In M. Brenner (ed.) The Structure of Action. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.28-65, 1980.

Action, Joint Action and Intentionality

JOHN SHOTTER Nottingham University

‘Tis here, but yet confus’d Knavery’s plain face is never seen till us’d. Iago: Act 2, Scene 1 , Othello

1 Introduction: The ‘Crisis’ in Contemporary Experimental Social Psychology

As usually defined, psychology is thought of as the science of behaviour, and social psychology as that branch of the science which studies either how ‘individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others’ (Allport 1954) or, more recently, the psychological aspects of the process of social interaction itself (Argyle 1969) .As a science, its paramount aim is taken to be that of discovering general laws by use of systematic observation, usually within the context of controlled experimentation. But experimental social psychology has for some time now been under attack and supposedly in a state of ‘crisis’ (Smith 1972; Gergen 1973; McGuire 1973; Strickland, Aboud and Gergen 1976) .Many criticisms have been levelled at the ‘experimental’ side of the research process itself. Difficulties have been found, for instance, both with attempts to formulate ‘theories’ and also with attempts to test them.

              Many such ‘theories’ have been formulated, for example, [end 28] cognitive dissonance theory, social comparison theory, balance theory, and Soon. Besides being inadequately defined, and only understood because experimenters using them come from the same or similar socializing communities as their subjects (Bem 1967), none are notions of a very fundamental kind: their appearance in the world is not understood in terms of Some deep properties of the social world in the same way as, for instance, some phenomena in the physical world are understood, i.e. , as arising out of the fundamental properties of space and time. They appear merely as the names of empirical generalizations, indicating Common aspects of our social world current, perhaps only at this point in history (Gergen 1973). Rather than ‘theories’ they should more properly be called ‘heuristics’, statements serving merely to order our perceptions and to direct our attention to phenomena which might otherwise go unnoticed. But if that is the function they serve, then they are clearly not amenable to empirical test, for they provide the terms within which our observations are made. In fact, says McGuire (1973), ‘we social psychologists have tended to use the manipulational laboratory experiment not to test our hypotheses but to demonstrate their obvious truth. ‘ ’Theories’ are abandoned, not because they fail to conform with external reality, but because they fail to explicate properly the intuitions they were meant to illustrate.

              To move beyond ‘the crisis’ in social psychology, an effort must be made to link the data of social life to some more fundamental notions than those presently available. To this end, I want to attempt to do two things in this paper: First, I shall investigate a number of conceptual categories which seem to be fundamental to any account of a social world, notions such as action, joint action, and intention, as well as those of person, self and agency, but especially time and intentionality, these constituting a whole intrinsically interrelated web or network of concepts. Concerning the structure of intentionality, I want to suggest that mental activity is ‘specificatory’ in nature, and that, in structuralist (Culler 1976) terms, what we grasp in a person’s actions or expressions is a process of specification, a successive expression of differences, specify[end 29]ing aspect after aspect of a synchronically present whole. And that we understand his action, not by referring it to already known general rules, laws, or principles (nor by any mysterious empathic sharing of his thoughts), but by constructing with him in the course of joint action a shared synchronically present whole within which each action or expression plays its part, its meaning being understood in terms of the special entities in that world and only in that world.

              This idea is, of course, borrowed from structural linguistics: there it is claimed that the significance of an event or act is to be understood not in terms of its place in a temporal sequence of events, not in a diachronic perspective but in a synchronic one, in which the event has a place within a system of differences which are all simultaneously present (Culler 1976).

              Following the outline of such a conceptual web, I want, secondly, to set these fundamental notions to work in making sense of some well-known but puzzling everyday phenomena: a. the fact that people are able normally to understand one another’s actions or expressions in the process of their performance, without having to wait for such expressions to be ‘completed’ in some way, and b. the fact that people often construct social worlds between themselves in terms of which they are able to explain themselves to one another, whilst at - the same time experiencing a personal world which is in some respects unique.

2 Preliminary Remarks on Action, Joint Action, Social Worlds and Personal Worlds

I can now state my purposes in this paper. While avoiding talk of Kuhn (1962), ‘new paradigms’, ‘paradigm switches’, and the like, my purpose in general is to explore some aspects of the view that, instead of taking human nature as something ‘fixed’, as ‘already there.., as ‘existing independently of any- thing which we might do or think about’, we take changefulness as the basic constant of humankind. What if ‘human nature’ is a continuously changing and developing artifact, a ‘product’ [end 30] constructed and reconstructed in the process of people’s in- teractions with one another? I want to avoid talk here of concern with such a view as being a ‘paradigm switch’ , a ‘new paradigm’ to replace the ‘old’, for it seems to me that the ‘old’ view of ourselves, as having, from the classical perspective, a certain kind of fixed nature, still has a part to play.

              Just as we can effect a ‘gestalt switch’ from one to another view of an ambiguous figure, so in life it would seem, ‘switching’ from a view of ourselves as basically changeable or transformable to a view of ourselves as basically fixed and unchangeable is a real possibility for us also. Unlike with most ambiguous figures, however, both modes of existence re- main, I want to suggest, synchronically present, one as figure in the context of the other as ground; the changeable or trans- formable only existing in the context of the fixed and un- changeable, and vice versa. Such an ability, and what it means, should not go uninvestigated. Thus at various points in this paper (though it is to one side of my main purpose) I shall touch upon the complementarity of these two otherwise incommensurable perspectives, the causal-explanatory and the hermeneutical-understanding perspectives, as we may call them; though I shall argue that they are not simply or symmetrically complementary, for the quasi-causal laws of the explanatory approach can only have their being within a hermeneutical framework, a shared and agreed system of interpretation (Gauld and Shotter 1977, pp. 97- 98).

              While such are my concerns in general, specifically I want to explore human action as a form-producing process. Rather than a rule-using, or ‘rule-following animal’ (as Peters 1958, p. 5, and other philosophers of a Wittgensteinian persuasion suggest, for example, Winch 1958), I want to study people as primarily form-creators (and thus as rule-makers) and only secondarily as form-, plan-, or rule-users. To take such a ‘creative’ view of human action is to treat it as a formative process in its own right, as a continuous sequence of transformation rather than as merely a sequence of discrete events, as a developing process rather than as merely a (changing) medium through which other (more constant) factors exert [end p.31] their determining influence, as in the idea of people as rule- following animals, an interpretation which, once again, ex- presses the classical preference for the invariable as the essence of things. Viewing human action not as a sequence of well- defined events but as something which develops in time, which involves a passage from something less to more definite, emphasizes the fact that while we can, on occasions, act deliberately, according to rule, plan, or script, and so on, we need not always necessarily do so. Often we act simply upon the basis of our ‘thoughts and feelings’ we say, in terms of the situation as ‘we saw it’.

              In such cases we do not find it easy to give a well articulated account of why we acted as we did, even though we know ‘we had our reasons’; we simply felt that our action was ‘required by’ the ‘situation’ we were in, our ‘circumstances’ ‘demanded’ it. For example, each sentence of what I have struggled to write so far has been determined, of course, by my following of many ‘rules’, but it also expresses a certain aspect of a-situation-as-I-understand-it, and seems to be ‘required’ by that situation to such an extent that only certain forms of words will correctly express it (although sometimes I judge incorrectly) .Thus each sentence both helps to express or to constitute that ‘situation’ and must be understood in the context of it, as a part is related to a whole; each sentence helps to create the ‘world’ in which it appears. All truly personal actions have this quality , of necessity; they are part of, as I shall call it, a personal world. Many social or joint actions have it too: utterances in a dialogue, moves in a game, a quarrel, love- making, an industrial negotiation, for example, in fact any action in an interaction in which an individual must inter- weave his actions in with the unpredictable actions of others. Such interaction involves a shaping or formative process; the participants have to build up their respective lines of conduct by constant interpretation of each other’s ongoing lines of action as indicated in their expressions. In the course of such a process a social world can be created and each action understood in its context.

              In attempting to understand the idiosyncratic actions of [end p.32] individuals, whether acting alone or in a group, rather than referring to rules, to anything social, impersonal, or common to everyone, it is often necessary to characterize their situation as they saw it, to grasp the personal or social world in which they acted, and to understand the part their action played in such a world. To reconstruct that ‘world’ in such a way, that puzzling or enigmatic actions are provided with reasonable interpretations, is the hermeneutical task here. Rather than assuming that we all live in an already established common world, and that our actions are distinguished from one another merely by the different rules that we choose to follow, the account above puts human action into quite a different perspective: it is. seen as a formative process conducted by the actors themselves (actors make their own acts); it is not seen as produced by a variety of external factors, be they rules, roles, norms, needs, attitudes, and so on, coming to expression t through the medium of human conduct, but as constructed by actors by what they take into account; in group life it is not seen as caused by, or as a reaction to, objective structures but as a process of building up joint actions, people and groups exerting their influence upon one another not directly but indirectly through interpretations.

              Such an ‘in-process’ view of human action need not, it is important to note, preclude the existence of structure in the personal and social worlds so fabricated. Rules, norms, roles, statuses, and the like obviously have a kind of existence, and are indeed central features in any account of human social life. But their importance in this perspective (in the causal- explanatory perspective things are different) cannot be in their alleged determination of action, nor in their alleged existence as parts of a self-operating societal system. As concepts they are important only as they enter into and determine our thought about action; but that is a different matter, a matter of the interpretations and expressions out of which joint actions are formed. And the manner and extent to which they may enter into that process can vary from situation to situation, depending upon what people take into account and how they assess it. Thus on this view the sociological account of social [end p.33] interaction, for instance, while important (when one is in the causal-explanatory frame of mind) , reduces the true state of affairs; in the process-perspective social interaction is between people not roles. And in interaction their need is not always simply to express their role, they must interpret and cope with what confronts them, be it a practical problem, a topic of conversation, or both. It is only in highly ritualistic, pre- established forms of social interaction that the direction and content of conduct can be explained by rule/role models; usually the direction and content of the exchange is fashioned out of what people in interaction have to deal with.

3 Intentionality, Time and Action

Gauld and I (Gauld and Shotter 1977) suggested that intentionalityl is a fundamental and irreducible feature, or better, a presupposition of all thought, all conceptual activity! and all action. As such, it would seem, it can only be noticed or grasped (or not); it cannot be further described or defined. Under such circumstances metaphor is the only recourse; and metaphor will abound in the account that follows as my purpose is not to give a philosophical analysis of intentionality, but to attempt to build a ‘formative process’ model of intentionality to illuminate the nature of the process-view of human action, hence, ultimately, to clarify methodological issues.

Time

As a preliminary it is necessary to discuss the nature of time, for in a process-perspective it has quite a different quality to it than the uniform left-right flow to which we are used in our conventional representations of it .[end p.34]

When acting, one does not experience a sequence of disconnected objective events, one simply replacing the other, but a succession without, as Bergson puts it somewhere, an externally defined ‘before’ and ‘after’. There is a flowing succession of interpenetrating phases, each containing aspects ofwhat has already happened and of what is yet to come. For instance, when I say the word ‘cat’, I shape my mouth for the vowel before I let the initial consonant go, and even as I am moving from that consonant to the vowel, I am beginning to shape my mouth for the final consonant (Liberman et al. 1957; Liberman 1970) .The phases of the word are thus mutually interpenetrat- ing, it is not made up of externally definable elements; they are all reciprocally implicated or intrinsically interrelated, they are, ethnomethodologists would say, irredeemably indexical. There is, for instance, no pure /k/ sound, as the saying of ‘keep cool cat’ should illustrate; all the initial consonants are coloured by the vowel that follows them. The ‘specious’ present, the moment of my control of my action would seem to be influenced both by my past and my future. It can be influenced by what I have just done but which has now passed ‘outside’ my agency to control further, and has thus, strictly speaking, become a part of my immediate environment. Such a product remains ‘on hand’ but not (as we shall see below) as an object, but as a tool, a structured means, a set of meanings, for use in forming my further conduct. My action can also be influenced by my ‘intention’, by the ‘object’ at which I seem to be aiming in my actions, by, Dewey (1896) would say, the current ‘redistribution of tensions’ or ‘transformation of structure’ I experience in my world.

              About the structure of action, ‘l’effort intellectuel’, Bergson (1920) says:

“This operation, which is the very operation of life, consists in the gradual passage from ~he less realized to the more realized, from the intensive to the extensive, from the reciprocal implication of parts to their juxtaposition” (p.188). [end p.35]

In other words, in taking the uninvolved, external observer view of behaviour appropriate to the causal-explanatory framework, behaviour is viewed as a sequence of externally defined, objective events which, as such, can exist in isolation from one another. This suggests a spatialized view of time, in which time is seen merely as a fourth dimension of space. Such a spatialized view is quite inadequate for capturing the struc- ture of one’s experience from a standpoint ‘in’ action: there one experiences not a sequence of disconnected events, with one state of mind simply replacing another, but an indivisible , heterogeneous continuity, in which successive phases cohere without ceasing to be qualitatively diverse. This is a meaningful continuity with an altogether different structure to it from the kind of spatial continuity possessed by points in (or upon) a time.

              The passage ‘from a less to a more realized form is already familiar to us in psychology in Chomsky’s account of the derivation of a sentence. In that there is no simple left-to-right juxtaposition of structurally independent parts, but a top-down differentiation of wholes into their structurally dependent (or reciprocally implied) parts. 1f we take such structures as defining a temporal ordering, a ‘topochronology’ we may call it, then, rather than defining a time metrically, by a numbered point on a line, the ‘place’ occupied by an event in such a structurally dependent whole may be defined topologically, in terms of the superordinate event which contains it as a part.

Consider a life :

A Life

Childhood Adulthood

                                                                                      Youth Middle Age Old Age

_____________________________________________________

                                           metrical time —> the current moment

Fig.1. [end p.36]

It has a certain temporal structure to it. Topologically, today’s event is the latest part of the structure to be derived so far; all other events can be found located or ‘placed’ between certain other events, and contained within more overarching ones. Above, perhaps unadvisedly, I have confounded a topological with a metrical ordering by projecting the structure onto a line of numbered points, thus illustrating the confusion we fall into when we ask ‘Upon what day exactly did I lose my youth?’ Strictly, a topology is incommensurable with a met- ric, time may go slowly or quickly within a topological scheme of things, though it does provide a clear ordering. Just as with a metric, events are located in strict relation to one another; however, within a topological scheme, time is no longer a one-dimensional line: it has a structure to it.

              Not only does such a view of time allow the past to be ‘revocable’, in the sense that different structures (as with Chomsky’s ambiguous sentences) may be erected over the same flow of past experience, but the completed part of the structure offers to the uncompleted part only limited styles of completion, for example, events appropriate in youth are inappropriate in middle-age; living has, one might say, a ‘grammar’ to it. There are many other interesting features of such a view of time, not least the light it throws upon so-called subjective and pathological ‘distortions’ of one’s time sense. It would be beside the point to explore these here; it is the way in which the structure of what has been completed-so-far ‘specifies’ how one may go on that is important in what follows below.

Intentionality and intentions

The notion of intentionality was introduced into modern philosophy essentially by Brentano. In trying to clarify the distinction between mental and physical phenomena, he pro- posed that one of the main differences between the two was to be found in the fact that unlike physical ones, mental phenomena are characterized by the ‘intentional in-existence’ [end p.37] (of the intended object); an object, even if it does not have a real existence outside the mind, exists ‘in’ all mental activity. To put the matter in his own words (Brentano 1973):

“Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambigu- ously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood as meaning a thing) , or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as an object within itself, although they all do not do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on” (p.88).

In other words, mental phenomena are related to one another not externally by casual relations, but by the relations of ‘containment’ or ‘implication’ in a way that we have already explored. It is not that a mental act ‘points to’ something as a sign-post points to a town, where sign-post and town exist as external to, and defined independently of one another; a mental act would seem to be ‘in’ the world towards an aspect of which it is directed, it is an intrinsic part of such a world, intensionally rather than extensionally related to it.

              Thus we may take ‘intentionality’ to be an already given property of a world of form-producing processes, with ‘meaning something’, ‘containing something’, and so on, being an intrinsic property of all mental activity. As Gauld and myself (1977, p.114) say, regarding thought:

“Thought must from the very beginning have some tendency to ‘point be ond itself’ to a ‘something’ however vague which is other than itself. Without such a pointing, the process of conceptually dividing the world could not get a toehold from which to begin. You cannot divide up the world in thought unless you have an inkling that there is a world. Without that inkling (which contains within itself the possibility of error) one’s experiences could not lead one to the belief in a world of objects. Any process of inference from present data presupposes, and could not arrive at, some apprehension of a reality beyond and outside the immediate thought” (p.114). [end p.38]

And we add, in case our language is misleading:

“It would perhaps be better to say that in thinking the thinker points beyond his momentary self, his self as engaged in thinking that thought. For to talk of thoughts ‘pointing beyond’ themselves is to make them sound like momentary agents in their own right. Furthermore, the object of a thought is not thought of as set over against that thought; it is thought of as set over against the thinker as he now is.’ (p. 115).

All mental phenomena, no matter how primitive, no matter how vague, are intentional; intentional phenomena cannot be derived from phenomena which in essence are non- intentional, action cannot be derived from non-action. Well articulated processes simply have their origins in less well articulated processes of the same kind; not in some other kind of phenomena altogether.

              In the passage from the less to the more well-realized something is formed, or perhaps better, forming occurs; momentary ‘product forms’ are continuously created (and perhaps dissolved) in the flowing movement, as perhaps ‘ripples, waves, and vortices are created and dissolved in a flowing stream of water’ (Bohm 1973, p. 95). As an analogy of such formative processes, a stream of water is, however, inadequate, for a process of growth or irreversible transformation is involved. This idea is captured, Bohm suggests, in the original meaning of the word ‘form’ in ancient Greek philosophy; as a verb it meant, according to Bohm, an inner forming activity which is the cause of the growth of things, and of the development and differentiation of their various essential forms. As Bohm (1973, p. 95) outlines:

“For example in the case of an oak tree, what is indicated by the term ‘formal cause’ is the whole inner movement of sap, cell growth, articulation of branches, leaves, etc. , which is characteristic of that kind of tree, and different from that taking place in other kinds of trees. In more modern language, it would be better to describe this as the formative cause, to emphasize that what is involved is not a mere form imposed from without, but rather an ordered and strnctured inner movement that is essential to what things are” (p.95). [end p.39]

As well as a model for the process-aspect of intentionality, there is perhaps also a model for an intention tobe dra wn from this example, a model for later reference.

              In the same way that an intention is said to ‘contain’ or ‘point to’ its object, so an acorn may be said to ‘contain’ or ‘point to’ an oak tree. But an acorn certainly does not contain an oak tree, or anything like it, even in miniature. It is best seen as the strnctured medium or mealls through which, in interaction with its surroundings, an oak tree forms, developing itself as the structured means for its own further development or growth. Furthermore, although an acorn specifies the production of an oak tree from it, and not any other kind of tree, it does not specify the tree that grows from it exactly (number of branches, twigs, leaves, and so on), for the tree grows in unpredictable interaction with its surroundings. In the same way, an intention may specify a whole range of acceptable realizations, the actual one realized being formulated in interaction with other relevant contingencies. An intention, then, as I will suggest at greater length in a moment, may be thought of as a specified yet further specifiable means through which one can work towards an end; its already realized aspects limiting and specifying what one may yet do in the attempt to more fully realize it.

              Although more metaphors and models could be offered in an effort to illuminate yet further aspects of intentionality, other matters are pressing and space is limited. The aspects touched upon will be sufficient for our subsequent purposes. They are, to summarize: a. the temporal flow of mental activity from less to more realized states and. as a corollary of this, the importance of less realized states of affairs in specifying their own further realization; b. the tendency of all mental phenomena ‘to point beyond themselves’; and c. the ‘intrinsic interrelatedness’ of all mental phenomena such that, as Gauld and myself (1977, p. 145) put it:

“Without certain beliefs, intentions would disintegrate, without in- tentions or action-tendencies wants would collapse into idle wishes, [end p.40]without the exercise of a conceptual capacity to think of the future intentions and expectancies could not be sustained” (p.145).

As in discussing the ‘intrinsic interrelatedness’ of the phases of the word ‘cat’ earlier, the matter is best expressed, perhaps, by saying that ‘belief’, ‘intention’, ‘action’, ‘self’, ‘agency’, ‘person’, and so on, are all different phases of the same unity. An intentional world thus has quite a different unity to it than a mechanistic world of physically isolable objects held together by external forces; everything in an intentional world is intrinsically interrelated to everything else .

              I want to turn now to a discussion of the ‘specificatory’ nature of mental activity and the yet further ‘specifiable’ nature of its momentary products, and attempt to construct a more detailed model of what might be involved in the realiza- tion of an intention. My aim is to illuminate how, even when expressions may remain irredeemably indexical, that is, less than fully realized, vague and utterly context dependent, their import, especially in the back-and-forth of interaction, may still nonetheless be grasped.

              In discussing how a thought can ‘point beyond itself’, can be ‘of’ something, Gauld and myself (1977) suggest that it could be said to have a ‘specificatory function or aspect’:

“it specifies as it were upon a grid of intersecting co-ordinates, some state of affairs beyond itself. The specifying function does not exhaust [end 41] thought – there is, prima facie, a difference between thoughts in which the specified state of affairs is affirmed, and those in which it is merely supposed – but it is a sine qua non of there being any thought at all” (p.127).

The ‘specificatory’ nature of mental activity is a central presupposition of structuralism (Culler 1976) as well as in the approaches of such psychologists as Neisser (1976), Kelly (1955), Gibson and Gibson (1955), myself (1975), and others. While Gauld and myself (1977) discuss mental activity further to show how ‘specificatory function’ terminology and ‘pro- position’ terminology may be related. I shall take it here, without any further elaboration, that mental activity functions to structure a whole into a system of intrinsically inter-related or reciprocally implicated parts, each part being known in terms of its relations to all the others in the system. The point about such a system of perceptually distinguishable but physically inseparable ‘parts’, is that the momentary ‘parts’ produced are always open to yet further differentiation and specification, but only in terms of what they already are; they are, we may say, ‘further specifiable’. This is a point I shall explore further below.

              William James (1890), in discussing what kind of mental fact a person’s ‘intention of saying a thing’ is, suggests that it often begins with only an extremely vague ‘feeling of tendency’; such

“...’tendencies’ are not only descriptions from without, but they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all” (p.253).

In attempting to grasp further the nature of w hat is involved in the expression of an intention, I want, following Johnson (1971), to consider a ‘feeling of tendency’ we can name: the ‘initial difficulty’ from out of which a question is formulated. In general, however, I think we must accept that such ‘tendencies’ are not nameable as falling into any particular class before [end 42] they issue in an expression which formulates them; they are just intentions to say or to do something appropriate in some way to the circumstances. The problem with such ‘feelings’ is what is the nature of our knowledge of them; in what sense does one know them?

              Johnson asks us to consider as an example a history student asking his tutor quite a complex question: ‘What are the differences in the present day societies of England and Scotland which can be explained in terms of the historical fact that England was invaded and conquered by the N orman French in 1066, while Scotland had no similar experience of invasion and therefore remained a relatively homogeneous society?’ Let us suppose that this is not a rhetorical question, but that the student is genuinely puzzled about the answer. How then does the student succeed in asking his question? What is the nature of the source from which he draws it?

              As Johnson remarks, this much is clear: the student cannot be referring to some objective ‘question in itself’, an aspect of a so-called ‘cognitive structure’ floating vaguely somewhere in his mind, and be simply recording its properties in language. Such an idea is absurd as it leads immediately to further problems of the type it was meant to solve, for what might be the source of the supposed objective question? Certainly it cannot be something simply caused in the student by the objective environment in which he finds himself (the person of his tutor, his own current brain states, and so on), for how could he then call such a question ‘his’ question? How could ‘he’ take responsibility both for its content and for its current formulation if he merely found it occuring within him? How could he know that that was the question ‘he’ wanted to ask? Further, he would require, as Anscombe (1957, p. 57) puts it, ‘a very queer and special sort of seeing eye in the middle of the acting’ to ‘see’ such an object, a special sense organ with which we might observe (or not, if we so preferred) the nature of our own mental activity. But as both Anscombe (1957) and Gauld and myself (1977) argue, paradigms of observation- knowledge are just not applicable to one’s knowledge of one’s [end 43] own intentions and actions ; knowledge of quite a different kind is involved.

              If objective knowledge of the kind gained in observation is not involved, what kind of knowledge is? The question does not just ‘come out of the blue’ to the student.

              Let us return once again to James’ vague ‘feelings of tendency’ and to the source of the student’s question in his ‘initial difficulty’. How might the student ‘use’ this difficulty (and the answer is prejudged by the use of the word ‘use’ rather than ‘refer’) to arrive at his question? Well, he could perhaps be said to use it as one might use any tool or material as a means or medium in achieving an end: one acts ‘through’ it, its nature specifying to a degree what one may do with it, its further specification being up to you. Rather than an objective thing, an ‘initial difficulty’ may be a datum of such a ‘specifiable’ (Johnson 1971) nature. As such, a person may be said not to know or be aware of it as an objective thing at all, only to know it practically, to the extent that he ‘uses’ it or ‘works through its medium’. And just as the blind man feels, not his stick in the palm of his hand, but the character of the terrain at its tip, so may we be said to experience not our ‘feelings of tendency’ in themselves, but the ‘ends’ or ‘objects’ towards which they may lead. But the analogy above is not quite right, for realizing an intention is not like working with a tool or material external to ourselves, simply working ‘with’ it. It is more the case that a ‘feeling of difficulty’ is an intrinsic aspect or ‘phase’ of ourselves, and we live ‘within’ its so far specified structure working towards its greater specification within the limits its previous specification allows.[end 44]

              To summarize: the model for the realization of an intention offered has two aspects or components to it. One component is the initial ‘feelings of tendency’ from which the expression of one’s action seems to issue. Such feelings are known, it suggests, not objectively, but only vaguely in terms of their possible further specification in practice, or more strictly, in terms of their already specified further specifiability. Although often only momentary product-forms, with no more than a fleeting existence, such ‘feelings’ may (as in a dialogue, say) provide the basis for further action, being transformed as one’s circumstances change. The other component of the model is a formative process, an inner forming activity that is essential to what a person’s intention is, that is, its already specified but yet further specifiable nature. Just as the whole inner movement of an oak tree in its growth (in its structured passage through time from less to more modes of being) is characteristic of the kind of tree it is, with its source in an acorn, so the action of a person is characterized by the intention, the phase of his being , in which the action has its source.

              The metaphors and models in this section illustrate some of the properties of the ‘worlds’ within which human action has its being. Such worlds are unitary worlds of intrinsically interrelated entities awaiting yet further differentiation; worlds full of vague yet further specifiable products of human action; worlds in motion which, in the very character of their motion, indicate the style of what is yet to come. In such [end 45] worlds action can in and of itself have a structure and order to it without such an order needing to be determined by externally defined rules.

4 Action and Interaction: Social and Personal Worlds

I want to turn now to the discussion of action and interaction, and the creation of social and personal worlds. I want to show (a) that the ‘workings’ of such worlds are just ‘invisible’ to us, but no less full of charm and strangeness, as the world of modern physics, and (b) that, in investigating actions in them, a hermeneutical (understanding) approach should first be applied to construct the ‘world’ (as a unity whole) within the context of which an action (as a proper part of the whole) can be seen to have its sense. Only then is a search worthwhile for the method, rule, or device by which members of that world achieve such a sense. 1f the sense was made routinely, then the device sought will already be a part of members’ competence in that world. 1f the sense was not made routinely, then the device discovered may be offered as a possible addition to that competence, as is the case with noviciate members not yet well versed in the ways of such a social world.

              The peculiar charm and strangeness of ‘social worlds’ resides in the paradox that while people quite clearly do construct their own ways of life for themselves, their own ‘worlds’, they none the less experience them as ‘given’, as ‘realities’ existing externally to and independently of them, and as containing things which, even before they actually find them or become conscious of them, are thought of as existing ‘somewhere’ in that world: the thesis explored below then is that people, although unaware of doing so, construct social worlds of meaning between themselves in the course of social interaction, and in so doing, determine the form of their own consciousness, their own modes of being in the world, their own categories of thought, perception and action. [end 46]

ACTION

Currently, psychology and social psychology are taken to be sciences of behaviour, but as the concept of action is central to my whole endeavour here, let me begin by pointing out the traditional distinction people draw between action and behaviour, between acts and events, between things people do and things which merely happen to them, within them, or around them, outside of their agency to control. While boats, bombs and barnacles behave, we recognize people as being able to act; and it is the special quality of human action, especially its intentional nature, its ability to ‘point to’ something beyond itself, that we shall find crucial in its ability to indicate a ‘world’.

              The distinction between action and behaviour is crucial in everyday life, where we are continually concerned with whether people themselves intended what they did, or whether it happened by accident, or with what a person meant by his action. It is only because people themselves know, in at least some important cases, whether they intended their activity or not, and whether they achieved what they meant to achieve (or whether they made a mistake), that such questions about their actions make any sense; beings unable to distinguish between what they intended and what just happened irrespective of their agency would find such questions quite senseless. Besides being crucial in everyday life, the distinction is most certainly crucial in science (Shotter 1975) .If people are unable to distinguish between what just happens, by itself, and what happens only as a result of their intended action, there would be no basis for empirical inquiries in science at all, no way of doing controlled experiments.

              We thus approach human action in a quite different way to the way we approach other behaviour; a quite different set of interpretative assumptions (or rules) are involved. Gauld and myself (1977, pp. 42- 45) set out some of them. Central is the assumption that actions are initiated and/or guided or controlled by agents, by people themselves. Rather than describing [end 47] events and their regularities impersonally, without reference to their authorship, people are treated as the authors of their own actions.

              There seem to be a number of good reasons for this: first, as Winch (1958, p. 32) points out, “the notion of following a rule is logically inseparable from the notion of making a mistake.” In other words, unlike the motions of planets in their orbits, actions have criteria of success or failure; people need to evaluate or ‘monitor’ (Harré and Secord 1972) their actions in relation to these in the course of their performance. Often, of course, they fail to meet the appropriate criteria, then they may be censured; on some occasions they succeed, then we may congratulate them. We do not congratulate the moon for having managed to stay in its orbit last night, but we do congratulate young Johnny for managing not to fall off his new skateboard this afternoon.

              The mistakes and errors to which human action is prone do not issue from it being governed by ‘looser’ laws than motions in the natural world, for what rules there are in sociallife, as Chomsky has shown in the case of language, are extremely precise, and prescribe very fine distinctions on occasion. Mistakes and errors occur because skill, effort, and care is required in applying and implementing them. As Ryle (1963) remarks:

“The well-regulated clock keeps good time and the well-drilled circus seal performs its tricks flawlessly, yet we do not call them ‘intelligent’. We reserve this title for the persons responsible for their performances. To be intelligent is not merely to satisfy criteria, but to apply them...” (p.29).

But even more than skill at applying criteria is involved if people are to be treated as the authors of their actions, for they may still, so to speak, ‘be going through the motions’. As Gauld and myself (1977) point out:

“accepting a criterion as the criterion... by which the success or otherwise of an action is to be measured involves not just applying it [end 48] to one’s directed movements, but as it were committing oneself. To fulfilling it, guiding one’s self-expression in accordance with its requirements” (p.44).

One’s self is involved in one’s acting such that success or failure of one’s action is one’s success or failure. And the mark of such commitment is not the meeting of certain criteria in the making of one’s movements but the skilful relating of one’s motions to one’s own intentions, to one’s inner ‘feelings of tendency’. In such a case, people’s actual patterns of movement are irrelevant, it is the way that they ‘go on’ (to use a Wittgensteinian phrase) from one phase of their activity to the next that counts.

              Human action would seem to be unique not because, from an external observer’s point of view, no other behaviour is quite like it, but because it is only about human behaviour that we are able to make and sustain certain assumptions. Observing a projectile now (as beneficiaries of Cartesian metaphysics and modern science) we ascribe the pattern of its trajectory to the operation of impersonal general laws, but in observing people’s motions we still ascribe their trajectories to them; we still think of them as controlling their own movements in relation to their own thoughts and feelings. And such ascriptions in this case ‘work’, for we do, so to speak, see ‘through’ their actions to their thoughts and feelings. This is not to say that we actually see their objective thoughts and their objec- tive feelings; as such, not only are these completely hidden from us, but if our earlier account of ‘intentions’ is correct, they are as almost unknown to other people as they are to us. On our earlier account, what we see in a person’s action is his use of the thought or feeling in which it had its source. People’s actions are thus understood when their ‘intentions’, as something to be used, are as plain to us as thev are to them; then we can go on as they goon.

              Such an understanding is achieved, not by referring to general laws or rules, nor by sharing thoughts or feelings, but by constructing, on the basis of at least the abo’!e assumptions, the whole context (or ‘world’) within which the action or [end 49] expression played its part (or had its sense). Such constructions or interpretations may, of course, be wrong. But there is no reason for supposing that they should not be subjected to just as much critical scrutiny and testing as theories in the natural sciences; and in this sense, a hermeneutical science is just as feasible as an explanatory-causal science. Consensual understanding is achieved when, in negotiation with those whose actions one is attempting to understand (and therein lies its difference with a natural science) , a joint ‘way of going on’ from the action or actions in question is constructed and agreed (Habermas 1972). Understanding in the hermeneutical view is not achieved by, as mentioned earlier, re-experiencing people’s thoughts or feelings, nor when one knows how to ‘pass’, or to re-enact the actions in question by’ going through the motions’. In neither case can the sense and significance of people’s actions be discovered in that way.

              While logically possible, such a negotiated consensual understanding is, of course, difficult to achieve in practice; negotiation has to stop sometime, and some people or groups of people will always feel that interpretations have been imposed upon them by others. This is no less of a problem when natural scientific methods are used in the study of human affairs (Habermas 1972) .These most important considerations must be discussed elsewhere, however; here we must turn now to problems in the ‘explanation’ of social behaviour.

              An approach to the study of human action has been proposed in which workers have noted the distinction between action and behaviour, and have claimed that while behaviour may be explained by reference to general laws, human actions cannot be so explained; they must be ‘explained’ by discovering the reasons people have for doing them, the rational considerations in terms of which they, as rational social agents, in the perspective of their social world, structured their actions in the course of their execution. Thus, instead of people being treated as mechanisms caused to behave like mindless billiard balls by they-know-not-what forces acting upon them exter-[end 50]nally, people are to be treated as entities able to explain ; themselves by giving, or at least by negotiating with those who are investigating them, ‘accounts’ of their reasons for their actions. And this ‘negotiation of accounts’, it has been pointed out, is a mode of explanation quite different from the causal kind: instead of explaining a particular event by show- ing how, in the circumstances of its occurrence it is an instance of a general law , a person’s particular action is explained by discovering what in particular he was trying to do in executing it: Jones’ reason for crossing the road is that he believed he could buy tobacco on the other side. The particular is being explained here by the particular. Rather than an instance of a general law, his action is being treated as the precise adjustment of a unique self to his own special circumstantes as he saw them; an adjustment in which he could, of course, have failed.

              A sphere of autonomous, skilful action has been marked out here; in this sphere men are not caused to act by events outside themselves, but are the originators of their own actions. In such a sphere, as Hollis (1977) remarks, ‘rational action is its own explanation’, that is, Jones is there as an agent in his action, and ‘he’ is executing it in terms of certain grounds and other rational considerations. His actions are explained when, roughly speaking, those grounds and considerations are as plain to us as to him. The considerations in terms of which he acts explain his action. The understanding achieved here may be used as an explanation, that is, a generalization, when it is offered in the context of the assumption that in such circumstances as Jones’ all other rational agents would have done the same.

              So far so good: we have succeeded in opposing, at least in theory, man-the-mechanism with man-the-autonomous-rational-social-agent, and in showing that there is a mode of rational explanation which can legitimately be applied to his conduct. The most well known approach in social psychology in this sphere is Harré’s and Secord’s (1972) ethogenics, and in this chapter I want to continue to share with them the problem [end 51] of how to treat people for-the-purposes-of-science, as rational, social agents, able to act as the source of their own actions. But there is something very wrong, I think, with their approach to this problem in which (a) they take deliberate activity, activity in which people seemingly refer to a ‘theory’, an ‘idea’, a ‘grammar’, or some other ‘cognitive structure’ somewhere in-their-heads in structuring their activity, as a model (or all that people do, and (b) see people’s activity as determined in some way by factors external to it, by pre-established ‘grammars of the social order’ (Harré and Secord 1972, p. 123). ‘In order to understand what people do, one must see their activities in terms of deliberate followings of rules. ..’ (p. 15).

              But as Hollis (1977) shows, actors who are creatures of rules are still passive in the sense that the actions they perform are not ‘their’ actions. To learn which rules people are following in their actions is not to learn (a) their intentions in following them, nor (b) why they put themselves under the guidance of those rules. Reference to rules may answer the ‘how’ question, but the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ question remain. If there is nothing more to discover in ethogeny than, as Harré and Secord (1972, p. 9) put it, ‘the “generative mechanisms” that give rise to behaviour’, then once again, as in the behaviourist paradigm, the idea of people themselves, as individual personalities, being the authors of their own actions disappears.

              Besides the threat to self and genuine individuality in Harré and Secord’s approach, there is also a threat to genuine creativity and development. They suggest that a social individual is an entity ‘which consciously self-monitors its performance and is capable of anticipatory commentary. ..’, as if it is always possible to know what one is doing while one is doing it, as if there is always a script, plan, or rule to which to refer in structuring one’s actions. However, there are many everyday activities, it seems to me, in which we remain deeply ignorant as to what exactly it is that we are doing, not because the ‘scripts’ supposedly in us somewhere are too vague or too deeply buried to bring out into the light of day, but because the formative influences shaping our conduct are not wholly there [end 52] in-our-individual-heads to be brought out: in our everyday affairs we must act not only in an unpredictable environment, but our actions are influenced by the unpredictable actions of others. Hence other forms of action require analysis other than just autonomous action: besides acting autonomously, people also interact as well as acting jointly (and heteronomously, that is, subject to the rule of externally imposed laws). And in interacting or acting jointly they do things collectively, they lack the ‘power’ (Harré 1970) to do things singly. It is in this sphere then, not in that of deliberate followings of rules, that we may expect to find ‘developmental’ phenomena (Gauld and Shotter 1977) , the growth of the general factors that make routinely meaningful action possible.

              This then will be my concern in the remainder of this section: the analysis of the joint action (to use Blummer’s 1965/66 term) involved in developing the grounds for routinely meaningful action. I shall be concerned with such activities as discussions, industrial negotiations, football matches, tutorials, greetings, insults, promises, listening to academic papers, and so on, using joint action as a model to some extent as help in understanding more unstructured interactions like general conversation, and -just ‘playing around’ .Such activities as these cannot wholly be performed simply by following the rules or referring to pre-established plans; they are, none the less, actions with a particular style to them: people seem committed by one phase of their activity to behaving in one way rather than another in the next. Whilst friendly conversations differ from philosophical debates which differ from psychotherapy which differs from formal interviews, and so on, people know in which activity they are engaged and conduct themselves accordingly. Elsewhere (Shotter 1973a, 1973b, 1974) I have explored the growth of people’s ‘personal powers’ in social interaction; here I want to explore people’s ‘social powers’. They have the power, I think, to create and sustain a ‘social world’ between them in such activities, a seemingly ‘external’ and ‘objective’ world in terms of which, when required as autonomous agents to do so, they can give their [end 53] reasons for their actions, and have them understood and accepted by those, and only those, who understand with them the same ‘world of meaning’. And this, as we shall see, is a quite different way of accounting for one’s actions, of giving them a rational explanation, than in terms of rule-, plan-, or script-following. It involves grasping the ‘intentional structure’ of the ‘world’ from which the action draws its sense, grasping it not objectively but practically, knowing how to use the context it provides to go on as the people in it go on.

              A personal world, I suggest, has the same intentional structure to it as a social world and thus possesses most of the other properties of social worlds discussed below. But what people lack when acting all alone is access to the processes in which a common sense can be constructed; joint action is essential to the construction of a common context within ‘what I see’ can be contrasted with ‘what everybody sees’. It is not so much that in joint action ‘agreements’ are made, but that, as Winch (1958, p. 50) puts it, ‘action with a sense... goes together with certain other actions in the sense that it commits the agent to behaving in one way rather than another in the future’; and that commitment is a moral commitment. Strangers meeting one another’s glances in the park seem to establish a shared commitment of a kind quite different from that if their glances had never met, but no ‘agreements’ have been made here; they have merely ‘recognized’ one another as creatures with possibly agreeing assumptions about the interpretation of the world. A more precise ‘agreement’ remains to be constructed.

THE NATURE AND STRUCTURE Of SOCIAL AND PERSONAL WORLDS

In discussing the nature and structure of the ‘social worlds’ constructed in the course of joint action, I want to make two interrelated points: the first is simply that in the world of practical human affairs, men must often interlace their actions in with those of others, hence, what they as individuals desire and what actually happens are often two quite different things. [end 54]

              Vico (1744; see also Pompa 1975; Berlin 1976) was the first to note the importance of this phenomenon. As the results of joint action cannot be traced back to the intentions or desires of particular individuals (as we normally assume the products of actions can), they can take on a seemingly ‘objective’ and ‘external’ quality. They may seem to have the quality of impersonal, just-happening events and thus it seems necessary to seek their external causes just as ,one would for other impersonal, just-happening events. Rather than being attributed to an author, their occurrence is attributed to an external force or agency ‘outside’ of the people involved; ‘social norms’ , ‘role demands’ , or some such other influence acting upon people and structuring their action is invoked. A paradigm example here is the movement of the wine glass on the Ouija board. Clearly it does not move unless people’s fingers are on it. But so strong is the conviction that its movements cannot be traced back to any intentions of the people involved, while its movements none the less display intelligence, that they are attributed to an external spirit, acting through the medium of the people present -the work- ings of such social processes as these remain quite invisible to the people involved in them. Laing’s (1971) ‘knots’ are examples of the ways in which people unknowingly trap themselves within the ‘micro-social worlds’ they construct between them, ‘worlds’ too small or too restricted for people’s self-expression.

              The second point is that unintended though the results of joint action may be, such action remains, nonetheless, intentional, in the sense of ‘pointing beyond itself’ already discussed at length above. Such action ‘points to’ a realm (or realms) of other possible actions, to a ‘world of meaning or reference’ which seems to make its appearance even as the action occurs, and can thus function as the context in which the sense of the action is understood and a reply to it formulated. The reply may transform, or specify the already specified context yet further, and so on, until a common or joint product of the exchange is formed which is the responsibility of neither of the parties to its construction. [end 55]

              These two features of the ‘worlds’ so produced, their impersonality and their intentional structure, are well described by Merleau-Ponty (1962) when he says:

“Ahead of what I can see and perceive, there is, it is true, nothing actually visible, but my world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come. ..Husserl uses the terms protentions and retentions for the intentionalities which anchor me to an environment. They do not run from a central I, butfrom my perceptual field itself, so to speak, which draws along in its wake its own horizon of retentions, and bites into the future with its own protentions” (p.416).

I as an individual personality remain distinct from ‘the world’ in which I find myself; that world confronts me with, among other things, problems which I must solve if I am to go on in it. My perception seems to express a given situation within which I, by my personal acts may create others. My perceptual experience feels as if, Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 215) suggests, ‘it comes not from my own being, the one for which I am responsible and for which I make decisions, but another self which has already sided with the world, which is already open to certain of its aspects and synchronized with them’. It is created, we might say, by the ‘natural powers’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 215; Shotter 1973, 1974), the protentions and retentions, the assumptions I use and through which I work in coping with my circumstances. Even ‘personal worlds’ may thus be impersonal in the sense that, what we may wish and desire is one thing, while the nature and structure of the ‘world’ within which we find ourselves, is another. But they are not common worlds in which what one confronts is also confronted in the same way by everyone else.

THE REFLEXIVE, MORALLY COERCIVE, AND INCORRIGIBLE NATURE Of ‘SOCIAL WORLDS’

The nature of socially constructed realities is such as to render all Popper’s (1963) strictures about falsifiability quite beside [end 56] the point, for such worlds are both morally coercive and reflexive. That is, (a) they provide a world in terms of which a person who inhabits it must determine his action; for example, rational Skinnerians must see the human world in terms of stimuli and responses, and must structure their explanations in terms of schedules of reinforcement and so on, if they want to remain living, that is, in a Skinnerian world. Its other members, actual or potential, exert a morally coercive force upon them, in that sense. And (b) in so determining people’s actions, there is no way in which their actions can lead to results beyond that reality; it is reflexive in the sense that, no matter what happens, it is understood and dealt with in terms that the reality provides. Piaget (1971) calls this the self-regulating property of structures.

              Let me illustrate with an example: when the Azande of Africa are faced with important decisions, Evans-Pritchard (1937) tells us, decisions about whom to marry, or where to build their house, and so on, they consult a spirit oracle. They do it by first gathering a. substance from the bark of a certain type of tree and then, after having prepared it in a seance-Iike ceremony, they feed it to a small chicken. The Azande have decided beforehand whether the death of the chicken will denote a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer, and the oracle, working through the medium of the chicken’s living or dying, gives them an unequivocal answer to their question.

              We, with our western ‘scientific’ knowledge, ‘know’ that the tree bark used by the Azande contains a poison that kills some chickens but not all. Knowing the oracle’s bark is ‘really’ poison, we wonder what would happen when, for instance, someone else consulted the oracle about the same question and got a contradictory answer? What if the oracle is contradicted by later events, the house site floods, the wife becomes a whore? How is it possible for the Azande to continue to believe in oracles in the face of so many evident contradictions in their faith? (The same way, in fact, that we all, including Skinnerians, maintains our beliefs.)

              What ‘we’ would call contradictions are not contradictions for the Azande; they are only contradictions for us, as we view [end 57] the events from within the reality of western science. While we look at oracular practices to determine whether oracles exist or not, the Azande know that oracles exist; that is the beginning premise of their particular mode of rationality. Everything that happens they experience as supporting that initial assumption in some way. And they explain away apparent failures by what Evans-Pritchard (1937) calls ‘secondary elaborations of belief’. When he tried to confront them with apparent failures of the oracle, they only laughed or met his arguments,

“sometimes by point-blank assertions, sometimes by one of the evasive secondary elaborations of belief ...sometimes by polite pity, but always by an entanglement of linguistic obstacles, for one cannot well express in its language objections not formulated by a culture” (p.330).

They said that a taboo must have been breached, or that sorcerers, witches, ghosts, or gods must have intervened; these ‘mystical’ notions reaffirming, in fact, the very reality of a world in which oracles are a basic feature. The Azande explain the failure of the oracles by retaining as an initial premise, the unquestioned absolute reality of oracles; their reality is morally coercive in the sense that it provides the terms in which they as social agents must structure their actions. ‘Witchcraft, oracles, and magic form an intellectually coherent system’, says Evans-Pritchard (1937) ,

“Each explains and proves the others. Death is proof of witchcraft. It is avenged by magic, The achievement of vengeance-magic is proved by the poison-oracle. The accuracy of the poison-oracle is determined by the king’s oracle, which is above suspicion” (p.476).

These are the terms in which the Azande experience their world. They are reflexive when, by using ‘secondary elaborations of belief’, apparent refutations are turned into verifications of the oracle’s existence. Their beliefs are thus incorrigible in the sense that there is no way in which they can ever be discovered to be false. [end 58]

              We ‘scientists’ feel thankful that we are not as the Azande, trapped within a web of obviously false beliefs from which we cannot escape. But this same irrefutability, Lakatos (1970) has shown, is also a property of all the great scientific research programmes. How is it then that if both the Azande and, say, our Newtonian ‘realities’ are or were irrefutable in principle, have we managed to transcend our Newtonian beliefs while the Azande, seemingly, have no hope of transcending theirs? The answer can be found, I believe, although I have no space to discuss it at length here, in the phenomenological distinction Schutz (1953) and Garfinkel (1967) draw between the rational properties of scientific and commonsense activities, between taking a theoretic and a practical interest in the world. Taking the former attitude, we assume the ‘interpretative rule’ when confronting phenomena that we know nothing of them and that they are not what they seem; thus we must construct theories about them. Taking the latter attitude, we take our commonsense knowledge and our social competencies for granted and things are accepted as being what they seem to be. We possess a ‘scientific attitude’ that the Azande lack; even though they may as individuals disagree as to the proper interpretation of puzzling phenomena, they do not as we do disagree upon the whole nature of the appropriate interpretative framework, their understanding is always ‘within’ it.

UNDERSTANDING IN AND OF SOCIAL WORLDS

Our understanding of a phenomenon is always from a position ‘within’ an interpretative framework, even if that framework constructs an impersonal world regulated by causal laws. Our explanation of natural phenomena requires us to interpret them as if they were regulated by laws. We have already discussed our understanding of human phenomena, and the different interpretative assumptions with which we approach them. Understanding them is not, I have claimed, a matter of seeking the grammars of the social order (as if these [end 59] already existed in social worlds before any people, so to speak, came along to inhabit them) .It is a matter, at every stage, both practical and theoretical, of constructing common and agreed worlds. Being able to live by, and use, grammars presupposes everywhere the existence of the general conditions in terms of which grammars may be developed. Denying that one meets these conditions is tantamount to denying one access to a social world; it is to refuse to recognize one’s status as a person in fact.

              Consider what happens when someone shouts, ‘Hey, you!’ at you: what is that person doing, what is he saying, even when he shouts it at you in the most general of contexts? We might answer by following Austin (1962), seeking the ‘speech act’ that the utterance performs: it is hardly a greeting or salutation of any kind, but neither is it necessarily an insult, although it does seem to be an incivility of some kind. As it is more than just an exclamation, let us call it, for want of something better, a directed-attention-demander, an unwieldy but seemingly accurate description. But is it accurate? 1f that was the function to be served, surely ‘Hey’ or ‘Hello there’ would have done just as well. But neither expression seems to say the same thing at all. While the person is perhaps demand- ing attention with his speech act, he is saying much more: at least in his use of the vernacular he is recognizing one’s status as a person, as a being able to use language and indicate intentions in his expressions. ‘Hey’ could equally well have been addressed to a dog; as such it leaves one nonplussed as to how to go on to reply to it; it involves no attempt to make any sense. Should one act frightened as a dog might when surprised by a loud noise, or what? ‘Hey, you!’ creates in its very utterance a world in which you are not personally recognized but are already assigned a role, that of paying attention, of giving recognition to the other that you await his next move; as such your role is a subservient one. ‘Hello there’ may surprise you, may get your attention, and so on, but it constructs a quite different kind of social world, a world of civility and tolerance in which you are invited to play the part [end 60] of an equal, to reply in kind as a personal other: ‘Oh hello there, I’m so-and-so.’

              Let us move now from a general context to more specific ones, for we have still not encountered the speaker as an individual; the sense of his utterance, and thus our reply to it, will depend upon where and who we both are. If you are the managing director of a large company, just unlocking the door of your Rolls in your firm’s underground car park, and the parking attendant shouts ‘Hey you” at you, you may be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and ignore it, or you may feel sufficiently incensed to discover who he is and make an appointment to see him the next day. If you are not the owner of the Rolls you are just unlocking, your ‘reply’ may be to run. If you are the managing director and you have just turned down a request by the parking attendant to marry your daughter, you may consider running again (especially if he is bigger than you) , and so on. As an utterance, ‘Hey, you!’ specifies in general a social world with a certain style to it, even when heard by quite young children. Although it is further specifiable in various ways, it cannot easily be transformed into one of a different kind, in which the subservience imputed to the ‘you’ is changed into equality or dominance, say.

Two things are illustrated in the examples above. The first is that ‘Hey, you!’ draws its sense mostly from the very general interpretative assumptions we apply in making sense of the actions of agents and very little from anything like a rule. Straight away it specifies a style of exchange which may (or may not), with further specification in a particular context, become established as a clear and distinct form of social ex- change, that is, become as if governed by rules. The second point, which follows from the first, is that as the exchange is not initially a ‘rule-governed’ exchange, to attempt to under- stand it as one (on analogy with TG-grammar or dramaturgy) is to distort the ‘developmental’ aspect of its nature. The particular sense of the utterance, the particular author’s par- ticular intention in uttering it, is understood practically by perceiving it as occurring in a world with a particular inten[end p.61]tional structure to it (see Merleau-Ponty’s account quoted earlier) .As interaction proceeds that structure is transformed accordingly, and one’s perceptions of it change. Theoretically, the sense in the author’s action may be understood, to repeat the by now familiar hermeneutical formula, by constructing an account, in negotiation with those whose action one is attempting to understand, of a common and agreed world of meaning, an account of a way of going on from the action in question. Such negotiated and agreed accounts of ways-of-going-on actually are rules.

              Essential to the establishment of rules, of regularities, repeatabilities, stabilities is humankind’s moral sensibility and people’s capacity to understand how to be responsible for their own actions. If we can retain that capacity, to use a remark by Hanna Arendt (1959), then,

“even if there is no truth. men can be truthful, and even if there is no reliable certainty, men can be reliable” (p.254).

And that, when we put the changefulness of humankind at the centre of things as we have in this chapter, is perhaps the best for which we can ever hope: but surely that should be quite enough.

References

R. Abelson, 1977, Persons: A Study in Philosophical Psychology, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

G.W. AIlport, 1954, ‘The Historical Background of Modern Social Psychology’, in: G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. 1, Cambridge, Mass: Addison-Wesley

G.E.M. Anscombe, 1957, Intention, Oxford: Blackwell.

H. Arendt, 1959, The Human Condition, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

M. Argyle, 1969, Social Interaction, London: Methuen.

J. Austin, 1962, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

H. Bergson, 1920, Mind-Energy, London: Macmillan.

I. Berlin, 1976, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, London: Hogarth.

D. J. Bem, 1967, ‘Self-Perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena’, PsychologicalReview, Vol. 74, pp.183-200.

D. J. Bem, 1972, ‘Self-Perception Theory’, in: L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 6, New York: Academic Press.

H. Blummer, 1965/66, ‘Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 71, pp. 535-44.

D. Bohm, 1973, ‘Human Nature as the Product of Our Mental Models’, in: J. Bentall (Ed.), The Limits of Human Nature, London: Allen Lane.

F. Brentano, 1973, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

J. Culler, 1976, Saussure, London: Fontana.

J. Dewey, 1896, ‘The Concept of the Reflex Arc in Psychology’, Psychological Review, Vol. 3, pp. 13-32.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1937, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, London: Oxford University Press.

H. Garfinkel, 1967, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.

A. Gauld and J. Shotter, 1977, Human Action and its Psychological Investigation, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

K. Gergen, 1973, ‘Social Psychology as History’, Journal of Persona- lity and Social Psychology, VoI. 26, pp. 309-320.

J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson, 1955, ‘Perceptual Learning: Differentation or Enrichment?’ Psychological Review, VoI. 62, pp. 32-41.

J. Habermas, 1972, Knowledge an4 Human Interests, London: Heinemann.

R. Harré, 1970, ‘Powers’, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 21, pp. 81-101.

R. Harré and P. F. Secord, 1972, The Explanation of Social Behaviour , Oxford: Blackwell.

M. Hollis, 1977, Models of Man, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

W. James, 1890, Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, London: Macmillan.

D. M. Johnson, 1971, ‘A Formulation Model of Perceptual Knowledge’, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 8, pp. 54-62.

G. Kelly, 1955, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, New York: Norton.

T. S. Kuhn, 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

I. Lakatos, 1970, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in: I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A. M. Liberman, 1970, ‘The Grammars of Speech and Language’, Cognitive Psychology, Vol.1, pp. 301-325.

A. M. Liberman, F. S. Cooper, D.P. Shankweilerand & M. Studdert-Kennedy, 1967, ‘Perception of the Speech Code’, Psychological Review, Vol. 74, pp. 431-61.

W. J. McGuire, 1973, ‘The Yin and the Yan of Progress in Social Psychology’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 26, pp. 446-456.

M. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

U. Neisser, 1976, Cognition and Reality, San Francisco: Freeman.

R. E. Nisbett and T. D. Wilson, 1977, ‘Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports an Mental Processes’, PsycholoRical Review, Vol. 84, pp. 231-59.

R. S. Peters, 1958, The Concept of Motivation, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

J. Piaget, 1971, Structuralism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

L. Pompa, 1975, Vico: A Study of the ‘New Science’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

K. R. Popper, 1963, Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

G. Ryle, 1949, The Concept of Mind, Harmondsworth: Peregine Books.

A. Schutz, 1953, ‘Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 14, pp. 1-38.

J. R. Searle, 1969, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press.

J. Shotter, 1973a, ‘Prolegomena to an Understanding of Play’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Vol. 3, pp.47-89.

J. Shotter, 1973b, ‘Acquired Powers: the Transformation of Natural into Personal Powers’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Vol. 3, pp. 141-156.

J. Shotter, 1974, ‘The Development of Personal Powers’, in: M. P. M. Richards (Ed.), The Integration of a Child into a Social World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

J. Shotter, 1975, Images of Man in Psychological Research, London: Methuen.

J. Shotter, 1978, ‘The Cultural Context of Communication Studies: Theoretical and Methodological Issues’, in: A. Lock (Ed.), Action, Gesture and Symbol, London: Academic Press.

M. B. Smith, 1972, ‘Is Experimental Social Psychology Progressing?’, Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, Vol. 8, pp. 86-96.

L. H. Strickland, F. E. Aboud and K. J. Gergen, 1976, (Eds.), Social Psychology in Transition, New York: Plenum Press.

J. A. N. Whitehead, 1975, Science and the Modern World, London: Fontana.

P. Winch, 1958, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relations to Philosophy, London; Routledgeand Kegan Paul.