George is addressed with a consideration of acting-into an altercast position in conflict with his less than socially ideal plans.



As opposed to a libertarian, prioratizing dreams of individual adventure and world travel, George contemplates acting-into, shaping and crafting the specificatory structure altercast by Mary, who addresses him as a man of ideals, which of necessity compel adjustment of those priorities to practical duty: to a position rather as husband and community builder, upheld against capitalist destruction thereof.

..........

Analysis: John Shotter’s Social Accountability and the Social Construction of “You” Part 2

In pursuit of this analysis, we may usefully trace background to Shotter and Harre’s negotiated concerns here:  “The Verum Factum Principle”

From Wikipedia:

“Giambattista Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) (“On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language”).[7] The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation: “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.” This criterion for truth would later shape the history of civilization in Vico’s opus, the Scienza Nuova (The New Science, 1725), because he would argue that civil life – like mathematics – is wholly constructed.”

Giambattista Vico

 

Analysis: John Shotter’s Social Accountability and the Social Construction of “You” Part 2

I. Coherence of conjointly constructed individuality Differanced to Coherence of individuality acted into through the address of deontical positions of Voice by those of actively involved Person.

From Social Constructionist Coherence as conjoint creation of persons in relation to one another, a notion of coherence is set out with the deontical positions of Voice and Person of the verb; viz., JS focuses on activities of the second Person addressive Voice in construction of coherence.

Appropriating Harre’s use of social constructionist coherence wherein the conversation of everyday moral orders (read “order” to connote “third person”) corporeal Persons in relation to one another (read as “first persons”) make their individual Voices coherent through reflexive reflection on the obtainment and possession (possessive) of conjointly constructed discourse (passive), Shotter Differances from the vestigial cognitivism by taking Voice and Person into the rigorous maxim that any enunciated continuity of social life must speak toward its continual activity and thus, practical involvement. In Shotter’s notion of coherence, i.e., grammars of address, activities of discourse enable personal continuity as individual coherence is created through constraints and affordances of address. Voices of address altercast persons specificatory, or partly structured deontic operators which “you’s” act into – and through which they craft and shape the coherent, yet developmentally susceptible stories of their history and identity – to become “I’s”. Embeddedness within second person coherence, in lieu the third and first person narratives of enlightenment texts, emphasizes wherein addressive voice to you in temporality is a-priori necessary to any unified, agentive I. JS proceeds to engender this non-Cartesian text of conjointly constructed individual coherence by evincing its preliminary indebtedness to 1) internal relation and 2) its permanence through accountability.

Internal Relations – Voice [Individual constancy is dependent upon actional criteria – specifically in the conversational doings of active/acting into Voice] J.S. deconstructs first to third person conversation of Voices in relation to one another, the remnant of static and monadic points of view, in favor of constancy of individuality as being inseparable from action, practice and procedure. Sense is made only through internal relation to public display accounted valid by interlocutors. That is, rather than personal possessive viewpoints in conversational relation to one another conjointly creating coherent voices, Shotter begins continuity with the voice’s conversational point – activity, which performs into the reconstruction of intralinguistic precursive address and creates pronominal fields deeply social in constitution. Thusly created voices are constrained from acting out arbitrarily; however, this depth in conversational relation affords accountability into routine continuities of “self” despite the continual commotion of the temporal, and also motivates and invites the contiguous creation of new performance responsibilities vis a vis the active addressivity of other individual Voices.

Permanence of Accountability – Person [Coherence depends on permanent relatedness to Persons]. In the verities of relatedness and continual activity, individual continuity is dependent upon the directive person of the verb; in rejecting an objective starting point, i.e., individuality being achieved through equally viable possessive positions, it is rather as second persons that accountable means, speech genres of coherent rights, privileges, and obligations are (at least originally) made available. Presence of the individual “other” provides antecedent and essential directives by which to complete intentionality; thus, continuity of a person’s point of view is permanently indebted to second persons for whatever first person possessive agency or third person autonomy accounted. Further, as people are beings created, nurtured, and informed by other beings, especially predecessors, they are permanently related and developmentally susceptible to directive structures into which they might account, reconstruct, or rebel against in establishment of any coherent voice of autobiography. So Differancing from “extra-discursive theory”, J.S. Takes the putative remnant (possessive pure agency) directly “into” continual deontical accountability to Second Person You.

You being in continual relation and commotion of the social, sometimes messy process

Summary: Given the inexorable commotion of continual relatedness, the first person active voice in connection with a transcendent theory, and concomitant third person passive voice assuming a scientistic detached stance as the receptor of sensory input from a fixed social order, are impractical. Any constancy, uniqueness, or autonomous agency of individuality must be internally related to others, thus subject to permanent accountability in actional criteria. Hence, the Appropriated Social Constructionist notion of coherence, wherein first Persons appropriate and reflexively reflect upon the coherence of their Voices from a third person panorama, is Differanced to preliminary and permanent indebtedness: 1. The Enlightenment context remnant third person view of persons in detached relation to one another is deconstructed by favoring individuality making sense through Internal Relation to public display as second Persons accounted valid by other individuals. 2. The Enlightenment context remnant of unified agency which issues out from the voices of equally viable possessive positions is deconstructed by favoring the Permanent Indebtedness as accountable Voices in relation to second persons for any achievements of autonomous narrative. This coherence of individuality through internal relation and permanent indebtedness elaborates a reversal in the traditional relation of individual knower to what is known of one’s self.

II. The Relationship of Knower to Known which is Corporeal Persons Acting Toward conversational voice is Differanced to Knower Knowing Individuality Through the actable into Addressivity of Conversational Voice toward their active person

As the critical turn takes a stance of research through participatory involvement rather than contemplative withdrawal, self knowing is constructed with other persons; but since Social Constructionist texts have typically begun from the Cartesian first person starting point in relation of knower to known individuality, Shotter deconstructs this text by taking a second person starting point in relating knower to known.

JS Appropriates Harre’s use of this relationship, in which pre-nominal first person positions act toward and appropriate voices from a third person conversational field, and Differances by reversing it to where the provisional relation of the conversational voices is viewed as being directed to pre-nominal second person positions.

What am I, chopped liver?

Specifically regarding the relation of knower to their known individuality, Shotter takes his point of departure from Harre’s (1983, p. 168) thesis for the social construction of the pronoun “I”; viz., “the necessary condition for acquiring the use of ‘I’ is the capacity to use ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘we’, ‘Mary’, ‘John’, etc.” Shotter then advances this point to where Harre’s notion of relationship [suggested more in stylism than in perfect understanding of his intent] – i.e., person (pt of view) acting-out toward conversation (pt of action – obtuse active voice of address) is reversed to its being through conversation (acute passive voice of address – pt of action) that I’s act-into conjointly create their person (pt of view).

Persons toward conversation: “No resolution of the antithesis between referential and non-referential uses of “I” that has emerged is subsuming the other. In each case the making of counter-arguments can be treated merely as demonstrations of the need to admit the viability of the other concept in our and psycholinguistic practices” (Harré 1983, p 79). With that Harré argues that a corporeal person must conceive of themselves as a conscious unitary agent, a theoretical self capable of reflexive self consciousness if they are to be singularly accountable and socially intelligible. Thus, he leaves the question of why this referential non-referential distinction is made in favor of asking how a person can accomplish individuality within this “Bohr-like complementarity”. Within full social constructionist matrix, he endeavors to establish a model to rescue the personal agency and unified autonomy of individuality over and against causal systems by means of defiant, but by no means naïve use of traditional dichotomy. In lieu of inner-outer, he proposes a hierarchically organized relationship of knower to known individuality which distinguishes an empirical public collective (referential “I”) indexically marshaling from public conversation an open-ended transcendent theory of private/individual (non-referential “I”); for “the long history of Cartesian distinctions must reflect some important aspects of the psychological functioning of human beings. It can hardly have convinced so many if it were wholly without some empirical foundation (ibid. p 44).” 2,764

Conversation toward persons: Shotter contends that the reason this kind of talk holds sway is not because it has some “empirical foundation” - “There ain’t no such things as I’s and You’s”, not for more than a moment anyway.” Like James and Beneventine, he believes little can be said of involvement through a first person possessive starting point beyond its being “a pencil” - and even that is preceded by directive relations to others. Perhaps the Enlightenment frame starting with agentive “I’s” acting toward the passive conversation of second person yous or third person theys might simply as well be set aside for a new way of talking about individuality – though a frame beginning with the conversation of second person address jointly acted-into by persons, the hierarchical relationship of knower to transcendently known individuality might be farther deconstructed in differance to a knower immanently related to other known individuals. But Shotter argues that if this remnant Cartesianism is to be disabused, we must first answer why “we feel so strongly that there must be a unitary and total way to refer to what we are.” Advancing Harre’s hypothesis viz. Acquistion of pronominal address is requisite to abstracting “self concept” from the public domain, Shotter “describes” a coevolution of found and sought individuality: While derived “horizontally” in constitutive rules of deployment deeply enmeshed in hierarchical social orders, pronominal positions also serve as regulative rules of accountability, characterizing the conversation toward our person with requiremental clues to the kind of knowable individuality sought.

Summary: Thus, the reason we feel (we are regulated to act) that there must be a unitary and total way to refer to what we are is due to the fact that we are deeply enmeshed in (accountable to constitutive rules) already established ways of speaking. This allows us to account to them in a seemingly natural way, as all texts must be partly taken for granted. Therefore, in a seemingly natural way we ask “how” do we establish individuality? However, the enactment of the occidental text’s first and third person relationship of knower to known has the effect of removing us from corprisocial indebtedness. In taking the individual knower back to a relation of contemplative withdrawal, it removes them from the sources of their individuality which is constructed through participatory involvement with others. Therefore, if we are to establish individuality, we must elaborate and specify “why” we feel so strongly accountable to this notion of relationship.

III.Rhetorical hermeneutic’s Purpose of the “how to” practicality of individuality is Differanced by asking “why” it recreates The Story Told of detached individualism, and by proffering a counter-text of The Story Lived in active relation to others.

Social Construction of individuality is concerned with the means by which the personal is constructed, the praxia activity of how people interact in the creation of rhetorical, hermeneutic (“textual”) accounts of themselves: To handle the relation between knower and known in the co-evolution of these accounts, a critical interpretive approach is taken which uses circular attention to context and particulars of how stories/practices reflexively reconstruct both interpreter and interpreted. Finding that this leads back to the purposes of Enlightenment texts Shotter counter-textualizes individualism lived through accounts in addressivity as yous.

Asking “Why?” tends to lead to teleological and lineally causal explanations.

Appropriating Harre’s Pupose for the “how to” practicality of individual agency, JS Differances in the manner of 1. Platonic “why-ning”: Since “how to” reconstructs the Cartesian Story Told of detached individuality, he has asked “why” and endeavors to Deconstruct the intransigence of that story by Taking The Hermeneutic Turn to a Didactic extent, creating   2.“Buzzwords” of an amelioratively overcompensating counter-text toward the Story Lived though activities relating to immediate others.

Deconstructing the traditional textual Story Told and proffering a counter-text of the Story Lived.

1. Platonic “why-ning” - differing from the critical-interpretive emphasis on “how to”: In present milieu, the quest of how reverts to persons taking the anachronistic concept of detached individualism. Thus, of necessity JS deconstructs the traditional Story Told by asking “why” occidents are so inclined to this appropriative way of talking – he finds it is in part a) custom, due to their accountability to these texts, and b) part inherent invisibility to/of the language game’s reflexive effects of non-accountability – a bi-produced “pure” agentive self, “acting-out” of a “possessed (ha!) location”, i.e., “rational blindness.”

To exorcise the possessed self

Rational blindness to relational enmeshment: In everyday practices persons are accountable for correctly (re) constructing (regulative use of) the resources (obligations, prohibitions, and legitimacies) constituting the taken for granted depth grammar rules of their culture. In the case of occidental texts of individuality, accountability to cultural grammar means that one is responsible for the mastery and correct enmeshment of the particularized requirements of its pronominal forms. Specifically, one is obligated to the agentive voice and the first person possessive “I” in relation to passive second persons yous and third passive person theys – this is a very powerful reflexive need: to fail in the situated usages of these rules is to risk prohibition from the very resources by which one’s being human is constituted. Paradoxically, this individualistic obligation reflexively effects disengagement of people from corprisocial, deonitc and hermeneutic abilities from which to construct and practice their individuality; and on a deeper level this narrative “rationally blinds” enmeshed individuals from recognizing the Story Told as being a text – persons feel so strongly that they must talk in the manner of possessive agency due to their accountability to a text which enjoins its own interpretation as a text through prohibition of recourse to hermeneutically interpreted relatedness and by obligating the notion of perceptive immediacy (and the unassailable equality thereof).

Mary (Donna Reed) acts-into the immediate opportunity of the moment..

..and begs to Differance from the detached way…

Shotter Denies that there is much content to self assertions, be they in the inward proprioceptive direction or toward the outward end of a trans-social character. Perhaps one can merely open their eyes to a mirror and perceive aspects of a person in the Lockeatine sense, but this perceptual immediacy is not an unassailable truth nor does it mean as much, i.e, it has nothing to do with the way ordinary folks talk about individuality until one has plagiarized socially accountable and mutable sequences of words through which to enact perception of it (Harré declared emphatically, no wonder David Hume could not empirically perceive a self!). Along with the explanation of this (guilt ridden?) half blindness to the process of “unconsciously” appropriating one’s grammars of individuality Shotter wants to explain why third and first person personages of the verb create dubious moral orders. As the appropriated from occidental text transforms recognition from social indebtedness, it elaborates the objectivist/ subjectivist – relativist notions of mechanistic coherence (artificial possession - “that’s just their/my prerogative”) and causal individual necessity – (the “truth of that’s just the way it is”), ideas which do not entail a personal moral responsibility to other individuals (see sections 4 and 5). In hopes of establishing ways of talking which readily acknowledge indebtedness to others, he proffers a new grammatical starting point emphasizing the relational nature constituting selves or identities – that is, he differances from the rhetorical stance with a counter-text toward the reflexively needed Story Lived.

Appraised of the objectivist Voice’s lack of responsibility…

2.Buzzwords – Shotter takes the hermeneutic turn to a didactic extent: If accountability is to make sense, a counter-text must be available to Make Common acknowledgement of corprisocial, hermeneutic and deontic indebtedness to other individuals for providing the means of personal identity. To do this he disabuses the occidental Story Told of its traditional grammatical starting point which acts-out toward a concomitant detached stance – and proffers an ameliorative overcompensation toward the Story Lived in continual commotion of everyday social life as it entails normative involvement with the “Addressivity” of “Other Voices” to “Second Person ‘You’s” - in this counter text, overstating the internal relationship of “known to knower”, (my quote) beyond mere symbiosis, the rhetorical directives and hermeneutic interpretation of other voice “addressivity” is depicted as precursive for the active involvement in which situated discourses of individuality are imbued. If this text were made common (buzzwords) it may reflexively effect “differently structured means through which to act”, and (hopefully) recursively reconstructed normative attention to “different aspects of one’s surroundings in relation to one’s self” - that is, this way of talking would readily legitimize or obligate accountability to the grammar of second persons – as yous are imperative to provide the “Specificatory Structures Into” which pre-nominal persons may act and craft their individuality – their “I”. This text would prohibit the notorious imperviousness of traditional individual coherence; and it might begin to rectify the brutal relativism of the formal legacy by constituting accountability to actual persons in concrete situations as they are made through the continual activity of conjoint construction.

Summary: Social Constructionism’s “how to” purpose is more elegantly stated the praxia activity that goes into creating rhetorical hermeneutics. In order to handle the internal relation of questioner to questioned, a critical interpretive account normally uses circular attention first to context and then to the particulars of how stories/practices reflexively reconstruct both interpreter and interpreted. In this piece that takes two major forms 1. Platonic “why-ning”: JS differs from emphasis on “how to”, arguing that in lieu of an alternative, this quest leads back to the traditional Story Told of individuality; his purpose instead is to ask why and why not create “differently structured means” than the favorite Cartesian starting place so that individuals might discover, as put forward by Plato in the Theatetus, “different aspects of [their] surroundings.” Therefore, he disabuses the Cartesian “pure” agentive starting point, underscoring deconstruction of its possessive text by asking “why” occidents are inclined to talk that way – he finds it is due to their being accountable to this text which enjoins its own interpretation as a text through prohibition of recourse to socially interpreted relatedness and obligation of “perceptual immediacy.” 2.“Buzzwords”: JS takes the critical/interpretive turn to a didactic extent: if individuality is to make sense against the insensibility of the traditional Story Told, a counter-text must be available to “make common” recognition of corprisocial, hermeneutic and deontical indebtedness to other precursive voices for the active involvement in which situated discourses of individuality are imbued. Therefore, he proffers an ameliorative overcompensation toward the Story Lived; it is an overcompensation, because there is no acknowledgement of purposiveness with regard to physical criteria and consensus; in overstating the internal relation of “known to knower” beyond mere symbiosis, it is not just that the first person cannot stand unrelated to second persons and their textual interpretations, first persons are thoroughly dependent on second persons for providing rhetorical directive and hermeneutic interpretive means (the means of accountable structures) of personal identity.

..George embraces the specificatory altercasting, a difference that makes a Differance

End of Part 2