Knowledge in transition: The role of prospective,descriptive concepts in a practice-situated,hermeneutical-phronetic social science

Noticing ‘incipient starting points’ for the elaboration of a practice: Disquiets

Currently, we think it best to begin the whole research and learning process with the collection and analysis of what we call data – a step in which we continuously pick out certain kinds of focal events as separable from their context of occurrence, the context within which they originated and had a specific meaning. But, to the extent that these focal events have been robbed of their original meaning by being divorced from their original surroundings, they need to be given back a meaning or function by being appropriately placed within a particular analytic methodology or theoretical framework – within a conceptual framework, as suggested above. But if Bergson (1974) and Wittgenstein (1953) are correct, and I think they are, we can never capture the nature of knowledge in transition in this way. The moves we thought quite innocent – collecting and analysing data into its separate elements – have (mis)led us into trying to make sense of activities that are still incomplete, still unfolding in relation to their actual surroundings, in terms of complete, ready-made, self-contained, idealized entities of our own making.

Long ago, Williams (1977: 128) gave the following very apposite description of the difficulties we face in relating ourselves to knowledge in transition: ‘In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense. The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products’; whereas, in fact, such knowledge in transition does not have to ‘await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action’ (p. 133); such knowledge in transition, Williams suggests, ‘can be defined as changes in structures of feeling … as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available’ (pp. 132–134, my emphasis). In other words, more than 30 years ago, Williams outlined some of the baleful consequences that our methodological definitions of the problems we face can raise for us. They can exclude from our inquiries the very phenomena that we need to inquire into – in Garfinkel’s (2002) terms, they can (mis)lead us into ‘losing the phenomena’ (pp. 264–267). Indeed, a number of management learning scholars have addressed this issue, arguing for a move from abstract knowledge towards one of practice and experience, for example by situating learning within social practice (Corradi et al., 2010; Mørk et al., 2010), knowing (Cunliffe, 2008; Hicks et al., 2009), or in aesthetic understanding (Strati, 2007). It is this orientation I wish to explore, to capture knowledge in transition in ways useful to us in our practical affairs. Other methods of inquiry arising out of this quite different orientation, a quite different set of embodied expectations are, I think, needed.

If what I have suggested above is true, then our everyday thinking-in-practice – our thinking while on the hoof, so to speak, in contrast to our stopping to think within a disciplinary practice or discourse – has to take place in fluid spaces in which there are no fixed and finished things in terms of which to conduct it. ³ As living beings moving around in the world, we are both inescapably responsive to happenings within our surroundings and continually active within them. What is important to us is thus sensed by us in the relations between our outgoing activities toward our surroundings and their incoming results.

In other words, we have to think in terms of nameless dynamic stabilities, in terms of what Gibson (1979: 178) – in his ecological psychology – calls ‘formless invariants’ or Mol and Law (1994: 658) call ‘invariant transformations’. That is, we need to think not of static, pictureable and frameable forms, but in terms of sequences of continually changing forms, all of which appear as aspects of a stable ‘something’ which emerges within a larger flow of activity? And like Mol and Law and Gibson, not only do I think it possible, but I think that in practice – particularly in our speech intra-twined activities – much of our mental work is in fact done on the basis of sensing such ephemeral dynamic stabilities within such essentially fluid places. And this is why, as I mentioned above, most of the time we do not need to think before we act, for most of the time, as they come to expression, most of our actions are appropriate to their circumstances, and when they still are not, we adjust them in the course of our acting until they are.

As we have already seen, someone who long ago wrote on the indeterminacy of our experience within such a world ‘in-flow’ was James (1912). About our fields of experience he wrote (p. 71):

[They] have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. The relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are…

where we can now see this ‘more’ as including, not only the vague, action guiding feelings of tendency of which James (1890) spoke, but also (pp. 225–256):

the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead … We all of us have this permanent consciousness of whither our thought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling of what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen.

In an effort not to divorce data from its context, let me begin with a situation, with an episode within an interview with a senior manager, Wayne, in a large international energy company – I’ll call it FragTech – who had been given the task of bringing an internal academy into existence to train marketing managers. In the initial part of the interview he had recounted to me how, when he had at first been given the task, he had discovered that although FragTech wanted an Academy – ‘because all good marketing companies have them!’ – they had no idea in detail of what they meant by that: ‘So here was a lovely example of them saying something: “Here is the direction. Go forth and deliver”… They’ve asked me to do something, but they don’t know what it means’ – a very common but unrecognized feature of talk in this organization, as we shall see. Luckily, this gave Wayne some time for a number of exploratory conversations within quite a few different divisions of the company, a remarkable outcome of which, for him and his team, was that ‘our own sensitivities increased… [as well as] our ability to pick up weak signals’. The interview continued as follows:

So here is an account of someone who has been given the in fact unusual chance to conduct a large number of exploratory conversations across the different divisions of a company, and who discovers as a result, that while there is a common vocabulary within the company, when it comes to understanding things that need to be implemented in practice, there is anything but a common understanding. There is clearly something not quite right with how things are working in FragTech: the understanding of an abstraction – ‘We need a company Academy’ – does not easily translate into its implementation in all the different ways required, in all the different contexts.

How might we make use of Wayne’s account above as a starting point for our further inquiries in first, trying to discover what it is ‘that’s not quite right’ in FragTech, and also next, in trying to get a clear understanding of what we might try to do to put it right? What are the methods that we might we employ in our inquiries?

Difficulties of the intellect and difficulties of the will

Currently, our first step is almost always to treat the difficulties we encounter as problems to be solved by the application of rational thought, and this entails the setting out of an appropriate system of concepts in terms of which to formulate the problem and to conduct one’s thinking about it. However, with his sensitivity to qualitative differences in our use of words, Wittgenstein (1980) notes that there are two very different kinds of difficulties we can face in our lives, not just one: there are difficulties of the intellect and difficulties of the will. He introduces these two kinds of difficulty thus (p. 17):

What makes a subject hard to understand … is not that before you can understand it you need to be trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see … What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect.

Talking of this second kind of difficulty as having to do with the will is, of course, in current parlance off putting. It arouses images of strong willed individuals resisting urges to act that weak willed people give in to. But what Wittgenstein means by it, as I will explore further below, this is how we are oriented in our inquiries, whether as researchers in Management and Organization Studies, consultants, or as managers in an organization: we want to see complex situations as amenable to being analysed into simpler parts. This is our first step.

But, as I see it, it straightaway raises the difficulty of whether this is feasible or not, for surely, such analyses lead immediately to an eradication of the crucial living relations within the organization that make it the unique self-developing and self-organizing organization it is – as Williams (1977) and Garfinkel (2002) above makes very clear. Thus we need to look into this very first step in our inquiries more closely. For often, as Wittgenstein (1953: no. 308) puts it, this ‘first step is the one that altogether escapes notice … But [it] is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter … (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)’ – is there, perhaps, another first step in our inquiries that we might take instead? The question of how we might we engage with those living relationships is beginning to be addressed in various ways (Keevers and Treleaven, 2011). Kempster and Stewart (2010) for example, utilize an autoethnographic approach to examine how a leader’s understanding of his practice develops in situated activity and reflexive dialogue between academic and leader – a process that involves perceptually noticing crucial events, picking them out from the overall flow of activity within which all are involved. It is this relationship between academics and practitioners, that is, the process of knowledge in transition, which I wish to explore. Where might Wayne and we start with our inquiries?

We must start, I suggest, with our first spontaneously felt sensing of a ‘something not being quite right’ in a situation of concern to us, with a disquiet – the initial embodied sense that in fact currently motivates our urge to begin with an analysis as the step in our adoption of an intellectual attitude towards our difficulty. But to understand the different possible directions might we take from this starting point, we must look into these two kinds of difficulties more closely: difficulties of the intellect arise for us when we take an intellectual attitude to the circumstance before us and formulate the difficulty we face in dealing with it as a problem, as something which with the aid of an ingenious theory we can solve by the use of reasoning. Thus usually, in adopting this approach, having once encountered the situation, we turn away from it to enter into discussion with others about how best to think about it. Difficulties of the will, however, are of quite a different kind, for they are to do with how we might orient ourselves bodily towards the events occurring around us. They are to do with how might we relate ourselves to them, the ways in which we can ready ourselves for seeing, for hearing, for experiencing and valuing, the anticipations and expectations that we might adopt in going out to meet and to respond to the others and/or othernesses in our surroundings – for it is these expectations which will organize our lookings and listenings, our sense makings and judgments of value, and which, ultimately, will determine the lines of action we resolve on carrying out further. ⁴ I say ‘ultimately’, for in this approach, rather than turning away from the situation bewildering us, we must dwell in it, and on it, and move around within it, in coming to a sense of the particular qualitative kind of bewilderment it is engendering in us.

In other words, (1) when we attempt to understand things intellectually, we place them up against a system of separate generalizing concepts, such that particular relations between instances of the concepts can be judged as corresponding to actual relations between the elements of the situation in reality; whereas (2) in our spontaneous, unproblematic understanding of things in the course of our ordinary everyday practical dealings with them, we understand them in a quite different way: in terms of the dynamic stabilities occurring in the relations within the flow of our outgoing activities towards our surroundings and their incoming results

While both the above ways, so to speak, go beyond experience, in our making sense of it and acting upon it – and thus both make essentially a hermeneutical move in that the meaning of an experience is understood by placing or situating it (or a representation of it) within a larger whole or framework of other interrelated things or events. In understanding things intellectually, we go beyond mere experience by placing it within a conceptual framework, within an already existing framework of already well-known generalities. While in becoming oriented, we learn how to go out towards a concrete situation in all its particularities.

This distinction between difficulties of the intellect and of the will is not easy to grasp, for the difference between them cannot be captured formally, i.e. they cannot be named and described in terms of objectively observable features, for an orientation to a situation, a way of relating ourselves to it, is something that emerges, that is arrived at only slowly as we explore the terrain of possibilities around us for a satisfactory way of going forward within it.

Indeed, very generally, it can be likened to the task we continuously face in understanding, say, the speech or writing of a philosopher telling us of a whole new approach to philosophy, which Merleau-Ponty (1962: 178–179) describes thus:

Here there is nothing comparable to the solution of a problem, where we discover an unknown quantity through its relationship with known ones. For the problem can be solved only if it is determinate, that is, if the cross-checking of the data provides the unknown quantity with one or more definite values. In understanding others, the problem is always indeterminate because only the solution will bring the data retrospectively to light as convergent, only the central theme of a philosophy, once understood, endows the philosopher’s writings with the value of adequate signs.

Thus what is accomplished here cannot be accomplished simply by applying something already made; it involves a process of making – a process that begins with a person’s feelings of disquiet, of things not yet being quite right, of not yet being understood. And it is the unique quality of a person’s initial disquiets, of their bewilderments and disorientations that is of crucial importance here. For, as Dewey (1988) points out, although psychologists have paid much attention to processes of perception, they have only done so by describing the perceived object in terms of the results of an analysis of the process, and this leaves out of account the whole context, the situation within with the process occurs, the situation that was present even before the process began – thus for him the term ‘situation’ designates ‘a complex existence that is held together in spite of its internal complexity by the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality’ (p. 246).

‘Entering into’ an actual situation: Singularities

Now bear in mind that the proposition which I uttered as a paradox (THIS is produced by a brain-process!) has nothing paradoxical about it. I could have said it in the course of an experiment whose purpose was to shew that an effect of light which I see is produced by stimulation of a particular part of the brain. – But I did not utter the sentence in the surroundings in which it would have had an everyday and unparadoxical sense. And my attention was not such as would have accorded with making an experiment. (If it had been, my look would have been intent, not vacant.) (Wittgenstein, 1953: 412, my emphasis)

As William James (1996: 250–251) put it: ‘The only way to apprehend reality’s thickness is either to experience it directly by being a part of reality oneself, or to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining [its] inner life’. In other words, if we can become involved or engaged in an active, back and forth relationship with the others or othernesses in our surroundings and can develop relationships with them within which – if we go slowly, and allow time for the imaginative work that each response can occasion within us to take place – we can gain a sense of the ‘inner landscape of possibilities’ available to us for making a next move in relation to them. If, that is, we can gain an initial point of entry, a starting point for entering into it.

Here, then, I want to explore what evoking a situation in imagination by sympathetically entering into its inner life, might be like, and why the experience of a paradox might be of importance in providing the required ‘point of entry’. We can begin this exploration by returning to my interview with Wayne; as we can see, he began with the paradox that senior people were confidently using words without realizing that they did not mean the same thing to different people:

And as Wayne had recounted to me earlier, in this six months he and his team had learned the art of ‘picking up weak signals’, i.e. the art of going beyond managers’ confidently expressed decontextualized abstractions to hear their less confidently expressed, contextualized concerns regarding their implementation – in short, to listen to their disquiets, their ‘But,…s!’ For these, not their ‘good ideas’, are related to their sense of their surroundings, their sense of the particular circumstances in relation to which they must work, which outside inquirers cannot grasp.

Finding these fixed points of entry, pivot points in relation to which one can begin to differentiate and thus to organize the otherwise bewildering complexity of one’s first impressions, is of crucial importance in overcoming orientational difficulties. For they can function like fixed landmarks in an otherwise unknown landscape to which one can return, time and again, as one begins to take one’s exploratory journeys within it.

To try to exhibit what I mean here, it would be useful if the following sequence of statements could be read quite slowly, in fact, almost sub-vocally uttered while reading them, with a pause at the end of each one, while taking ‘time out’ to imagine oneself in each situation depicted:

Having found a number of points of entry and gone through a number of different images, we can come to a sense of the actual landscape of possibilities giving rise to them all. Indeed, we can gain a sense of familiarity with such landscapes that we can come to feel confident of knowing our way around within them, and of being able to resolve on a way or ways of going on within them.

This process, then, of resolving on a line of action, is not at all like carrying out a calculation, or of making a decision or choice among a set of already clear alternatives. It is quite different. It involves moving around within a landscape of possibilities, and in so doing, being spontaneously responsive to the consequences of each move, and judging which one (or combination of moves) seems best in resolving the initial tension aroused in one’s initial confusion – judgment is involved because, to repeat, we are operating here only in the realm of possibilities, not that of actualities that can be named and formalized. Below, I will suggest, following Flyvjberg (2001), that the process outlines above is an aspect of what is involved in phronêsis, the arriving at a line of action that can be judged as the best that circumstances will allow, but I will not pursue that connection further here.

And as teachers, researchers, or managers, we ourselves can be changed in our very being-in-the-world in such encounters. For, in becoming involved with, immersed in, the ‘inner life’ of the others or othernesses around us, everything we do can be partly shaped by being in response to what they might do. Thus, rather than an objective knowledge of their nature, we gain – and come to embody – a certain orientation toward them, a certain set of expectations to do with how to ‘go on’ with them, expectations to do with the possible ways they might respond to us. And although at first we can be wholly ‘bewitched’ (Wittgenstein, 1953: 109) by their ‘voice’, as our familiarity with them grows, their voice can become just one voice among the many other voices within us, and we can even become disenchanted with what they call us upon us to do. However, we can never gain complete mastery over them – they can always surprise us, no matter how familiar to us they have become. Our constant vigilance is required; the precise words we use are important – for their grammar commits us now to what is expected of us in the future.

In the process I have described above, then, the urge to begin one’s inquiry with an analysis of a situation into its separate parts has been replaced by an urge to dwell in the situation as long as it takes, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, to come to know our ‘way about’ (no. 123) within it, and thus, as a result, to resolve on a best way of ‘going on’ (no. 154) within it – in other words, we have overcome a difficulty of the will.

Vygotsky (1966: 32–33) remarks on the process involved here – of coming to see and to hear previously unnoticed features in one’s surroundings – as the ‘phenomenon which we can call mastering one’s own reactions’. Central to it in a child’s development, is being able to draw one’s own attention to a feature in one’s surroundings by the use of an utterance or other form of expression, rather than having it directed by the expressions of more knowledgeable others who have thought it important in the past to do so. Similarly, Wittgenstein (1953) describes trying to teach a pupil a way of seeing a number series as having a certain pattern to it as follows (no. 144):

I … put [a word] picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this rather than that set of [word] pictures. I have changed his way of looking at thing’.

Both are concerned here with overcoming or resolving difficulties of the will, of bringing someone to see, i.e. to notice and attend to something of importance previously unnoticed.

Overcoming the way of theory: The role of ‘prospective, descriptive concepts’ in practice-based inquiries

For quite a number of years now I have been exploring the notion of understanding or knowing from-within (Shotter, 1993), a contextualized kind of knowing as opposed to Ryle’s (1949) two other kinds of de-contextualized kinds of knowing, knowing-that and knowing-how. My exploration of this notion has been motivated by the question of why certain forms of social scientific inquiry – supposedly oriented towards our more public, everyday concerns, including the nature of our working lives within organizations – very often prove to be utterly irrelevant to them. And the simple answer that I now want to give to this puzzle is as I have set it out above: all theories, concepts, and methods that are set out prior to our investigations – if they are to be used in an explanatory-predictive fashion – are necessarily set out in terms of separate, self-contained, context-independent terms, and thus necessarily exclude from consideration the unique particular living relations that we have to our surroundings as we human beings actually live out our lives. Concepts of a different, more relational, more prospective – in the sense of pointing towards future possibilities rather than past facts – seem to be required. Like ‘living’, rather than dead metaphors, we need concepts that bring previously unnoticed aspects of our activities imaginatively to light if we are to be truly innovative.

By the use only of objective-explanatory concepts in our accounts of human activities, by excluding relational, transitional phenomena, and by focusing only on already completed entities in trying to make sense of our performances, we can very easily make what Ryle (1949: 17) calls category mistakes, the mistake of representing ‘the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type of category …, when in fact they belong to another’. He introduces what he means by way of an example: a visitor who wants to be shown Oxford University, is shown the colleges, administrative buildings, and so on, goes on to ask: But where is the university? In other words, he fails to realize that ‘the University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized’ (p. 18). This mistake can be especially crucial when, as Ryle points out, we should be distinguishing between what he calls ‘task verbs’ and ‘achievement verbs’, that is, between those activities which, when appropriately sequenced or organized, can be aimed at getting or at bringing off something, and already well organized activities in which something is in fact ‘got’ or ‘brought off’. He notes (p. 143):

The differences, for example, between kicking and scoring, treating and healing, hunting and finding, clutching-and holding fast, listening and hearing, looking and seeing, traveling and arriving, have been construed, if they have been noticed at all, as differences between coordinate species of activity or process, when in fact the differences are of quite another kind.

The influences of importance exist only in the transitory understandings at work in the relational dynamics involved in the development of the organization.

Yet, as we have seen, time and again, we find concepts, vocabularies, of the wrong logical type being used to describe such human activities as leadership in this misleading fashion – Cunliffe (2009) provides example of leaders themselves reflexively recognizing this. Concepts designating what a collection of observable fragments of activity would amount to, if they were appropriately organized, are used in an attempt (in a ‘trying’) to tell people of a new activity they should perform. In other words, the use of concepts, of words of the wrong logical type, misleads us into approaching a circumstance with the wrong action guiding anticipations at the ready (Shotter, 2005), i.e. ready to seek a mysterious essence hidden behind appearances, rather than to pay attention to the still unfolding details observable in what is actually before one’s eyes (and ears). This is especially the case, as Ryle makes clear above, when what are in fact tasks are described as already completed achievements.

Indeed, it is clear that in the initial establishing of what later becomes an organized practice, all kinds of once-off exploratory excursions and retracings, of first-time twists and turns, are involved. But once the practice is established, these are, or can be, forgotten, and the finalized practice (mis)represented to interested others as simply a matter of implementing an orderly sequence of explicit, nameable, component actions from beginning to end. This, however, is doubly misleading. For not only is the disorderly nature of its beginnings ignored, as the outcome of an intra-active process, the resulting organization is emergent in the sense, as Lewes (1875: 412) pointed out long ago, that ‘it arises out of the combined agencies, but in a form which does not display the agents in action’ – thus it is impossible, from an examination of their outcomes, to itemize the part or parts played by each separate agency in their production.

Such category mistakes, however, are common in Management and Organizational Studies. In presenting the implementation of a new procedure in an organization as merely a matter of following an already well-organized sequence of activities, the experiences involved are presented as formations which have been precipitated, when in fact the relevant experiences belong to quite another category, to that of social experiences still in solution (to use William’s (1977) phrases). As such, they do not exert their influence in an objective-causal fashion at all, but in quite another way – without needing to ‘await definition, classification, or rationalization’ before doing so. As we have seen above, the experiences of tendency occurring in our living relations to our surroundings, provide action guiding influences which are sufficient to act upon as our relational actions unfold.

Clearly, however, as a result of our inquiries and other kinds of academic activities, we provided many objective concepts that we hope will operate in people’s practices in a causal fashion. Indeed, more often than not, researchers and practitioner-consultants in this sphere, we make use of models set out in terms of collections of what we think are crucial, but extremely abstract, concepts – for instance, the McKinsey & Co, 7S-model talks of Strategy, Structure, Systems, Shared Values, Skills, Styles, and Staff; while Cooperrider and Whitney (2005) set out Appreciative Inquiry in terms of a re-entrant spiral of Define → Discover → Dream → Design → Deliver. Such models are often introduced as providing a conceptual framework of an explanatory kind within which to think, and as such, are used in directing and shaping our inquiries, with the aim of planning crucial, causal interventions. Their attraction is that they seem to take us ‘beyond mere experience’ and to give us a way of organizing it into an intelligible structure, shape, or form. Without such models, we feel, our experience would be chaotic and far too complex to cope with. And in fact now, the number of conceptual models in the field is really quite enormous.

And we can find mistakes of this kind arising continually in organizations, and in everyday life. For instance, the new Leadership Model of a large, global company includes as a characteristic of good leaders, ‘Energizing People’. But what does energizing people look like in concrete detail in its execution? It may, for instance, mean listening to frontline workers who have never before been listened to, it may mean giving and receiving honest feedback in ways never done before, and so on and so on. Aware of this, a good section leader might suggest:

The most powerful thing we can do is to share the model with our teams, talk through what it means, piece by piece, and then simply start to try to do it. Our teams will be the first to tell us when we’re not doing it.

As this section leader realizes, just to issue the exhortation ‘Energize people!’ is not to issue an account of what tasks might make up the relevant achievement. Those on the receiving end of such an exhortation would remain mystified as to what they must actually do to achieve its aim.

Despite all my objections above, to do with the abstract, de-contextualized, up in the air, ambiguous nature of the concepts presented in the organizational and management literature, the practice of formulating and presenting new such theoretical concepts continues unabated. No matter how bewildered people may be in implementing them, people still seem to find them useful. Why? What we seem to do in inquiring into phenomena we at first find confusing, is not simply to compare the configuration of a state of affairs in reality with the configuration of an inner mental representation to arrive at the one and final account of the happening of an event, but something else much more complicated and less precise. Only if the state of affairs appears to us as being already organized could it be a simple matter of pattern matching. What we seem able to do, is to assemble and to organize in a socially intelligible way, i.e. in a way which makes sense to the others around us, bits and pieces of information from our surroundings, dispersed in space and time, in accordance with ‘directions’ provided by the words that they (and others) have used (or could use) in constituting the ‘concept’ in the first place. ⁵ In using a concept in this way – in relation to attending to features in our surroundings, rather than in planning an intervention – the concept need not be well-defined. Wittgenstein’s (1953) ill-defined concept of language-game being an (in)famous case in point.

But many of our crucial concepts, in fact, have this incomplete, still open character to them. Language, communication, organization, democracy, freedom, trust, beauty, education, philosophy, mental illness, leadership, and research, to mention just a few, have this kind of prospective aspect to them, in that we feel we know exactly what they each designate, but we cannot exactly say it our loud. As St Augustine famously said about time: ‘What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.’ Yet, with all these, and many other such concepts, we each have come to embody a conceptual schema which, in practical terms, seems to provide us with ‘grammar’ (or sense of sequencing) and a set of criteria for ordering events, against which the ordering of a set of events in an account of a circumstance – be it a claim of good leadership, political freedom, or whatever – may be matched and tested.

I want to call these incomplete or unfinished concepts designating emergent phenomena prospective, descriptive concepts, as I want to draw attention to their frankly future oriented, descriptive nature – they cannot be ‘summed up’ as having an essence, they work by helping us to pick out from an otherwise amorphous background, certain distinctive features or crucial aspects relevant to our current ends-in-view. In other words, their practical use is of a hermeneutical kind, in the sense that, by tacking back and forth between them and a particular event or phenomenon, we can bring to light general features within such an otherwise unique event, such that the words we use in the descriptions we provide, can arouse in us appropriate anticipations of what we next might expect to happen.

Conclusions

When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition’, ‘name’ – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? – What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (Wittgenstein, 1953: 116)

This is how philosophers should salute one another: ‘Take your time’. (Wittgenstein, 1980: 80)

Central, then, to the overall account I have tried to fashion above – to do with what our thinking has to be like if we are to move into a fluid, indeterminate reality, within which the only stabilities we can grasp onto are dynamic ones, that are there one moment and gone the next – is the claim that we cannot begin our inquiries by first trying to establish an appropriate, well-defined theoretical or conceptual scheme. Thus, I have not been concerned at all with the search for explanatory-predictive theories. Instead, what I have been trying to draw attention to above – with my talk of knowledge in transition, of transitional understandings, and of the prospective, descriptive concepts needed to illuminate their nature – is the need to characterize the influences at work in a third, relational realm of human activity, distinct on the one hand from the more objective and mechanical accounts of the external causes supposedly shaping our activities in the world, and the more subjective, cognitive accounts of people’s reasons for their actions on the other.

As I intimated above, I have been trying to set out what Flyvbjerg (2001) currently wants to call a phronetic social science, in the sense that overall, I have been concerned with trying to bring to light in a way communicable to others, people’s practical wisdom – with that kind of inquiry that Aristotle termed phronêsis. I emphasize this because, as Flyvbjerg notes: ‘researchers [need] to make explicit the different roles of science as epistêmê, technê, and phronêsis, respectively. Today’s researchers seldom make explicit which one of these three roles they are practicing’ (p. 60). And clearly, my concern here has been neither with epistêmê – i.e. with the role of explanatory theories aimed at discovering de-contextualized facts or mechanisms – nor with technê – i.e. with the role of models and frameworks in the devising of (again) de-contextualized recipes or techniques – but with a kind of situated practical understanding of events of a unique kind, i.e. with those which offer new openings to the future but which can only be arrived at from within the unique situation itself.

Clearly, when operating in this way, we possess a spontaneously operative, embodied, perceptual mode of understanding, an understanding of a specific field of possibilities in which we are, in each changing moment, embedded. For without it, we would lack all orientation. In other words, it is a kind of understanding to do, not with facts or information, but with our grasp of what kind of context we are in, with what our surroundings require of us, with the ‘calls’ they exert upon us to respond within them in appropriate ways – a kind of knowing that shows up, not in our readiness to respond in a particular way immediately, but in our readiness to explore what is bewildering us for its own unique character, making use of whatever prospective, descriptive devices that can provide us with guidance. And ‘it is a mark of the trained mind,’ says Aristotle (1955: 65), ‘never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject allows’. It is a readiness that shows up in how we next act in a situation, in a step-by-step fashion, ‘to put an end to the ambiguity of its merely anticipated, suspected, character’ (Todes, 2001: 64), and to arrive gradually at a best resolution of our initially felt bewilderment, confident in the knowledge that all possibilities have been explored and judged.

But how can we portray to others such singular, unique situations that were for us, ‘still in flight’, so to speak, as we experienced them? We need forms of expression that will arouse in our listeners and readers the kind of influences we felt exerted upon us as we originally moved around within, that will arouse similar feelings of tendency sufficient to act upon in their practices, that will provide memorable action guiding resources that they (and we) can draw on in different ways at a later date. And this, I hope, is the function of some of the descriptive concepts I have outlined; their task is to illuminate certain general features of such otherwise unique events. The concept of ‘prospective, descriptive concepts’ is, of course, itself just such an incomplete, unfinished concept, but others I have used fall into the same category: emergent phenomena, changing moments, happening events, ways of looking, listening, etc., embodied expectations, tasks, achievements, spontaneous, bodily responsiveness, expressions, difficulties of orientation, difficulties of the intellect, … to name just some. Their task is, of course, to try to describe what important aspects or details of such unique passing events might look like, if they could be laid open to view, if we could re-experience them whenever required, to aid us into what to look for, but not to tell us what actually we must see.

Our task in our writing, then, and our task in the phronetic, descriptive disciplines in general, is to turn passing events, unique events which exists only in the moment of their own occurrence, into ‘moving’ accounts of events, into dramatic or poetic scenes, or scenic events, which can exist in their inscriptions, and which, on being read, or in being experienced in some other manner, can ‘move’ readers in a way similar to how people were moved by the original events. Thus – to end also as I began with William’s (1977: 129) words – if we want to allow the tendencies already present in our transitional knowledge to emerge further, then our positive task is:

to make [these tendencies] present, in specifically active ‘readings’… [such a making] is never itself in the past tense. It is always a formative process, within a specific present. At different moments in history, and in significantly different ways, the reality and even the primacy of such presences and such processes, such diverse and yet specific actualities, have been powerfully asserted and reclaimed, as in practice of course they are all the time lived.

Our negative task is continually to resist their precipitation into fixed and finalized, authoritative forms, claiming to offer the final, authoritative explanation of things.