Chapter prepared for the book: Democracy and Trust, edited by Mark Warren - proceedings of the conference: Democracy and Trust, Georgetown University, Nov 7-9, 1996, never subsequently published.

VICO, WITTGENSTEIN, AND BAKHTIN:

'PRACTICAL TRUST' IN DIALOGICALLY-STUCTURED COMMUNITIES

John Shotter

"What can I rely on? I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something (I did not say 'can trust something')" (1969, nos 508, 509) .

"Nothing is so difficult as doing justice to the facts" (1993, p.129).

"The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions. This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academics"(Vico, 1968, paras. 238 and 239).

In our everyday talk of trust, and of its importance for democracy, we talk as if in some primordial sense we are all already well acquainted with its nature, as if we can already refer to its existence in certain prototypical forms 'out there' in the world around us. Yet currently, we are worried that somehow it is slipping from our grasp, that trust between both individuals and groups is eroding. Hence our feeling that, if we studied it more, if we researched into its nature further, then we might be able to do something about our predicament, for it is our failure to grasp its true nature that prevents us from acting correctly - or at least, this is what we feel the case to be. As a result, in searching for what we think will be a proper understanding of its nature, we attempt, as philosophers, to formulate new concepts, and as social scientists, to invent explanatory theories, as to what, exactly, we think it 'is' . We then all seek to argue in some way with each other for the truth of our own individually proposed concepts or theories, for if it can be established, we will then be justified in asking others to help us to apply them in practice, as 'the solution' to our problems.

Problems with the 'problem solving' approach.

There is, though, I want to argue below, something deeply wrong with approaching problems in this sphere in this 'problem solving' way. For problems to do with the nature and existence of trust are to do with the very structure of our relations to each other, and the problem-solving approach forgets the prior necessity for all those proposing such concepts or theories to be participants in the same cultural community, or (to use some expressions of Wittgenstein's, 1953), participants in the same language-game along with its interwoven form of life. And, as we have already seen (in the epigraph above), Wittgenstein (1969, no.509) suggests that a language-game is only possible if we do in fact trust the others involved in it. In other words, this approach itself - while claiming the problem of trust to be of this or that precise kind - relies amongst its participants for its implementation on an unexamined, spontaneous presence of trust in some basic or prototypical form. That is, only those sharing similar talk entwined ways of acting, perceiving, judging, thinking, and generally making sense of and orienting themselves in relation to their surroundings in similar ways, will find each other's formulations of disquiet intelligible and legitimate. What kind of problem then, is the problem we currently face in trying to understand what is happening to us in our relations of trust to each other? Is it in fact an erosion of trust, as such? Or is what is happening best characterized in another way? Whilst participants in a cultural community may agree on what, from within its dominant form of life, constitutes a manageable problem for them, problems to do with the dominant form of life itself - whether it is an adequate 'container' for all the needs and desires, etc., of its members, whether it is somehow 'destructive' or 'unconducive' of something very basic to our human ways of being in the world - are of a quite different character. Creating, changing, and sustaining different ways of relating ourselves to the Others and othernesses around us, is a problem of quite a different kind to those we manage procedurally from within our already established forms of life. In other words, establishing different cultural forms of life seems to require a wholly different kind of approach.

               As Bernstein (1983) remarks (and I think correctly): "A community or polis is not something that can be made or engineered by some form of techne or by the administration of society" (p.226). And he continues by noting a special feature of socio- cultural developments: "There is something of a circle here, comparable to the hermeneutical circle. The coming into being of a type of public life that can strengthen solidarity, and a commitment to rational persuasion presupposes the incipient forms of such communal life" (p.226, my emphasis).

               That is, unlike deliberately engineered objects, put together piece-by-piece from externally related component parts, i.e., parts that retain their character irrespective of whether they are parts of the object or not, human societies grow into existence: they develop from simple into richly structured forms in such a way that their component parts at any one moment owe not just their character but their very existence both to each other and to a society's previous components at some earlier point in time (i.e, all its components are internally related to one another) - and their history is as important as their present structure in their growth. More richly structured, later forms do not emerge in an instant, from out of nowhere, but as internal articulations of already existing, less well articulated, incipient forms. But if this is so, if Bernstein is right, and the problems we are currently facing in our worries about trust are not of a technical or an administrational kind, to be solved by philosophers and social scientists attempting to 'design' and to 'engineer' new social structures into existence, what are we to do? What is involved in encouraging a process of cultural growth or transformation as distinct from undertaking a piece of social engineering? Especially, how can we proceed to facilitate the growth of democratic, dialogically structured communities when, as Bernstein (1983) notes, the problem is such that, not only is there "a breakdown of such communities," but "the very conditions of social life have the consequences of furthering such a breakdown?" (p.226). It is not at all clear what professional academics in their current role, as individualistic theorists, should do.

               As Bernstein remarks: "We know what has been a typical modern response to this situation: the idea that we can make, engineer, impose our collective will to form such communities" (p.226). We have thought it possible 'to make a fresh start', 'to wipe the slate clean', and 'to begin again'. Indeed, this was precisely Descartes's (1986) stance in the Meditations in which he remarks: "I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last" (p.12). And, along with Descartes, we moderns tend to think that this is what we must always do if we are properly to establish our lives on a sound footing: we must work to establish the truth of a single, value- free system which functions to interconnect all the relevant, diverse phenomena together into a hierarchically ordered, timeless framework of belief, and live our lives according to it - at least, this is the (revolutionary) claim (of revolutionaries). Yet, as Bernstein (1983) remarks about our attempts to live our lives in accord with such rationally designed systems: "But this is precisely what cannot be done, and attempts to do so have been disastrous" (p.226).

               But why are they disastrous? And why, if they disastrous, do we still persist in attempting to 'solve problems' in our human relations in this technological fashion? Why do we still indulge in talking and thinking about our everyday social experiences - in terms of new and arbitrarily invented academic concepts and theories that are thought appropriate to explaining them mechanistically - if it is precisely this way of talking and thinking that is the problem?

              We persist in it, I think, because at the moment, we all to an extent live inside a shared reality of a certain kind, one that leads us, both officially and professionally, to approach and make sense of events occurring around us in a single, systematic kind of way, and actively to ignore others. Charles Taylor (1995) calls it "the epistemological tradition" (p.1) and talks of it as a "dominant" view which has "to some extent colonized the common sense of our civilization" (p.63). Indeed, I think it is difficult to overestimate the depth of its penetration into our western way of being, especially into our academic practices - for academics especially, in passing their exams, have more thoroughly than most trained themselves into its ways. As the dominant discourse in our academic culture, it currently leads us to talk of our world as if we are mentally seeing everything in it through, or in terms of, a certain kind of image: that of the unitary, socially inert, mechanically organized, Cartesian-Newtonian world of externally related elements of matter in motion, in which, among other things, we see our knowledge as being representational in nature and foundational in structure. Hence it is 'natural' for us, so to speak, to think of ourselves as subjects, set over against a world containing certain object-like 'things', and for us to talk of ourselves as only having knowledge of these 'things' and of acting with reference to them in terms of our 'inner representations' of them. We are not used to thinking of ourselves as also having certain, spontaneous, but culturally specific, bodily reactions to them. Indeed, the different ways in which we are struck by certain events - that they call out from us certain kinds of involuntary reactions that, quite often, show or display us as treating our surroundings as being anything but socially inert or merely objective - does not strike us as being in any way crucial to our more intellectual understanding of things. These of some of the kinds of events that we have actively trained ourselves to ignore, to be deaf to.

Reorienting ourselves toward a new project:

new images through which to see new connections

for the very first time

In learning to orient ourselves toward project of epistemology, we have learned to concern ourselves primarily with the limited aim of trying to establish the validity of our representations of states of affairs in the world. But this picture of ourselves - as always acting in relation to an inner representational processes of some kind - "stands in the way" (as Wittgenstein, 1953, no.305, puts it) of us noting the many other important ways in which we in fact relate ourselves both to the Others and the othernesses in our surroundings; which in turn preempts us questioning how it is in fact possible for us to do what we do do in the world of our everyday affairs. In other words, the fact is, as active members of an ordinary, everyday human society, we possess a great deal of what, following Taylor (1995) we can call "agent's knowledge " - knowledgeable ways in which to negotiate and navigate our immensely complex and subtly detailed relations with the Others around us. And indeed, once we begin to pass beyond the epistemology project, an unbelievably vast terrain of the nuanced and detailed ways in which we can (and do in fact) conduct ourselves, moment-by-moment in our daily, practical-social affairs, gradually begins to come into view.

              In contrast with the picture of ourselves provided us by epistemology, certain central features of ourselves as practical- social agents stand out: Primarily, instead of us seeing ourselves as separate from the world around us, as standing 'over against' it as an 'external world', we find ourselves unable to be indifferent to our surroundings. We continuously react and respond to the world around us, spontaneously, in a living, bodily way, whether we like it or not. It is the existence of this pre-epistemic relation to the Others and othernesses around us, rooted in our immediate responsiveness to them, that is, I think, central to our new stance toward ourselves. It means that, without us having 'to work it out', we find ourselves necessarily related and connected to our surroundings in one way or another. Yet crucial in the character of our responsive relatedness to our circumstances is the distinction we can all, to differing extents, draw in the outcomes of our own activities: between those for which we as individuals are responsible, and those which merely happen to us, outside of our agency to control - while between these two extremes is a great zone of uncertainty, so to speak (to which I shall return in a moment), in which we are unsure of the extent to which we are involved in what occurs.

              Our capacity to make this distinction in our activities is fundamental, not only in everyday life in which we are continually calling each other to account and sanctioning each other's (minor or major) transgressions, but also in science where it is absolutely fundamental: lacking any sense of their own functioning, scientists would be unable to conduct experiments in the testing of their theories. Epistemology takes these distinctions for granted; for it, they are distinctions that, as Garfinkel (1967) puts it, are "the social standardized and standardizing, 'seen but unnoticed ' expected, background features of everyday scenes" (p.36).

              In what follows below, then, I want to explore the articulation of further possible distinctions in our current sense of ourselves as socially aware agents in the world, distinctions in the sense that we do have from within our own responsive relating of ourselves to events occurring in our surroundings. And in particular, I want to point to the (perhaps currently rather fleeting and only momentary) practical, dialogical circumstances in which trust is inevitably and inescapably a constitutive feature of people's current social activities - in order thus to argue that as yet undeveloped, incipient forms of democratic, dialogical forms of life are not in fact unknown to us. The pointing out of these perhaps seemingly trivial events will also be coupled with a quite new, nontheoretical aim for our investigations in this sphere: the provision of new 'practical ways of talking' whose function is, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, to give "prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook" (1953, no.132) - or, to put it another way: whose function is to draw attention to certain crucially important features of our conduct of our social activities, from within our activities themselves, that would otherwise escape our notice. For, if Wittgenstein (1980a) is correct in his claim, that "the origin and primitive form of the language-game is a reaction. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'" (p.31), then, if our academic purpose is to help initiate a new language-game with its associated form of life, it is with the noticing of the appropriate incipient forms of responsive reactions to each other that we must begin.

              Thus below, with the practical nature of this project in mind, I want to explore aspects of the work of Vico (1968), Wittgenstein (1953), Volosinov (1973, 1976), and Bakhtin (1984, 1986, 1993), for these writers in particular (along with many others, of course) have, it seems to me, provided us with many important new vocabularies in terms of which to 'see' what it 'is' that we are doing in the doing of our ordinary, everyday, practical affairs. They have provided us with the new (poetic) images 'through' which to see what we have not seen before - images, not 'of something' that was already in existence for us, but images 'with which' to see certain connections or links between things for the very first time, images which draw our attention to relations between details within our practical activities which previously have gone unnoticed. I shall turn first to Vico's work, for, in his attempt give an account of how "speech was born in mute times..." (para. 401), gives us a grasp of how a stance toward something (of fearfulness, say) 'carried in' a way of acting, could be 'carried over' (in a practical metaphor, so to speak) to another circumstance to which it was previously unrelated, without any images or ideas as such necessarily appearing 'in the heads' of any of the individuals involved . Only after this will I turn to the main theme of my approach here to our trustful relations to each other: the ineradicably dialogical character of all our relations to each other - so let me state its essence now. Our practical relations to each other become dialogical relations only if 'you' respond to 'me' in a way sensitive to the relations between 'our' actions can we act together as a 'we', if both 'mine' and 'your' actions shape and are shaped by their joint ongoing outcome. Only if we have a spontaneous practical trust in each other can we be a 'we' (me thinking that I must trust you, will not do). If, in moving a piece of furniture, say, I sense that as I lift the right- front-corner to clear the rug you also lift the left-front-corner, then we can have a sense that 'we' are clearing the rug together. But if, as I lift the right-front-corner you lift the whole left- side, then although we still might clear the rug, we will not have a sense of 'being with' each other in the outcome. And if I sense you as simply not attending to what I am doing in us trying to move the furniture, as simply following your own agenda, so to speak, I shall erupt in an outburst of 'righteous anger' at your failure to participate in our joint venture. Similarly in dancing, or a handshake, or in conversation, we have an acute sense of whether the joint activity in which we are involved is unfolding in a properly coordinated way or not.

              A dialogically structured outcome can only come into existence if all those involved in producing it play their appropriate parts in relation to their relations to each other at each moment. Usually we fail to notice the subtlety and amazing complexity of our reciprocally sustained spontaneous involvements with each other. Usually, we attend from the dialogical details of our interactions to their joint products; that is, we have only a 'subsidiary awareness' of the 'seen but unnoticed' dialogical details contributing to our 'focal awareness' of their outcome (Polanyi, 1958). The subtlety and complexity become very evident, however, if one tries to learn dancing from a book of instructions, or, one sets out (like Garfinkel (1963, 1967), as we shall see below) to 'make trouble' by not doing what we are usually trusted to in routine daily social exchanges. Clearly, us each relating what we do to what 'we' are doing, is not something that need happen. It can either not occur at all or admit of degrees: we need not be (and cannot be) sensitive to every seeming nuance in each other's behavior. But unless it spontaneously occurs to some extent in the early days of a child's life, the child comes to treated as in some way abnormal (usually, as autistic). And we might conjecture that in recent times, the upsurge of interest in intimacy (Giddens, 1992; Zeldin, 1994), is in fact a mark of our increasing sensitivity to the dialogical structure of our interpersonal relations. The sheer complexity of our relations with both the familiar others and with all the new others around us is now such that, although we may feel all but overwhelmed in being "saturated" with so much otherness (Gergen, 1991), we are also at the same time becoming more aware of the usually 'seen but unnoticed' details of our daily dialogical exchanges with the others around us.

The 'poetic' world of Vico's first people

Let me begin my further exploration of the dialogical details of our lives by noting, that the way talking I adopted above - of us as living 'inside' a shared reality - has something of an awkward feel to it. For until very recently, to repeat, in line with our Cartesian sensibilities, we moderns have talked of ourselves as living, not inside a world, but as set over against the External World, i.e, in a relation to it such that its nature is independent of our nature. Thus we have not felt 'at home' in it; it has not been present to us as a space of yet further possibilities for our own Being. Indeed, so alien is its nature to us that we seem to need the guidance of 'experts' in helping us to regulate our dealings with it. Officially, we are not supposed to feel ourselves as having an internal relation to such a reality, as having our Being 'within' or 'inside' it. To feel that our way of being is in some way related to what 'its' nature 'is' - such that if 'it' were to change so would 'we' - is unintelligible to us. Talk of this kind feels strange; we are not quite yet cognizant of what it might mean to say such things. But let me persist in such talk for a while. For in exploring the dialogically structured development of a practical sociality, instead of questioning what might go on inside individual people's heads, we need to begin to explore the character of what it is that our collective heads might go on inside of! What might it be like to live inside a humanly constructed, social responsive, dialogical reality?

              It might be like the life of the first people Vico (1968) depicts in his Scienza Nuova, living more like mute animals in an unbroken flow of responsivity to our surroundings, in which at first, as Vico puts it, "each new sensation cancels the last one" (para. 703). But how, without the idea that our (outer) expressions picture or depict (inner) states of affairs, might we imagine the nature of meaningful mental activity amongst them? Modern theories of knowledge begin with us as already having a mind inside our individual heads, and with certain things being present to it, e.g., Descartes begins with it containing self-evidently true, clear and simple, innate ideas. But Vico suggests, however, that our "doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matter of which they treat" (para. 314), and thus we must "descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great effort" (para. 338). Vico thus begins by asking in effect the question: 'How is it that we come at all to have a realm of activity, seemingly within us, that we can call the mental or the inner?' (Verene , 1981). And he goes on to answer it in, what for us, is a quite unexpected manner. "We find," he says, "that the principles of [the] 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" (para.34) - where by poets, he means simply that they were creators (poitetes {Gr} = one who makes, a maker, an artificer). Although the kind of creating Vico has in mind here, is "infinitely different from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by knowing them, creates them; but [the first men] in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination" (para.376).

              To enter into the nature of the process of socially shared, creative making involved here - which, Vico reminds us, requires "great toil" imaginatively - we must divide it into two parts: i) The first part is to do with the forming what Vico calls a sensory topic, the original possibility of everyone in a group being able to sense themselves as being 'moved' again and again in the same way; and ii) the second, to do with the forming of an imaginary universal, or a corporeal image, which is 'rooted' in the sensory topic and which 'shapes' people's first, socially intelligible forms of expression responsive to it. And we shall find the resources we require to grasp the significance of this two-part process, in the following (poetic) example Vico provides, involving the behavior of his first people to thunder.

              In paras.377-391 of the New Science, he discusses what he calls the "civil history" of the sayings that: "All things are full of Jove," or that: "From Jove the muse began." Taking these sayings seriously, he first points out that everyone running in fear to shelter from thunder is an instance of all reacting in the same way, in the same circumstances. Whatever the 'inner mechanisms' might be which bring this about are irrelevant. Vico's concern here is with the 'outer', practical-social consequences of such behavior: this first shared way of responsively acting in shared circumstances provides a first, fixed 'stopping place' in the flux of activity in which these first people are immersed. The whole of the flux of fearful activity can be found again in this focally shared reaction. But this is only the first half of the story: How should they actively respond to being moved in this way, to finding themselves reacting in such a fearful manner? For, to be struck by this kind of fear, is not to be struck by a fear of an immediately present dangerous event, a fear to which one can respond in an effective manner according to one's perception of the concrete particular's of the actual event: a small animal can in turn be frighten away, and from a large animal one can escape. But the fear of thunder is "not a fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves" (no.382). It disorients and confuses them. While they can escape from the thunder into their caves and hideaways, they cannot, so to speak, 'answer' to it in a satisfactory way.

              This is the 'poetic moment' in dialogically structured activity: when one actor stops and another must bridge the gap between them with an answering response. What should these first men do in 'answering' to the thunder? "When men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, and cannot explain them by analogy," says Vico, "they attribute their own nature to them " (axiom, para.180). Thus they respond as if its sounds are big but unintelligible words, emanating from a big body in the sky. At this point, Vico suggests:

"... the first theological poets created the first divine fable, the greatest they ever created: that of Jove, king and father of men and gods, in the act of hurling the lightening bolt; an image so popular, disturbing, and instructive that its creators themselves believed in it, and feared, revered and worshiped it in frightful religions... They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of Jove" (para.379).

But this first image was a corporeal image, a corporeal metaphor: for in 'answering' to the thunder, they 'carried over ' to it the ways 'carried in' their reactions to each other.

              Thus, as Vico sees it, the key to us understanding the mute nature of the origins of human institutions and practices, in practice, is not the concept, but the corporeal image, dialogically realized. Prior to our possession of concepts is the occurrence of particular spontaneous bodily responses to particular circumstances, embodied ways of answering to events in our surroundings that we have transferred from elsewhere. Vico's first people responded to the sky around them, not as a socially inert environment, but as a vast, living body - the body of Jove - that must also (or so it seemed to them) be responsive to them in some way. Thus the first people's sense of what was happening around them was thus 'shaped' by them answering or responding to thunder in a particular practical way, in terms of the mute poetic image of Jove. Irrespective of any supposed ideas as such they might have had in their heads, as a result of them all humanly responding in the same way to thunder, these first people began to jointly create between themselves a practical sensus communis, a sense common to them all. Where it is important to note here, that "the formative and organizing center [giving shape to their actions] is not within [them] but outside. It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around - expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction" (Volosinov, 1986, p.85). In other words, here is a circumstance in which people begin to respond, not diversely and individually but collectively and dialogically, as a 'we': sensitive to each other's way of responding, it is as if there is an 'it' (Jove) out there in the world between them to which they all must be answerable. But at this stage, the stage of the corporeal image, an image of Jove does not exist 'in their minds' as such; it appears only in what they do, in their deeds.

              What Vico provides us with then, is a fable, a poetic image in terms of which we can grasp the mute, extraordinary, common sense basis for an articulate language - where such a basis constitutes the unsystematized, primordial contents of (what we have come to call) the human mind, its basic paradigms or prototypes. In his account, the collective sensuous activity from out of which the image of Jove originates is thus a 'common place' (topos), a moving movement, a way of responsively acting within which it is possible to 're-feel' the complex mixture of all the influences at work when the thunder comes - at those times when 'Jove' is supposedly active. And as such complex feelings are slowly transformed and articulated into more ritualized and ordered forms of expression, the original mute but collectively shared feelings remain on hand as 'standards' against which more explicit forms of expression may be judged as to the adequacy. But why is this fable of any use to us? Because it is usually "beyond our power to enter into the vast imagination of those first men, whose minds were not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they were entirely immersed in the sense, buffeted by the passions, buried in the body" (para. 378). If we do want 'enter into' the character of the usually 'unnoticed' background features of our current, everyday way of being in the world with each other, thus to further articulate those aspects of it in which we can still see some glimmerings of trust at work between us, then Vico's poetic fables illustrate a method available to us. Many of Wittgenstein's (1953) 'poetic' methods also have the same aim: to articulate more fully those aspects of our deeds which, because we collectively rather than individually structure them in our ongoing, spontaneous conduct of them, are unavailable to our individual reflections. It is to Wittgenstein's work that I now turn.

Wittgenstein's 'grammatical' investigations

As Vico depicts them, when acting collectively, his first people acted not in terms of shared concepts, but by 'carrying over' from one set of surroundings to another, a form of activity already 'carried in' their embodied ways of responding to events around them. So although it may seem as if their individual responses were 'shaped' by them individually referring to an 'inner' image of some kind, this was not so. The image (if image is the right word here) is not in their individual heads but 'in' their ways of acting, 'in' their dialogically structured practices, 'in' their ways of relating themselves to their surroundings. Thus its nature can only be revealed in a study of how 'it' shapes the different relational activities in which it is involved. Hence the importance of what Wittgenstein (1953, no.90) calls "grammatical" investigations, and the relevance of his claim that: "Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is..." (no.373). For, as we can now begin to appreciate, when our activity is rooted in a 'common sense' rather than in a specific image which we can mentally 'see', it is not rooted in anything which we can wholly contain within ourselves. It is rooted in a dialogically structured way of acting which depends on us spontaneously trusting the others around us to play their part when we play ours. Thus, a common sense is in fact, as Wittgenstein (1969) claims, rooted in "ungrounded way of acting" (no.110). Thus, in our arguments, in our debates and discussions with each other, our "giving grounds... justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is not certain propositions striking us as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game" (1969, no.204). This is what is so difficult for us moderns to grasp (to orient toward practically), living as do inside a form of life with a foundationalist grammar to it, whose language-games continually suggests to us that our actions are in fact grounded in propositional representations inside our individual heads: the groundlessness of our language-game entwined forms of life. "You must bear in mind," suggest Wittgenstein (1969), "that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable or unreasonable). It is there - like our life" (no.559).

              Wittgenstein's aim in these remarks, it seems to me, is somewhat similar to Vico's: He is suggesting that prior to any attempt to explain a person's actions, we must first in some way 'enter into' their 'world', grasp their Weltbild (world-picture), their general, background way of relating themselves to their surroundings 'carried in' their everyday way or ways of acting. For these taken for granted ways of acting are "the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting," says Wittgenstein (1969, no.162) to himself about his own functioning. We must somehow characterize the overall style of the movement, in the flow of activity between us, within which all our arguing, our testing of hypotheses, our claims to truth and our assessment of the evidence in their support, and so on, have their life, and exist as further differentiations within it. For it is this background "bustle of life" (1980b, II, no.625), "the whole hurly-burly" (1980b, II, no.629), that is for us the unquestioned 'way' we deal with things, it is certain for us. Literally, we do not know intelligibly how to doubt it, for all our intelligible doubts must be formulated in its terms. Prior to attempting to prove the truth of one's explanations of people's actions, we must appreciate the 'shape' of the background context within which they occur, the context that provides the "ungrounded" common sense in terms of which what is done is judged as fitting.

              Wittgenstein (1993) criticizes the explanations given by Frazer, in his Golden Bough, for the nature of certain ritual observances in supposed 'primitive' cultures, because he fails to make the effort to imaginatively 'enter into' a world not his own. "Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory," he writes, "it makes these views look like errors" (p.119). And he continues: "The very idea of wanting to explain a practice - for example, the killing of the priest-king - seems wrong to me. All that Frazer does is to make them plausible to people who think as he does" (p.119, my emphasis). If we are to grasp what is going on here, what it is that is shaping the practice, we need another approach: we need a grasp of the original forms of expression organizing the experience of the people in question. To see how misleading Frazer's explanatory accounts are, Wittgenstein (1979) suggests, we can easily invent so-called 'primitive' practices ourselves "and it would be pure luck if they were not actually found somewhere" (p.127). For instance: "Recall that after Schubert's death his brother cut some of Schubert's scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favorite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable to us as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no-one" (p.127). Indeed, in acting in these different ways, we would be expressing to those around us how we stood in relation to a person's death; we would be spontaneously 'displaying' certain relational possibilities to them for 'going on' with us, in practice; we would be offering them certain, momentary invitations, discouragements, openings, resistances, and suchlike for responding to us in this special time.

              Thus, as Wittgenstein sees it, in seeking hypotheses to explain the strange practices of other peoples, Frazer is looking in the wrong direction for the solution to our puzzlement. Instead, "one must only piece together [richtig zusammenstellen - correctly interrelate] what one knows, without adding anything, and the explanation follows of itself" (1993, p.121). Thus, instead of looking behind appearances for something hypothetical (the people's 'wrong' beliefs), Frazer should be seeking their Weltbild, the 'shape' of their world as 'shown' in the grammar of their practices. And this got by relating or connecting the nature of their practices with certain feelings and experiences of our own: "Indeed, if Frazer's explanations did not in the final analysis appeal to a tendency in ourselves, they would not really be explanations" (1993, p.127). And Wittgenstein demonstrates this by reference to Frazer's use of the word "ghost," in his remark that certain superstitious observances "are dictated by fear of the ghost of the slain seems certain..," (quoted in Wittgenstein, 1993, p.131). Frazer seems to want a solution to a mystery when in fact, he already shows in his own use of the words, that he has the solution: "He evidently understands this superstition well enough," remarks Wittgenstein (1993), "since he explains it to us with a superstitious word he is familiar with" (p.131). And Wittgenstein (1993) continues to make the point already made above, that: "If I, a person who does not believe that there are super-human beings somewhere which one can call gods - if I say: 'I fear the wrath of the gods', then that shows that I can mean something by this, or can give expression to a feeling which is not necessarily connected with that belief" (p.131). That is, people's practices do not issue from any views, opinions, or beliefs that they might hold in their individual heads; whatever views, etc., that they might individually hold occur along with their practices. As Wittgenstein (1993) puts it, "they are both just there" (p.119).

              Wittgenstein's remarks above suggest a couple of important methodological points for us, in our concern here with attempting to get an intelligible grasp of the usually unnoticed background to our lives, and the functioning of trust within it. Firstly, in connection with us failing, like Frazer, to make better use of what is already known to us from our everyday living in the world with others, our "agent's knowledge," he remarks that one of our difficulties

"...is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it... This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution of the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it. The difficulty here is: to stop" (1981, no.314).

For, in not attempting to see either behind or beyond an event or phenomenon, but by dwelling both on its details and on their relations to their surrounding circumstances, whilst continuously 'answering' to what we experience, dialogically, we can endlessly find within ourselves, not new insights, but new joint creations - new origins for new language-games.

              But more than the endless dwelling on details is required if we are to come to a grasp of how all the new features brought to our attention might 'hang together', a practical grasp that we could 'show' in our intellectual practices, even if we were unable to 'empty it out', so to speak, into a single coherent theoretical picture. The kind of problems we face here are solved, Wittgenstein suggests, "not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known" (1953, no.109). Where the kind of arrangement required is such that, as we pass from one detail to the next, as we connect and interconnect the particular details to each other, we gradually come to a sense of the structure of the whole - just as, say, in walking about in a city or region of countryside day by day we come to know our 'way around' inside their 'relational landscapes', or, as in reading a well written novel, we get a feel for the 'shape' of its plot, such that we have few difficulties in outlining it to anyone who asks us about it. Thus, here, his notion of a "perspicuous representation [Ger: übersichlichte Darstellung]" is central: "A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'... The concept of perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of the account we give, the way we look at things," he says (1953, no.122).

              But such a form of understanding - just as in getting to know one's way around inside a cityscape or landscape - is not arrived at without effort, without encountering and practically coping with many unique and particular details, in many different ways. Thus, finding our 'way about' inside our own linguistically structured forms of life, 'entering into' their 'grammatical geographies', so to speak, is a vast and complex task. But this, I think, is where the main relevance of Wittgenstein's works lies: It offers to us individualistic and scientistic moderns - obsessed with knowledge and with information - something radically new: a set of methods for a renewal of our sense of connectedness and relatedness, both with each other, and with our larger surroundings. I have mentioned some of these methods above, and described others in more detail elsewhere (Shotter, 1993a, 1993b, 1996). Here it is only relevant to emphasize that their main point, is to direct our attention toward the unnoticed, spontaneous reactions and responses we 'carry in' our practices, and (often mistakenly) 'carry over' from one sphere of our activities into another. That is, his methods are aimed helping us grasp something we currently ignore in our own speech entwined activities as they unfold in our very ears (if not before our very eyes!). Through his 'poetic' remarks, he wants to draw our attention to "observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes" (1953, no.415), and in particular, what it is that essentially we are doing in our speakings and actings with each other. But, whereas others "see in the essence [of language]... something that lies beneath the surface... and which analysis digs out," he sees it as "something that already lies open to view and becomes surveyable by a rearrangement" (1953, no.92). Hence his striking similes, his contrasts and comparisons, his dialogues with the different 'voices' within himself, etc. - they all work to draw to our attention aspects of our own activities with which we are already in fact conversant, but of which we need to remind ourselves. Of especial importance to us here, are the spontaneously trustful relations we exhibit in our dialogically structured activities. Why is it so difficult to remind ourselves of them, why are we so insensitive to them?

The 'seen but unnoticed' dialogical nature

of our everyday realities

As I mentioned above, we 'carry over' (often mistakenly) a way of acting appropriate to one sphere in our lives inappropriately into another: of particular relevance here, is the way in which we often try directly to explain people's practices when first we should simply try to describe them. But how are we to avoid such "misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between forms of expression in different regions of language" (1953, no.90)? For we cannot just ourselves, individually, choose to speak in a new way whenever we please: our lives are so deeply embedded in the grammars of our language-game entwined forms of life that changing ourselves while ignoring our involvements with others is not that easy. It is not just a matter of us thinking and speaking differently, but of us changing our spontaneous ways of answering to the events occurring around us; it is a matter of us not only perceiving, acting, and judging differently, but of us coming to desire and want differently also. We have to overcome "a difficulty to do with the will, rather than with the intellect" (1980a). Without a change of this kind, a change in our unreflective, everyday ways of relating ourselves both to each other and to the rest of our surroundings, it is only too easy for any new words that we might speak to still be serving the same old ends. So, although we may be worried that "a simile that has been absorbed into the forms of our language produces a false appearance," and say to ourselves: "But this isn't how it is!" Wittgenstein (1953, no.112) replies to us: "Yet this is how it has to be!" It is as if our very words themselves will only allow to us certain shared usages, whether we like it or not.

              And this, I would like to say, is the nature of the problems we face today in our efforts to give undeniable articulation, both to what it is in our current practices we feel destructive of trust, and to the incipient tendencies upon which we might build in developing ones of a more democratic kind: "the difficulty is to remove a prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice" (1953, no.340). The difficulty is especially acute when, to repeat, our common sense has to an extent been "colonized" by a certain dominant discourse: that of epistemology. For in such a period, as Bakhtin (1984) remarks:

"When a member of a speaking collective comes upon a word, it is not as a neutral word of language, not as a word free from the aspirations and evaluations of others, uninhabited by others' voices... Every social trend in every epoch has its own special sense of discursive possibilities... By no means all historical situations permit the ultimate semantic authority of the creator to be expressed without mediation in direct, unrefracted, unconditional authorial discourse... every thought, feeling, experience must be refracted through someone else's style, someone else's manner... If there is at the disposal of a given epoch some authoritative and stabilized medium of refraction, then conventionalized discourse in one or another of its varieties will dominate..." (p.202).

And this is, perhaps, the nature of our epoch now, in which all our dialogical exchanges - if they are to be accredited as properly rational - have seemingly to be expressed through an authoritative stabilized medium of expression that allows us to talk of only two categories of events: individual actions (utterances and actions to be explained by giving people's reasons) and natural occurrences (just happening events to be explained by giving their causes). Here is where Bakhtin's and Volosinov's work on the dialogical nature of our practical understandings is so important: for it turns our attention toward a third category of events, unique, only "once occurrent" (Bakhtin, 1993, p.2), joint events which are indeterminate as to whether they occur naturally or are intended. Indeed, it is their very lack of specificity and thus their openness to be specified by those involved in them, from within their conduct of them, in practice - while usually remaining unaware of having done so - that is one of their central defining features.

              In turning our attention to the dialogical, by contrast, they make us aware of how in the past we have mostly attended only to the repeatable, monological nature of the linguistic forms we utter. Instead, they focus our attention on that aspect of our linguistic forms which is 'shaped' by their unique dialogically responsive relations to their unique surroundings. In other words, rather than as repeatable patterns of already spoken words, they suggest we attend to people's unique speakings of their words, to their utterances as a dialogical rather than as monological phenomena. Then, instead of seeing people's words as objects with supposed already fixed but 'hidden' representational meanings that must be inferred, we can begin to see their speakings as having a more practical meaning out in the world between the speakers: "There is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding. Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener" (Volosinov, 1973, p.102). "The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine - and determine from within, so to speak - the structure of an utterance" (Volosinov, 1973, p.86). "our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings," says Wittgenstein (1969).

              This highlights what is especially distinctive about dialogical phenomena: as soon as a second living person responds to the activities of a first (while acting in relation to an environment common to them both), we have a circumstance in which the second person can never be wholly the author of their own activities - their activities must always be partly shaped by the activities of the others around them. Thus, the overall joint outcome of people's dialogically interrelated activities is such that no single individual alone can be held wholly responsible for what happens between them; nor can it ever be traced back to any wholly external causes either! It emerges from within the relations they have to each other, and from the way in which these relations structure their relations to the rest of their surroundings. Where, due to their dialogically responsive nature, what emerges from these relations is an indeterminate mixture, an interweaving of influences from many different sources, and 'it' that is not recognizably 'yours' or 'mine' but 'ours'. Thus, just as Vico's first people 'show' in their ways of responding to thunder, ways they 'carry over' from their responding to each other, so we also 'show' in the 'grammar' of our actions certain dialogically shared ways of acting we 'carry over' from other spheres of activity in our lives also. In other words, when we act dialogically, we act into, or in answer to, a momentary relational-structure 'carried in' the flow of activity in which we are involved, embedded, or engaged, a relational-structure which, because it is neither 'yours' nor 'mine' but ours, has the character of a 'reality' for us.

     Here, then, is another central feature of dialogical phenomena: as Bakhtin (1986) puts it, our words create "a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet but a trio)" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.122). In being dialogically involved with our surroundings, we find ourselves acting within a comprehensive reality that is created and sustained 'in' the flow of activity between us and our surrounding circumstances, where the 'reality' in question functions almost as if it is itself a 'living agency'. Indeed, Bakhtin (1986) talks of our dialogues as taking place "against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue... The aforementioned third party is not any mystical or metaphysical being (although, given a certain understanding of the world, he can be expressed as such) - he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it" (pp.126-127). In other words, the 'living' agency of our circumstances not only exerts a normative influence on us, but it also functions as the source of all our other kinds of judgment, especially those of an ethical kind.

              In this respect, work by both Goffman (1967) and Garfinkel (1963, 1967) is very relevant. Goffman discusses what he calls the "involvement obligations and offenses" that arise in our conversations with each other. He notes, as already suggested above, that people's "conjoint spontaneous involvement" with each other need not occur; that it "appears to be a fragile thing, with standard points of weakness and decay, a precarious unsteady state that is likely at any time to lead the individual into some form of alienation" (p.117). And he goes on to discuss in detail the remarkable range of subtle ways in which people sense, and morally react, to what they take to be each other's failures in being 'properly' involved with each other. For, as we have seen, dialogically structured activities can only come into being if all those involved in them play their appropriate parts at the appropriate moments. If we experience the others around us as not doing the interactional work expected of them, then we take offence and call them to account: "Pay attention while I'm speaking to you," says the angry mother to her child. But, although it is often the case that, on the one hand, we can easily find ourselves offending or offended against in our involvements with others, on the other, we can also often find ourselves feeling so coerced by our involvement obligations that we continue in them longer than we desire. Yet, in remaining loyal to a conversation long after we could excusable withdraw from it, participants "show a nice respect for fellow-participants and affirm the moral rules that transform socially responsible people into people who are interactionally responsible as well" (p.118, my emphasis).

              Indeed, in being interactionally responsible, we both dutifully help others in understanding their meanings, while offering them opportunities to participate in creating the meaning of what we say or do. And it is this that makes our concern with the dialogical structuring of our interactions of direct relevance to our concern with democratic relations: for only if the individuals involved in dialogical exchanges make their expressions of their own interests also serve as opportunities for others to express their's, can the exchange continue - otherwise it falls apart into senselessness. Indeed, as Garfinkel (1967) has pointed out, "the anticipation that persons will understand... waiting for something later in order to see what was meant before, are sanctioned properties of common discourse... People require these properties of discourse under which they are themselves entitled and entitle others to claim that they know what they are talking about, and that what they are saying is understandable and ought to be understood... departures from such usages call forth immediate attempts to restore a right state of affairs" (pp.41-42).

              In other words, only if I spontaneously offer you opportunities both to be responsively involved in what I say and do, while at the same time being prepared to be responsively involved in what you say and do when your turn comes, and trust that you will do the same, is conversation between us possible. Without that practical trust between us, without us honoring our continuously changing involvement obligations, maintaining a flow of meaningful activity between us is impossible. Indeed, Garfinkel (1963, 1967) has shown empirically how instantaneously sensitive to transgressions in this kind of practical trust we can be. To highlight the fact that we normally trust (and morally require) each other to help us say what we mean, Garfinkel had his student experimenters respond to speakers as if it was the speaker's sole responsibility to make their own meanings clear. Here is the result of one of these experiments:

Case 6

The victim (S) waved his hand cheerily

(S) How are you?

(E) How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my piece of mind, my...?

(S) (Red in the face and suddenly out of control) Look! I was just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don't give a damn how you are.

Clearly, a part of the 'seen but unnoticed' background to our myriad daily dealings with each other, is our spontaneous honoring of countless small expectations that we will in fact trust one another. Where the authenticity of our trust in each other is not a matter of me thinking that I must trust you, and you me, but is fully expressed in the unproblematic way in which we 'orchestrate' our everyday exchanges - as Wittgenstein (1953) says: "to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule" (no.202). We only required to have a subsidiary awareness of our duties. Thus it is only as we turn away from attending to the overall outcomes of such dealings, and toward the moment-by-moment unfolding of their dialogically structured subsidiary details, that we can begin to appreciate the often strange and surprising properties of such activities.

Conclusions: Democratic relations

in dialogically-structured communities

It is now time to try to draw together the points made above and to explore what the 'landscape', so to speak, of a democratic community might look like, i.e, the nature of the opportunities it might offer to those involved in it to express questions about their lives within it, and to have them taken seriously by the others around them. For, as we have seen, to live within a community which one senses as being one's own, as 'mine' as well as 'yours', as 'ours' rather than 'theirs', a community both to which and for which one feels answerable, one must be more than just a routine participant in it; one must in a real sense also be able to play a part in its creative reproduction and sustenance. Rather than just drawing upon its resources, one must also participate in those moments in a community's practices relevant to one's life, that are aimed at their critical evaluation and creative reproduction. One must be able to express from one's own position of involvement in a practice, one's own sense of its proper functioning.

              However, for one to feel able to play a proper part in such moments of assessment, to feel that one's expressions and formulations, whether ultimately accepted or not, will at least be at first welcomed and listened to seriously, one must feel able to speak without first having to struggle to have one's voice heard. One must be able to speak in one's own words, without feeling that all one's expressions "must be refracted through someone else's style, someone else's manner" (Bakhtin, 1984, p.202). To have to live under terms set only by others is always to feel not just different, but inadequate in relation to the others around one - as if lacking access to the basic, taken for granted ways of acting which all those, who already seem to have a life-time's unconditional membership of the community, seem to possess. To have access to these ways does not mean that one will unthinkingly feel a sense of total harmony with all those around one, or that one will always find oneself immediately intelligible to them. Far from it. But it does mean that one will be able to speak out from within one's own actual living involvement in the communal life of the polis at large, and in so doing, not be treated by others as an intrusive alien. And this, I think, is a major part of what it is that one wants in wanting to live in a democracy, in wanting to be a citizen in a State with a civil society to it. We seek a sense of belonging, a sense of feeling 'at home' with the others around us, without us somehow having first to deserve it. It is this that participation in a dialogically structured community can give us.

              But I began with Richard Bernstein's claims that such communities could not be administered into existence, that the incipient forms of the affective ties that bind individuals together into a community must somehow already exist - if only we knew how to recognize them and to build on them. And that is what I have tried to do here. "What we desperately need today," Bernstein (1983) suggests, "is to be more like the fox than the hedgehog - to seize upon those experiences and struggles in which there are still glimmers of solidarity and the promise of dialogical communities in which there can be genuine mutual participation and where reciprocal wooing and persuasion can still prevail" (p.228). And the hedgehog's concern with small details instead of one big thing, is the approach I have taken here. Thus, rather than seeking an overall understanding of democracy and trust theoretically, I have taken a very different tack. I have begun to explore them as aspects of our already existing dialogically structured relations to each other, and what might be involved in us cultivating the growth of such a structuring in all the practices in which we are involved.

              Their cultivation depends on us being able to draw each other's attention both to hints within our circumstances conducive to their own further development. But we can only do this, pay this kind of attention to our practices if, at the same time, we can stop ourselves from always wanting to look beyond them, to explain them in terms of supposedly hidden, hypothetical entities or events. While such a process is supposed to lead to the 'survival of the fittest', the 'one true view', paradoxically, it leads only to an unending debate. For, it is in the nature of our everyday practices that unspecifiable particularities have both gone into and continue unendingly to go into their very constitution. If this is the case, then we cannot ever explain them in terms of our own seemingly unifying but simple beliefs. Indeed, all such efforts will have the form of a religious crusade in disguise, and in the meantime, out in the world, some of our practices continue to grow and develop spontaneously in almost a cancerous fashion, whilst others all but die and whither on the vine. This is why, I think, in "the darkness of this time" (1953, p.x), Wittgenstein's methods are so important for us. For they can help us to learn to dwell on the unnoticed opportunities in our current ongoing practices to build more democratic ways of proceeding from those already existing within them.

References:

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minnieapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act, with translation and notes by Vadim Lianpov, edited by M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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

Descartes, R. (1986) Meditations on First Philosophy: with Selections from Objections and Replies. Translated by J. Cottingham, with an introduction by B. Williams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Garfinkel, H. (1963) A conception of, and experiments with, 'trust' as a condition of stable concerted actions. In O.J. Harvery (Ed.) Motivation and Social Interaction. New York: Ronald Press.

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

Gergen, K.J. (1991) The Saturated Self. New York: Basic Books.

Goffman, E. (1967) Alienation from interaction. In E.Goffman, Interactional Ritual. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Oxford: Polity Press.

Luhman, N. (1979) Trust. In Trust and Power: Two Works by Niklas Luhman. Chicester: John Wiley and Sons.

Polyani, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. New York: Harper Torch Books.

Shotter, J. (1993a) Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Shotter, J. (1993b) Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. London: Sage.

 Shotter, J. (1996) Living in a Wittgensteinian world: beyond theory to a poetics of practices. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 26, pp.293-311.

Taylor, C. (1995) Overcoming epistemology. In Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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

Vico, G. (1968) The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ed. and trans. by T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Volosinov, V.N. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Volosinov, V.N. (1976) Freudianism: a Critical Sketch. Bloomington and Inianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1965) The Blue and the Brown Books. New York: Harper Torch Books.

Wittgenstein, L. (1969) On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1974) Philosophical Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980a) Culture and Value, introduction by G. Von Wright, and translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980b) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Blackwell.

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

Wittgenstein, L. (1993) Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. In Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951. Edited by J.C. Klagge and A. Nordman. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

Zeldin, T. (1994) An Intimate History of Humanity. New York: HarperCollins.

Notes: