“Mundane Realism and Practical-Theory in a Psychology of Everyday Life,”
(from Shotter, J. (1984) Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford; Blackwell, pp.24-30.)
Preamble 2007: In this 1984 book, I was concerned to counter a version of realism proposed by Roy Bhaskar, a version he called “transcendental realism.” I wanted to oppose it, not because of his concerns with a non-socially-constructed, material reality, but because he claimed that there was no intrinsic difference between the natural and the social sciences – an approach that he termed “naturalism.” I thought then that there was a difference, to do not only with the need to deal with meanings, but also with the strange properties of joint action (a view that I now hold even more strongly). Thus the crucial points I make about “practical-theory” are somewhat buried in the context of an argument with Bhaskar. So in the extract produced here, I first present two crucial paragraphs on their own, and then the whole section of the book in which they appear.
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“Thus while we might want to criticize certain ways of talking – claims, for instance, that our ‘outer’ expressions are caused by prior events ‘within’ us; that we possess ‘selves’ conceptually separable from ourselves as persons; or that mental events are contained ‘in our minds’ (see chapter 10) – we can do so by appealing, not to any particular method or special source of knowledge, but simply to other forms of usage, to other ways of talking readily available in our everyday accounting practices. For our accounting practices seem to revolve around ‘images’, ‘pictures’, ‘paradigm cases’ (Wittgenstein, 1953; Rosch, 1973; Ossorio, in Davis, 1981), or ‘metaphors’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; and see chapter 10); and the mistakes we make often arise from extending a way of talking beyond the form of life, beyond the activity within which it originally had its currency.
Sometimes, however, criticism will not be sufficient; alternative images or paradigm cases will be required to replace those currently being used. Occasionally, even, new images will have to be introduced de novo, to indicate a form of order, a way of human being, an activity or relationship previously unrecognized. Such terms will have the form of ‘theoretical’ terms (as if denoting the real things at a deeper level investigated in a theoretical science), but they do not have the same functions at all. As they serve the purposes of practice, I shall call what they provide ‘practical-[end 27] theory’; but there is no need to use special terms for individual practical-theories other than those already at hand: for they are images, metaphors, paradigm cases, etc. Their primary function, to repeat Garfinkel’s dictum, is to work to render unreported and in fact as yet unreportable human phenomena, ‘rationally-visible-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes, i.e., ‘accountable’, as organizations of commonplace everyday activities’. Their purpose is not to help people, who are already clear as to what and who they are, simply to gather further information relevant to decisions as to how to act: but to help change people in their being, in their mode of relationship both to themselves and to others. Thus they are not to be evaluated as theoretical terms in a theoretical science, in terms of their correspondence to reality. Their task is not to provide a ground-plan for a mechanism working independently of human consciousness or experience; nor is it their function to finalize a decision, to achieve a universal consensus within a group of individuals who already know their way around in the world, so to speak. Indeed, just the opposite is the case: their function is to promote a form of understanding which, as Wittgenstein (1953, no. 154) suggests, is best described not as the occasioning of a mental process but as the provision of circumstances in which individuals say ‘now I know how to go on.’ And those circumstances are provided by ‘paradigms’, etc., which work as instruments in the ‘making’ of accounting practices (in, as Wittgenstein would put it, the setting up of ‘language-games’)” (pp.27-28).
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(Two paragraphs from the previous section): “It is at this point that the difference between Bhaskar’s position and the one which I have adopted begins to become clear. His concerns, clearly, are with the social sciences as theoretical sciences, in Aristotle’s sense of that term. He is concerned to produce, as a result of his scientific activity, theoretical objects, the ‘transitive’ changing objects, which give access to the unchanging experience-independent ‘intransitive’ objects he thinks of as constituting social reality. But recall here briefly Anscombe’s dilemma quoted earlier. Clearly Bhaskar accepts two knowledges: one known to us transcendentally (in intention), gained by us in our practical but socially accountable encounters with the phenomena in question, and the other in our theoretical accounts, gained by us making scientific observations - the first gained, I would say, as an unintended consequence of the ‘joint action’ (see chapter 8) in which we are involved, the second as an intended consequence of our own individual actions. With Bhaskar’s formulation, we again find ourselves in the darkness of which Anscombe speaks, for (a) the relation between the two is unclear, and (b) as Anscombe points out, a ‘queer and special sort of seeing eye in the middle of the acting’ seems to be required if knowledge of Bhaskar’s ‘intransitive’ experience-independent objects is to inform our actions, and to inform them, of course, in a socially accountable way. For in psychology (as I discuss in the next section) our talk of such things as our emotions, etc., itself works to constitute what our emotions are, and as such, as an accounting practice, works as a real determinant in our actions. In other words, the idea of experience-independent objects is difficult to uphold in psychology.
To avoid this dilemma, a more appropriate account of intentionality is required than that given by Bhaskar (1979, p. 44), merely in terms of people’s ability, not only to control and monitor their performances, but to monitor their monitoring. For, as we shall see, an ability to report on and to account for one’s performances need play no part in their initial shaping. The intentionality of action is itself such that - in being directed upon an object (or as Searle would say, in being ‘fitted’ to one), whether any such object exists or not - it is intrinsically informed by the context into which it is directed; no reference to any objective things is necessary at all, whether ‘inner’ or ‘outer’ (see chapters 8 and 11).
Mundane Realism and Practical-Theory in a Psychology of Everyday Life
Bhaskar argues for the possibility of naturalism, for an essential unity of method in the natural and social or human sciences. Whether he does so successfully or not, in the social accountability view I am proposing here [end 24] he fails to account rationally for its adoption; in C. Taylor’s (1980) terms, which I will elucidate below, he fails to make explicit its ‘desirability characteristics’. Clearly, the ‘scientific’ mode of accountability Bhaskar outlines is not the only mode there is; others exist and have other aims, other implicit intentions; and we choose between them in terms of what we find significant for ourselves at the time of our choosing. While claiming, essentially, that sciences create in their own traditions and practices their own criteria by which they evaluate the theoretical entities which they propose as real, he seems to adduce only historical and pragmatic ones in justification of the overall stance he proposes. However, if our reality is constituted for us by the ways we commit ourselves to talking about it in our attempts to account for it, what kind of reality is it which Bhaskar’s way of talking would lead us to constitute?
As C. Taylor (1980) argues, one of the requirements which has traditionally been seen as central to science being science, is the ‘requirement of absoluteness’, a criterion realism satisfies:
that the task of science is to give an account of the world as it is, independent of the meanings it might have for human subjects, or how it figures in their experience. (1980, p. 31)
An adequate scientific account cannot be about things which exist only in people’s experience. Thus: since Galileo said in a famous passage of The Assayer in 1629, ‘tastes, odours, colours and so on are no more than mere names ... they reside only in consciousness,’ such things have been denied a place in a proper science of real objects. But are not tastes, odours, colours and so on, real determinants in how we act in the world? At least, is it not the case that it is perfectly legitimate in everyday life to account for some of our actions in these terms? Similarly: in accounting for others, we talk of our emotions, intuitions, understandings, aspirations, values, etc. These words may not ‘stand for’ things, but they are clearly an effective currency in the conduct of social exchanges (Mills, 1940; Wittgenstein, 1953, 1980). They may not denote any entities ‘in’ an individual, but they can nonetheless ‘indicate’ or ‘index’ (Bar-Hillel, 1954) an individual’s real commitments, their powers and tendencies, the real point of their actions for them, in terms accountable to others. Hence, in our attempts to understand someone, these are the real things we want to know about.
The realism being proposed here might, to contrast with Bhaskar’s transcendental realism, be called simply a ‘mundane realism’, for it suggests that the ways of making sense of things indexed by the terms people use in their accounting practices, or which are otherwise indicated [end 26] ‘in’ their actions (see chapter 9), really are the terms in which they are trying to conduct their affairs. They ‘point to’ the things which make an action desirable for them (or what makes it undesirable); to understand it, we need to grasp the appropriate ‘desirability characterizations’, as Taylor calls them. For a person, we need:
to understand [what we call] his emotions, his aspirations, what he finds admirable and contemptible, what he loathes, what he yearns for, and so on. Understanding doesn’t mean sharing these emotions, aspirations, loathings, etc., but it does mean seeing the point of them, seeing what is here which could be aspired to, loathed, etc. Seeing the point means grasping the objects concerned under their desirability characterizations. To use the language made familiar by phenomenology, understanding another person is understanding his world; it is grasping the significance of things for him. (1980, p. 32)
A science which must meet the requirement of absoluteness, claims Taylor, precludes this kind of understanding.
Thus, to claim that there is no essential difference between the social and human sciences on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, on the grounds that both possess an interpretative (i.e. hermeneutical) component and that both have unobservable (if not necessarily imperceptible) real objects as their subject matter, is to forget that as theoretical sciences (in Aristotle’s terms) the aim of the natural sciences is to account for things in experience-independent terms. This is achieved (Shotter and Burton, 1983) by the use of idealizations and formal systems of interpretation which determine, prior to any empirical investigations, the basic kinds of things being sought, from which the ‘world’ being investigated is composed. In other words, the mode of accountability pursued in a theoretical science constitutes reality as a ‘unity of homogeneity’ (see chapter 11), as a ‘world’ composed from a small number of different kinds of already existing ‘fundamental elements’. The human sciences cannot, however, so limit themselves; they cannot afford, by the use of idealizations and systematic formulations to prejudge their discoveries, determining prior to any investigation the ‘whatness’ of their subject matter (see Introduction). Their task, if they are to be adequate to people’s experience, is to understand what different people’s ‘worlds’ contain, and what their relation to their ‘world’ is. Thus they must discover a way of talking which allows for such a possibility, which constitutes a ‘unity of heterogeneity’ (see chapter 11), a ‘world’ in which the elements composing it are all true individuals, all distinguishable from [end 26] one another while all, nonetheless, a part of the same unity, and having an essentially indeterminate nature.
How then can we proceed? Our initial task is simply (to put it ironically) to describe our human ways of living: the activities, procedures, methods, discourses, behaviours, nonbehaviours, doings, makings, thinkings, speakings, and so on, in terms of which we come to be as we are, and to do and to talk as we do. Yet how, exactly, should such goings-on and states of affairs be described? The fact is that with the world of everyday social life we are always dealing with a pre-interpreted, a pre-understood reality, a reality already seen as being a reality of a particular kind by the social actors involved in it. Although unformulated and only vaguely conceived, although indefinite and amenable to a multitude of descriptions (Goodman, 1972, 1978), this pre-understood grasp of reality is nonetheless sufficient at a practical level to render social action intelligible to those involved in it, and to mediate interpersonal relations. Thus, if we are to account for human behaviour in everyday life, as the accountable behaviour it is, we must account for it in at least some of the same terms as those in which it is conducted - for irrespective of their inadequacy, their incompleteness, their indirection, their misleading and perhaps downright mistaken nature, such terms serve to determine its nature.
Thus while we might want to criticize certain ways of talking - claims, for instance, that our ‘outer’ expressions are caused by prior events ‘within’ us; that we possess ‘selves’ conceptually separable from ourselves as persons; or that mental events are contained ‘in our minds’ (see chapter 10) - we can do so by appealing, not to any particular method or special source of knowledge, but simply to other forms of usage, to other ways of talking readily available in our everyday accounting practices. For our accounting practices seem to revolve around ‘images’, ‘pictures’, ‘paradigm cases’ (Wittgenstein, 1953; Rosch, 1973; Ossorio, in Davis, 1981), or ‘metaphors’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; and see chapter 10); and the mistakes we make often arise from extending a way of talking beyond the form of life, beyond the activity within which it originally had its currency.
Sometimes, however, criticism will not be sufficient; alternative images or paradigm cases will be required to replace those currently being used. Occasionally, even, new images will have to be introduced de novo, to indicate a form of order, a way of human being, an activity or relationship previously unrecognized. Such terms will have the form of ‘theoretical’ terms (as if denoting the real things at a deeper level investigated in a theoretical science), but they do not have the same functions at all. As they serve the purposes of practice, I shall call what they provide ‘practical-[end 27] theory’; but there is no need to use special terms for individual practical-theories other than those already at hand: for they are images, metaphors, paradigm cases, etc. Their primary function, to repeat Garfinkel’s dictum, is to work to render unreported and in fact as yet unreportable human phenomena, ‘rationally-visible-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes, i.e., ‘accountable’, as organizations of commonplace everyday activities’. Their purpose is not to help people, who are already clear as to what and who they are, simply to gather further information relevant to decisions as to how to act: but to help change people in their being, in their mode of relationship both to themselves and to others. Thus they are not to be evaluated as theoretical terms in a theoretical science, in terms of their correspondence to reality. Their task is not to provide a ground-plan for a mechanism working independently of human consciousness or experience; nor is it their function to finalize a decision, to achieve a universal consensus within a group of individuals who already know their way around in the world, so to speak. Indeed, just the opposite is the case: their function is to promote a form of understanding which, as Wittgenstein (1953, no. 154) suggests, is best described not as the occasioning of a mental process but as the provision of circumstances in which individuals say ‘now I know how to go on.’ And those circumstances are provided by ‘paradigms’, etc., which work as instruments in the ‘making’ of accounting practices (in, as Wittgenstein would put it, the setting up of ‘language-games’).
As an example of what he means here, he discusses the use of hermetically sealed colour samples as standards in the definition of colour names. The example itself is not a particularly good one, for we already know how to ‘see’ (perceive) colours, and thus it is not obvious that that is the problem towards which it is directed. But his account of the function of paradigms in the process is instructive. He describes the status of the activity of naming a particular standard colour sample thus:
[It] is an instrument of the language used in ascriptions of colour. In this language-game it is not something that is represented, but is a means of representation .... It is a paradigm in our language-game; something with which comparison is made .... (1953, no. 50, my emphasis)
As a ‘means of representation’, paradigm forms of accountability suggest to us ways of ‘going on’ with certain kinds of phenomena which otherwise, at a practical level, would leave us bewildered; they suggest ways of ‘seeing’ them as being of this or that kind of thing; they indicate or ‘point to’ a stance we might adopt regarding them. Their function is thus [end 29] one believes that one needs to fill out the facts in order to understand them. It is as if one saw a screen with scattered colour-patches, and said: the way they are here, they are unintelligible; they only make sense when one completes them into a shape. - Whereas I want to say: Here is the whole. (If you complete it, you falsify it.) (Wittgenstein, 1980, vol. 1, no. 257)
Thus: ‘Not to explain, but to accept the psychological phenomena - that is what is difficult’ (1980, vol. 1, no. 509). Yet it is only by such an acceptance, and an attempt to describe things simply as they are, that we can begin to clarify, at least for ourselves if not in any absolute experience-independent terms, the question of ‘what is it to be human?’”
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The Need for 'Practical-Theory' (p.40)
In its guise as a practical,' moral science, psychology cannot be, as I said above, solely the study of individual, responsible action. For while there are some things we as individual personalities clearly do do, there are others which just as clearly we do not do. These distinctly different kinds of activity belong to two different but clearly related spheres of study, and later I shall distinguish between individual action, in which individuals act all alone in terms of `plans', `scripts', `ideas', `inner representations', etc., and `joint action', in which people interlace their activities in with one another's, and in which what one person does is determined just as much by what another does as by their own `ideas'. And it is in explaining joint action that new terms must be introduced: `joint action' is itself just such a term, while others such as 'intentionality', `duality of structure', and so on will be introduced also; furthermore, it must be noted that terms like `social structure' and `social order' also designate entities only understood initially by use of metaphors and images, for they also do not appear in immediate perception as objects. Most of our important concepts we shall find only appear `in' people's actions.
I would like to continue here by introducting a number of other distinctions to do with the difference between artificial or constructed things and the so-called natural world. Though we must be careful of the sense in which the word `natural' is taken, for sometimes it means (a) what is done by people spontaneously, without individual deliberation (the sense in which I shall mostly use it); or (b) the world of the `natural sciences'; or (c) as meaning a `world of nature' which exists beyond all the accounts we might give of it.
In Chapter 4, I shall explore the distinction between the individually constructed and the socially `constructed', between what individual personalities with their personal powers can do planfully and deliberately (using the term powers there in Harre's (1970a) sense, to do with the causal powers of an agency), and what people as unselfconscious agents with their natural powers can do; and with how the transition from this second form of activity to the first can be accomplished. This will bear upon a distinction I would like to make between the cultural and the `natural' (in the first sense above), i.e. between social orders and institutions, and the social ecology within which they are embedded.