In Brit.J. Psychology, vol. 25, pp.199-211, 1986

A SENSE OF PLACE:

VICO AND THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF SOCIAL IDENTITIES

ABSTRACT. Currently there is a need for an account of the sociopsychological or sociohistorical processes which produce, not just single individuals, but "collective individualities" or"social identities." The paper explores Vico's contribution to the solution of this problem. His account of such sociohistorical processes is unique in suggesting that sociohistorical processes develop neither by chance nor by necessity, but providentially, i.e., by the "organized settings" people construct in their own past activities providing a set of enabling constraints for their current activities. Thus social processes are based, he claims, not upon anything pre-established either in people or their surroundings, but in socially shared identities of feeling they themselves create in the flow of activity between them. These identities he calls "sensory topics" - "topics" (Gr. topos="place") because they give rise to "commonplaces, "i.e., to shared moments in a flow of social activity which afford common reference, and "sensory" because they are moments in which shared feelings for already shared circumstances are created. These, he claims, constitute the pre-linguistic origins of asocial order, the paradigms or prototypes from which more organized, conceptual forms of communication may be derived. His account of sociohistorical processes has implications for how we, as social psychologists, 1) should "place" or situate ourselves in relation to those we study in our investigations, 2)for how we might formulate our topics of study, and 3) for the form in which we should communicate our results to those we study.

Historically, not only have human beings gradually become more individualistic, more self-controlled and reflective creatures (Elias, 1978, 1982; Lyons, 1978), so seemingly have social groups and societies also changed in the ways they order the relations amongst their members. And as such orders have changed, so apparently have the representations of reality used by their members (Vico's description of the sequence of such changes will be found below - also, see White, 1976). As yet, however, we still lack any clear idea as to how (or why)such changes occur, neither do we understand how to formulate a satisfactory description of the processes involved. Marx's formulation of the relation between the mode of people's consciousnesses and the form of the social order in which their lives are embedded, is well known: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness, " he says (Marx, 1968). But in terms of the current cognitive-individualistic background against which much social scientific thought is interpreted, that formulation is taken as proposing only a one-way relation:society determines consciousness. Thus to many, such formulations seem to deny the existence of a" thinking society;" they seem to suggest that groups and individuals, "on their own, ...do not do anything and they create nothing new: they reproduce and are reproduced" (Moscovici, 1981, p.183).

The impasse: the lapse into individualism.

Currently then, we have an impasse. We still do not seem to possess a satisfactory account of the nature of the sociohistorical (or, to use a term introduced by Moscovici (1972) and Tajfel (1972, 1981) the sociopsychological processes) responsible for the socialization of society - if it is permissible to personify societal development in that way. Even more than the processes working to produce single individuals, we feel we do not understand those producing a"group identity." Indeed, we find the very idea itself, of a "collective individuality, " diffusely distributed throughout a group, utterly mysterious, and difficult to articulate. We seem unable to grasp the nature of either process (social) or product (individual), never mind the link between them. Thus, in a collection of articles in this journal recently(Hewstone, 1985; Moscovici, 1985; Potter and Litton, 1985a and b; Semin, 1985) discussing Moscovici's attempt over recent years to articulate his "theory of social representations" (Moscovici, 1961, 1972, 1981, 1984; Farr and Moscovici, 1984), Semin (p.93) was prompted to remark that it was "the absence of any theoretical supposition or conceptual armory with which to link the products of a 'thinking society' to the social-psychological processes involved in the production and reproduction of social representations, " which led to all the problems raised by the critics of the theory of social representations.

             Mainly, as Potter and Litton (1985, pp 87-8) point out, what leaves the precise nature of social representations vague, is the failure properly to characterize linguistic (or communicative)media, not just as representative but as constitutive of what they represent, i.e., as working in fact to construct it, to give it a form which otherwise it would not possess(Shotter, 1984, pp.174-8). While Moscovici appears to reject the metaphor dominant in most of mainstream psychology at the moment - that of information processing (cf. Moscovici, 1982, pp 140) - and attempts to shift the level of analysis in social psychology from the individualistic and inter-individualistic to the genuinely social, as Semin points out, he remains entrapped by it: "The various 'social-psychological processes' proposed by Moscovici", he continues (Semin, pp 93), "do not pave the way for a conceptualization of the social processes involved in the production, reproduction and mediation of social representations." Precisely! He fails to give any account of how individuals in a shared context might come to attribute a shared significance to it. While he does, as he says (Moscovici, 1981, p.184), pay attention to their structure and their internal dynamics, he like Durkheim, takes them as "givens." He points out that "they have a curious position somewhere between concepts whose purpose it is to distill the meaning of the world, to make it more orderly and perceptions that reproduce the world in an orderly manner" (1981, p.184), but he says nothing at all as to how in all this vagueness identities come to exist. As he sees it, social representations play their part in"inter-individual communications" (1981, p.183), in a world in which people have already individuated themselves in relation to one another. What it is which underlies their status as individuals and makes it socially possible (Shotter, 1984) remains unanalyzed.

             Now it is not my intention here, nor do I have the space available to continue the discussion and critique of Moscovici's theory of social representations. I refer to the issues raised by Moscovici's critics here, however, because many of them seem to me to be central problems in social psychology in general, especially the problem of how a common "sense" is established - the inarticulate feelings against which explicit statements may be judged as to whether they adequately characterize a state of affairs or not. The fact is, all of us, not just Moscovici, find it difficult to articulate the nature of such vague but none the less shared feelings, to imagine the nature of psychological processes in other than individualistic terms, and to describe mental activities intelligibly in other than cognitive terms. This is because, as Sampson (1981) points out, to step beyond the cognitivism of the day:

"...would demand a radical break not only with [the existing tradition in psychology but also with psychology's relation to society" (p.733).

Currently, cognitivism accords with our dominant modes of "common sense, " with (as Moscovici puts it) the "substratum of images and meanings" constituting our current "common sense" (1981, p.185). It is 'natural' for us to attribute people's mental capacities to them as individuals; we do not look back into history for their roots in social practices not now prevalent. But it is the use of the cognitivist perspective which, if espoused, leads us back inescapably to the individualism of the day.

Theories and historical narratives.

Indeed, if Foucault (1970, 1972) is right, then even if we were apparently successful in escaping from an individualistic ideology in formulating a theory of social representations, the very attempt to present an account of them as a theory, amenable to proof by reference to evidence, would entrap us again in that same ideology. In fact, as Lyons (1978) points out, the very idea of people as individuals conducting investigations by way of formulating and testing their own theories, is itself of recent vintage, a product of the rise of individualism. Thus genuinely social alternatives to cognitivism's implicit individualism must of necessity challenge the communicative (or interactive) bases in terms of which we all currently relate ourselves to each other in Western life, i.e., they will challenge our current belief that foundations for our investigations can be found in theoretical knowledge and discourse (Rorty, 1980). Vico's alternative is to suggest a basis in shared feelings, a basis in people attributing a shared significance to an already shared circumstance.

              In discussing Vico's views, then, what I want to do here is to contribute to a broad movement concerned with what one might call the social psychology of the social context. My concern is with a particular strand of this movement, perhaps started by Gergen (1973), which focuses upon the historical nature of social processes: the fact that what we do irreversibly creates a different setting for what we might do next. Gergen calls his version of this movement "social rationalism"(Gergen, 1982), or "social constructionism" (Gergen, 1985). Other attempts to deal the problem of the social psychology of the social context currently exist in ecological (McArthur and Baron, 1983), and contextualist versions (McGuire, 1983; Rosnow and Georgoudi, in press). Where these approaches differ from Gergen's (and mine here) is in the means they feel adequate to representing their subject matter: while ecological psychologists talk in terms of theories, and contextualists in terms of metatheories, social constructionists feel that the historical nature of the phenomena involved can only be adequately represented in an ordinary language narrative account (see Shotter, in press, for a list of criteria to be applied in judging the adequacy of narrative accounts). This is because, not only can a circumstance be represented from a number of different points of view within the same narrative(instead of a single perspective in a theory), but also its drama, i.e., the interplay of people's motives and opportunities, etc. And what Vico provides is what might be called the "plot structure" for such narratives. And of especial importance to our concerns here is what he has to say about the beginnings of the plot: his account of the creation of "sensory topics." In recounting the story he tells here, it is worth adding that I have influenced in my account of it largely by Berlin (1969, 1976), Pompa (1975), Rosnow (1978), Verene (1981) and White (1976).

Vico's "Scienza nuova."

Vico was born in Naples in 1668 and died there in 1744 - the year in which the third and final edition of the work, which was to become his magnum opus, Scienza nuova (The New Science) was published (Vico, 1948) - the new science in question being a science of the historical processes productive of "the world of civil society, " and of the ways in which we might account for them. I would like to approach Vico's solution to the problem of establishing a shared way of meaning common to a group, by discussing a number of separate issues in turn. Let me first outline the general nature of Vico's account of the nature of the historical transformations occurring in our ways of talking and communicating, and their relations to transformations in both modes of consciousness and patterns of social order. He proposes, says White (1976, p.76), "a strict analogy between the dynamics of metaphorical transformations in language and the transformations of both consciousness and society."

1) Vico's 'plot structure' for sociohistorical processes.

In outline, the plot structure offered by Vico for rendering sociohistorical processes intelligible is as follows: Firstly, he suggests that whatever people find problematic or unfamiliar they understand by relating it to, or representing it by, aspects of what is familiar and unproblematic to them. Secondly, the mode of relation used makes provision (i.e., can be a basis for) further modes: metaphor is basic, based on that is metonymy, then comes synecdoche, and finally derived from that irony. Thirdly, as such modes of understanding are formed in a communicative setting and are used for communicative purposes, they influence how people relate to one another; thus, as the mode of relating what is unfamiliar to what is familiar changes, so will the social order change. And finally, the changes will follow a certain order, each stage making a provision both for a progression to the next stage, or fora lapse back to the one before, depending upon the choices people make. There is thus, so to speak, a grammar to the character of the changes possible; they have different 'privileges of occurrence'.

             As he sees it, the sequence can begin only with metaphorical processes, processes in which essentially formless circumstances are given or lent a form by being related to something already familiar; it is in this process that people first distinguish themselves from animals. Further transitions are then possible, giving rise to different social orders (White, 1976). 1) The first transition is from metaphorical identifications to metonymical reductions, giving rise to a theocratic, poetic age. As an example here (to give in very brief outline an example Vico himself uses which I shall return to below), we can consider early people's fear of thunder: after having first metaphorically identified their fear of thunder as like their fear of anger, people may make a metonymic shift from effect to cause, and attribute their fear to an unseen agency who must be angry with them - a god. 2) Next, suggests Vico, is a transition to synecdochic constructions giving rise to an aristocratic, heroic age. Here, Vico sees a movement in which parts are treated as wholes, and particulars are elevated into universals. Here is a shift in which, for instance, to use another example of Vico's, the word "man" comes to be appreciated as not just denoting an individual man but as "comprehending as in a philosophic genus the body and all its parts, the mind and all its faculties, the spirit and all its dispositions" (Vico, 1948, para. 407). 3) His final stage is marked by a transition to the use of ironic statements and gives rise, he says, to a human, democratic age. While in the first two ages, Vico presumes only figurative speech to be possible, in the third age, people become aware of the formative functions language, that one can speak fictitiously, that one can tell lies and misrepresent reality. It is only in such an age that the distinction between speaking figuratively and speaking literally can arise.

             This then in very brief outline is the 'plot' Vico provides. But it is not a plot which runs itself off with an iron necessity, nor does it occur merely by chance. In his resolution of the idiographic-nomothetic debate, individuals make their own individual choices within a socially constructed setting which is both enabling and constraining in what they do. The nature of providence in human affairs is such, he argues, that although people are not omnipotent and cannot act simply as they please, neither are they powerless pawns of their circumstances; they can act in the ways made possible for them by their historical circumstances, either progressively or retrogressively - that much at least is up to them. What is not up to them, as individuals, are the social processes required if they are to form self-maintaining groups of mutually intelligible beings.

2) The "made" nature of civil society.

Unlike Descartes, whose quest was to find an Archimedean point for the grounding of our knowledge, Vico was concerned, he said in his autobiography(written in the third person), with "the good ordering of mankind in civil society" (Vico, 1944, pp 122). He took, he said:

"little or no pleasure in the moral philosophies of the Stoics and Epicureans. For they are each a moral philosophy of solitaries ... he could not accept either seriously or playfully the mechanical physics of Epicurus or Descartes, for both start from a false position" (ibid. p 122).

No matter what we might abandon in a Cartesian flurry of doubt, as long as we are still concerned to live in the everyday world of practical social life, then we should, he said, anchor our thought about ourselves in the following principle:

"... in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question; that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men and that its principles are to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects upon this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which since men made it, men could come to know" (Vico, 1948, para. 331).

We can come to know its nature fully, Vico suggests, because we can acquire a knowledge of it per caussas, i.e., through its reasons or causes; we can find "within the modifications of our own human mind" the kind of knowledge which all creators possess of their own creations and constructions, a knowledge of what they did to bring them into existence and why. This is his verum-factum principle, the claim that we can only properly know that which we ourselves have made, or are in principle capable of making.

             But for Vico, such a form of knowledge is not to be obtained merely by an effort of memory. Like all other forms of knowledge, it must be "constructed. "Thus it cannot be perfect, for it will, so to speak, create a world of its own. However, not only is it of a more immediate kind than the knowledge of phenomena derived, as in the natural sciences, from the position of an external observer, it is also superior to that obtained in mathematics and geometry. For it is concerned, not with a realm of abstract possibilities which may or may not be true according to evidence, but with an actual reality, the reality in terms of which we live our lives. Its objects are thus more sensuous and concrete, less abstract and mental than those of geometry. To that extent, however, to us moderns, situated in a scientific, geometrical universe, they are less intellectually visible to us;as products, says Vico, of a "divine providence, " they have a special"divine" i.e., hidden, nature. It is to the providential nature of social activity that we must turn next.

3) Divine Providence and the Self-Specifying Nature of Social Activity.

What is at work in the making of civil society, suggests Vico, is clearly not rational choice, but neither is it a matter of chance or necessity;something else is at work, something sui generis which operates "without human discernment or counsel, and often against the designs of men" (para. 342). He calls it "divine providence." By this, however, he does not mean a supernatural agency, something external to the social activities of everyday life which imposes a form upon them; he means that within practical social activity itself there is a natural provision of the resources required for its own further evolution or transformation (or dissolution). Such activity is, one might say, self-specifying in the following sense: that, as many workers today have suggested (e.g. Bartlett, 1932; Dewey, 1896; Mead, 1934), our past activities can be thought of as creating (as Bartlett put it) an"organized setting" for their own sensible continuation. Thus, rather than acting 'out of' an inner plan or schema, we can think of ourselves in our current activities as acting 'into' our own present situation, in terms of the opportunities and barriers, the enablements and constraints that it offers. Mead (1934, p.140) provides the following example of such a process in the short term:

"...being aware of what ones is saying to determine what one is going to say thereafter - that is a process with which we are all familiar."

A more long term example is the fact, already discussed, that the cognitivism implicit in our current dominant modes of "commonsense" makes it easy for us to reflect upon the logical structure of our own discourse, but difficult for us grasp how we might find the roots of our present mental capacities in the provisions made for them in earlier social practices.

             In the past, says Vico, "the philosophers have been altogether ignorant of it (i.e. divine providence);" they have asserted, he says, that human affairs are either wholly random or wholly determined. "They ought to have studied it, " he says,

"in the economy of civil institutions, in keeping with the full meaning of applying to providence the term "divinity" [i.e. the power of divining, from divinari, to divine, which is to understand what is hidden from men - the future - or what is hidden in them - their consciousness" (par. 342).

What unfolds or is made explicit in our practical social activities at any one moment is, suggests Vico, already present, implicitly, in the "organized setting" created by our past activities. Although we may have no plan, purpose or intention, explicitly, to do certain things, nonetheless, only certain kinds of consequences can at any one time ensue, i.e. those for which a provision exists in our current social context; there is, so to speak, as the examples above show, a 'grammar' to our social activities. But the discovery of that grammar requires a special kind of investigation. It is by divination that we can find, says Vico, the primitive origins of our civil societies. Quite what he means by divination here, however, is not immediately clear. For, as we shall see, although it is not unrelated to psychoanalytic and hermeneutical investigations, neither achieve the results at which he is aiming.

4) Archaeology.

In attempting now to penetrate through to the origins or bases of our current ways of knowing, certain inevitable barriers have to be overcome, Vico claims. Although the objects of social knowledge may be more real than those in, say, geometry, as I mentioned above, they clearly, in some sense, lack the immediacy of those now made intelligible to us by mathematical, geometrical, or natural scientific concepts. We are too 'distant' in time to remember the original activities, in which the 'tools' and 'resources' now available to us in our social environment, were created. But if that was our only difficulty, if they had been invented long ago and had then functioned unchanged up until the present day, then such a difficulty could be easily overcome. Our task would simply be that which ethnomethodologists have specified for themselves: the description of the hidden ethno-methods reflexively embedded in people's everyday practical activities, the methods by which they make "those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes, i.e., "accountable, " as organizations of commonplace everyday activities" (Garfinkel, 1967, p.vii). For our ways of making our "civil society, " of making its different social structures, institutions, and the individualities inhabiting them, would be the same now as then.

             But the 'tools' and 'resources' available to us for our "makings"are not the same now as then. We cannot now recognize their original nature even though, as the phenomenologists say, they must still be among the ever-present conditions for all our genuinely social activities. This is not because these earlier modes of being were stages which we passed through and left behind, but because they have been overlaid, supplemented (Derrida, 1977, 1978), or repressed (in a non-Freudian sense) by others. The fact is, Vico claims, they are still available to us, and can be found within the current form of our consciousness. But how we now think and communicate, hides from us the nature of the underlying conditions which make our productive or formative achievements possible.

5) The conceits of knowledge.

How might we penetrate through from the current, highly articulated overlay of transformations, to the nature of the very basic formative social activity in which the production of individualities begins? In the first paragraph in the section of the Science nuova in which Vico (1970, para 330) begins to expound the "principles"of his new science, he attempts to issue some correctives which, if they are not observed, will vitiate all our attempts to find within our current forms of mind its originary forms. Indeed, all that had been written up till his time he felt was,

"A tissue of confused memories, of the fancies of a disordered imagination; ... [our intelligence has been rendered useless by ... two conceits ... For on the one hand the conceit of nations, each believing itself to have been the first in the world, leaves us no hope of getting the principles of our Science from the philologians. And on the other hand the conceit of scholars, who will have it that what they know must have been eminently understood from the beginning of the world, makes us despair of getting them from philosophers. So, for purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world."

It is precisely this admonition which we must take seriously. For currently, as Derrida (1976), Goody (1977), Harris (1980, 1981), Luria (1974), Ong (1982) and Vygotsky (1962), for instance, all point out, literate peoples, those who speak a written language, experience their knowledge of their language in a way wholly different from oral peoples. "In learning to write, " says Vygotsky (1962, p.98), "the child must disengage himself from the sensory effect of speech and replace words by images of words." It is this "sensory aspect" of speech which is so difficult for us to recognize and describe; such "feelings of tendency or relation" are, as James (1890, p.254) describes them, "often so vague that we are unable to name them at all."

             Indeed, as Harris (1980) points out, the literate peoples of the West have all thought of themselves, and many still do think of themselves, as giving in their speech 'outer' expression to pre-existing 'inner' ideas, images or thoughts, which already exist in them as if pre-formed things. They subscribe to what Harris calls "surrogationalism, " the ideas that words are essentially surrogates or substitutes for other things. Rather than the words we speak standing for things, Harris (1981)wants also, like Vico, to explore "the formative role" played by processes of face-to-face communication, to make the activity of speaking primary. But how can we do that, how might we conceptualize the process of spoken communication, of speaking? If, that is, it can be conceptualized.

"Suppose we strip away [the superficial phonetic garb of the sentence, what lies underneath it? Something which must have all its words in place, their order determined, their grammatical relationships established and their meanings assigned - but which simply lacks phonetic embodiment; a string of words with the sound turned off. In short, a linguistic abstraction for which there is only one conceivable archetype so far in human history; the sentence of writing. What the contemporary ... model of sentence generation provides, albeit unintentionally, is a revealing anatomy of the difficulties inherent in an essentially literate society's attempt to conceptualize something it has already forgotten, and which cannot be recalled from its cultural past; what an essentially non-written form of language is like" (Harris, 1980 p.18).

I have quoted Harris here at length to bring out the force of Vico's corrective: if we do have to reckon as if there were no books in the world, it is the nature of oral, pre-literate, non-conceptual, non-logical, poetic, rhetorical forms of communication that we must understand - a form of communication which consists only in a flow of activity between people, not in a sequential occurrence of things, in a process, not in a series of products. Without the metaphor of written texts to help us, how might we imagine its nature? In what might we find the beginning not only languages but of letters? And how, if we cannot conceptualize it, might we inform others as to its nature?

6) "Sensory topics" as a mute basis for language.

It is precisely to these questions that Vico claims to have an answer, indeed, it is the master key of his science. "We find, " he says,

"that the principle of these origins both of languages and of letters lies in the fact that the early gentile people, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we [moderns cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men."

But what is meant here by saying that the early people were poets- where the word "poet" is from the Greek poitetes = one who makes, a maker, an artificer'?

             Descartes began by taking the mind as already containing something and by attempting to discover what basically it was:innate ideas, he answered. Vico, however, begins by asking how it is that the mind comes to have anything present to it at all. This question really is of the utmost importance, for it concerns people's abilities to create and establish within the flow of experience between them an "is, " to form a "stopping place" in the flux of sensation which can be found again, an identity, a fixed meaning or feeling about one's circumstances. Without the possibility of referring to such constructions, the individual must live, as Mead (1934, p.351) puts it, "in an undifferentiated now ... " in which each sensation must cancel the next. For Vico, the first anchor point, the roots of a "civil society, " are to be found in the formation of "sensory topics, " i.e. the giving of a shared sense to an already shared circumstance or state of affairs.

             As an example, Vico analyses (in para 391) what he calls the"civil history" of the saying that it is "From Jove that the muse began." Taking it seriously, he suggests that fear of thunder is indeed the paradigm for the first "sensory topic, " the first fixed reference point which people can "find again" within themselves and know that others "feel the same way." For, as they all flee to the caves to shelter from the thunder, all in a state of fear, an opportunity exists for them to realize that it is the same thing that they all fear; and a look or a gesture will communicate this: a moment of common reference exists between them. What the 'inner mechanisms' might be which make such a realization possible are not Vico's concern here; his concern is with the 'outer' social conditions." Thus, " says Vico (para 382), "it was fear which created gods in the world; not fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves" - a fear expressed in the character of people's bodily activities together in shared circumstances. But this kind of fear is not an ordinary fear of an immediately present dangerous event whose character is obvious to them all;there is no immediate practical response available to them all in response to thunder. Their fear seems to point beyond the thunder. When people hear it, they become confused and disoriented, they move furtively and with concern for one another - the thunder's presence is the unspoken explanation of their actions. And often, "when men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, " says Vico (para 180), " ... they attribute their own nature to them;" they assimilate them to what is familiar to them. Thus, they attribute their fear, in this instance, to the anger of a being like themselves but more powerful. A "sensory topic" is established between them, a common feeling, which expressed in them acting practically in the same way in the same circumstances.

             While for Vico, fear of thunder was the paradigmatic activity in which a common "topic" was formed, Gadamer (1975, pp. 91-108) takes play as an originary activity. It is in the "joint action" of playful activity that new "topics"or commonplaces come into existence and moments of common reference occur. To give an example: Imagine two boys throwing sticks into a river and watching them appear on the other side of a bridge. One says to the other: "I bet mine comes out before yours." He doesn't need to say to what "mine" refers: it does not matter that it cannot be precisely specified. It is clear to both, however, that in their play they are both playing "with the same thing;" "it, " so to speak, presents itself to them in their play. As Gadamer says (p.92), "play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play, " all playing is, he says (p.95), "a being played." Indeed, the intentionality of play is such that one is always in contact with some "thing" beyond oneself, a thing which can work as a basis for action in common with others.

             What Vico and Gadamer outline above then, are what might be called paradigms or prototypes (Rosch, 1977), poetic images in terms of which one might understand the mute basis for an articulate language - where such a basis constitutes the primordial contents, the loci, of the human mind. And as Wittgenstein (1953, no.50) says about the functioning of such a paradigm or prototype:

"In the language-game it is not something that is represented, but it is a means of representation...something with which comparison is made" (italics added).

They are the feelings against which the adequacy of a concept may be judged.

             Such paradigms do not function to describe its contents, but nonetheless, they do inform us, or indicate to us, their nature; they help us to recognize as familiar something which, due to its being overlaid by many historical products, has become somewhat unfamiliar to us, something which we have 'forgotten'. Clearly, this primitive form of mind is not the reflective mind of us moderns. Its 'thought' is bodily thought; id does not have an abstract or intellectual content. Its function is merely a figurative one:that of linking, or of 'carrying across' to a shared circumstance, a shared feeling. Like Mead's (1934) "language of gestures" before the construction of "significant symbols, " the meaning of a gesture is solely in the bodily action consequent upon it. But unlike Mead, however, Vico suggests the existence of an intermediate stage, between the gesture and the significant symbol. It is, he says, a "mute" stage; it must be present before people can begin to articulate a language as such, to refer to shared topics or "objects:" it is a stage of "significant gestures." Such a stage is required if shared feelings are to be constructed in the first place - a stage when, as I have already said, a shared circumstance is given a shared significance. Thus, as Vico put it, "speech was born in mute times...[it was not a language in accord with the nature of the things it dealt with...but was a fantastic speech..." (para 401). In other words, the first mute language is the immediate representation in gesture of a point or moment of common reference, where the gesture functions metaphorically, not to refer to something already known about, but to indicate an"is, " i.e. to establish a common significance.

             Metaphorical operations are, for Vico, the primary operations productive of human mentality: the process in which forms are produced out of formlessness. To give metaphor its root meaning of 'to carry over, transfer, 'from the Greek metapherein, such gestures carry or transfer a significance. In such a view of language as this, it ceases to be a neutral medium for the representation of, and reference to, events and things somehow already grasped as such non-linguistically; it characterizes language, to return to Potter and Linton's comment quoted above, as being constitutive of what it represents. It involves tropes, figurative and formative ways of communicating and speaking, at every level. Human experience is, by its very nature, says Vico, uncertain, but it can be made certain and determined by use of what is naturally provided within it. It is such that it can be given or lent a form which is not wholly its own, but which, so to speak, it 'allows' or is 'open to.' Hence the "fantastic" nature of the first mute languages; they created imaginary entitles - while nonetheless providing the first common "sense, " the first shared basis for a social order.

Common sense: a knowing of the third kind.

What, then, is the result of Vico's 'archaeology'?The result is, I think, something rather surprising: the discovery of a kind of knowledge not currently recognized. Anscombe (1957, p.57) puts the problem this way:

"Can it be that there is something that modern philosophy has blankly misunderstood: namely what ancient and medieval philosophers meant by practical knowledge?"

And her answer is "yes;" it was one of Aristotle's best discoveries but its true character has been obscured. But what kind of knowledge is our practical social knowledge? How do we know directly and immediately what people mean in what they do and say?How do we appreciate in some direct manner the provision in our current circumstances for how next we might act? The kind of knowledge required does not seem to be theoretical knowledge (a "knowing-that" in Ryle's (1949) terminology), for it is knowledge we are unaware of possessing, except in practice. Nor is it merely knowledge of a craft of skill ("knowing-how"), for it is knowledge in common with others. It is a separate, special kind of knowledge, sui generis, which cannot be reduced to either of the other two, the kind of knowledge one has from within a situation, a group, social institution, or society; it is what we might call a "knowing-from." It is a knowing of a third kind which takes into account(and is accountable within) the social situation in which it is known.

             Although Anscombe (1957) and Bernstein (1983) credit Aristotle with its discovery, Sir Isaiah Berlin (1969, 1976) claims that it was Vico who first recognized this new and special third kind of knowledge which is basic to all humane studies:

"the sense in which I know what it is to be poor, to fight for a cause, to belong to a nation, to join or abandon a church or a party, to feel nostalgia, terror, the omnipresence of a god, to understand a gesture, a work of art, a joke, a man's character, that one is transformed or lying to oneself" (1969, p.375).

It is a way of knowing of a practical and sensuous, of a passionate and emotional kind, which is known to us only in how it "in-forms" our actions in the course of their performance. Such a common "sense, " such a set of "sensory topics" provides a means by which people can co-ordinate their activities together in a way which has, says Vico, "respect for human needs and utilities" (para 141); they provide a sensus communis, which, he says, is a means of "judgement without reflection, shared by and entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race" (para 142). As societies develop, however, such a sensus communis is overlaid by intellectually and reflectively constructed devices and procedures. Highly developed social organizations come to work by reference to rules rather than sensory topics and the presence of an underlying common "sense" is lost. It is to the recovery of that 'lost' or 'hidden' sensory basis to our common sense, to our social life together, that Vico's work contributes.

Conclusions.

The formative view of language, as well as the sensory nature of it social origins outlined above has implications for the method of our approach to the understanding of all social phenomena, not just the nature of sociohistorical or sociopsychological ones. It means that we cannot take our ways of talking for granted as neutral forms of expression which simply work to 'reflect' or 'depict' in their structure, the structure of what, seemingly, we are talking about. It means that the different topics of our discourse are lent their different structures by the different ways in which we discourse about them - where the different ways in which a way of speaking can represent the subject matter being talked about, are clearly numerous: 'reflecting, ' or 'depicting' is just one such trope among many. Indeed, more than that: Vico's claim is that all our modes of linguistic representation work only by linking the unfamiliar to the familiar; in other words, they only work in a context already shared with those to whom our communications are addressed. This means that we must be circumspect in our attempts to provide in social psychology context-free, theoretical representations of practical abilities, especially, if our aim is one of understanding common sense, everyday social activities, instead of trying to modify them. What we say about other people's activities must at some point be grounded or rooted in the same context as that in which they are performed, even if later, in relation to some other context, we wish to be critical of their supposed significance in their original context - for instance, an effective criticism of cognitivism can only work by referring to our current forms of life and modes of discourse and drawing our attention to the discrepancy between the two.

             Thus the whole attempt to produce enlightenment by the process of formulating theories and attempting to prove them true - the currently most common approach in social psychology - requires re-thinking, for it can entrap us in many inescapable difficulties (Rorty, 1980). Not least, it can produce what Baker and Hacker (1984) call a "mythology of symbolism." As they say (p.372),

"far from 'theory' providing the answer to an independent problem worthy of investigation, the 'problem' is parasitic on the 'solution'; hence, were the 'theory' to be put aside, nothing would remain to be explained."

A topic of investigation can be imaginary, created as an illusion of discourse by the means used to represent it(Wittgenstein, 1981, no.446). The theoretical approach is prone to such difficulties, because it is an approach which assumes that a rock-bottom basis for socially shared agreements can be found in agreements about"significant symbols, " i.e., in agreements about propositions and descriptions, when what is required basically are agreements about "sensory topics." A basis in an inarticulate set of shared feelings of familiarity is necessary; their nature cannot be described, but what can are the social conditions necessary for the creation of such shared feelings - conditions such as those discussed by Habermas (1970), for instance, necessary for "undistorted communication."

             The approach implicit above, but explicit in Vico's writings, is a less theoretical more practical approach, one which in fact elevates rhetoric to a position of primacy over that of logic - where, by the study of rhetoric, I do not mean the study of the techne of rhetoric, the ways in which persuasive speech works (Billig, 1985), but the study of those aspects of language usage aimed simply at giving a first shape or a form to the activity and feeling of the human world. The study of how common understandings are established before one turns to their criticism (Booth, 1974; Burke, 1969). As Grassi (1976, p.202) says of such an originary or "archaic" speech:

"it shows something which has a sense, and this means that to the figure, to that which is shown, the speech transfers (metapherein) a signification; in this way the speech which realizes this showing "leads before the eyes" (phainesthai) a significance."

This, says Grassi, is true rhetorical speech; it is non-conceptual, moving and indicative; practically, it is with such a way of talking that we must begin our investigations - it cannot itself be explained by any theory.

             In other words, the position discussed above amounts to a repudiation of what might be called the "Cartesian starting-point" for our investigations in psychology - the starting point localized in the "I" of an individual which assumes that all psychological problems are solely to do with the (essentially biological) individual's acquisition and utilization of knowledge in an already objective world. We are now beginning to appreciate that we must start by situating ourselves within a much more diffuse and flowing process, a process with not only biological and ecological aspects to it, but with social, cultural, political and economic aspects as well, not to mention it overall historical nature. In other words, we must find a proper place for ourselves as social psychologists in everyday life at large; there is little pleasure, as Vico said, to be found in the moral philosophy of solitaries. And in situating ourselves thus, we are beginning to be less concerned to account for the world and ourselves as we currently experience them in contemplation and in theory, and more concerned to attempt to grasp our experience of ourselves in practice, in our different daily social practices. But it is not actually in our daily practices themselves that we can find the true origins of our current collective individuality: it requires a degree of archaeological digging through the historically accumulated layers (Foucault, 1972).

             As for our concern with "social identities" and with how best we might grasp their nature: in what might this mysterious individuality, diffusely distributed throughout a group, consist? What I have argued above is that essentially, it consists in a shared way of speaking based upon, or rooted in, "sensory topics"formed in the flow of social activity. And that it is by reference to these that people are able, even while all occupying different 'positions' in relation to one another, nonetheless intelligibly and sensibly relate themselves in their practical activities to each other. Thus what it is that individuals who share a form of individuality share, so to speak, is "a sense of place, " that is, they share a sense of how they all are situated, and how they are each placed in relation to one another and what topoi there are in their locales (Shotter, 1985). In other words, their collective individuality resides not in them but in the collective sense of place they all create between themselves.

References.

ANSCOMBE, G.E.M. (1957) Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.

BERNSTEIN, R.J. (1983) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell.

BAKER, G.P. and HACKER, P.M.S. (1984) Language, Sense and Nonsense. Oxford: Blackwell.

BARTLETT, Sir F.C. (1932) Remembering: a Study in Experimental Psychology. London: Cambridge Univ. Press.

BERLIN, I. (1969) A note on Vico's concept of knowledge. In G. Tagliacozzo (Ed.) and H.V. White (co-Ed.) In Giambattista Vico: an International Symposium. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

BERLIN, I. (1976) Vico and Herder. London: The Hogarth Press.

BILLIG, M. (1985) Prejudice, categorization and particularization: from a perceptual to a rhetorical approach. European J. of Soc. Psychol., 15, 79-103.

BOOTH, W.C. (1974) Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

BURKE, K. (1969) A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

DERRIDA, J. (1977) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

DERRIDA, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

DEWEY, J. (1896) The concept of the reflex arc in psychology. Psychol. Rev., 3, 13-32. Reprinted in W.Dennis (Ed.) Readings in the History of Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

ELIAS, N. (1978) The Civilizing Process: the History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell.

ElIAS, N. (1982) Power and Civility: the Civilizing Process: Vol II. Oxford: Blackwell.

FARR, R.M. and MOSCOVICI, S. (1984) (Eds.) Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FOUCAULT, M. (1970) The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan. London:Tavistock.

FOUCAULT, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans.A.M. Sheridan, London: Tavistock.

GADAMER, H-G. (1975) Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward.

GARFINKEL, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

GERGEN, K.J. (1973) Social Psychology as History. J.of Pers. and Soc. Psychol., 26, 309-320.

GERGEN, K.J. (1982) Toward Transformation in Social Knowledge. New York: Springer.

GERGEN, K. J. (1985) The social constructionist movement in modern psychology. American Psychologist, 40, 266-75.

GOODY, J. (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

GRASSI, E. (1976) Rhetoric and philosophy. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 9, 200-216.

HABERMAS, J. (1970) On sytematically distorted communication. Inquiry, 13, 205-18.

HARRIS, R. (1980) The Language-Makers. London:Duckworth.

HARRIS, R. (1981) The Language Myth. London:Duckworth.

HEWSTONE, M. On common sense and social representations: a reply to Potter and Litton. Brit. J. Soc. Psychol., 24, 95-7.

JAMES, W. (1890) Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1 & 2.London: Macmillan.

LURIA. A.R. (1974) Cognitive Development: its Cultural and Social Origins. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

LYONS, J.O. (1978) The Invention of the Self: the Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press.

MARX, K. (1968) Preface to the Critique of Political Economy London: Lawrence and Wishart.

McARTHUR, L.Z. and BARON, R. (1983) Toward an ecological theory of social perception. Psychol. Rev., 90, 215-38.

McGUIRE, W.J. (1984) A contextualist theory of knowledge:its implications for innovation and reform in psychological research. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 16. New York: Academic Press.

MEAD, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MINK, L.O. (1978) Narrative form as a cognitive instrument. In R.H. Canary and H. Kozicki (Rds.) The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

MOSCOVICI, S. (1961) La Psychoanalyse: Son Image et Son Public. Paris: Presses Universaires de France.

MOSCOVICI, S. (1972) Society and theory in social psychology.In J. Israel and H. Tajfel (eds.) The Context of Social Psychology. London: Academic Press.

MOSCOVICI, S. (1981) On social representation. In J. Forgas (Ed.) Social Cognition: Perspective on Everyday Understanding. London: Academic Press.

MOSCOVICI, S. (1982) The coming era of representations.In J-P. Codol and J-P. Leyens (Eds.) Cognitive Analysis of Social Behaviour. The Hague: Nijhoff.

MOSCOVICI, S. (1984) The phenomenon of social representations. In R.M. Farr and S. Moscovici (Eds.) Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MOSCOVICI, S. (1985) Comment of Potter and Litton. Brit.J. Soc. Psychol., 24, 91-2.

ONG, W.J. (1982) Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. london: Methuen.

POMPA, L. (1975) Vico: a Study of the "New Science". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

POTTER, J. and LITTON, I. (1985) Some problems underlying the theory of social representations. Brit.J. Soc. Psychol., 24, 81-90.

RORTY, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell.

ROSCH, E. (1977) Human categorization. In N. Warren (Ed.) Studies in Cross-Cultural Psychology, vol.1. New York: Academic Press.

ROSNOW, R.L. (1978) The prophetic vision of Giambattista Vico: implications for the state of social psychology. J. of Pers. and Soc. Psychol., 36, 1322-31.

ROSNOW, R.L. AND GEORGOUDI, M. (in press) Contextualism and Understanding in the Behavioral Sciences.New York: Praeger.

SAMPSON, E.E. (1981) Cognitive psychology as ideology. American Psychologist, 36, 730-43.

SEMIN, G.R. (1985) The 'phenomenon of social representations': a comment on Potter and Litton. Brit. J. Soc. Psychol., 24, 93-4.

SHOTTER, J. (1984) Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford: Blackwell.

SHOTTER, J. (1985) Accounting for place and space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 3, xxx-xxx.

SHOTTER, J. (in press) Realism and relativism; rules and intentionality; theories and accounts: a reply to Morss. New Ideas in Psychology.

TAJFEL, H. (1972) Experiments in a vacuum. In J. Israel and H. Tajfel (Eds.) The Context of Social Psychology. London: Academic Press.

TAJFEL, H. (1981) Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

VERENE, D.P. (1981) Vico's Science of the Imagination. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

VICO, G. (1944) The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. (M.H. Fisch and T.G. Bergin, eds. and trans.). Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press.

VICO, G. (1948) The New Science of Giambattista Vico, (T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch, eds. and trans.). Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press (3rd. ed. orig. pub. 1744).

VYGOTSKY, L.S. (1962) Thought and Language. Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press.

WHITE, H. (1976) The tropics of history: the deep structure of the New Science. In G. Tagliacozzo and D.P.Verene (Eds.) Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

WHITE, H. (1978) The historical text as a literary artifact. In R.H. Canary and H. Kozicki (Eds.) The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

WHITE, H. (1980) The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry, 7, 5-27.

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1981) Zettel, (2nd. Ed.). G.E.M.Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.) Oxford: Blackwell.