john shotter Getting it

WITHNESS-THINKING AND THE DIALOGICAL ... IN PRACTICE
This is a book for practitioner-researchers, for everyday work people who want to inquire into what is involved in having to think ‘in the moment’, while ‘in motion’, both from within the midst of complexity, and in relation to unique, never before encountered, ‘first-time’ events. It is especially oriented toward those undertaking professional masters or doctoral degrees in which their own practices figure centrally.
It is also a book about complexity and the mysterious, considered as a third category of events subsisting between the realm of problems soluble by the methods of reason, and the realm of the ineffable that cannot ever be spoken of in any satisfying way – for we can, with the help of Wittgenstein’s (1953) methods, find our ‘way about’ within the realm of the mysterious, to ‘find our feet’ within it, so to speak, even though it may never be wholly comprehensible to us.
Currently, as thinking people, as rational agents, when faced with the task of thinking about how to inquire into the difficulties we encounter in our lives, we immediately begin to think about how to ‘solve the problems’ we face.
We think of the initial stages of our inquiries as requiring our capacities to reason. But: is there another point of departure that we might adopt? I think there is. I have called it withness-thinking, thinking in the moment of acting with the voice of another, or with a detailed concrete example in mind, that provides us with an action-guiding anticipation as to how we might act next.
If I had to put the central focus of this book in a very few words, it would be that it focuses on our spontaneously responsive, living bodily activity. If I was allowed a few more words, I would add that this activity is also expressive to others, and that everything of importance to us in this book occurs in meetings between us and the others and othernesses around us. Finally, I would add that, due to the fact that living processes grow and develop irreversibly in time, something unique and novel is always created between them when two or more such living beings meet.
And this is why I have called this book ‘Getting it’: for it is the unique nature of that ‘it’ that we must somehow grasp, and do justice to, without ‘stripping it down’ to fit it into already well-known categories or frameworks.
New!
www.pubpages.unh.edu/%7Ejds/Chapsall.doc
Getting it:'Withness'-Thinking and the Dialogical... in Practice
A complete 126 page book in MSWord 2000 (827 kb) that can be downloaded here free Contents
Prologue – a ‘new’ realm of inquiry, pp.1-8
Chap One: Where the action is, p.9-16
Chap Two: ‘Withness’-thinking and the dialogical, p.17-26
Chap Three: The dialogical, joint nature of human activity, pp.27-40
Chap Four: Wittgenstein’s remarks: the role of reminders,pp.41-49
Chap Five: Wittgenstein’s methods: withness-thinking and grammar, pp.50-59
Chap Six: Living expression, entanglement, chiasmic entanglement, and time, pp.60-71
Chap Seven: Cartesianism and ‘losing the phenomena’, pp.72-81
Chap Eight: Styles of writing: withness- and aboutness-writing, pp.82-91
Chap Nine: Writing on the edge: the expression of unique moments, pp.92-102
Chap Ten: Rethinking truth in practice:the recovery of truthfulness,pp.103-113
Epilogue – Oh brave new world, pp.114-119 http://pubpages.unh.edu/%7Ejds/bookpage.htm'>bookpageclass='poweredbyperformancing'