In EL CONOCIMIENTO DE LA REALIDAD SOCIAL (Social Psychology in the Making: Problems and Basic

Issues, Barcelona and San Sebastian, 15th-19th July, 1987) Ed. T. Ibanez Gracia. Barcelona: Sendai
Ediciones.

THE ROLE OF THE IMAGINARY IN THE MAKING OF SOCIAL LIFE.

John Shotter

Faculty of Social Sciences,

Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht.

"What then is this reality to which 'I' or 'you' refers? It is solely a 'reality of discourse',
and this is a very strange thing” (Benveniste, 1971, p.218).

ABSTRACT: Taking a social constructionist approach but of a practical rather than a

theoretical kind - I shall discuss the processes within which people, between themselves,
construct 'organized settings' of enabling/constraints 'into' which to direct their future
actions. Such settings give rise to imaginary, and indeed, often impossible objects which
have no real existence, and which 'subsist' only 'in' people's social practices. However, to
the extent that we can talk about them, they can inform and structure our behaviour. The
most important 'object' of this kind is what we each are pleased to call our 'self'. Such
imaginary objects play important roles, both in maintaining the multiple, partial
structurings of daily life, and in maintaining its openness to further articulations. Any
attempt to complete them as real objects destroys their nature, and can lead to an
enclosed (mechanical) form of social life.

To begin with, let me first distinguish the world of "civil society" (Vico, 1948), or the "hurly-burly" of
everyday life (as Wittgenstein, 1980, called the multiplicity of partial orderings in everyday life), from the
devices and institutions of the State, as well as from the economic mechanisms of production, distribution
and exchange. These latter, as self-reproducing patterns and structures of official social life, clearly exist
and are empirically identifiable as such. But what I want to argue is that the unofficial, everyday hurly-
burly of social life, is not best thought of as consisting in particular, fixed and empirically identifiable
structures and activities, but as possessing, in a special sense, an imaginative nature. Its nature is best
thought of as only subsisting 'in' the mutually intelligible activities occurring between people.

It lacks, I want to claim, any fully developed nature at all; it is only partially structured and open,
to a certain limited extent, to further development, to further shaping or reshaping by those involved in
its conduct. Hence, in our arguments about the nature of things, we must take it that our statements
(whether true, false, or meaningless) are not always about real things, sometimes what they refer to is
imaginary; and there can be true (and false and meaningless) statements about imaginary things.

And furthermore, what I want to argue, that what is at stake in the further structuring and
shaping of the imaginary character of our daily social life together, is what people are pleased to think of
as their identities, i.e., who and what they think of themselves as being, or as trying to be, in relation to the
others (and the "otherness") surrounding them - and this, their embeddedness in such formative
activities, is what determines their motives and feelings, what they feel worth undertaking, and what they
feel is intelligible and reasonable. Hence the importance and the 'contested' nature (Gallie, 1955-56) of
factors affecting the material structure of the hurly-burly of everyday life: our uncertain task is to be
human beings, if only we knew what was entailed in being so. While we may live a life consciously
'alienated' from the State, as well as from the economic mechanisms of social life, it is in the practices of
daily life which seem to structure our images of what we take our 'real' nature to be. And they do so to
such a deep extent that, quite literally, we do not know how to argue for ourselves as being otherwise -

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even though we may often feel a deep disquiet at the adequacy of such images of ourselves and our lives
together.

ENTRAPMENT: UNTRUE BUT INCORRIGIBLE 'CERTAINTIES'.

"Waiting for Godot" as how it is.

Let me try to illustrate some of my reasons for wanting to argue in favour of the imaginative nature of
everyday life, by beginning with a quotation from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (Beckett, 1956,
p.80). Vladimir, one of Beckett's down-and-outs, is addressing a great deal of confused discourse to
Estragon, the other tramp, about whether they should stick to their apparently assigned task - to wait for
Godot - or whether it is a proper part of their general human nature to help a fellow human being in
distress, urgently calling for their help. Vladimir suddenly sees a way out of their confusion: they do not
need to know whether they are responsible for representing the whole of mankind or not, because

"... that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are
blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one
thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come -"

And that is how at first they justify their reluctance to help.

But the tragedy for Beckett's down-and-outs (and the comedy for us) is that the one thing they
feel perfectly clear about - their supposed motive for most of their daily activity together, the one thing
they feel would transform everything for them: the actual arrival of Godot - is an illusion. It plays no part
in their lives at all; in fact, they live without it. It is a talked-about-Godot, a stand-in, a surrogate, for the
elusive being who never actually appears, and only subsists 'in' their talk, which we, and they, would say
(but falsely) exerts 'its' influence. But such a claim is false, it is the reverse of the truth: for it is a certain
form of talked-about-activity, activity talked about as waiting, which necessitates their reference to a
Godot, not the existence of a Godot which necessitates their waiting. No such Godot (at least in their
experience) has ever existed. While they explain their activity to themselves by referring their supposed
waiting to the supposed existence of a Godot (rather than Godot's existence by their waiting), they
actually get on in the meantime perfectly well without the existence of this Godot. It is an imagined Godot
which plays a part in their lives.

Indeed, the final hollow laugh in all of this, is, of course, that, not only are they are self-deceived,
but they collude in one another's self-deception: they not only accept one another's account of what it is
that they are doing, they remind one another of their task. But the one thing which alone seems clear to
them - that they are waiting for Godot - is not a correct account at all of what they are in fact doing. It is a
socially-constructed and socially-maintained illusion in terms of which they together make sense of their
lives to themselves, and to which they feel they must subordinate themselves.

Estragon: We're not tied?

Vladimir: I don't hear a word you're saying.
Estragon: (chews, swallows) Tied?
Vladimir: How do you mean?
Estragon: Down.
Vladimir: But to whom?
Estragon: To your man.
Vladimir: To Godot? Tied to Godot? What an idea! No question of it. (Pause) For the
moment. (pp20-21)

But the joke is that their subordination is self-imposed. Indeed, time and again they have to remind each
other of their waiting (for Godot). And when they forget, then they indulge in practices and activities,
informed by other images and identities (the music hall, the circus, and so on), which - upon remembering

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their task and who they think they are - they must look upon as diversions from what they see as the
proper, meaningful purpose of their lives: their waiting. For their waiting is what gives them their
identity; that is who they "are;" they do not know how to account for themselves to themselves except in
its terms.

But we - as their audience - can see that they deluded, that what they say they are doing is false;
they are doing more, much more than waiting: they are living (perhaps not very well and with not much
enthusiasm), but they are none the less, before our very eyes, living out a number of different, particular
forms of life. Yet they cannot 'see' that fact; they have imprisoned themselves within an account of
themselves of their own devising. And they, as the individuals they are, prevent themselves from 'seeing'
its inadequacy: not just because it is the only 'currency', so to speak, in terms of which they can conduct
their joint endeavours, but because they owe their being who they are, their identity in relation to one
another, to its continued use. Thus they feel, if they are to avoid a certain ontological disorientation, they
must hold each other to its use.

The illusion of clarity: the failure to recognize confusion.

Yet clearly, in the middle of all their confusion, the clarity they appeal to is illusory. And although they
lack a sense of confusion, although they do not feel confused, to us, they are in fact still confused: for they
have clearly mistaken features of their talk (about some 'thing') for the features of the supposed 'thing'
itself. And the fact is, that no matter how clear (in certain special moments of reflection) the existence of
Godot may seem to them - as a special and separate being beyond themselves who gives a meaning to
their lives - not only need Godot not actually exist, they clearly in fact possess no actual knowledge of
Godot at all. Indeed, they wonder at first if another wanderer in the wilds, Pozzo, is Godot. They can (and
clearly do) live without an actual Godot or Godots. Yet if asked, that is how they explain their conduct:
they are waiting for Godot. Without their waiting - false though it may be as an account of what they are
actually doing - their life would seem at least to them to lack any sense or meaning. But the only Godot
known to them is a Godot 'subsisting' in their ways of talking about such a being between themselves.

And we too, Beckett (and I) want to claim, are living like his down-an-outs: no matter how clear
and definable the topics of our talk and discussions may seem to us to be, no matter how strongly we may
possess a sense of their 'reality', often, we are merely talking about and studying things which only
subsist in the speech we use in coordinating our activities with each other in its terms. We have 'lent' or
'given' the things we talk of a nature which - although that which grounds our talk is such that it 'permits'
or 'allows' such an account - it does not actually have the nature we claim. And when it comes to our talk
about our own nature, then the issue becomes acute.

It is not just that our means of warranting, justifying, or explaining our actions to those around us
- by reference to our supposed 'inner' mental states, to 'motives' and 'feelings' supposedly 'in' s
somewhere - is false and hides from us the proper relation of our actions to their context, to their
surrounding circumstances. neither is it just that it supports the illusion of an individualistic, ahistorical,
decontextualized form of human agency which falsely ignores the role of our relations to others,
especially those of our predecessors who fashioned the current 'organized setting' into which we now act.
The nature of the falsity involved is even deeper and more dangerous than that: It is to suppose that our
essentially unknown and unknowable human nature, that our meaning, that all our meanings, can be
captured within a circumscribed and well-defined system; it is to mistake the imaginary beings, which
only subsist in our stories about ourselves as actually being who we are. Or to put the matter more
positively: what I want to argue is that of nature is such that it is always in the making, that it is never
complete, that it is always elusive; but that the range of identifiable, well-defined 'places' we can make for
ourselves and occupy in our ways of relating ourselves to one another can function, so to speak, 'in place
of' ourselves. They (or more properly 'we') can create a sense - an illusion - of fixity and completeness
about ourselves; we can 'lend' ourselves a nature which, what we already are will 'permit' or 'allow' but
which is not wholly what we in fact are. The danger is in mistaking this illusion for reality, and in thinking
that at last one has, in a single, coherent system of thought, the secret to the meaning of life. Hence the
purpose of my arguments are:

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1) Primarily, not just to try to make sense of how we make sense together, but of how we in fact
manage (at least sometimes) to make sense together in such a way that it leads to the
reproduction of, not a well-defined, closed system of social relations, but contributes to the
maintenance of only a partial ordering, and the prevention of such a closure.

2) Thus I want to explore ways in which we warrant, or account for our claims for the worth of our
utterances when it is impossible to appeal to already established schemes of accountability.

3) Further, I want also to explore why it has been so difficult to recognize our own
disempowerment of ourselves, our own self-entrapment within imaginary limitations of own
making; for there are some very special fallacies, in the sense that they are disguised and
protected from discovery, involved in attempting to think about essentially historical processes
from within a system - what might be called ex post facto facts fallacies, to do with retrospectively
'lending' or 'giving' earlier unformulated events a formulation from within a later system.

4) Finally, I want to explore the possible consequences of our recognition of the part we can play in
the making of our own identities, their 'contested' nature, and the dilemmas such a recognition
poses for understanding the nature of human personality in a future, post-naturalistic world, i.e.,
a future which is no longer psychologically disconnected from the socio-historical processes of its
own development. For such a view means that it is not just in the economic arena and in work
activities (as Marx seemed to think) that different forms of human consciousness are produced
and reproduced, but in the different arenas (whatever and wherever they are) of everyday life,
and this is to give 'social theory' a whole new thrust - a turn which has already taken (if I am not
mistaken) in the current interest in Gramsci's concept of hegemony, i.e., the idea that a form of
class rule, or ruling illusion, can exist, not only in political or economic institutions, but also, more
deeply, 'in' the forms of consciousness and experience deriving from the practices of everyday
life at large (Bocock, 1986).

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM: JOINT ACTION AND ITS UNACCOUNTABLE

OUTCOMES.

Language and the coordination of diverse action.

To explain how such a circumstance can occur, to study the practices of everyday life, we must, I think,
turn to a quite new kind of approach to these problems than that used in the past in social sciences and
social theory: the formulation of decontextualized and formal theoretical principles and the collection of
empirical 'evidence' in an attempt to prove them true. We require a practical rather than a theoretical
account. Past attempts to provide a theoretical representation of a practical activity are what, I feel, have
misled us for so long. They suggest that acting practically can be understood as the "putting of theory into
practice," when in fact, just the opposite is the case: acting theoretically is a social practice, in the sense
that before any theory can be applied, a practically efficacious account is required of how its terms should
be used and made sense of (Stapp, 1972). Indeed, as both Polanyi (1958) and Kuhn (1962) make quite
clear in Physics, and Davis and Hersh (1983, 1986) and Kline (1980) in Mathematics, without one's
socialization into a research community and its investigatory practices, one is at a loss in judging whether
an investigatory procedure has been properly conducted. In other words, as Davis and Hersh (1986,
p.71) say for mathematics: "There is no formal definition of what an acceptable proof is;" the passage
from an assertion to its acceptance must always involve use of extra-logical criteria. Even the stating of a
mathematical argument cannot be conducted in wholly mechanical or formal terms; it always involves a
non-logical, i.e., rhetorical element, drawing upon human agreements achieved in everyday human
discourse.

The approach I want to take respects this fact: that theories rely upon social practices for their
currency, and thus cannot in themselves be revealing about such practices. Thus I shall not seek theories

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but accounts, practical, noncognitive, social constructionist accounts (Harre', 1979, 1983; Gergen, 1982,
1985; Shotter, 1984) of people's social activities and practices. In particular, I shall be concerned both
with those of our practices in which we both 'construct' both our selves and our social orders, and those in
which we conduct our investigations and inquiries into ourselves. Such accounts will be practical in a
number of senses: 1) in the sense that they are not couched in theoretical terms, which refer to hidden
entities "behind appearances," but are instructive and formulate practical recognition procedures for
certain high level characteristics 'in' our relations to our surroundings, e.g., "intentionality;" 2) they can
also work technologically, to render our socially constructive practices 'visibly-rational' (to use a phrase
of Garfinkel's, 1967), thus enabling us to act with some deliberation regarding them; as well as 3) to
reveal their 'rationally-invisible' aspects - the way in which, for instance, by working to emphasize the
'individual' and the 'natural', they also work to repress social and historical (and political and moral)
matters.

What this means is, that unlike natural scientists, but like rhetoricians, practical social
constructionists are more concerned with how we might live our lives, not with how in fact we at the
moment do so. They want to reveal the new opportunities offered us by our current historical
circumstances, rather than to discover a set of explicit, circumstance fee principles characterizing our
current ways of life. They thus accept that there is no single answer to the problem - produced by the
apllication of a method of inquiry - but that a number of answers may be correct. And that once evidential
criteria have been applied - to establish, not that the account offered is the one, single true account which
the circumstances will permit - then other, further criteria of preference are required: namely, the
different values of those involved in the argumentative process. As Toulmin (1982, p.107) points out, such
a shift means that "questions of justice have taken a place in the forum of scientific judgments alongside
questions of truth;" for in analyzing one's relations to others, it is at least arguable that one should use
terms which do "equal justice" to both the others as well as oneself.

Let me now turn specifically to language, in a practical social constructionist approach, our initial
(but not our final) concern, is not so much with language as such, but with speech, with our ways of
talking to one another and the ways in which those forms of speech come to possess their (rhetorical)
force.

Those of us developing this approach take it that the primary function of our talk is not to
represent the world, but to coordinate diverse social action (Mills, 1940; Wittgenstein, 1953): to create,
maintain, reproduce and transform certain modes of social and societal relationships. In our view, words
do not stand for things. If, in experience, it seems undeniable that words do in fact denote things, they do
so, we would argue, only from within a form of social life already constituted by the ways of talking within
which such words are used. Thus the entities they denote are known, not for what they are in themselves,
but in terms of their currency in our different modes of social life, that is, in terms of what it is one can
achieve in everyday activities by their use. In other words, the approach we are taking implies that we
cannot take our 'lived' experience as in any way basic. Indeed, from our point of view it becomes a
problem as to why we in the West, at this moment in history, experience ourselves as we do - as if we all
existed from birth as separate, isolated individuals, containing wholly within ourselves "minds", set over
against a material world itself devoid of any mental processes. Rather than beginning our analyses with
the experiences of the "I" of the individual, social constructionists repudiate this "Cartesian starting
point," and take it that we are all 'rooted' in a much more diffuse and flowing process - a process with not
only social, cultural and historical aspects to it, but with biological and ecological ones too; a large scale
developmental process which is productive of individual, localized subjectivities, but which is itself, as
Popper (1972) has put it, "without a knowing subject."

Joint action.

In attempting to understand the nature of this process, the way in which a seemingly autonomous social
process can come into existence and influence the nature of the individuals participating in it, let me
introduce the concept of "joint action" (Shotter, 1980, 1984). Joint action has two major features:

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1) As people must often interlace (interweave, i.e., context) their actions in with those of others,
what they intend and what actually results is often different; in other words, an unintended
outcome is produced, an outcome independent of any particular individual's wishes.
2) Although the outcome is unintended, all human action none the less has intentionality, in the
sense that it 'points to' something beyond itself, to a set of next possible actions. Another way of
putting this is to say, that an action in progress, before it is complete (or abandoned) and its end
attained, works both to specify its object to a degree, as well as specifying the style of how it may
be specified further, i.e., it specifies the further specifiability allowed (Gauld and Shotter, 1977;
Shotter, 1980).

In other words, in joint action, people create between themselves an "organized setting" (Bartlett, 1932),
which can then function as an already partially structured context into which to direct their next actions.
Thus rather than acting 'out of' an inner schema or a plan, they may act 'into' the opportunities and
invitations offered them by their own current situation.

The remarkable thing about joint action is that its results, appearing to be independent of any
particular individual's wishes or intentions, appear to be nobody's; they cannot be attributed to an author
(Heider, 1958). They must therefore, have an 'external' or 'objective' quality attributed to them; and
rather than their reasons, one feels that one ought to seek their causes. In other words, they possess a
sense of reality. Yet this is still an unsuitable attribution, for although their nature is independent of the
wishes of any individuals, they lack the completeness of truly objective entities. In their incomplete or
open nature, they are intentional in so much that what so far is 'rationally-visible' in them (to use
Garfinkel's, 1967, phrase again), specifies what further developments they will permit, afford, or allow.
This means that, while their significance may be accounted for practically, in the context of their
occurrence, logically, it cannot be accounted for in any context-free way without distortion: they are
"ordering processes" still in progress, rather than already "ordered structures;" they still on their way
towards a structure, so to speak.

The imaginary.

This is the importance of joint action: it can create social realities, partially structured social settings
created by people's past activities which work as a set of enabling/constraints for their current activities
(Shotter, 1985). But as I have already argued, many aspects of such realities are imaginary, not in the
sense of being real things located in a special place, the imagination, in the heads of individuals, but in, for
instance, the mathematical sense (Descartes's) of subsisting, like √-1, (the square root of -1) only 'in' the
procedures occurring, ultimately, between people (Davis and Hersh, 1983; Kline, 1980). A sense of their
supposed 'reality', their existence independent of the wishes and opinions of individuals, is carried by
'their' (?) apparent ability to 'necessitate' a certain structure in our social interactions - whereas, the true
state of affairs is that a certain talked-about way of interacting is what necessitates referring to them as if
they must be actually existing things.

In mathematics, although such "impossible numbers" cannot exist as objects, one can none the
less make good use of them in mathematical procedures - Hamilton, for instance, showed in 1837 in his
Theory of Couples:

"The present Theory of Couples is published to make manifest that hidden meaning of
complex numbers, and to show, by this remarkable instance, that expressions which
seem according to common views to be merely symbolical, and quite incapable of being
interpreted, can pass into the world of thoughts, and acquire reality and significance"
(quoted in Kline, 1980, p.178).

But perhaps some of the best examples of both imaginary and impossible objects, which none the less can
generate in one a sense of their 'reality', are currently to be found 'in' one's key-board mediated
interactions with computer generated displays (Sudnow, 1983; Greenfield, 1987). Greenfield (1987)
discusses a video arcade maze-game called "Castle Wolfenstein:" Castle Wolfenstein does not exist, yet

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none the less, children in interacting with the computer display, come to gain such a grasp of its
'structure' (an architecturally impossible structure, actually), that as Greenfield shows they can draw out
its plan.

Davis and Hersh (1983, pp.400-4405) discuss interacting with a computer display generated by
the equations for a 4D-hypercube. They describe how, by interacting with the display long enough, by
turning "it," i.e., the set of projections of the 4D-cube on the 2D-screen, around and so on, they gained a
feel for it as a unity. However, this is not only an imaginary object, it is an impossible one too - in the sense
that no reality yet known to us will permit, allow, or afford it; no reality we know of is open, as yet, to
being interpreted within the scheme of possibilities it allows. Yet: the gaining of an intuitive grasp of its
nature is clearly, perfectly possible. And as Davis and Hersh say, regarding such "imaginary objects":

"These imaginary objects have definite properties. There are true facts about imaginary
objects."

But in what sense are they true? It cannot be a matter of correspondence with reality, as in the testing of
physical or empirical truths. It can only be a matter of achieving reproducible results by the use of socially
sharable (mathematical) procedures.

But as Davis and Hersh point out, this means giving up the idea that mathematics is about objects,
existing in an ideal realm in the same way as in physical reality. It means that even in mathematics, that,
not only is there no undisputable concept of "proof," but also that convincing proofs do not just consist in
the application of a procedure, but also in persuasive testimony (sometimes implicit) that the procedure
was correctly applied. Without at least the possibility of such testimony, the "proof" is incapable of
commanding universal assent. And my point here is the same: that our ordinary, everyday talk abounds
with references to such imaginary things - many of them also impossible in the sense mentioned above.
Like Escher drawings, they have the property of being incomplete in any one perspective; and while they
may seem open to further specification (of an already specified kind), other perspectives present in the
'object' prevent it. Their nature is such that, as Wittgenstein (1980, no.257) says: "Here is the whole. (If
you complete it, you falsify it.)"

SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY.

Intralinguistic realities and routine accountability.

This point reaches its full import when we follow Vygotsky's (1962) approach to the development of
human mentalities - where it is not so much our knowledge in terms of the contents of our minds, as the
ways and means we use in negotiating our way in the world. He maintains that our mentalities are formed
by the interpolation of "psychological instruments" which function to 'instruct' our activities. And the
importance of the imaginary emerges when the 'instrument' in question is not a material object but 'in' a
form of communicative activity: when a way of talking which is at first used to influence the activities of
another person is used in an intermediary way to influence one's own further actions - where, as Mead
(1934, p.140) puts it, "...being aware of what one is saying and using that awareness of what one is saying
to determine what one is going to say thereafter - that is a process with which we are all familiar." In
other words, as adults, we reach a stage in our use of language in which, as we speak, we can create a new
artificial, intralinguistic, or imaginary context (in the procedural sense of imaginary referred to above) for
our own further activities, and thus talk about possible rather than our actual circumstances.

However, if there is a decrease of reference to what 'is' with a consequent increase of reference to
what 'might be', then what is said requires less and less grounding in an extralinguistic context - for it can
find its supports almost wholly within the new, linguistically constructed, imaginary context. In other
words, if a person wants to be perceived as talking factually, they must warrant their talk about what
'might be' as being about what 'is', by making use in their talk of what can be called "a rhetoric of fact,"
(Smith, 1978), i.e., they must, in addition to the structure of the state of affairs in question, show that
certain checks have been, or could be carried out, which warrant their claims: That it is a state of affairs

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which is, for instance: 1) it is 'permitted by' or 'grounded in' a particular circumstance; 2) it is
independent of one's wishes; 3) it is (or could be) the same for everyone; 4) it depends upon practical
experience; 5) that the checking procedures used are teachable; 6) that they were indeed applied aright;
and that 7) they take into account the unique, local, and contingent nature of the circumstances; and so
on. And one must provide opportunities in one's talk for the challenge of these warrants by others. And
only if they fail to take them up, or if they do, one can refute or otherwise discredit their counterclaims,
can what one says be accounted as factual.

By the use of such methods and procedures, adults (unlike children) can construct their
statements as factual statements in the course of their talk, and adult forms of speech can thus come to
function with a large degree of independence from their immediate context. While, just like computers, in
that our powers of reasoned production outrun our powers recognition (Myhill, 1956), unlike them, we
do not have to test all the outcomes of a way of proceeding ahead of time; for we can, so to speak, check
them out on the spot, in the course of their occurrence - this is the nature of human accountability, and
what makes us (in the end) different from computers. We assess the worth of a performance, not in
terms of its antecedents, its origins or the procedures of its production, but in terms of its present
appropriateness to its circumstances.

Being taken seriously.

But there is even more to it than this - if, that is, one is to be seen as a morally autonomous, socially
competent person in the giving or stating of one's accounts, thus to have one's account taken seriously:
there is the question of one's immediate relation to one's audience. A part of what it is to be seen as
offering worthwhile accounts, is to be seen as offering something which is, in the circumstances, fitting,
that is, something which is socially and morally fitting.

So what is at stake here in speaking in a properly accountable manner is, not just whether what is
being claimed is simply perceived as being warranted, nor whether it can also be accounted as
appropriate to the circumstances, but also, whether it is being said with a proper respect for the audience
to whom it is being said: hence, not only must speakers show in their speech an awareness of their 'place',
their relatedness to the others around them, their status and the rights it allows them and the duties it
places upon them; but they must also construct opportunities accordingly in the course of their talk to be
challenged in terms of their awareness of their 'placement', and know how to respond if others take up
those opportunities.

Thus to act in an accountable manner, or to give an account of one's actions, is not to accompany
one's actions with a description of their structure, to give a 'picture' of them of them in some way. It is not
to do the same thing again but now in other terms; it is to do something else in addition to what one has
already done: it is to add a certain kind of further specification to one's actions. By use of the sense-
making procedures available to one in one's society, one's actions are 'given' or 'lent' an intelligible an
legitimate form; one which shows how they should be treated according to the requirements of the
medium of communication in operation in one's society. In other words, no matter how vague and
incomplete, and open to interpretation they are (and remain), they are 'lent' an imaginary completeness
which allows them to be treated as actions of a certain particular kind: they become actions appropriate
to the reproduction of a particular social order of social identities. They are 'given' a character, an
imaginary character - about which many true facts can be established - but which they do not in fact in
themselves have.

MISTAKING FEATURES OF LANGUAGE FOR FEATURES OF THE 'WORLD'.

Let me now repeat the point I drew out of my comments upon Waiting for Godot, which is also one of the
lessons, I think, to be learned from Wittgenstein: that it is all too often the case that, in constructing a
means (a system?) of communication for the conduct and maintenance of a workable social order, we
entrap ourselves within a prison house of our own devising - and even worse: in attempting to devise

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ways of studying and reflecting upon such activities, we intensify rather than alleviate our own
imprisonment.

One consequence (among many) of such an entrapment, is the way in which we place ourselves
in the thrall of particular images - because of their subsistence in certain of our patterns of
communication, we become ensnared by certain 'pictures'; they hold us captive; we do not know how to
be (the persons we should be) without them; we cannot get outside them; they lie in our language and our
language repeats them to us inexorably (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.115). Their sheer 'naturalness' is what
makes them so hard to escape. We may say about a circumstance, "But this isn't how it is!" Yet, if our talk
is to be seen as intelligible and legitimate by the others around us, if we are to be seen by them as
possessing the required social competence, then "this is how it has to be!" (no.112). As a result, in our
investigations of ourselves and our world, we continually mislead ourselves: we think we are tracing the
outline of a thing's nature over and over again, but we are merely, without realizing it, tracing around the
frame through which we look at it (no. 114) - "we predicate of the thing what lies in the method of
representing it" (no. 104).

Why? Why do we subordinate ourselves so tenaciously to our own forms of talk? It is because,
Stolzenberg (1978) maintains, we have fallen without realizing it into a trap of our own devising, where,
as he defines it, a "trap" is

"a closed system of attitudes, beliefs, and habits of thought for which one can give an
objective demonstration that certain of the beliefs are incorrect and that certain of the
attitudes and habits of thought prevent this from being recognized" (p.224).

The trap is of this kind: a situation (or statement), whose meaning is initially indefinite and open to
interpretation, but which none the less 'permits' or affords' its use as a basis for the construction of
further situations, or the making of further statements, is then interpreted ex post facto, from within their
context, as now having a definite character; it is 'given' or 'lent' a structure in their terms which it did not
in itself have.

This, as Stolzenberg points out, is a fundamental "methodological error;" it functions, whatever

the nature of the system in question, to undermine the proper processes of rational argumentation and
debate and to bias its outcome always in favour of the maintenance of the system so formed. Discovering
an entity's nature retrospectively, i.e., claiming that something which has already occurred must have been
of a certain nature, because of what followed from it later, is methodologically unsatisfactory - for it
prejudges the whole nature of the relations between events, often, for instance, suggesting that they are
connected only by an unbreakable chain of causal necessity, rather than being a matter of local and
contingent relations.

What Stolzenberg shows here, then, is how the process involved in introducing a system of
thought and expression can work to disconnect that system from not only its social and historical origins,
but also (seemingly) to uproot it from the social practices required to maintain its appearance of an
autonomously existence, and to create the illusion of the system being about "a world of things" existing
independently of, and external to it. Indeed, the process Stolzenberg describes is entirely general: it can
be seen at work, for instance, as an extension of William James's (1890, p.196) "psychologist's fallacy" -
mistakenly describing a process retrospectively in terms of its supposed or usual product.

The nature of the "psychologist's fallacy" is as follows: 1) A vague or still incomplete process, P,
occurs; 2) as it could come to completion as an event E, there is 3) a tendency to label it as such. In
reality, however, it is still what it was originally, the incomplete process P. The ex post facto facts fallacy is
a more complex version of this same fallacy. It can be outlined as follows: 1) A vague or still incomplete
process, P, occurs; 2) it can be seen as being either an event of kind A or kind B; 3a) if X follows from it, it
must have been of kind A; 3b) if Y follows from it, it must have been of kind B - in fact, of course, it was
always and remains the incomplete process P.

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 Besides James, Wittgenstein (1980, vol.1, no.257) also warned against the unwarranted
completion (in our descriptions) of essentially incomplete human activities still in progress. "Mere
description is so difficult," he said,

"because one believes that one must fill out the facts in order to understand them. It is as
if one saw a screen with scattered colour-patches, and said: the way they are here, they
are unintelligible; they only make sense when one completes them into a shape. -
Whereas I want to say: Here is the whole. (If you complete it, you falsify it."

The fallacy is in retrospectively seeing the origin of a process as not only being an event of a definite kind
(because of what is now seen as having followed from it), but as in fact being the most crucial
determinant of the process's outcome, its supposed cause. It is Ossorio (1981) who has called it the "ex
post facto facts paradox," and he has discussed it in the context of what he calls "intractable origin
problems" - our misplaced need always to explain things in terms of their antecedent causes, instead of,
quite often, as intelligent and fitting responses to present circumstances.

To escape from ex post facto fact fallacies, we must talk about our ways of talking about things -
and the illusions to which they can subject us. To list them, these illusions are, I think: (1) The changing of
a creative process into a causal system; (2) the changing of a developmental process, in which people as
individual agents use their knowledge, skill and judgment to respond in a moment by moment fashion, to
the specific, local contingencies in the situation they create between themselves in their exchanges, into a
seemingly mechanical sequence of episodes, in which not people, but certain mechanisms, laws,
principles, scripts or plots, 'function', and people are represented as animated by them.

In other words, we have to be careful that it is not just our commitment to an historical form of
talk which creates the appearance of things as happening through time in a simple progression. In
decontextualizing people's actions, it can suggest to us, for instance, the working out of an author's
intention where none exists, or the workings of a mysterious "hidden but intelligent hand" - thus to seek
the 'as yet untold story', or 'design' supposedly guiding the progression of an action. In other words, our
methods are not ideologically neutral; they work to construct a certain kind of world, a certain set of
social relations and ways of treating and regarding people. Our commitment to the formulation of
systems, and our subsequent entrapment in them, also works to create the illusion of referentiality, i.e.,
the illusion that words stand for things, that the syntax of sentence 'parallels' or 'pictures' the structure of
reality - the illusion upon which the whole mistaken edifice of cognitive psychology rests.

CONCLUSIONS: A POSTMODERN SCIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY.

Currently, there is a shift from "modern science" to "postmodern science" (Toulmin, 1982; Lyotard,
1984). Amongst the other shifts it involves, there is a shift in the character of both standpoint and
investigatory activity, i.e., from the standpoint of the detached, theory-testing onlooker, to the interested,
interpretative, and procedure-testing participant-observer; a shift from one-way activity to two-way
interaction; a shift from an interest in theories to an interest in the actual practices in everyday life. And
this opens up a wholly new set of research topics to do with what does or can go on between people: The
change in conducting one's investigations from an onlooker standpoint to a position of involvement is,
however, not the only change taking place. Far from it. There are many other changes, for instance,
associated with the adoption of different standpoints or statuses, i.e., not only different attitudes, values,
aims, but the different rights and duties associated with the 'place' one possesses in relation the 'others'
one is investigating, as well as the different guidelines, apparatuses, devices and investigatory 'tools' used
in relation to the standpoint adopted. One also may adopt different starting-points (e.g., whether one
starts one's investigations when a breakdown occurs, or during the flow of successful activity); in types of
investigative procedure; in attitudes to language; and especially in modes of legitimation (Lyotard, 1984);
and so on.

In detail, to repeat, there is a shift 1) from a concern with theorizing to the provision of practical,

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instructive accounts; 2) from an interest in things to an interest in the uses to which we can put the
'mental tools' of our own devising; 3) a shift away from what goes on in the heads of individuals to an
interest in the nature of our surroundings and what they can (or will) 'permit' or 'afford'; 4) a shift from
procedures conducted on one's own, to the 'negotiation' procedures with others; 5) from starting-points
in reflection (when the flow of interaction has ceased), to local starting-points embedded in the historical
flow of social activity in daily life; 6) from language being for the representation of reality, to it being for
the coordination of diverse social action; 7) from a reliance upon our experience as a basis for
understanding our world, to a questioning of the social processes of its 'construction' (Gergen, 1985);
and, perhaps most importantly of all, 8) a shift away from investigations based in foundations already
accepted as authoritative - which thus claim an acceptability for their results ahead of time - towards
modes of investigation which allow for error-correction 'on the spot', so to speak (Barnes, 1982;
Bernstein, 1984; Rorty, 1980).

This last shift bespeaks of a shift in our understanding of rationality: there is now a growing
recognition that the pursuit of formal rigour is not necessarily a route to rational soundness (Toulmin,
1982). Indeed, many would now suggest that there is a need to develop methods of inquiry which allow
for warranting (or discrediting) claims to truth in the course of investigations (Barnes, 1982; Bernstein,
1984; Billig, 1986; Nelson and Megill, 1986; Rorty, 1980) - claims about what 'might be' can only be
defended as factual claims about what 'is', by the proper inclusion of what might be called "a rhetoric of
reality" in those claims. That is to say, that one must include in one's claims an account (a contestable
account) of the procedures one has applied in establishing one's claims as factual. And this is a part of
what one must learn if one is to be taken seriously as a social competent person in one's own right.

But our conclusions must go deeper than this: for they bear also upon the current western
conception of what it is to be a person, and may be expected to change our attitudes to ourselves in two
ways: (1) In relation to our talk about our reasons for our actions; and (2) about the contexted nature of
our "selves."

 (1) Currently, we believe that what it is to be a person is: That we possess an inner psychic unity
(which we call our "self"), and it is from it, from our self, that all our motivations issue, and it is
within our self that all the reasons for all our actions can be found. In this, I now believe, we are
corporately and incorrigibly self-deceived. But the incorrigibility of the self-deception involved
consists in more than just our way of talking about ourselves being corporately maintained; it
arises out of the fact that in its maintenance, we construct imaginative surrogates or stand-ins for
ourselves, of which such facts are true! But what this means is that many of our ordinary,
common sense ways of accounting for our everyday actions are false - many of our motives are
the products of our activities, not their causes (we wait because we give currency to talk of
Godot, not talk of Godot because of the fact of waiting for Godot to arrive).
 (2) The shift from a modernist to a post-modernist perspective upon ourselves involves a shift
from an attempt to capture the nature of our 'inner' selves by introspection, by a context-free
reflection upon the products of our own self-formative activities. Instead, we are beginning to
recognize how we construct (along with others) the contexts which give rise to such self-
formative activities, and thus how we construct our selves. As a result, the current western view
of the person as possessing an inner psychic unity can be expected to change to a more
pluralistic conception, to a view which recognizes that "I's" in being "me's" must inevitably be
intermingled with the local "you's" of the moment.

And the aim in all this talk? To fashion an idiom, a practical idiom, and informative and
instructive way of talking, suitable for the practical tasks, not only of making sense of how we make sense
together, but also for understanding how to act in a responsible and accountable manner (which allows
for us both to be called to account by others and to be taken seriously by them), while still maintaining
the partially structured, but none the less open nature of everyday social life. This is the goal, as I see it, of
a program of research for a postmodern science of mental life.

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