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Inside processes: Transitory understandings, action guiding anticipations, and withness thinking
[journal article]
Abstract "To talk and to think, not about process, but in relation to it, is not easy.
Many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past have helped us to
think about process from the outside, about processes that we merely observe
as happening ‘over there’, but few have helped us to think in terms
... view more
"To talk and to think, not about process, but in relation to it, is not easy.
Many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past have helped us to
think about process from the outside, about processes that we merely observe
as happening ‘over there’, but few have helped us to think in terms
of our own, spontaneously responsive involvement in ongoing processes
from the inside. Yet practitioners need a style of thought and talk that allows
them uniquely to affect the flow of processes from within their own
unique living involvements with them. Crucially, I will argue, this kind of
responsive action and understanding only becomes available to us in our
relations with living forms if we enter into dialogically-structured relations
with them. It remains utterly unavailable to us as external observers.
I will call this kind of thinking, thinking-from-within or “withnessthinking,”
to contrast it with the “aboutness-thinking” that is more familiar
to us. In articulating its nature, I will draw on the work of Bakhtin and
Wittgenstein, along with Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, and Polanyi. Central
to it and quite unavailable to us in aboutness-thinking, is our subsidiary
awareness (Polanyi, 1958) of certain “action guiding anticipations” and
“transitory understandings” that become available to us within any ongoing
processes in which we happen to be engaged, such that we can always
have an anticipatory sense of at least the style or the grammar of what next
might occur." (author's abstract)... view less
Keywords
understanding; action orientation; thinking; psychology of thinking; action research; Wittgenstein, L.
Classification
General Psychology
Philosophy, Ethics, Religion
Document language
English
Publication Year
2005
Page/Pages
p. 157-189
Journal
International Journal of Action Research, 1 (2005) 2
ISSN
1861-1303
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Deposit Licence - No Redistribution, No Modifications