First draft of a submission to: Seventh International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, Theme: “Skilful Performance: Enacting Expertise, Competence, and Capabilities in Organizations”, 24th– 27th June, 2015, Helona Resort, Kos, Greece — PROS-058.

Reconsidering language use in our talk of expertise —have we missed something?

John Shotter

“Modern existentialism... is most significantly carried forwardby Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as aided by the work of Husserl. All these philosophers see that it does not make senseto speak of ‘overcoming’ circumstantiality.... The fundamental aspect of this problem is to understand a local situation in theworld, as distinct from the universal condition of the world’s total content. It is the primary thesis of this study that a local situation is understandable only in terms of the felt unity of our active body in these circumstances” (Todes, 2001, p.8).

“... my body [is] a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.93).

There is currently, I think, something of a disconnect between the de-contextualized talk of generalities employed by public professionals as they, retrospectively, give reasons for their actions, and the fact that in every instance they act in a unique, particular circumstance, in which never-before-encountered contextual details are of crucial importance. In other words, as Fleck (1979) puts it, a certain “thought style”1 seems to be at work within the socio-linguistic groups within which we grow up as thinking/speaking individuals which, in the western world , shapes the wayswithin which we account for or justify our actions to those around us (Mills, 1940; Scott & Lyman, 1968) — as Fleck (1979) puts it: “The explanation given to any [causal] relation can only survive and develop within a given society if this explanation is stylized in conformity with the prevailing thought style” (p.2). And our prevailing thought style seems to be a highlyintellectualized style which, not only individualizes a person’s actions by locatingthe influences at work in shaping them solely within an individual’s head, but which also leads us to think of that influence as being exerted by an inner picture, image, or mental representation of an outer state of affairs2.

A certain use of language is at work here which, I will claim, misleads

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us in our attempts to understand the nature of expertise into seeking ‘finished’ or ‘completed’ regularities and patterns out in the world, rather than alerting people to attend to sensed similarities within their own, ‘still developing’, practices. Clearly, in Todes’ (2001) terms, we are still trying to ‘overcome’ the circumstantiality of people’s activities and practices, and to discover certain self-contained, nameable, ‘context-free’entities we suppose to be at work (causally) in shaping our activities.

Below, I want to explore the meaning of this disconnect for our deeper understanding of the nature of expertise, and what our accounts or explanations of our actions would look like, if we were to take our embodied, perceptual relations to our circumstances into account — for it is the very basic importance of these relations which I think we have missed.

The fact of this disconnect was brought home to me a few years ago when interviewing, along with a colleague, a fairly senior executive about the nature of her successful practices: we thought she was exemplary in how she considered local possibilities, exploring them in this way and that, always wondering if there was a ‘something more’ she had not yet considered, saying she would often seek further understandings from more ‘front line’ people, ‘in-touch-with the situation’, and so on. Because of her exemplary ways of gaining a situated ‘in-touchness’ with each differentcircumstance she had to deal with, we asked her if we could re-play her interview to her colleagues, as we thought they could learn much from it. Given the ethics of the situation, before deciding, we suggested that she listen to herself. Not long after she had begun listening to the interview she said: “You can’t let them hear that; I sound like a total idiot!” Now, it was not that she was continually making mistakes in her actions, far from it. But in being publicly accountable for them, she clearly felt that in justifying them, she had to show that she had in fact employed a certain general kind of rational decision-making in coming to act as she did; that she had arrayed a set of possibilities, considered evidence for and againstthem, and chosen a best option to put into action. How else, after having performed them, could she give her reasons?

And indeed, currently, it seems to me, as ourselves public professionals — in our efforts at seeking to understand what it is that allows, or affords, or makes it possible for people to be consistently successful in their practices, and thus to be considered as experts — we can also very easily feel under that same pressure: We must — mustn’t we? — exhibit in our work that we have reasoned like proper research scientists, that we have proposed possible theories and found evidence in their support, while describing and justifying all these activities in general terms available to all around us.

Yet what my colleague and I had felt to be of importance in the behaviour of the executive we interviewed, and why we wanted to play her tape to her colleagues, was her recognition of the fact that each next situation

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she had to act in was unique, that she had first to come to an appreciation of itsparticularity, that she had first to explore its ‘inner landscape’, so to speak,before she could feel confident of ‘moving about’ within it in a ‘sure-footed’ manner — for after all, it was not full of separate, all-alike, self-contained atoms in lawful, mechanical motion, but full of already related, but somewhat unruly, still developing, human beings each with their own unique ‘point of view’ on their common circumstances. In short, she exhibited in her interview with us a very different way of coming to an understanding of each particular situation she had to act in, than the kind of understanding she felt, rhetorically, she had to exhibit publicly when called upon to justify her actions in a rational fashion.

As I see it, this other way of coming to an understanding of a practice involves our developing, not any new concepts or theories, or models, or any other devices that we takes as corresponding with reality, but with our developing new perceptual or “ontological skills” (Shotter, 1984, p.71; Spinosa, Flores & Dreyfus, 1997, p.1), new ways of being not simply an expert in a practice, but new ways of being an expert in a practice — developing new sensitivities, new capacities within ourselves to notice fleeting events indicative of possible beginnings of new ways of acting, and also to develop new ways of expressing their nature in terms of sensed similarities to ‘things’ already well-known amongst us. It is how we might in fact gain an expertise in developing ourselves in this way that I want to explore further below. Crucial, will be a focus, not simply on our use of words, but on the bodily activity of our actually speaking them.

Two ways of understanding, two kinds of difficulties in life,and two ways of using language

Clearly, as living beings, we have two quite distinct ways of coming to an understanding of the nature of the world around us (see Todes, 2001): (1) cognitively or imaginatively, in thought (in terms of conceptual generalities and/or idealizations), and (2) perceptually, in our bodily activities moving around in the world about us (in terms of vaguely felt, still indeterminate particularities3). Elsewhere (Shotter, 2014), I have called these two modes of understanding after-the-fact representational understandings and before-the-fact responsive understandings, but I will bring out the differences between them in other ways, below, in a fashion more appropriate to our concern with how we express our attributions of expertise in ways conducive to its acquisition.

Associated with these two ways are two very different kinds of difficulties that we can face in life: (1) some difficulties are of an intellectual kind which we can formulate as problems and can solve by the application of clever and methodical thought, while (2) others, as I see it, are difficulties of orientation or of ways of relating, to do with the kind of

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embodied expectations with which we approach and relate ourselves to a particular situation, expectations that work selectively to influence what we notice and what we are prepared to respond to (see Shotter, 2009, p.136). Rather than solving a problem here, the sense of satisfaction we can feel isakin to bringing a blurred image into focus, to resolving it into its constituent details.

These differences arise out of the fact that as growing and living beings both in and of the world, we live immersed within a whole flowing array of active, intra-mingling, spontaneously responsive relations, both to the others (our fellow beings) and to all the othernesses (the rest of the material ‘stuff’) around us. And just like all organic beings, we are affected as much by being immersed within these intra-mingling activities, if not more so, than we can affect them. Indeed, it is as a result of our growing up within the already existing, language rich ways of intra-acting with of our fellow beings, that we come to possess these two distinct ways of judging what the circumstances confronting us at any one moment are — we judge them perceptually in terms of what bodily movements our circumstances will possibly allow or afford (Gibson, 1979) us to try to execute, while cognitively, we need to judge what is in fact the circumstance before us, and to attend to it as those around us indicate in their linguistic and other expressions that we should attend to it.

The importance of our first language learning

In other words, in learning our first language, we must come to relate ourselves in a certain manner to at-first-indeterminate ‘somethings’ in our surroundings, to distinguish them, not only in terms of what, bodily, they mean to us, but also to act towards them as having the character of Xs, i.e., as like Xs — as those around us ‘call’ them — rather than, say, as like Ys.

I emphasize the bodily aspect of this early learning to bring to attention the fact that, to the extent that such ‘somethings’ are never identical to previously encountered somethings, but are always unique and particular — such that we can only respond to ‘as themselves’, so to speak — we cannot be ‘told about them’ in words representative of ‘things’ already well known to us. In other words, in learning to act towards the unique what-ness of a previously unencountered ‘thing’ in the same way as those around us act towards it, we must also learn to make judgments as to what, linguistically, that ‘something’ is like, similar to their judgments, i.e., to make what Todes (2001) calls a “perceptual judgment,” i.e., a judgment which “expresses a determination arrived at by skill not by rule” (p.214), a judgment arrived at by our going out into our circumstances with a global, i.e, only partially specified, set of anticipations, allowing us to sense that this is like an X and not like a Y. For it is not the rule that determinesour actions, but how we have been trained to use the rule as others use it.

This, perhaps, is a surprising claim, and Wittgenstein (1953)

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acknowledged the unexpected nature of it in remarking: “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitionsbut also (queer as this may sound) in judgments” (no.242). Thus we must notonly be able to structure our own particular ‘doings’ as a sequence of events similar in kind to those already known about within a particular society’s ways of making sense of things, we must also be able to account for them, linguistically, as they also see fit.

It is at this point that we need to attend much more closely to the many different uses to which we can put our verbal and other expressions, not just in communicating information to others — to telling them facts about what they see before them — but also (1) in pointing out previously unnoticed features in our shared surroundings to attend to, (2) in suggesting relations between those features, and (3) in pointing to possibilities of seeing these relations as like others already shared betweenus, and so on. Here, rather than an after-the-fact representational use of language, in which we give expression to what is already for us a determinate circumstance, we need to note their before-the-fact function. As William James (1890) put it: “The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever” (pp.252-253); indeed, theycan arouse “feelings of tendency” within us, and in those we address which, as James goes on to say, are “often so vague that we are unable to name them at all” (p.254).

Elsewhere (Shotter, 2005, 2008), I have explored the function of whatI have called the action guiding anticipations4 we can arouse within ourselves by our use of words in our inner conversations — in sensing ‘where’ or ‘how’ next we need ‘to go on’ — in organizing our actions in the course of our conducting them. Thus, rather than using our words to express concepts, to designate a situation as being in fact of this or that kind already familiar tous, we can by our use of words in a non-conceptual manner to arouse in others, as in ourselves, a structured sequence of anticipations as to how, in looking over a situation, to see it in an utterly new way, or style of looking, a way or style of looking enabling us to say that it is like certain situations we have experienced before; another word we might use here is the word ‘genre’, to say that prior to our looking at all, we expect to see‘entities’ of a certain ‘generic’ kind, with only a globally specification.

Indeed, as I see it, it is about time we stopped talking about having ‘plans’, ‘rules’, ‘ideas’, etc. (and many other fictional entities in our heads we talkof as shaping our thoughts and talk), and started simply talking of our talking — although that is clearly very hard to do5. But the fact is, our words in their speaking exert much more of an influence in our being who and what we are in the world, and what we see and hear and value, than we are aware. For in their unfolding they arouse tensions, expectations, anticipations within us as to what next might possibly occur. As James (1890) puts it:

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“The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever” (pp.253-254). Thus we need to reverse, or to turn ‘inside-out’ or ‘back-to-front’, a great number of our taken-for-granted assumptions, and to accept that it is only as a result of an after-the-fact judgement that we can give distinctive names to the influences at work in shaping our unfolding relations to our surroundings, if we are to come to asense of the import of our talk, of our words in their speaking.

Yet this non-conceptual, action-directing use of our words — in essentially working on ourselves, rather than in seeking to discover uniquely new facts about the world in which we live — is highly unusual in our avowedly ‘scientific’ inquiries, in which our prior concepts, and the reasoned use of their implications, play such a central role in shaping our thinking and speaking. Yet, as Billig (2013) points out: “the big concepts which many social scientists are using — the ‘ifications’ and the ‘izations’ — are poorly equipped for describing what people do. By rolling out the big nouns6, social scientists can avoid describing people and theiractions. They can then write in highly unpopulated ways, creating fictionalworlds in which their theoretical things, rather than actual people, appearas the major actors” (p.7). And in our inquiries in to the nature of expertise, we have not yet, as I see it, escaped from using many of our major descriptive terms in this after-the-fact manner.

In other words, we are currently still caught up in a certain “thought style” (Fleck, 1979) in which we feel compelled to describe the world in which we live in words naming specific ‘entities’ or ‘forms’ that can be represented in terms of static shapes or patterns or configurations or concepts, to which our reality corresponds. We then go on to think of them ashaving agency in themselves, and thus of being responsible for how we act, or have acted. But the fact is, in doing so, we end up locating ourselves in a fictional world of our own creation, rather than remaining in the actual world of our everyday lives. But what we miss, in answering to our own initial anxiety at being disoriented in this fashion, is the fact that we always possess a prima facie sense of the ‘global genre’, so to speak, to which our current circumstances belong; our bewilderments are never general bewilderments, they are always situated, and as such, are specific bewilderments, giving rise, to repeat, to a structured sequence of anticipations as to how, in looking it over, to pick out features in it of importance to us.Yet currently, if challenged to account for our actions by colleagues, without having such mental representations to hand, we still act as if we are totally lost ‘at sea’ without a ‘compass’ or ‘echo (depth) sounder’, so to speak, to use in ‘readying’ ourselves in making our next move, when this isnot the case at all.

The retrospective discovery of our needs

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Turning now to the before-the-fact anticipatory function of our spontaneously responsive bodily expressions7, and their crucial role in our resolving on what the particular situation before us, we can now begin to see the development of an expertise in a particular practice in a new light. As Todes (2001) puts it, “practice makes the practitioner” (p.173). It is not merely a matter of our gaining, as the persons we are, a new skill or a newbody of knowledge, but of our actually becoming different persons — the changes in us are not merely epistemological ones but are ontological. For we can continually develop new ways of being practitioners of a particular skill, of being speakers, of being listeners, of being lookers or observers, and so on. And what we have missed in the past, is what is at work in us, motivating our urge to develop in this way.

Central to Todes’s (2001) whole approach to the ways in which we can develop, ontologically — by more well differentiating and articulating our skilful bodily relations to our surroundings — is his crucial assumption that “we begin as a creature of need rather than desire” (p.176). As he puts it:

A need, unlike a desire, is originally given as a pure restlessness; as the consciousness of one’s undirected activity. It beings with the sense of a lack in oneself, without any sense of what would remove that lack; it begins with the sense of an indeterminate lack of something-or-other, but nothing-in-particular... Now the whole sense of our explorationand discovery of the world is prompted by the sense of having been initially lost in the world... It was not that we had lostsomething; but that we were lost.... Our whole quest of discovery is thus initially prompted by need rather than desire. It is initially ‘directed’ not to get what we want but to discover what we want to get... The meeting of a need, unlike the satisfaction of a desire, always involves a confirmatory recognition of the need met, a recognition that retroactively determines the true nature of the need that prompted the activity culminating in its filling” (pp.176-177).

What is crucial in all of this, is that what we designate an ‘indeterminatesomething’ before us as, linguistically, is something we can only arrive atretrospectively, after-the-fact of the initial anticipatory tension spontaneously it spontaneously arouses in us as the particular indeterminacy it is — for, to repeat, as we assumed at the outset, as practitioners we must always act in unique, particular circumstances, in which never-before-encountered contextual details are of crucial importance. But to go further, in our sense of restlessness, our successes are never enough for us, we always feel that there is, or there was, a ‘something more’ we could have done in the circumstances before us — if only???? Thus we must examinenow, not only the processes within we can arrive, retrospectively, at

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appropriate linguistic designations of our needs, but also why such designations are always incomplete, and open to yet further articulation.

Reorientating our vocabulary:from Cartesian to Wittgensteinian accounts of expertise

What Todes (2001) brings to our attention above, is that it is one thing for us to make use of concepts in shaping our talk and other bodily expressions; it is quite another for us to learn in the first place how to master, so to speak, our own bodily responses to circumstantial events with the aid of the action guiding anticipations aroused within us by people’s utterances, and/or other bodily expressions. I say mastering here, as one of the ontological skills we learn in our first language learning, is the deliberate enactment of certain bodily responses to particular circumstances that previously happened, both to us and within us, only spontaneously. We must first learn, bodily8, to respond appropriately to the conceptual expressions with currency within our language communities, and then later, to go on to use these expressions in ways that those around us will find intelligible. As Todes(2001) puts it: “The percipient’s sense of the integrity of his perceptual activity is a sense of achievement, of practical self-com-posure, of having put-himself-together, integrated himself, by his skilful practice. This sense is derived from the verification of his [bodily felt] anticipations, which allows him to rest assured. It takes the form of an ease, or, at best, grace, of poise and movement. He feels, at least momentarily, the absolute master of himself as practical agent” (p.128) — agents only later become able, as I described it above, to ‘move about’ in the world in a ‘sure-footed’ manner. But at first, they must discover to themselves how to do this.

Redirecting our use of words

At this point, given our concern with how we acquire a certain expertise inour acting, and given Billig’s (2013) claim that we far too easily locate practitioners in fictional worlds of our own devising, it is important to notice that we can apply the same words to aspects of our activities in two very different ways: (1) after-the-fact of their occurrence in making factual claims as to the particular category of activity into which they seem to belong; or (2) in a before-the-fact manner to draw attention to facets or aspects of our activities that are very like facets or aspects present in other activities already well-known to us. In other words, with respect to the issue of expertise, we can distinguish between what we might call Cartesian-accounts of expertise (C-As) and Wittgensteinian-accounts (W-As), in that practitioners claim in their accounts of their expertise, either: (1) that they make use of a ‘framework’, ‘theory’, or ‘perspective’, or ‘model’ thatthey take as corresponding with reality, through which, or in terms of which, they perceive and act in the world around them9; or (2) that in their

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expertise, they make use of, as Wittgenstein (1953) calls them, “objects of comparison” (no.130) for use in sensing or noticing, not only similar, but also dissimilar features or aspects in and of their surroundings, indicative of possible ways that they might, or might not, be able to ‘go on’ to act further within them — not for use “as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond” (no.131).

Such objects of comparison (what later I will call descriptive expressions)are an aid practitioners in orienting or to relating themselves to their circumstances, practically, in that they can provide them with a structure of anticipations which they can ‘hold at the ready’, so to speak, indicative as to what the nature of the incoming results of their out going exploratory actions might be like. Indeed, it is at this point that I need sharply to make a distinction between the use of the phrase ‘account for’ here and theword ‘explain’: as I see it, an account is an aid to perception, to do withbringing ordinary everyday words to an otherwise indeterminate flow of circumstances, to constitute it as a sequence of recognizable events, i.e.,of events of a kind already well known within a society’s ways of making sense of things. While an ‘explanation’ is usually couched in the technicalterms of a theory, a cognitive device whose function is to reshape or remakeduce events, which already make one kind of sense, and to talk about them as being quite other than what ordinarily they seem to be (Shotter, 1984, p.4).

Further, in our everyday lives, we only need to give an account of our actions to others, if they find our actions bewildering, and cannot make sense of them. In so doing, we make use of, as Mills (1940) puts it, “the integrating, controlling, and specifying function [fulfilled by] a certain type of speech10... in socially situated actions” (p.905, my itals), thus toprovide others, not with an explanation of them, but with an orientation to them. Where the use of the words in uttering one’s account, works to arouse in its recipients, the “anticipated situational consequences of questioned conduct” (p.905).

I want to make this distinction between Cartesian-accounts of expertise, and Wittgensteinian-accounts, because, as Collins & Evans (2009) claim: “As with language, so with the expertises analogous to language — coming to ‘know what you are talking about’ implies successful embedding within the social group that embodies the expertise” (p.7), i.e., expertisehas often been attributed to certain people because they are very eloquent inbeing able to do representational talk that enables listeners to ‘picture’ relevant situations, thus to gain the impression that this is all there is to a fully detailed understanding of a crucial circumstance. I disagree. There have now been enough disasters — particularly in the spheres of international, military interventions, in health care, in banking, and evenin engineering — in which the judgments and decisions of such accepted experts in representational talk have turned out to be disastrously wrong (e.g. see Peterson, 2010). The ‘thin pictures’ couched the conceptual

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generalities they provide, not only exclude crucial particularities, they also exclude the crucial first-time responses that certain events happening around us can spontaneously ‘call out’ from us, quite surprisingly. Something hereis being missed.

What is being overlooked, Collins & Evans (2007) claim, is the role of what they call “interactional expertise,” that is, an “expertise in the language of specialism in the absence of an expertise in its practice” (p.28) that can aid “contributory experts” (p.31) — the actual practitioners of a practice — by bringing to their attention details that they themselves have not yet, perhaps, noticed. While I agree with Collins and Evans on the importance of language here, and my suggestion of a W-expertise is not wholly un-related to theirs, I am critical of it — especially in relation to how they want to use the term connoisseurship: “that it is at least possible to judge an expertise without being able to practice it” (p.59). For yet again, their talk is not in terms of before-the-fact perceptual judgments, to do with making sense of unique particularities, but is talk of after-the-fact judgments that Todes (2001) calls (following Kant), “theoretical judgments about experience” (p.75), which express uniformities or generalities inour experience.

What Collins and Evans miss, in my estimation, is yet again the fact that true expertise in a practice, enables practitioners, continually, to act in uniquely new, particular circumstances, by the exercise of an embodied skill, rather than by the application of the concepts or rules learnt in becoming a member of a particular linguistic community. For, although wecan continually find new ways of ‘wording’ our experiences to bring to light previously unnoticed aspects of our skilled activities that open up possibilities for their further development, as I see it, only those already withan embodied expertise in the practice can do this in a way that brings to light a need within the practice which have not yet been met. For what is needed, is not the mere naming of an unnoticed, circumstantial feature, but the deliberate arousing of an “acutely discriminative sense” of a vague or global “feelings of tendency” — to use James’ (1890) phrases — that might enablea ‘stuck’ practitioner to ‘go on’ to take a relevant next step.

So, although Collins and Evans surmise that, “as things develop the day may arise when, in response to a technical query, a respondent will reply ‘I had not thought of that’, and pause before providing an answer to [a] sociologist’s technical question” (p.33), the influence exerted by a sociologist’s utterance will not have issued from “what the analyst knows about the field” (p.33, my itals), i.e., from his or her acquired “interactional expertise,” an influence of an epistemological kind. If it exerts an influence at all on the practitioner, it will again be of an ontological kind, an accidental influence on a practitioner’s way of being a practitioner.

The crucial role of the bodily influences at work within us:

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the formation of particular hermeneutical unities of meaning within us Central to Collins and Evans’ (2007) account of the importance of what theycall “interactional expertise,” and central to their criticism of Dreyfus’ (1967)11 emphasis on the importance of our bodily involvements out in the socio-material world at large, is the case of Madeline; a congenitally blind woman with cerebral palsy, discussed by Oliver Sacks in his 1985 book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, who was admitted to his hospital in her 60th year. What is special about Madeline for Collins and Evans — although Sacks provided no childhood account of how, while being looked

1 “What actually thinks within a person is not the individual himself but his social community. The source of his thinking is not within himself but is to be found in his social environment and in the very social atmosphere he ‘breathes’. His mind is structured, and necessarily so, under the influence of this ever-present social environment and he cannot think in any other way” (Fleck, 1979, p.47).2 The economist John Quiggin (2010) coined the phrase “zombie ideas” to designate undead ideas in economics which still walk amongst us, in spite of repeated philosophical and theoretical refutations and a whole range of contrary facts. Suchis the case also, as I will endeavour to show below, in our efforts at understanding expertise — for we continuously feel that we cannot begin our inquiries until we have conceptualized or theorized the supposed topic of inquiries, that is, until we have fixed and captured the relevant phenomena in satisfactory language. This, however, I shall claim, is the get the issue back-to-front. 3 The somewhat oxymoronic nature of this phrase is intended; like any plant growingfrom a seed, such a particularity is still open to further inner articulations (developments), but only those that preserve its initial identity. The fact that the ‘indeterminacies’ we face are always particular indeterminacies, and not general ones, is crucial in all that follows. 4 I am aware that in talking of ‘anticipations’ I am also talking in an after-the-fact manner in relation to people’s activities. Yet we note the fact of their existence in people’s activities, by what, at any one moment, they go on to try to do, and bywhether they look satisfied or surprised, or whatever; as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, “there are characteristic signs of it in [a person's] behaviour” (no.54) indicating their anticipations to us.5 See note 4.6 It is noteworthy here, that Collins and Evans say that “a tacit-knowledge-laden expertise ... is in the language of a specialism” (p.28); not in the uses to which people might put that language.7 Here, we might draw on Mead’s (1934) conversation of gestures: “We must be constantly responding to the gesture we make if we are to carry on successful vocalconversation. The meaning of what we are saying is the tendency to respond to it” (p.67); or on Bakhtin’s (1981) claim that: “Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any living dialogue" (p.280).8 Even if the bodily learning involved is solely a matter of learning how to form speech sounds by sequentially ‘orchestrating’ the many distinctive features of one’s vocal tract skilfully. Thus, as will become clear, I am in disagreement with Collins and Evans (2007) when they claim, against Dreyfus (1967), that “you do not

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after by her family all her life, she had leant to understand language in the first place — is that she acquired an enormous amount of knowledge passively, not by having leant to read Braille, but by listening to talking books and by having others read to her. Indeed, as Sack remarks that, although he expected to find her “both retarded and regressed.. She spoke freely... revealing herself to be a high-spirited woman of exceptional intelligence and literacy” (p.56). Yet, although her “hands were mildly spastic and athetoic... [but still perfectly sensitive to] light touch, pain, temperature, [and] passive movement of the fingers” (pp.56-57), she had not learnt Braille, for she had developed no voluntary use of her handsat all12.

I have described the case of Madeline in some detail, as it is very central to Collins and Evans’ (2007) efforts at Rethinking Expertise, for they want to claim that she had acquired a great deal of knowledge of things, solely from being a passive (?) listener to other people’s talk. But what they miss in all of this, in treating her as a mere receptacle of (linguistically representable) knowledge are the bodily feelings Madeline makes use of in her skilful choosing and sequencing appropriate words in her being a communicator — a highly-spirited and intelligent communicator in fact. She did not just gabble words, but clearly had a skill in expressing her knowledge in certain13 relevant ways in the course of her conversations with Sacks, and with others, and to sense how to use particular words in particular circumstances to give fitting responses to those speaking with her. What might be at work within her enabled her to do this? What do we

have to use your body... in order to speak the language of a domain” (p.78). Indeed, I will have more to say below about their claim that “interactional expertise” (p.14) — being able to speak well about a domain of practice — is a crucial aspect in achieving the highest levels of expertise.... doing new and unexpected things... 9 Like a ‘point of view’, a ‘framework’ or ‘perspective’ imposes on a visual scene, that otherwise would be an inexhaustible source of discernible features, a particular ordering. 10 I italicize the word ‘speech’ here because, as we will see, it is the actual activity of speaking a sequence of words that can, by arousing certain bodily feelings in recipients, provide them with appropriate orienting anticipations. And because, further, below, Collins & Evans (2007) write, not of speech or speaking, but simply of “the language of a specialism” (p.28).11 Dreyfus (1967) acknowledges Todes account of our bodily felt “needs” here, and the fact that we only discover them to ourselves retrospectively, by discovering in ourbodily activities out in the world at large, those that provide us with what “Todescalls our sense of gratification” (p.25).12 Later, as Sacks (1985) reports, by leaving her food out of her reach: “One day it happened — what had never happened before: impatient, hungry, instead of waitingpassively and patiently, she reached out an arm, groped, found a bagel, and took itto her hands. This was her first use of her hands, her first manual act, in sixty years, and it marked her birth as a ‘motor individual’” (p.59). In other words, as Todes (2001) puts it, she was still “a creature of need rather than desire” (p.176)

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come to embody in the course of learning a first language that makes it possible for us to do this?

What we learn, in leaning a first language, is not merely facts, thatevery ‘thing’ has a name14, but how to pick a ‘something’ out from within the flow of indeterminate ‘stuff’ happening around and within us, and to place it within a whole inner web of internal relationships as a unique thisness, a unique presence, in relation to a whole range of other distinctivethatnesses already known to us — and to become acquainted with it as a ‘something’ called an X (but not a Y). In our words, prior to our acquiringwhat we call knowledge, we acquire, I want to suggest, an inner sense, an inner landscape, a whole set of intra-connected particular hermeneutical unities15 which function to situate us, to orient us, in relation to the our current circumstances. For our primary task in the world is not that of arriving atitems of factual knowledge, at a set of finished and finalized objective understandings that can be represented by (pictured in) purely spatial forms, butthat of getting clear to ourselves, possible ways of moving around in the world we share with others.

Thus, as I see it, just as we can come to construct a particular, holistic, unity of meaning as we read the sequence of separate words constituting a particular text, so as we look over a particular visual scene — fixating sequentially first on a feature here, and then on one there, until we feel that we have satisfactory perceptual sense of what, actually, the scene before us is — we also come to construct within ourselves a similar such meaningful unity. Beginning from our immersion within an indeterminate, but unique whole, approached by us initially with only a global preparedness — as a text, we initially expect it to be a novel, poem, or text-book, say, while if it is a social situation, full of people, our global expectations are of a quite different kind — as we move,step-by-step, from part-to-whole and back again, we gradually specifying orinternally articulate it as a living order adapted to the undistorted accommodation of all its particular, discernible details, with our initial only partially specified, global expectations becoming more specific as we proceed. And in the process, in being prepared to explore the circumstance before us, this way and that, in a flexible manner, in accord with seeking gratification of our expectations, to repeat, what each particular detail

13 I say ‘certain’ ways, as it is one thing to simply reproduce a factual account of what one has learnt, and quite another, to use that knowledge creatively, in bringing to light previously unnoticed features within a person’s activities; Sacks providesno descriptions of Madeline’s capacities in this later respect. 14 Naming facts — after the fact of their occurrence — already presupposes too much about our ability to use language in responding to other people’s utterances for us toassume naming as the foundation of our ability to use linguistic forms: “One forgets,” says Wittgenstein (1953), “that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense” (no.257). 15 That I earlier called particular indeterminacies.

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means to us becomes clear, by it being ‘placed’ within the larger whole within which it ‘plays its part’, its role.

What we need to note about the process involved (of arriving at such a hermeneutical unity) is that just as we do not begin reading a particulartext by assuming a pre-established, theoretical order or set of abstract concepts to which we must assimilate the first words we encounter if we areunderstand their meaning, as particular instances of something more general, with all their uniqueness lost, neither do we in getting oriented in the circumstances before us. Rather, in getting oriented, as Todes (2001) puts it, our quest is to discover the precise nature of our disorientation, of our bewilderment, not simply to get what we want, but “to discover what we want to get” (p.177), what in fact our need “is” in the situation before us.

And when are such processes finished? Never, it would seem. Such processes of progessive articulation are always, clearly, open to yet further specification — but only (and this is most important) of an alreadyspecified kind. In other words, at each moment in the unfolding process, what has been specified so far is known only in terms of its already specified further specifiability (Shotter, 1980); it cannot be finalized and defined once and for all.

Beyond expertise

Central to my approach, in line with Todes’ (2007) distinction between theoretical and perceptual judgments, is the crucial distinction I have drawn between (1) after-the-fact and (2) before-the-fact uses of language: between (1) uses of language in which we describe things or events which already make one kind of sense to us as being in fact of another kind, determined by the theory, model, or framework we have adopted in guiding our inquiries, and (2)uses in which we describe particular things or event as being like others well known to us, in determining how we might possibly relate ourselves to them, with there being no end to the comparisons that we might make.

I want to insist on this distinction, as it seems to me that we all too easily mislead ourselves into thinking that we are discovering pre-existing ‘things’ in our inquiries — such as ‘rules’, ‘plans’, ‘thoughts’, intentions’, ‘ideas’, ‘values’, ‘beliefs’, etc., etc — when in fact, our claim that such ‘things’ have been at work in shaping our activities is theresult of an after-the-fact judgment. As a result, instead of portraying practitioners as people who must continually determine for yet another first time, the nature of the circumstances they face, we portray them as simply assimilating each new circumstance to one or another category of already well known ones, and thus acting according to a pre-established program of activities, just as, in fact, a computer may act16.

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No doubt, we can come to act like that. But it is only possible for us to do it, after we have already successfully completed quite a number of such performances, and established a global structure of anticipations within ourselves enabling us to ignore ‘calls’ from our surroundings, and to act solely in accord with our own inner plans or desires — what above, I called the intellectualized “thought style” (Fleck, 1979) of today. But our initial forays out into our surroundings, within which we discover to ourselves theincoming consequences of our own outgoing activities — the activities necessary to establishing our capacity to act in a solely self-directed manner — cannot possibly be conducted in this knowledgeable manner.

In portraying practitioners as people who first reflect on the circumstances they confront, and then simply decide upon a particular courseof action, chosen from among a number of possibilities, we totally fail to grasp that, as participants, they are already caught up in an ongoing, but quite specific maelstrom of intra-mingling, flowing activities — which is shaping them more than they can shape it — from within which they must produce recognizable, legitimate, and above all, successful (in relation toalready existing criteria) actions and utterances. In other words, rather than functioning within an already determinate world and moving around within it simply in regular ways, practitioners must move forward through astill to an extent indeterminate world that they are determining as they go. They are not merely reflecting on its with the aim of mastering it17, i.e., with making again, for a second time, what it has already made, but now according to our own wants or desires — although, mistakenly, we often doact as if that is our basic aim18 in life. Whereas, if Todes (2001) is correct, and I think he is, our quest in the world “begins with a sense of a lack in oneself, without any [initially clear] sense of what would remove that lack,” thus our seeking “begins with the sense of an indeterminate lack of something-or-other, but nothing-in-particular” (pp.176-177) — not an utterly indeterminate sense, a disordered chaos, but of a “specifically vague” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.40) nature.19

From Dreyfus (1967) to Dreyfus & Dreyfus (2008)

Dreyfus (1967), in his very first excursions into this sphere, also drew attention to the role of our bodies in our acquisition of skills: “The bodyallows a... flexible criterion of what fulfills its expectations. It need not check for specific characteristics or a specific range of characteristics, but simply for whether, on the basis of its expectations, it is coping with the object.... Thus, where...a machine [must] recognize an object in order to manipulate it, a human being can manipulate an object inorder to recognize it” (pp.20-21, my itals) — by beginning, initially, with

16 And indeed, because Collins and Evans (2007) claim that “you do not have to use your body” in acquiring an interactional expertise, “Dreyfus’s reliance on the embodiment thesis must fail as a critique of the possibility of computers acquiringlanguage” (p.78).

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global, already specified possibilities for further specification (see above). And he drew on Todes’ work on the importance of our bodily needs in structuring the prior expectations which prepare us to move in certain ways in the executions of our practical activities out in the world. Being able to see a thread in an indeterminate tangle of threads, thus to untangleit; to pick out details; to bring a visual scene into focus; to see an arrangement of lines as a blueprint for a building; all entail our going out towards what is before us, prepared to act in relation to it in certain ways, seeking the satisfaction of a certain need. But at first, as we saw above, we are unclear as to what our needs are: We find what they are, Dreyfus notes, “through what Todes calls our sense of gratification. This gratification is experienced as the discovery of what we needed all along, but it is a retroactive understanding and covers up the fact that we were unableto make our need determinate without first receiving that gratification” (p.25, my itals).

I mention this early work because, in its light — (1) the centrality of our understandings as arising only out of the importance of our initial before-the-fact, global anticipations and expectations, and (2) of our understandings only being made determinate retroactively — the later work of Dreyfus & Dreyfus(2005 & 2008) seems to me to be insufficiently mindful of their importance.The vocabulary of terms they use, first in their 5-stage model of skill acquisition, and then their addition of a sixth stage of mastery, completely fails, as I see it, to take these two issues into account. So, although the distinction between C-As and W-As of expertise I made above may seem to run parallel to Dreyfus and Dreyfus’20 (2005) five-stage model —moving from (1) ‘Novice’, to (2) ‘Advanced Beginner’, to (3) ‘Competent’ and then (4) ‘Proficient’, and finally to (5) ‘Expert’ — with C-As being roughly equivalent to their first three stages, and W-As to their last two,I still want to be critical of their use of words in a way similar to my

17 Descartes’ (1968) aim, in his 1637 Discours was, he said, by applying the methods of rational inquiry he had laid out there, to “thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78).18 As Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, our assumption that our world an already-made world functioning in terms of a rigorous ‘logic’, is an assumption our own making: “The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination round. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need)” (no.108) — where our real need is our coming to an understanding of why that (mistaken) assumption plays such a basic role in our everyday social lives together.19 “The expressions do not have a sense that remains identical through the changingoccasions of their use. The events that were talked about were specifically vague. Not only do they not frame a clearly restricted set of possible determinations but the depicted events include as their essentially intended and sanctioned features an accompanying ‘fringe’ of determinations that are open with respect to internal relationships, relationships to other events, and relationships to retrospective and prospective possibilities” (Garfinkel, 1967, pp.40-41, my itals).20 Henceforth D&D.

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critique of Collins and Evans.

For in their general use of words, and in their chosen vocabulary, they are still offering after-the-fact, de-contextualized accounts of people’s activities, suggesting the need for cognitive developments within ourselves in coming to an understanding of expertise, when in fact our need is for before-the-fact situated accounts influencing our perception — accounts that direct our attention, as Mills (1940) puts it, towards the “anticipated situational consequences” (p.905) of our acting in certain particular ways.

Let me clarify what I mean here, by turning their 2008 writing on: Beyond Expertise. In it, as they say, they are concerned to draw attention to a possible sixth stage, “Mastery,” in the acquisition of a skill, by introducing “a subtle, but important rethinking and rewording of what mightbe called one’s ‘intuitive perspective’ as it enters our account at stage four, proficiency” (MS, p.1, my itals).

First, as in their previous accounts, D&D set out Stage 1 in the following terms: “Normally, the instruction process begins with the instructor decomposing the task environment into context-free features that the beginner can recognize without the desired skill. The beginner is then given rules for determining actions on the basis of these features, like a computer following a program” (MS, p.1, my itals). But even here, as I see it, D&D come on the scene too late in the day (by assuming that giving ‘rules’ will lead to people sensing the ‘features’ needed to determine their actions)21, and look in the wrong direction (back in time, rather than to the future), with an inappropriate aim in mind (cognitive rather than perceptual).

For even with a beginner, an instructor cannot just state a rule, andexpect beginners to identify the ‘features’ named in the ‘rule’ correctly, in each new particular circumstance in which they must act; applying the rule correctly requires their making a judgment, that is, requires their skilful exploration of each new circumstance they encounter to see, if within its myriad features, just the anticipated situational consequences of their actions are likely to occur within it. Yet, nonetheless, just as D&D suggest, this is how beginners are instructed.

For instance, there have been many failures in recent time in Britishhospitals of adequate nursing care. As a consequence, the National Health Service (NHS) has now issued a statement of “The 6Cs of Nursing Care:” Care; Compassion; Competence; Communication; Courage; and Commitment — in that statement, for example, “Compassion” is described as: “how care is given through relationships based on empathy, respect and dignity; it can also be described as intelligent kindness and is central to how people perceive their care” (see The-6cs-defined, 2014). The trouble is, that in

21 See note 11.

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the relevant statement, it is assumed that the meaning of the features named — compassion, empathy, dignity, respect, and intelligent kindness — are all well-known to beginners, and will all show up in the same way in whatever the particular circumstance is, in which they need act. Indeed, D&Dgo on to say that such features or aspects will, in fact, show up as “a discriminable class of patterns of stimuli reaching one’s sense organs thatcan be identified and given a name by a teacher” (MS, p.9), thus drawing attention to some ‘thing’ out in the world, rather than to what an instructee can expect to experience happening as a consequence of their acting in a compassionate fashion.

But what beginner nurses lack, is not the capacity to say that compassion consists in being able to act with empathy and respect, etc.; weall know that. What they lack is the capacity to relate or to orient themselvesto their patients — in the course of washing, dressing, feeding, toileting,in giving medications to them, etc. — in ways that others will judge them, after-the-fact, as having related to them compassionately.

In other words, yet again, what is at issue here, even initially, is that the instruction required cannot be achieved by directing people’s attention to discriminable patterns out in the world — for non-such exist, little consensus has emerged in the psychological literature about what, for instance, counts as empathy (Coplan & Goldie, 2011). It is a matter of instructors arousing in their instructees, by the use of their words — in uttering their ‘pointings out’ and in their ‘helpful commentaries’ — action guiding anticipations of the situational consequences of their actions (Shotter, 2005, 2008). For the difference between recognizing compassion, after an expression of it, and knowing how to try, before-the-fact, to act compassionately in each particular situation we encounter, is another matter altogether.

From “Mastery” to “Poised, Resourceful Edge Dwelling”

I now want to extend this critique to what D&D (2008) say/write about theirsixth stage that they call the stage of Mastery. For again, it seems to me, D&D make use of Cartesian, representational forms of talk, which they themselves then use as a ‘framework’ or ‘perspective’ through which, or in terms of which, they perceive ‘things’, and think of them, as existing in a form corresponding to their own characterization of them. And in doing this, as I indicated above, they seem to an extent to have dropped Dreyfus’ (1967) concern with the flexibility22 of our bodily expectations.

22 The fact that when compared with a machine that “can, at best, make a specific set of hypotheses and then find out if they have been confirmed or refuted by the data. The body allows a much more flexible criterion of what fulfills its expectations. It need not check for specific characteristics or a specific range ofcharacteristics, but simply for whether, on the basis of its expectations, it is coping with the object” (Dreyfus, 1967, pp.20-21).

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Thus rather than a focus on activities that might arouse global bodilyexpectations within instructees, their cental focus is now of the notion ofstudents entertaining a perspective, cognitively. They first introduce the meaning of the term in a discussion of their Stage 3, Competence. At this stage, as they see it, as students become overloaded and realize the sheer complexity of the situations within which they must act, they learn “to devise a plan, or choose a perspective, that then determines which elements of the situation or domain must be treated as important and which ones can be ignored” (MS, p.3, my itals). In other words, at this point, as I indicatedabove, they use the notion of a “perspective” in giving an after-the-fact Cartesian–Account (C-A) of some ‘thing’ within us that specifically, ratherthan globally or stylistically, determines our perceptual experience for us.

Consequently, as they see it, rather than beginning by drawing the attention of beginners to the fact that they always already possess at least a sense of the style of the situation they confront — which they can then articulate in more detail by their further explorations of it — they begin by suggesting that practitioners look for “discriminable patterns” within it. They ignore whatstudent practitioners could learn from the responsiveness of their own bodies, from what just happens within them as a result of their moving around withinthe situation in question, and the consequent “feelings of tendency” (James) that can be aroused in such movements. Instead, in describing Stage 3 competent & Stage 4 performers, they say: “For the competent performer, perspective means the deliberative choice of what context-free features andaspects of a situation are important constituents of one’s rules for behaviour, and which are irrelevant or of lesser significance. For the proficient performer, however, perspective is best thought of as a set of discriminable patterns of stimuli, most of which are unnamable, with some component patterns seen as crucial and others as of lesser or no importance” (MS, p.9).

Then, after having centred their focus on the importance of deliberately chosen perspectives, in going on to introduce the new sixth stage of Mastery (beyond the stage of the expert), they say that: “The future master must bewilling and able, in certain situations, to override the perspective that as an expert performer he intuitively experiences. The budding master forsakes the available ‘appropriate perspective’ with its learned accompanying action and deliberatively chooses a new one” (MS, p.9, my itals). And they then go on to sum up: “When an expert learns, she must either create a new perspective in a situation when a learned perspective has failed, or improve the action guided by a particular intuitive perspective when the intuitive action proves inadequate. A master will not only continue to do this, but will also, in situations where she is already capable of what is considered adequate expert performance, be open to a new intuitive perspective and accompanying action that will lead to performance that exceeds conventional expertise... due to their dedication to their chosen profession, the ability to savour and dwell on successes, and a willingnessto persevere despite the risk of regression during learning, the master’s

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brain comes to instantiate significantly more available perspectives with accompanying actions than the brain of an expert” (MS, p.11, my itals).

There is much I think is wrong with this account, mainly to do with their claim, to repeat, that what it is at work within practitioners is a perspective — whether deliberately chosen or intuitively adopted — for a perspective, in imposing a specific order on a circumstance, seems to disallow practitioners the fluid, flexibility, to relate or to orient towards their circumstances, as being like this at this moment, and like that at that moment, while as being like neither in the next moment.

Further, in claiming that it is a master’s “dedication to their chosen profession, the ability to savour and dwell on successes, and a willingnessto persevere despite the risk of regression during learning,” that leads toachievements beyond expertise, draws attention away, I think, from other important characteristics of those special people — who are not leaders in the sense of being the central organizer of a whole group of other people within a social institution — but who nonetheless ‘stand out’ within their chosen field of endeavour in exhibiting to the others around them what elsewhere I have called a poised resourcefulness (Shotter, 2011). They are people who have, ontologically, explored ways of orienting or relating themselves to ‘human’ fields of experience that others have not yet explored, and who then go on to exhibit or to present in their actions, achievements made possible as a result of the new sensitivities they have developed in their ways-of-being-in-the-world — achievements that others experience as important and wish also to emulate.

As we explore each new field of experience we encounter, our need (Todes, 2001) as we approach it (or it approaches us), is that of coming to“know [our] way about’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.123) within it, of gaining orientation, or as Todes (2001) puts it, of gaining poise: “As soon as I am poised in my circumstance,” he says, “I know what I am doing. I know not merely what movements I am making. I know at once, by doing it, not merely what I, with my body, am doing, but also what I am doing, i.e., something about those objects to which I am doing something with my body... To be poised is to be self-possessed by being in touch with one’s circumstance. To lose touch is immediately to lose one’s poise” (p.66).

Rather than a focus on successes, what Todes’ focus on our need for poise suggests, is that departures from our embodied expectations, as we approach aparticular new circumstance, can play a major role in our coming to new andunique understandings, whether of individual people or of particular situations. For they can ‘call’ us to undertake the further practical explorations we still need to undertake, for instance, when meeting a new person, if we are to understand them as the unique person he or she is. And we do not do this (at least not wholly) by deliberately adopting this or that perspective in relating ourselves to them — the fact is, we find their unique personality becoming apparent to us as we intra-mingling our activities in

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with theirs. Our capacity to do this — to come to a unique understanding of a particular person or circumstance — seems to be something that our body does for us, so to speak. Indeed, our continual sensing of similarities (but not identities), and as a result, also of differences, is so basic to our very way orways of being in the world, that we take our body’s resourcefulness in thisrespect so for granted that we fail to appreciate its importance, and the fact that it, like many other aspects of our living being, is something that develops, and can still developed further, in different ways in different circumstances.

D&D’s focus on our use of perspectives and frameworks and such like, as devices for establishing boundaries around their fields of experience, in the avoidance of overloading, is in the service of people, not only stayingin control of the circumstances within which they must act, but also of staying within the limited ways of talking about, i.e., representing their fields of experience, already familiar to them. But for those innovators who ‘stand out’ for us, it is precisely this overload that opens up for them, new fields of experience and new ways of talking of them. As James (2003/1912) puts it: “Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a morethat continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds” (p.72) — and, as I see it, it is this ‘more’ that such innovatorsare continually seeking to explore.

They begin, not so much as D&D suggest, by “savouring” their successes, but by feeling intrigued at finding themselves entranced by a phenomenon without, at first, knowing why; with finding themselves disquieted, without at first know what their disquiet is. They feel that nomatter how successful they have so far been, there is always a ‘something more’ that they do not yet possess as a bodily resource; their felt need for orientation remains not wholly gratified. Thus they not yet feel whollypoised in responding to events occurring around them, as not yet being able to the speak the words that will arouse within them the needed way of anticipating what next might happen to and within them. While as signs of direction in thought we might possess an acutely discriminative sense of their globalnature, in is only in our speakings that we can open up for ourselves a socially intelligible inner landscape of meanings, of possibly accountable ways of acting. Where, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) so nicely puts it: “There is that which is to be said, and which is as yet no more than a precise uneasiness in the world of things-said” (p.19).

In place of D&D’s sixth stage, then, I want to propose, not Mastery (which in any case is an after-the-fact designation), but Resourceful Poised Edge Dwellers, a phrase designating outstanding people who have, not only acquired a great deal of discriminative knowledge in relation to a particular field of concern, but who also in their actions have taken achievements in that field to new, previously undreamt of ‘places’, and know how to continue to do so; people who after achieving a great deal of

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success, still sense ‘disquiets', that there is always a 'something more' unexplored within their fields of experience, and who know how to 'go out' in search of that 'something more'.

Conclusions: moving between our two ways of making sense

“We have two irreducibly different ways of experiencing things; byanticipation of them; and by immediate production of them. Neither capacity is derivable from the other. Yet we are not bound to understand one in terms of the other. We can pass backand forth between them as modes of understanding. Together withour two radically different ways of experiencing things, we have two basic modes of worldly understanding... Thus we can understand each mode of experience from the vantage-point of the other” (Todes, 2001, p.201).

It is important to accept that we never begin our inquiries in total bewilderment; not only are our bewilderments specific bewilderments, but our bodies possess resources, and can come to possess further resources, that allow us to relate ourselves to our surroundings, without our having to conceptually represent to ourselves the movements we are going to make in comingto a grasp of what is around us. As Dreyfus (1967) stated it long ago: “Where...a machine [must] recognize an object in order to manipulate it, a human being can manipulate an object in order to recognize it” (pp.20-21). We learn perceptual ways of judging things in the course of our practical involvements with the others around us, prior to our gaining a self-conscious sense of their nature, conceptually: they simply show up in how something is done within our “thought collective” (Fleck, 1979), in the course of our, and the others around us, doing of it.

Yet, the astounding success of the physical sciences, the sciences ofour “external world” (Russell, 1914), has (mis)lead us into feeling that there is only a single, royal road to proper knowledge of our surroundings, knowledge for which we can state our evidence for believing in it. This has led us to fail to pay attention to the basic role of our bodily felt sensings of the particular character of our current circumstances, and of the bodily capacities and resources, linguistic and otherwise, that we can bring to bear in making socially intelligible sense of them. As Todes (2001) notes above, neither of our capacities to function in these ways, is“is derivable from the other,” as I have suggested above, and as Todes suggests, we can pass back and forth between them in progressively articulating our particular understanding of a particular circumstance to adegree sufficient to our poised acting within it.

Currently debate rages (see Schear, 2013) as to whether all our skilled activities in fact draw on our conceptual capacities in some way ofother (the view of John McDowell), or whether we draw on non-rational, non-propositional, embodied coping skills of a completely non-conceptual kind

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(Dreyfus’ view). As Dreyfus (2013) sees it, “McDowell begins his account ofthe relation of mind to world too late” (p.23, my emphasis), and in this I can only agree. But I want also to add that Dreyfus does not supply an account of the process within which the kind of “holistic background” or “field of forces” that we can become absorbed in which can keep on “drawing us to keep up our ongoing coping like a pilot staying on the beam” (p.21). He merely provides an after-the-fact phenomenological description of the outcome of an earlier process. Thus in another sense, his account is also too late; as I see it, a before-the-fact account is required (see Shotter, 2014).

What might a before-the-fact account of the bodily process involved here entail? Among many other crucial features, central to it would be hermeneutically-structured unities of meaning: As I see it, the kind of holistic, fields of forces Dreyfus sees us as becoming absorbed in, are very like the holistic, unities of meaning we come to construct, hermeneutically, as we read a text.

We do not begin such a process with a set of pre-established, generalconcepts to which the first words we encounter need to be assimilated, hoping to explain them as particular instances of something more general, with all their uniqueness lost. The process begins with our being immersed within an indeterminate whole in its full individuality and particularity, known to us only globally as situated within a particular genre (as a novel, textbook, instruction manual, etc). We then proceed to conduct a step-by-step movement, from part-to-whole and back again, gradually specifying or internally articulating it as an organized unity adapted to the undistorted accommodation of all the particular, discernible details in the original global whole. Exploring the circumstances within which we must act can, I suggest, lead to us developing a similar such organized unity.

What is special about such hermeneutical unities, is their functioning as particular imaginative universals: a) particular in the sense of being distinct from all other such unities; b) imaginative in the sense of providing an inexhaustible landscape of possibilities related to the unity in question; and c) universal in the sense of our being able to make use of them, as sources of possible likenesses and differences, in many spheres of our everyday life’s activities — features that not only make them quite distinct from abstract generalities or general concepts, but which make them available for countlessly many different comparisons.

Much more remains to be said, but as I see it, a Wittgensteinian-accountof expertise aimed at looking out into our circumstances to notice more andmore connections and relations within them — guided by various comparative or navigational devices — has a chance of avoiding some of the disasters of a Cartesian-account of expertise in which we turn away from further explorations of our particular circumstances in order to think about them only in general terms.

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Clearly, there is much, much more to explore within the approach to expertise I have broached above. In it, I have both emphasized the role of our embodied, perceptual skills and judgments by following Todes (2001), and also suggested, following Wittgenstein (1953), that it in our speakings,in our actual face-to-face, body-to-body, communicative uses of language that we can exert an influence on the very nature of a practitioner’s being — not by providing them with knowledge of previously unknown facts — but byhaving an influence on the structure of anticipations or expectations which we they ‘go out’ to meet each particular circumstance within which they must act. Thus I have disagreed with D&D (2008) that what they call “Mastery” takes us beyond mere expertise, and criticized them for ignoring the fact that, as a consequence of our spontaneous involvement (entanglement) within a ceaseless flow of living, expressive-responsive activities as we grow up, we accumulate in our bodies various “ontological skills” (Shotter, 1984; Spinosa, et al, 1997), various ways-of-being an expert in a practice, to do with continually developing within ourselves new sensitivities, and new capacities to notice fleeting events and to anticipate their situated consequences. We come to embody this kind of knowing early in our lives without effort, as an aspect of our ‘growing up into’ the culture-world of the those around us. It is a form of learning that happens to without our undergoing any explicit teaching. It is done ‘in’ our being spontaneously responsive to ‘things’ occurring around us (including the spontaneous expressions of those around us), and also, by them being spontaneously responsive to the expressive aspects of our responsiveness.

Further, I have also disagreed with Collins and Evans’ (2007) attemptto claim an importance for the special nature of an “interactional expertise,” that they say is implicit (embodied?) simply in the language of a specialism, and which provides knowledge of a kind quite distinct from thatpossessed by practitioners. The novel claim that I have made, is that — with Todes’ (2001) claim that our need for poise in our everyday lives at its centre — is that certain outstanding people take us ‘beyond expertise’ by bothexploring fields of experience few others explore, and by verbalizing their findings that open features of those fields to others — I have called these special people Resourceful Poised Edge Dwellers. And even though I disagree with Collins & Evans, and with D&D, I count them as also among such edge dwellers.

Notes:

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