From ‘after the fact’ objective analyses to immediate ‘before the fact’ living meanings

Introduction: From what is inside us to what we are inside of

Martinez, Tomicic, and Medina (2014) justify the reporting of the research portrayed in their paper by claiming that this kind of psychotherapy research is relevant, not only to comprehending “the changes processes in the patients, but also its contribution to the development of basic knowledge about psychological transformations in persons by means the language and its meanings” (pp. 20–21). I wish to question this claim in every respect.

As I see it, the world of therapeutic interactions (and especially the world of our everyday social exchanges), as portrayed in the conceptualizations displayed this paper, are in fact very different from the world in which we all actually live our everyday lives. This is not because I think the conceptualizations offered here are in fact inadequate, and I want to argue for better ones. But because, as identifiable and nameable causal process, they can only be seen as having been at work in people’s activities after they have been performed. Moreover, as nameable ‘things’ they are often in fact foreshadowed in the very way in which, prior to the conduct of our investigations, we commit ourselves to a particular way or ways of looking into the phenomena before us – so that aspects of what is offered as an explanation of a process have in fact been assumed as being at work in it from the very start. In short, in relating to observed events, conceptualizations have their application after the fact of an event’s occurrence, whereas, much occurs in the experience of the participants before the fact of it happening.

William James (1890), long ago, recognized the fallacy of describing a process in terms of its products. He called it ‘the Psychologist’s Fallacy’ (pp. 196–197, p. 278): “We have the inveterate habit, whenever we try introspectively to describe one of our thoughts, of dropping the thought as it is in itself and talking of something else. We describe the things that appear to the thought, and we describe other thoughts about those things – as if these and the original thought were the same” (p. 279). Dewey (1896) stated the same fallacy thus: “A set of considerations which hold good only because of a completed process, is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result” (p. 362). Bakhtin (1993) is also aware of the reversed temporality at work in our theorizing:

“Any kind of practical orientation of my life within the theoretical world is impossible: it is impossible to live in it, impossible to perform answerable deeds … The theoretical world is obtained through an essential and fundamental abstraction from the fact of my unique being and from the moral sense of that fact – ‘as if I did not exist’ … it cannot determine my life as an answerable performing of deeds, it cannot provide any criteria for the life of practice, the life of the deed, for it is not the Being in which I live, and, if it were the only Being, I would not exist” (p. 9).

As the unique being that I am, although I need to act in ways intelligible to those around me, if I am to satisfy the tensions I feel at work within me, I also need to act in ways that matter uniquely to me – even though I quite often, mistakenly, formulate what I in fact need, inappropriately, as a specific desire (Todes, 2001). ¹

Thus, as I see it, ‘something else’ altogether is guiding people in the performance of their actions than the nameable things whose nature we seek to discover in our inquiries, something in their relations to the larger circumstances of their involvements with the others and othernesses around them, rather than merely in their actions and utterances exclusively. It is a matter, not of what is going on within their actions and utterances, but of what their actions and utterances are going on within. As Voloshinov (1986) puts it, the influences shaping our utterances are not to be found within ‘the individual psyche’ (p. 48) as individual creative acts of speech, nor within ‘the linguistic system’ (p. 52) as a source of normative forms. To the extent that, as living beings, in all our activities and utterances we are responsive to our surroundings; thus, as a dialogically-structured event: “The organizing centre of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outside – in the social milieu surrounding the individual being” (p. 93).

From self-contained mechanisms to living forms growing in response to their circumstances

More like the growth of plants in relation to the weather occurring around them, than like computers, impervious to their surroundings, acting only according to their internal programs, our actions emerge, I want to claim, in a moment-by-moment, back-and-forth, dialogical-hermeneutical manner, guided and shaped both by our efforts at attaining an overall end-in-view, and by the limited availability of relevant useable resources in our immediate surroundings. We are never not in a particular, concrete circumstance, and, as I see it, verbal communication can never be understood and explained outside of this connection with a concrete situation. Lynn Hoffman (2006) describes my view thus:

“In his [John Shotter’s] view, communication is like a social weather. It fills our sails, becalms, or sometimes wrecks us. Sensing what is called for in a particular context, responding correctly to gestures like an extended hand, feeling a black cloud settling over a discussion, are all examples of a weather system that can impact us in concrete and material ways” (p. 68).

So although we seek to explore how people do in fact conduct themselves in an intelligible manner in their meetings with each other, in relation to an overall end-in-view, we cannot, I want to argue, achieve any understandings of practical use to us in ‘weathering’ the storms or stagnations occurring to us in our lives, by populating our inner lives with theoretical entities of our own devising – no matter how much, after the fact, they can provide an accurate description of what happens to us. To repeat, as I see it, something else is at work, before the fact, in our guiding and shaping our actions and utterances in the particular circumstance we happen to be in, and it is the nature of this ‘something else’, and how it can be publicly studied in all its individuality and uniqueness that I want to explore below.

From causal explanations to ‘instructive accounts’ of new uses of language

In recent years, there has been a distinctive movement of thought, still somewhat ignored in the West, ever since our adoption of Cartesian, geometric modes of argumentative inquiry 350 years ago. For quite a while we have been focussing solely on the ‘shapes’ or ‘forms’ of objective things, along with the aim of seeking patterns out in the world. However, under the influence of such thinkers and writers as Wittgenstein; Heidegger; Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Vygotsky; James, Mead and Dewey; Gadamer; and Merleau-Ponty (among many others), some of us moved away from a concern with the supposedly eternal, i.e. fixed but hidden properties of objects in the world ‘out there’, and begun, rather, to move towards noticing similarities and differences in our experiences of events occurring around us (Katz & Shotter, 1996). We have also moved away from a concern with events supposedly occurring privately inside the heads of individuals, along with ceasing to search for the ideals hidden behind appearances assumed as the causes of the observations we make. Instead, we have turned to a direct focus on the unique concrete details of our living, dynamic, bodily sensed or felt involvements – or participations – in and with the world around us.

In so doing, we have become concerned both with what goes on inside the different ‘worlds of meaning’ we create within our meetings with the others and othernesses around us, along with noticing the ever present background flow of spontaneously unfolding, reciprocally responsive inter-activity between us and our surroundings, in the context of which our expressions have their meaning. For after all, we respond to the meanings of events occurring around us, not to their objective shapes or forms. And in telling the others around us of them, we do not just need to achieve a satisfaction of the tensions they arouse in us, we also need to verbally articulate their nature in such a way as to arouse in the others around us felt anticipations as to possible next steps they might take in coordinating their behaviour in with ours (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986).

If we were unable to anticipate, at least partially, how the others around us will respond to our actions in each of the unique situations within which we happen to find ourselves, organized social life would be impossible. We would have no sense of what, sequentially, should follow from what – no sense that particular expressions should be responded to in particular ways – and thus, no capacity as members of a social group, to coordinate our activities in with those of others. Without their embedding within that larger flow of activity, their own particular, unique meaning is lost – for its otherwise indeterminate meaning is only made more determinate, hermeneutically, by its particular placement within that larger flow.

To repeat, what is lost if we focus only on completed utterances, and subject them merely to passive, finalized, monological understandings on our part as observers of them by placing them – and thus offering interpretations of their meaning – within a theoretical framework of our own devising, is the active, unique, responsive, unfinalized meanings they have for those actually participating within the dialogic meetings in question.

Vygotsky (1986) described this loss of meaning thus:

“Two essentially different modes of analysis are possible in the study of psychological structures … The first method analyzes complex psychological wholes into elements … Psychology winds up in the same kind of dead end when it analyzes verbal thought into its components, thought and word, and studies them in isolation from each other. In the course of analysis, the original properties of verbal thought have disappeared. Nothing is left to the investigator but to search out the mechanical interaction of the two elements in the hope of reconstructing, in a purely speculative way, the vanished properties of the whole … In essence, this type of analysis, which leads us to products in which the properties of the whole are lost, may not be called analysis in the proper sense of this word. It is generalization, rather than analysis” (p. 4, my emphasis). ²

What is needed instead, is a genetic account (see Vygotsky, 1986, ch. 4), an account that does not take it “for granted that the relation between two given functions never varie[s]; that perception, for example, [is] always connected in an ideal way with attention, memory with perceptions, thought with memory” (pp. 1–2, my emphasis), but which studies the developmental trajectories involved in people developing the relevant “ontological skills” (Shotter, 1984, pp. 122–123) to relate themselves to events occurring in their circumstances, perceptually, such that they come to respond spontaneously to them in ways shared with those around them. As Vygotsky (1978) puts it: “The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech” (p. 32), and in doing so, learns both to pick out aspects of the sensory field as those around her or him do, and to express what they see in ways also shared by others.

In other words, rather than explanations of supposed processes hidden inside the individuals in question – explanations that can, as in our translation of words in our mother tongue into a second language, be understood without our having to learn any new practical skills – what we need if we are in fact to grasp the situated meanings understood by those in a particular, unique circumstance, is an instructive account of the social conditions conducive to our extending linguistically-structured perceptual skills. For explanations can only work as such, if a person already reliably responds in certain ways to our words, to our utterances, for example, by finding certain similarities well known to them relevant and others not, by looking at later utterances to clarify earlier ones, by testing our characterizations with examples of their own, and so on. In other words, if persons lacking the experiential resources and the skills required to carry our such imaginative work, as we might call it, then explanations will not be perceived as explanations, but merely as a sequence of words still requiring an interpretation.

To reiterate, a meaning is attributed to them after the fact – consisting of an assemblage of specific generalized component parts – that is not at all their meaning as we experience it in the course of our involved acting. Indeed, as William James (1890) shows in his account of “what passes through the mind as we utter the phrase the pack of cards is on the table” (p. 279). As he sees it, the ‘thought’ has what he calls time-parts:

“Now I say of these time-parts that we cannot take any one of them so short that it will not after some fashion or other be a thought of the whole object ‘the pack of cards is on the table.’ They melt into each other like dissolving views, and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feels the total object in a unitary undivided way. This is what I mean by denying that in the thought any parts can be found corresponding to the object's parts. Time-parts are not such parts” (p. 279).

As I see it, James provides us here with a before the fact account of the distinctive feelings or sensings at work in guiding us in shaping and structuring our utterances in the course of their utterance, right until the moment of their very completion.

Life within a world in which all ‘things’ exist as separate from other ‘things’

In a Cartesian world of already determinate mechanisms merely awaiting our discovery of them, the effort to place meaning at the centre of Social Theory has had a chequered career. Meanings felt or sensed in the course of sequentially unfolding activities within which one have been condemned as subjective, while only countable, objective things – know in terms of their spatial shapes (forms)– existing separately from each other have been accepted as the proper results of our inquiries. In short, meanings, as such, have been ignored. In the classical Cartesian/Newtonian world of separate particles of matter in motion according to pre-established laws, we have assumed the task of science to be that of discovering the formal nature of these basic constituents along with their causal relations, and that we should pursue this task by seeking to prove our proposed theoretical representations of their causal relations true. Crucial to this endeavour, of course, was the assumption that once a theory was proved true, everyone would, of course, both understand and agree with it and find it a fitting basis for their future actions.

It is on the basis of just such an assumption as this, that Martinez et al. set out to explore the nature of the talk occurring in psychotherapeutic encounters. As they see it, “therapeutic dialogue occurs in two simultaneous levels and [the] the particular way in which this takes place shapes it as a discursive praxis with its own limits and rules” (Martinez, Tomicic, & Medina, 2014, p. 5)– the two levels being, as they see it, the ‘dialogal’ and the ‘dialogical,’ i.e. respectively, the inter-mental dialogue between patient and therapist, and the intra-mental dialogues between voices and positions. They claim that these two levels are required because, as psychotherapy became a professional practice, “psychotherapeutic discourses constitute systems of meaning that have been built by psychotherapy as institution and which are then maintained through practice. [And] these discourses function as reference points by means of which therapists organize their intervention” (Martinez et al., p. 19). Thus, as they see it, what prima facie may start out as mere conversation can become a discourse or discourse genre when – as a result of various events being repeated over and over again so that therapists can get a sense of ‘what next’ is likely to happen – the exchanges taking place begin to be shaped, not only by “a set of common expressions, but also by certain given positions or perspectives adopted by speakers in the discourse as a whole” (Martinez et al., p. 1).

In other words, to repeat, Martinez et al. are here offering an after the fact analysis of a therapeutic encounter aimed at elaborating and extending Hermans’ (2001) explanatory Dialogical Self Theory. Whereas, as I see it, if we are to grasp what is involved in a second person replying to a first person’s utterance in such a way that (a) the speaker experiences what is said by the second as in fact a reply to it, and (b) the second person also experiences their reply as a satisfactory one (or, if not, acts to correct it), then what we need is a before the fact understanding, an understanding of how such an achievement is actually managed, in ways relevant to the immediate circumstances at hand – given that in our everyday lives, as yet at least, no general rules are applicable. ³ As I put it above, we need some instructive accounts of the social conditions conducive to extending our linguistically-structured perceptual skills, some useful words or statements which will aid us in picking out aspects of the sensory field around us in ways shareable with those around us.

I am not convinced that Martinez et al. achieve this in their analytical account of the psychotherapeutic practice they study. ⁴ Two factors are central to it: One is Althusser’s (1971) notion of interpellation in which individuals find themselves summoned by events in their surroundings to act in ways that are often not of their own choosing. Althusser himself introduced the term to describe the process by which ideology, embodied in major social and political institutions, constitutes people’s identities through them being ‘hailed' or ‘called upon’ to act in certain unavoidable ways by the language used within their everyday social institutions. Martinez et al., however, use the terms to describe a special discursive phenomenon that occurs, they say, when someone is called upon to give “an explanation about an action or expression… [which forces them] to adopt a determinated subjective position” (Martinez et al., p. 6).

The second central factor is their adoption of the dialogic discourse analysis (DDA) scheme of categories developed by Larraín and Medina (2007), which they have used elsewhere (see Martínez, 2011; Martínez, Tomicic, & Medina, 2012). As they see it, DDA sheds light not only on the different ‘voices’ they see as being present in people’s utterances, but also on the relationships between them, as well as on the nature of the ‘real’ dialogue occurring between participants. As they see it, at the level of discourse – the dialogical level at which the institutional ideologies at work in psychotherapy exert their influence – four major influences are at work which they term: (1) enunciators; (2) subject of the utterance; (3) subject of the enunciation; and (4) modalizers and modalities.

Along with the notion of interpellation, these are all highly technical terms, requiring coders analyzing the transcripts to have had DDA training (see Martinez et al., p. 10). Such training is necessary for, clearly, such ‘wordings’ are not ones which – in being uttered to typical psychotherapeutic practitioners – would orient them towards, not only noticing such features or aspects of events occurring in their consultations, but help them to develop relevant, linguistically-structured, ontological skills of such a kind that they come to respond to such events, spontaneously, in ways shared with those around them. Thus what coders have to be taught – in a training, clearly, conducted primarily in ordinary, everyday language – is to see sequences of words in the transcripts which already make one kind of sense to us, as being other than what ordinarily they seem to be, as being enuciators, or modalizers, etc.

Being able to translate everyday events into a technical language, however, is not enough for one to become a competent member of a community of practitioners ⁵ ; we need to learn how to use such terms in the same way as other members of that community. More than merely satisfying the anticipatory tensions they arouse within us, individually, we need to learn how to verbally articulate the nature of these tensions – by saying what they are like – in ways that will arouse similar such anticipations in others, enabling them to consider possible next steps they might take in coordinating their behaviour in with ours. It is not a matter of gaining new knowledge, but of developing within oneself the relevant, linguistically-structured, ontological skills, at being able to pick out aspects of the sensory field within which one is immersed as those around us do, and to express what they see in ways in which they also share.

For, as I see it, if we are unable to anticipate, at least partially, how the others around us will respond to our actions in each of the unique situations within which we happen to find ourselves, organized social life would become impossible. We would have no sense of how we should respond to other people’s expressions, and thus, no capacity as members of a social group, to coordinate our activities in with those of others.

It is this turn to living worlds of meaning, to worlds in which people come to share felt, distinctive anticipations as to each other’s future actions in otherwise indeterminate, fluid, not-yet-finalized circumstances, thus to coordinate their activities with each other that we must, I want to argue here, explore if we are to offer research inquiries of use to practitioners, rather than just to other researchers as observers of other people’s activities.

Conclusions: Before the fact accounts

Evidently, there are two ways in what appear to be theoretical utterances can be used: (1) one is in an after the fact representational fashion, as stating a claim about the nature of the hidden reality thought to be responsible for observed events, i.e. “as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.)” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 131). (2) The other is as before the fact aids to perception, as utterances which direct us to attend to this rather than that aspect of events occurring within our current circumstances; they are utterances which offer us, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) terms, “objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities” (p. 130). For new words can provide us with new anticipations as to what we might see in the events occurring around us that we did not previously notice, and to express what we see in ways also shared by others. Thus the kind of before the fact investigations Wittgenstein (1953) is advocating are aimed at clarifying “what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions” (p. 126).

So, although in the past we have felt “as if we had to penetrate phenomena,” says Wittgenstein (1953), this is not now the case. Our investigations need to be “directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena” (p. 90). We need to do this because, in our ordinary, immediate uses of language – in the words we utter as we conduct of our everyday practical affairs in with the others around us – we express ways of relating ourselves to the world around us that matter to us, many ways in fact.

In the past, we have tended to disparage ordinary people’s everyday experiences and the evidence of our senses in favour of the objective knowledge arrived at by the pure intellect. But clearly, what occurs to us in our everyday practical involvements, as we skilfully and spontaneously move around in relation to and with the others and othernesses around us, are primary, while what we give names to as ‘things’ or ‘objects’ is secondary, and dependent on quite specific meanings that come to be present ⁶ to us as a result of our bodily movements out in the world at large – the meanings that arouse in us specific anticipations as to what might next occur.

It is against this kind of background that I have offered my comments in relation to the research presented by Martinez, Tomicic, and Medina in their paper in this issue of Theory & Psychology. My criticisms have thus been more in criticism in principle than in detail. Indeed, as I see it a whole style of research, as a discourse genre, is in question. For if it really is the case that we are living in a turbulent, fluid world then, as I see it, it is not enough to produce general accounts of people’s actions that merely display their actions as orderly, and to report what can truthfully be said about them after the fact of their occurrence. More than merely true statements are required. As Rorty (1999) puts it, in such circumstances: “We cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry…. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behaviour is not inquiry but simply wordplay” (p. xxv).

If we are to provide instructive accounts of possibly occurring phenomena in psychotherapeutic meetings, we need to do more, much more, than merely satisfying the tensions aroused in us by the general questions we formulate in relation to certain designated kinds of bewildering situations. For we do not in fact live our lives in designated kinds of situations. We encounter the situations in which we live, as Garfinkel (1967) so nicely puts it, always for “another first time” (p. 9). Thus, if we explore how we might in fact deal the unique circumstances we encounter, and to do it in a way that others can benefit from our explorations, then we must articulate our experiences in such a way that arouses in the others around us anticipations as to possible next steps that make it possible for them to coordinate their behaviour with ours. Research of this practice-based rather than theory-driven kind, however, is still in its infancy (see Shotter, 2014).