Another goldmine hiding out on the web. This time oriented around phenomenological-constructive psychology and coming out of The Virtual Faculty in New Zealand. The VF has a modest facade behind which lies enormous resources; for example: The Vysgotsky Project.
I haven’t read all the papers, (not hardly!) but could point to a thinker worth curling up with. John Shotter.
If the unceasing flow of speech entwined activity is sustained between us spontaneously, i.e., in an unforced, unplanned, and unintended fashion, what must be the nature of our everyday activities such that we can not only sustain this flow routinely in our actions, but we also, unreflectively, repair or restore it should a significant hiatus occur within it (Buttney, 1993; Shotter, 1984)? To do this, we must both be able to ‘follow’ others in our talk entwined activities, while at the same time, we must speak and act in ways that they also can ‘follow’. To follow another’s utterance entwined activities, we must actively adopt an expectant attitude toward them. Besides noting their content, their reference to the current context, we must also note their point, the changes in that context toward which they ‘gesture’ in the future. As Bakhtin (1986) puts it: “…when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and understanding, from the very beginning – sometimes literally from the speaker’s first word” (p.68).
Inside dialogical realities: FROM AN ABSTRACT-SYSTEMATIC TO A PARTICIPATORY-WHOLISTIC UNERSTANDING OF COMMUNICATION. (from above link
Lots of important reasoning/feeling meta-psychology under his name at this site. Another grabber: VICO, WITTGENSTEIN, AND BAKHTIN: PRACTICAL TRUST’ IN DIALOGICAL COMMUNITIES.
…tip of the berg.
