent ourselves drifting back into our classical attitudes, changes of a much more comprehensive kind are required. We must refigure central psychological concepts, currently figured in classical terms, in relational terms. One such concept is the concept of “attitude.” Attitudes are treated as having to do with our evaluative judgments. But, as Zimbardo et al (1970), for instance, assert, as “the core of our likes and dislikes for certain [things],” they are “internal private states we infer from our own introspection or from some behavioral evidence” (p.20). However, as we move to a dialogically-structured, dynamic world of relations unfolding through time, our attitudes can no longer exist as private internal states. A person’s “evaluative attitude” is expressed ‘out here’ in the meetings between them and the others they address in their meetings (Bakhtin, 1986). This paper explores the changed ‘view’ of attitudes that arises within a dialogical-relational approach when considered as a “style of address.”
“The first and foremost criterion for the finalization of an utterance is the possibility of responding to it or, more precisely and broadly, of assuming a responsive attitude to it (for example, executing an order)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.76).
“There can be no such things as an absolutely neutral utterance. The speaker's evaluative attitude toward the subject of his speech (regardless of what it may be) also determines the choice of lexical, grammatical, and compositional means of the utterance... One of the means of expressing the speaker's emotionally evaluative attitude toward the subject of his speech is expressive intonation, which resounds clearly in oral speech...” (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.84-85).
“Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.284).
Respecifying “attitudes” as a relational concept
This symposium is about the very different guise under which classical psychological concepts appear when viewed in a social constructionist, relational, or dialogical light – which, for me, is both a Wittgensteinian and a Bakhtinian light.
One of the most boring areas of psychological research, at least in my estimation, has been that concerned with “attitudes” and attitude measurement.” But now, gradually, as I have been trying to work out what is involved in the move away from classical concepts toward more relational ones, I have begun to realize that the notion of “attitude” is central. What was boring has now become exciting. It leads to the opening up of a whole new area to do with, not cognition and the structure of our intellects, but to do with out ontogenetic development as agents, to do with the “will.”
To see why, let me put a couple of Wittgenstein’s (1953) remarks before you. One is: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” ( p.178). And the other is: “What makes a subject hard to understand – if its something significant and important – is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.17).
With regard to his first remark, what he is getting at, is that in my relations to other people, it is not a mere matter of me possessing some different information about one kind of object compared with another. My whole orientation toward persons as such, is immediately and spontaneously different from how I act toward physical objects. The whole range of expectations and anticipations I hold at the ready when regarding them is quite different. For, the role of the living, active, embodied agent is, fundamentally, that of an unceasing judge who must ‘orchestrate’ or ‘organize’ within him- or herself an appropriate set of inner mental movements to make the best sense of their ongoing confrontation with the others and othernesses about them (Luntley, 2003). And that organizing is done by our wilfully adopting a certain style of address toward them – addressin gthem as people or as things.
So we are in a quandary here: what is this difference between possessing a piece of information about an object or entity and having a persistent attitude or orientation toward it? Well one major difference shows up immediately in our acting wrongly: I step on a prone person’s face to give myself a view over a barrier. If it were a matter of acting on an opinion or in terms of a piece of information, I could always make the excuse that my information must have been wrong, or that I made a wrong interpretation.“Oh, I didn’t realize that that thing was a person, I thought it was just one of those robot things!” Whereas, if it is a matter of my attitude or orientation, those around me would not be satisfied with my appeals to being wrongly informed, and would, in all likelihood, brand me a sociopath and sanction me in some way. The fault would not be in my information but in me, in my very way of being in the world.
And this, of course, is what Wittgenstein (1980) is trying to get at in the second remark of his I quoted above. Indeed, the whole thrust of his philosophical method is – instead of seeing it as the handmaiden or under-laborer (John Locke) to science – of it as an inquiry into all the different possible ways of making sense available to us in the many different practical activities we share in our everyday lives together. And he wants to do this by making drawing our attention to aspects of a circumstance that our previous attitudes and inclinations, expectations and anticipations, had lead us to ignore. He gives the example of where he says something, not from his experience, but because he – and others – are “capable of imagining that? – I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things. (Indian mathematicians: “Look at this.”) (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.144). Let me emphasize this: his aim is not to give us new knowledge, new facts, information we did not possess, but to show us that other ways of paying attention to the relations between aspects and features of our surroundings.
Knowledge and “ways of knowing:” the classical notion of attitudes
In other words, we seem to be dealing with two very different kinds of knowledge here: one that we might call “representational knowledge,” (information), and the other that we might call a “way or style of knowing” or “style of address” (exhibited in having an attitude). What is it is to enter into relations with the others and othernesses around us, to approach them with one of a different attitude, with another “style of address”?
Let me begin by first looking at our current way of beginning an inquiry: When faced with issues of this kind, we are tempted to begin our explorations by straightaway formulating a question: “Well, what is ‘an attitude’”? Indeed, in academic psychology, we seem to begin all our inquiries in this way, asking ourselves such questions as: “What is the mind?” What is the meaning of a word?” and so on. And we then begin to search for the sign’s representation as if it were another object co-existing along-side it. As Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: “... you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning” (no.120). But if we do begin in this way, then, suggests Wittgenstein (1965): “We are up against one of the greatest sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it” (p.1). The very power of the question is, so to speak (and here, of course, we have an example of “the will” at work), such that it works to orient those to whom it is addressed toward a very limited realm of possible actions and answers. In other words, there is, in a sense, an implicit attitude or orientation embedded in the question.
So, instead of beginning in this way, we must resist this inclination to look for an object of any kind. Instead, I will take a Wittgensteinian tack and assume that, given the word “attitude,” we can influence each other in important ways by its use. So what we must explore, are the crucial uses to which we might put the word “attititude.”
Later, I will explore the relational use of it and other such words, and the countless different kinds of influence we can exert by intertwining them, at appropriate moments, into the activities we share with others. But for the moment, let me begin this exploration by looking at how “attitudes” have been thought of and talked of in attitude research in social psychology.
Clearly, all are agreed that attitudes are to do with our making of evaluative judgments in our activities. Thus, beginning with the questions: What is an attitude, many researchers in social psychology, like Zimbardo et al (1970) for instance, adopt a definition along the following lines: as “the core of our likes and dislikes for certain [things],” attitudes are “internal private states we infer from our own introspection or from some behavioral evidence” (p.20, my emphasis).
McGuire (1985), in his contribution to the Handbook of Social Psychology, notes that reviews of the literature report “that they found 500 different operational definitions of attitudes and that in 70 percent of the cases of the 200 studies in which attitude was defined in more than one way, different results were obtained depending on which definition was used” (p.239). Before going on to discuss “eight areas of provocative disagreement” that emerge “when analytical conceptual definitions are attempted” (p.239), he offers a “widely shared working definition” of what “specific attitudes” are. In his working definition, attitudes are:
“defined at least implicitly as responses that locate ‘objects of thought’ on ‘dimensions of judgment’. [Where] objects of thought are foci of interest such as self, mother, equality, etc.... Anything that the person distinguishes from at least one other thing on at least one dimension of judgment is an object of thought for that person. [While] dimensions of judgment are axes of meaning on which the person locates objects of thought when constructing meaning... An operational measure of attitudes typically involves asking a person to assign the object of thought to a position of a dimension of judgment” (p.239).
Note the use of the term “responses” here, for we shall return to that term in a moment.
McGuire (1985) then goes on to discuss how “the assumptions and surplus meaning” (p.239) implicit in this working definition in fact make it next to impossible to achieve a widespread consensus in attitude research. Indeed, I just didn’t have the energy to count how many different variables, models, theories of, and other influences on, people’s attitudes that McGuire reported in, as he put it, “the vast accumulation of empirical findings reviewed” (p.304). But I can tell you that the article was 71 pages long with approximately 1,800 citations, and with 4 or 5 factors of influence or definitions of attitude a page – but that is only a half the 500 definitions listed by earlier studies. Somewhat in desperation, one feels, he ends the article by saying:
“Theorists as varied as Hegel and Saussure have stressed that the simultaneous operation of opposites is the essence of thought and being... [We should, therefore, take it that the] partial views [presented above] are complementary rather than antagonistic, and each should be used where it works well and then discarded in favor of alternative partial views when situational and dispositional changes make another theory a more useful oversimplification... [But nonetheless] we expect that in the next two decades a renewal of substantial advances in attitude research, particularly in clarifying the content, structure, and functioning of attitudinal systems” (p.304).
But note the character of his proposed solution here: that we should use whichever partial view seems most useful at the time. This depends, of course, on the stance, orientation, or attitude we happen to have adopted in our relations with our surroundings at the time, and the judgments (responses) that issue out of those relationships. In other words, if we take him seriously, and assume that we cannot best act until we have scientifically clarified what it is for us to have an attitude, then his proposed solution would only seem to be of use to us if we already had a clear understanding of what attitudes are. But, those two decades are now nearly up, and, as I see it, all this research on attitudes has not in fact clarified for us one jot how, in practice, we attitudes play a part in how we act. Will it ever?
A muddle: a “something else” besides “mental states”
Given my very initial remarks – to do with the two different ways other people might relate to me when I step on another person: 1) by finding fault in me as a person for my ‘wrong’ attitudes, compared merely with 2) possessing the ‘wrong’ information – it is clear, I hope, that in my view, what we should be after in our research on attitudes, is not a new piece of as yet unknown information. We need a wholly new orientation, a changed attitude to attitude research. Rather than as static objects, already fixed frameworks, we as thinkers and actors are supposed to inhabit, we need to understand their fluidity, how – in a Wittgensteinian sense – having something previously unnoticed drawn to our attention, can change our attitude, etc. We need to be able to judge, all the possible suggestions our research throws up, which is suitable to apply in this situation, i.e., to be reflexively self-aware of our own judgments. Thus why do we still persist in our inquiries in this sphere, and other spheres of human activity, in proceeding in terms of the continual proposing and criticizing of theories formulated in terms of radically hidden mental states which we claim must be responsible for all the behaviors we observe – as if it is merely information we still lack? Why can’t we allow the possibility that, when it comes to attitudes, for instance, rather than it being a matter of “representational knowledge,” (information), what is at issue is, as I have suggested, a “way or style of knowing”, what elsewhere, I have called a “knowing of the third kind” (Shotter, 1993).
We can, I think, find the reason in the fact that in this realm of empirical research in psychology – indeed, in the whole realm – we have still not cured ourselves of a need for metaphysical philosophizing, and we intermingle it in, unnoticed, with what we think of as the introductory arguments justifying our purely empirical studies (Shotter and Lannamann, 2002).
The need for it arises out of still seeing philosophy as epistemology, as having as its task that of establishing clear foundations for our valid claims to knowledge, on the assumption that knowledge is seen only as the correct inner depiction or representation of an outer reality. Given this view of the philosophical enterprise, our attempts to answer the kinds of “What is X?” questions I mentioned above, seem unending. Indeed, Descartes (1968) realized this, and expressed this difficulty thus: “...all philosophy is like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics and the branches which grow out of this trunk are all the other sciences... But as it is not from the roots or the trunk of trees that the fruits are picked, but only from the extremities of their branches, so the principle usefulness of philosophy depends on its parts which we can only learn last of all” (pp.183-184).
But this ‘last of all’ proviso, means that we can never be wholly sure as to whether we have done sufficient ‘under-laboring’ (Locke) to have produced a clear path to knowledge. Thus, not only do we still seem to need “philosophies of science,” but all of us in our theory-based investigations even now, are faced with a dual task, of offering philosophical arguments in criticism of other’s theories, while at the same time, trying to justify both to justify conducting our own version of a scientific investigation – as McGuire (1985) illustrates to excess in his review. This dual activity entails, on the one hand, our appealing to readily visible events occurring out in the world between us as evidence for what, on the other hand, are the conceptual claims we want to make about the supposed “inner representations” responsible for the observable events in question.
All this philosophical argument, however, leaves us in a muddle as to what really matters here. Are the outer, readily observable events that we use as criteria for claiming the presence of the relevant hidden representations crucial, or is it the hidden representations themselves that matter most – even though their actual nature is unknown to us apart from the expressions we use as criteria for their existence? The muddle we have got ourselves into is this: On the one hand, even though we are still ignorant of their nature, we nonetheless feel our talk about mental states and processes is central. Thus with more research, we think, we shall get to know more about them. But it is just this that commits us to that way of looking at the matter, to that attitude toward it.
But this is not a muddle that can be sorted out by yet more empirical research. It is a problem created by a “style of address,” by the presence of a (Cartesian) metaphysical ‘picture’, a mythology, that has found its way into our ordinary forms of language use, and which misleads us into addressing all the uses of language we observe, as if they must be of a representational kind.
Styles of address
The classical definitions of attitude offered to excess above, another relevant Wittgensteinian (1965) remark: “There is,” he says, “a kind of general disease of thinking which always looks for (and finds) what would be called a mental state from which all our acts spring as from a reservoir” (p.143). His point in saying this, is not to argue that this is wrong, but only as suggested above, that other possibilities are available.
With that in mind, what if, instead of focusing on hidden mental states, we focus instead on the responsive expressions we take (at present) as the criteria for them? Indeed, if we return to McGuire’s working definition of attitudes, “as responses that locate ‘objects of thought’ on ‘dimensions of judgment’” (p.239), what happens if we simply cut out the unnecessary reference to mysterious ‘objects of thought’, and turn instead to what goes on inside people’s relations to each other? Then, it might seem to us, that people tell us their attitudes in their spontaneous reactions to events in their surroundings. We notice a person grimacing at a noise, others make spontaneous remarks like, “I’m puzzled,” “I’m in pain,” “I don’t like that music,” another makes a welcoming gesture, and so on, and from these 1st-person expressions, we get a sense of a person’s likes and dislikes, their ‘inner’ feelings about the events occurring around them.
Whether such a 1st-person expression is accurately linked to a mysterious inner realm or not, it has “a use quite independently of whether or not it accurately reproduces some supposed inner event” (Johnston, 1993, p.14). “The notion of the Inner,” says Johnston (1993), “does not refer to some separate reality but expresses our relation to each other and a particular way of understanding human action” (p.28). For such 1st-person avowals (especially if spontaneously expressed) tell us what their expectations and anticipations are as to how we should ‘go on’ with them, how we respond to them, how we should treat them. In other words, the importance of people’s inner-talk in our shared lives is not in giving give each other retrospective 3rd-person reports on already completed events that occurred in the inner workspace of our minds, but to tell each other, as 1st-persons, something about themselves, prospectively, something that – at the moment of telling – will help us to relate ourselves to what uniquely they have it in mind to do in the (often immediate) future (note 1). Their meanings are not hidden inside them geographically, in a private inner space, but are ‘hidden’ in time, in that their reference is to possibilities whose realization is still in the future.
Thus, to approach our relations to our surroundings relationally, is to begin to conduct our psychological inquiries into our own human affairs with a whole new and changed attitude toward them – one in which not only facts and actualities are at issue, but possibilities – in terms of people’s “background expectations” (Garfinkel, 1967) also.
In the past, we have keep our distance, so to speak, and focused on theories about the nature of inner mental states and representations, studied in an input-output manner, in experimental situations divorced from everyday life settings, in the search for repetitions and regularities. But, if we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against the others and othernesses around us, and adopt a less impersonal, more intimate style of address toward them, one which allows us to enter into an inter-involvement with them, then, due to the expressive, responsiveness of our living bodies when involved in such meetings, a very different form of understanding becomes available to us in our relationships with them. While we can come to an understanding of a dead form in terms of objective, explanatory theories representing the sequence of events supposed to have caused it, a quite different form of engaged, responsive understanding becomes available to us with a living form. It can call out spontaneous reactions from us in way that is quite impossible for a dead form. It is this that makes these two kinds of understanding so very different from each other. While we can study already completed, dead forms at a distance, seeking to understand the pattern of past events that caused them to come into existence, we can enter into a relationship with a living form and, in making ourselves open to its movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to it. In other words, instead of seeking to explain a present activity in terms the past, we can understand it in terms of its meaning for us, i.e., in terms of our spontaneous responses to it. It is only from within our involvements with other living things that this kind of meaningful, responsive understanding becomes available to us (Shotter, 1993).
Conclusions: ‘frontier’ thinking
I have taken the notion of responsive understanding from Bakhtin (1986). It can contrasted with the reprentational form of understanding more familiar to us in cogntive psychology. He formulates its nature thus: “All real and integral understanding is actively responsive... And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else’s mind... Rather, the speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth...” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.69). And all our responsive expressions are related, he suggests, “not only to preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain of speech communication... [Thus] from the very beginning, [an] utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created” (p.94).
In other words, something very special occurs when two or more living beings meet and begin, spontaneously, to respond to each other – much more happens than them merely having an impact on one another. Something special occurs that begins thus: As soon as we enter into such mutually responsive relations with those around us, then, instead of one of us first acting individually and independently of all the others, and then an other replying to us in the same way, the actions of us all are to an extent ‘shaped’ in the course of their performance by our spontaneous responsiveness to the actions of all those others (and the other things) around us. Thus, as a consequence, none involved can in fact account their actions as wholly their own – besides ourselves, events issuing from the others and othernesses in our surroundings exert a formative influence in shaping our expressions (see Shotter, 1980, 1993, for an account of “joint action”).
In other words, even though we may feel ourselves as speakers wholly responsible for what we say, to the extent that all our signifying expressions are addressed to someone, then they are continuously present in the constitution of our utterances: “... from the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually constructed... Both the composition and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend on those to whom the utterance is addressed... Each speech genre in each area of speech communication has its own typical conception of the addressee, and this defines it as a genre” (p.95). This means also, paradoxically, the determination of the present by what has not yet happened. For: “The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word; it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any living dialogue” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.280). And this, I claim, is the source of what Wittgenstein identifies as the grammatical influences on our conduct – our sense of the possibilities in a circumstance, our expectations of what might come next, of what is yet to happen.
There is, then, in our living, embodied, spontaneously responsive meetings with each other, the creation of qualitatively new and quite novel dynamic but invisible, sensed or felt forms, which are more than merely averaged or mixed versions of those already existing. We can call such invisible forms – which are neither wholly alive (as self-maintaining organisms) not wholly dead (as self-contained, inert objects) – “real presences” (Steiner, 1989; Shotter, 2002). And what is of crucial about such “real presences” or “relationally-responsive” understandings, is not that you ‘get the picture’, so to speak, but that as gestures (of either a mimetic or indicative kind), they spontaneously ‘call’ you or ‘move’ you immediately to respond in a certain way. We have a bodily experience of a barrier or resistence, of openings and invitations, in the situation of our actions. In other words, although invisible, the real presences generated in our active relations with our surroundings, have agency, and like another person can exert that kind of personal force upon us.
Indeed, in our new relational approach, we begin not only to respect the differences between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us, but also to see such differences as making crucial resources available to us (rather than as annoying particularities to be averaged away). We also begin to focus on unique, once-occurrent differences, occurring in fleeting moments which, if we are to study of the influence of such occurrences can make a difference in our live, we must study them in naturally occurring situations, not artificial ones – for it is only in such situations that we act in relation to the naturally occurring responses of others to our actions (Katz and Shotter, 1996).
Let me end with some comments influenced by Norwood Russell Hanson (1958) – a philosopher of science greatly influenced by Wittgenstein. He suggested that in studying the dynamics of research sciences, i.e., unfinished rather than text-book sciences, we need to study, “not theory-using, but theory-finding; my concern is not with the testing of hypotheses, but with their discovery. Let us examine not how observation, facts and data are built up into general systems of physical explanation, but how these system are built into our observations, and our appreciation of facts and data” (p.3). In other words, a style of address, an attitude, an approach, is built into our inquiries, and it determines the style of responsive understanding we will exhibit to events occurring around us. Thus, as Hanson (1958) notes, in finishing off his comments as to what seems to be important in scientific research: “The paradigm observer is not the man [or woman] who sees and reports what all normal observers see and report, but the [one] who sees in familiar objects what no one else has seen before” (p.30). So, although two scientists might not differ at all in doing calculations, making predictions, and in providing explanations when working with scientific formulae, differences could still occur between them in the connections and relations they sense as existing within the phenomena of their inquiries. But these would show up “only in ‘frontier’ thinking – where the direction of new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined” (p.118). And that can be our task too in this sphere: to see in attitudes what no one has seen before, thus to show why now, at this moment in history, this topic is a topic of such crucial importance.
References:
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Edited by M. Holquist, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.
Descartes, R. (1968) Discourse on Method and Other Writings. Trans. with introduction by F.E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Hanson, N.R. (1958) Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnston, P. (1993) Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner. London and New York: Routledge.
Katz, A.M. & Shotter, J. (1998) ‘Living moments’ in dialogical exchanges. Human Systems, 9, pp.81-93.
Luntley, M. (2003) Wittgenstein: Meaning and Judgement. Oxford: Blackwell.
McGuire, W.J. (1985) Attitudes and attitude change. In Lindzey, G. and Aronson, E. (Eds.)Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd Edition,pp.233-346. New York: Random House.
Shotter, J. (1980) Action, joint action, and intentionality. M. Brenner (Ed.) The Structure of Action . Oxford: Blackwell, pp.28-65.
Shotter, J. (1993) Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Shotter, J. (2003) “Real presences:” meaning as living movement in a participatory world. Theory & Psychology, vol.13(4), pp. 435-468.
Shotter, J. and Lannamann, J.W. (2002) Resituating Social Constructionism: its 'imprisonment' with the ritual of theory-criticism-and-debate. Theory & Psychology vol.12(5), pp.577-609.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1965) The Blue and the Brown Books. New York: Harper Torch Books.
Zimbado, P. and Ebbesen, E, with Maslach, C (1970) Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behavior. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Notes:
1.As Wittgenstein (1953) points out, usually, we are not at all puzzled and bewildered by people’s talk about their inner states, their inner feelings, etc. “The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain processes: how does it come about that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary life?... It is when I turn my attention in a particular way toward my own consciousness, and, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!.... But I did not utter the sentence in the surroundings in which it would have had an everyday and unparadoxical sense” (no.412).
But, as Wittgenstein (1953) realizes, the relevant events are of such a subtle and complex kind, and “it all goes by so quick” (no.453), that we cannot easily get an overall view of them. A visual grasp allowing us to survey all their detailed interconnections at once – thus to know ahead of time what might follow from what – seems, at first, impossible.
It is at this point, however, that Wittgenstein and C&L part company. Because the events relevant to us instructing our children and understanding each other’s ‘inner lives’ are not in fact radically hidden, Wittgenstein does not turn to theoretical claims and conjectures in their investigation. This is where his later philosophy is quite revolutionary. He introduces a whole compendium of devices – vignettes, dialogues with other ‘voices’, arguments, dramatic scenes, metaphors and similes, striking examples, subtle particularities, and so on – all aimed, not at learning “anything new,” but at “understanding something that is already in plain view... something that we need to remind ourselves of” (no.89). Indeed, he wants in his investigations “to replace wild conjectures and explanations by the quiet weighing of linguistic facts” (1981, no.447) thus to produce merely a description of the facts that matter in the issue concerned – a description which, if one was initially intellectually disoriented, justifies saying to those around one (at least for the immediate practical purposes in hand): “Now I know how to go on” (1953, no.154).... “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don't know my way about’” (1953, no.123).