p.2-3 if we do not care enough about making things happen, then we become passive beings to whom things happen.

[JLJ - We as human beings are virtually under assault from the aggressive members of our society out to further their own ends. Just now I received a phone call from a 1-800 phone number that was 'spoofed', someone calling me on my landline pretending to be someone else. I have 'nomorobo' and a call block system setup to block all 1-800 calls because most of them are harrassment from scammers. My counter-scheme meets their scheme head on. The schemes and plans - such as this one - aggressively court our attention, our business, our way of living, and even our very souls, if you consider the proselytizing activity of religious groups. If we do not intelligently and strategically plan and execute schemes and counter-schemes of our own to 'make our way in the world,' we will likely fall victim to the schemes and plans of others, and they will take and give - on their own terms, not ours.]

p.3 our continuous sense of self, or self-consciousness, emerges from our practical activity in the world.

[JLJ - I would say that the demands of the physical world on us, the fleeting opportunities, and the imagined demons all conspire to shock us into action, an action at first improvised by our human nature, but later developed and refined through mature plans and counter plans, perhaps after wisely pondering the likely efects of the driving forces. The world of our predicament is to us what the electric paddles are to a heart attack victim: a shock that brings us to life and drives us into a semi-controlled action directed to meeting our immediate needs, into at first basic maneuvers, then later into more sophisticated schemes and relationships which aim for emergent effects - which ideally are more or less in our favor. We as humans are full of ideas for what to do next at every given moment, the problem is in the sorting and weighing of options, and imagining the consequences, and the ticking clock of time.]

p.10 In short, we are who we are because of what we care about: in delineating our ultimate concerns and accommodating our subordinate ones, we also define ourselves... However, we do not make our personal identities under the circumstances of our own choosing. Our placement in society rebounds upon us, affecting the persons we become, but also and more forcefully influencing the social identities which we can achieve.

[JLJ - Yes, to some degree, but the driving forces of our age, and the demands of our society also shape us into what we are. In sum, the predicament we are in makes demands on us and we respond, however we are able. 'We' are what emerges to intelligently and efficiently manage the ongoing conflict.]

p.12 Our commitments, which define us as persons and also define what kinds of social Actors we become, are subject to continuous internal review. Thus we return to the inner conversation which never ceases.

[JLJ - Archer misses the human condition of reveling in the present - for her the conversation is the ultiimate human reality. Ask anyone at a rock concert if they are in the middle of a 'continuous internal review' or a 'conversation' that never ceases. We take a vacation, listen to music, attend a play or movie, perhaps dance with a partner, as part of reveling in the present.]

p.17 This book is concerned with the emergence of our human properties and powers.

p.35 Since life is 'a tissue of contingent relations, a web which stretches backward and forward through past and future time', it is not 'something capable of being seen steady and whole.' [Rorty, The Contingency of Selfhood]...His definition of the self re-echoes this decentering, for it is simply 'a network of beliefs, desires, and emotions with nothing behind it - no substrate behind the attributes'. A self 'just is that network' which is also 'a network constantly reweaving itself', in a 'hit or miss way' in the face of environmental pressures.

[JLJ - Continuing my thought from above, perhaps 'we' are an emergent from the artifact of our physical bodies and the 'real' world of our predicament. 'We' emerge from the cold indifference of reality when our human nature, including our memories, our theories of action, our physical bodies, and our 'tricks that work' start to work - perhaps partially of their own accord - and accept the reality of our predicament as a cause worth fighting in and for, seeking in deep plans and in improvisational schemes, to shape 'it' to 'our' ends.]

p.44 This brings us back to the charter of realist social theory, that in structure and agency we are dealing with two irreducible strata which make for a stratified social world, and to the charter of analytical dualism, namely that we must examine the interplay of their respective properties and powers to explain the outcome for either and both.

[JLJ - Perhaps this is why - when we look at something - we categorize it subconsciously and estimate to ourselves what it is capable of doing. A shortcut to understand something is to ask what it does, or what it can do. We might be curious about something, but if it does not impact our ability to 'go on' in our predicament, we are likely to soon grow disinterested in it, so that we might return to our predicament and the problems it presents to us.]

p.49 [Roger Trigg] The real world is not a dream-world under my control... At many levels, things are not always as I want them to be, or conceive them to be. Realism has to start with the realization that I or anyone else can be wrong. Fallibility is part of the human condition.

[JLJ - For this reason we should never be too sure of ourselves. Appearances can be deceiving. Life never requires more from us than to take a stance in the present, based on what we know or infer, and based on what we don't know yet can imagine. Human nature sees to it that being wrong is rarely fatal.]

p.50 Realism construes our humanity as the crucial emergent property of our species, which develops through practical action in the world. Our continuous sense of self, or self-consciousness, is advanced as emerging from the ways in which we are biologically constituted, the way the world is, and from the necessity of our human interaction with our external environment.

p.53 Passions, or desires... are things which we simply have... rationality does not have the power to select our passions for us or to evaluate our desires. All it can do is act as an ingenious 'slave' which serves them... Reason is busy, precisely because the passions are plural... reason's first task is to rank the passions and its second is to devise those courses of action which will maximise our overall satisfaction by producing the highest pay-off over the full set.

[JLJ - This perhaps is an intellectual approaches to the 'problem' of our human condition. The common man is not nearly as cerebral as to 'rank' the passions or to 'maximize' satisfaction, and in fact would be more likely to let the passions drive him or her wherever the winds blow, indifferent initially to direction, setting a course only in periods of crisis or in times of great change.]

p.59 It is that which is really... possible to which the rational actor has to accommodate her desires... To be rational, the adjustment of desires to possibilities would have to be freely and consciously willed.

p.60 'rational desires' are ones which display an optimal adjustment to what is feasible and thus generate the maximum utility which is realistically possible... Why are our most reasonable preferences those which are 'causally shaped by the situation'?

p.60-61 [Elster, quoting Berlin] 'it is the actual doors that are open that determines the extent of someone's freedom, and not his own preferences'.

[JLJ - Actual quote in 'From Hope and Fear Set Free': 'It is worth noting that it is the actual doors that are open that determine the extent of someone's freedom, and not his own preferences.']

p.61 in Accounting for Tastes, Becker introduces the proposition that 'Forward-looking individuals consider how their choices affect the probability of developing rewarding emotional relations.'

p.78 [Goffman] 'a self is a repertoire of behaviour appropriate to a different set of contingencies.'

[JLJ - But hopefully we can ponder our 'repertoire of behaviour', before we act. A self is an emergent from a physical body shocked into life and action by the predicament, and the demands of the predicament.]

p.97 Harré's startling assertion... the 'fundamental human reality is a conversation'.

[JLJ - Again, an intellectual or cerebral approach. 'Normal' people do not see the world the way Archer and Harré do, and Archer does not attempt to transcend her experience. To one playing a sport requiring quick reaction times such as ping-pong or American football, performing on a musical instrument such as a piano or singing, the fundamental human reality is one of relationships in action, in harmonious interaction, a reveling in the present, in producing a pleasurable sound or image (as in dancing), or in motivating oneself and in recalling lessons or corrections, and in making spontaneous small changes or adjustments to learned behavior, that aim to improve performance, or in creating an effect. I doubt that a 'conversation' drives artists - above and beyond the simple desire to create and to revel in performance. The 'fundamental human reality' is that people who write books see the world differently, from those who do not... The fundamental human reality for the common man is the predicament, including the social order and one's role in that order, and in deciding which trick in our bag of tricks to use in the current situation. Now 'a conversation' may play a large role in managing the predicament, but take the predicament away from conversation and you have a meaningless chatter that cannot answer to 'so what?'.]

p.97 Harré coined a motto for his work - 'Nothing in the mind that was not first in the conversation'... he posits the priority of language in human thought and action... he maintains that all mentation and mental attributes are derivative from conversation and... that our private mental activities are parasitic upon public discourse. Taken together they enable him to conclude that 'the minds of individuals are privatised practices condensing like fog out of the public conversation onto material nuclei, their bodies'.

p.106 The two of us [JLJ - Archer and Harré] would, I believe, agree that all human powers only exist in potentia. This both implies that action in the world is necessary for their development, but also that we humans have to be the kind of beings who can be developed in this way.

p.111 Harré argues that, 'Psychologically speaking, to be human is to be the kind of creature who uses theories to order and so to create the forms of experience.' It is the possession of these theories which distinguishes us from the chimpanzees, not that we have, say, a special kind of perception which is denied to them.

p.111 All observation is conceptually formed and the body's naturalistic trial and error learning is no exception to this... rule.

p.114 Harré accepts that 'while "knowing that" is conceptually tied to consciousness and the discursive production of propositional knowledge, "knowing how" is conceptually tied to agency and the manipulation of skilled performance'.

p.116 Basically a realist approach to the primacy of practice, which must also give due importance to everyone's societal encounter, is one which accentuates emergent properties and powers at every stage.

p.122 Marx's important insight that we are committed to continuous practical activity in a material world, where subsistence is dependent upon the working relationship between us and things... Our practical work in the world does not and cannot await social instruction, but depends upon a learning process through which the continuous sense of self emerges.

p.123 Bhaskar correctly maintains that, 'in so far as practice is quasi-propositional, it will depend (analytically) upon some anterior theoretical reasoning, e.g. about the nature of the world that the practice is designed to change. But this depends upon practice, which also encompasses both theoretical and practical reasoning.'

p.127 In general... the perceiver and her perceiving share in the constitution of the situation.

p.128 What 'I can' do is co-determined by the nature of the body and that of the world, and is only established by their conjunction in practice. Without the body, we have no modality of presence in the world, and without its activity, none of the properties of reality can be disclosed.

p.131 Consciousness is therefore essentially a lived involvement in a series of concrete situations. Progressive differentiation between the two entails practical action and such action always involves work, which is undertaken in the interests of our natural needs.

p.141 what is salient to us is perceptually filtered. We commit to memory on a need-to-know basis... Through practice we sift for relevance... At a more macro level, practice shapes neurological development through the process of 'activity-dependent self-organisation', such that the properties of brain cells adapt to environmental circumstances.

p.145 Practice has never been given primacy in the philosophy of modernity... Yet, it is only as embodied human beings that we experience the world and ourselves: our thought is an aspect of the practice of such beings, and thus can never be set apart from the way the world is and the way we are.

p.146 I want to... maintain that it is through the activities of embodied practice that we develop the powers of thought at all. To do so it is necessary to demonstrate that practical action is also the source, (i) of our thinking about distinct objects, distinct that is from both us and from one another, and, (ii) how they are subject to transfactual laws of nature which belong to them, but do not emanate from us.

[JLJ - Perhaps, but if you dig a bit into what a practice is at core, it is a set or collection of tricks that work, as modified and improvised by a collection of individuals who make up the practice, who learn from each other, and seek to make a living by serving the needs of society. The tricks that work need to be applied, and thought is the mechanism we use to operate in our practice, to execute our tricks, to manage our predicament.]

It should be noted that this defence of the primacy of practice sees it as the source of differentiation (of the self, subject/object, subject/subject), then the source of thought (the basic principles of logic, namely identity and non-contradiction)

p.151 Bourdieu... regards practice as issuing in its own logic - one of immediacy, urgency, contextual embeddedness and pragmatic common sense - which stands opposed to, and can only be misconstrued by, applications of the logical canon. Hence he maintains that, 'practice has a logic which is not that of the logician'

[JLJ - The logic of practice is 'do it this way, specifically with such-and-such a technique (and not heaven forbid thus-and-such a technique), because in the end, perhaps the end of a business quarter, you will be better off financially or otherwise.']

p.152 in the next chapter, I want to defend the proposition that practice is pivotal to all our knowledge.

p.156-157 As Merleau-Ponty argued, our desks and chairs... gain their meaning from the fact that in practical action we sit in them and write at them, that is we use them and are seen to use them meaningfully.

[JLJ - ...yet what is a desk or chair to a plumber, or to a roofer, or a HVAC technician? Members of these professions do not need any of these items in their practice.]

p.160 all of our human powers only exist in potentia and which of them do develop depends upon the contingent intervention of the world of things... Thus what emerges, at least initially, as non-linguistic knowledge, i.e. tacit information, skills, know-how, depends upon the practical interaction between us and nature - upon the confluence of the two sets of properties and powers... I want to maintain two things: firstly that many of our embodied powers and liabilities are causally efficacious in conjunction with the constraints and enablements of things, without any intentionality on our part... Secondly, both nature and artifacts encode information about possible practices, given the way that the world is and the way in which we are constituted.

p.161 our ability to describe things in words does not mean that practical knowledge is linguistic in kind.

p.162 Embodied knowledge... has three distinguishing characteristics; it is based upon sensory-motor interactions with nature (both animate and inanimate); it is possessed in unawareness of its cognitive content, which is not disentangled from physical operations; it can only be exercised in direct contact with nature, and is never detached from it in the form of abstract and decontextualised propositions... Embodied knowledge is a know-how about nature which has literally become 'second nature'. It is a 'knowing how' when doing, rather than a 'knowing that' in thought.

p.166-167 practical knowledge... is acquired through our practical relations with material culture, which is what distinguishes it from knowledge in the natural order, and has four defining characteristics which differentiate practical from discursive knowledge... Firstly, practical knowledge involves an active process of doing since it is performative ... It is therefore procedural... Secondly, it is implicit, being encoded in the body as skills... the active body interrogates the object from a particular point of view, such that action, perception and understanding intertwine... Thirdly, practical knowledge is tacit because it is reality understood through activity, not through the manipulation of symbols but of artifacts. Its cognitive element entails non-verbal theorizing, an active questioning of how things work, of their practical potentials... the tacit lends itself to the public, and thus explicit, codification of practice over time... Fourthly, the development of practical knowledge is extensive of the body and of our bodily powers... the blind man's stick... a prosthetic which extended the range of his body... these four characteristics mean that... the means of gaining practical knowledge is apprenticeship

p.168 Practical knowledge, like any other, is engendered by constraints and enablements - this is how objects 'tell' us how to behave towards them. Donald Norman's book [JLJ - The Psychology of Everyday Things, 1988] is full of examples of how the combination of affordances and constraints guides our practical relations with them. Thus when 'we approach a door, we have to find both the side that opens and the part to be manipulated; in other words, we need to figure out what to do and where to do it. We expect to find some visible signal for the correct operation: a plate, an extension, a hollow, an indentation - something that allows the hand to touch, grasp, turn or fit into. This tells us where to act. The next step is to figure out how: we must determine what operations are permitted, in part using the affordances, in part guided by the constraints.'

[JLJ - actual text: 'guided by constraints' - but in our 'internal conversation' we ask 'how much should we care about...' this inconsistency, and in response, 'how far will we go', will be to drop the issue as unimportant. Ms. Archer guides us in how to handle criticism of her (inexact) citation.]

p.169 The very physicality of material culture 'informs'... Furthermore, like nature, artifacts give us cues and clues as to how we are doing.

p.177 All knowledge entails an interplay between properties and powers of the subject and properties and powers of the object - be this what we can learn to do in nature (embodied knowledge), the skills we can acquire in practice (practical knowledge), or the propositional elaborations we can make in the Cultural System (discursive knowledge). Any form of knowledge thus results from a confluence between our human powers (PEPs) and the powers of reality - natural, practical and social. Thus what have been discussed sequentially are the physical powers of the natural order, the material affordances and constraints of material culture, and, lastly, the logical constraining powers of the Cultural System. However, for the three orders equally, the way in which they affect the subject is by shaping the situations in which he or she finds themselves, and there supplying constraints or enablements in relation to the subject's projects.

p.189 The realisation of every human property and power depends upon our relations with the natural, practical and social orders, without which these tendential developments will be suspended. What we are, and our continuous awareness that we are the same being, are emergent from humanity's relations with reality, which thus undercuts atomistic independence.

p.189 the argument that 'practice is pivotal' has, as its basic implication, that what is central to human beings are not 'meanings', but 'doings'.

p.194 our emotions... are the fuel of our internal conversation and this is why they matter.

p.195 the inner conversation... is a ceaseless discussion about the satisfaction of our ultimate concerns and a monitoring of the self and its commitments in relation to the commentaries received.

p.198-199 our concerns have to be sufficiently specific for the situations that we confront to carry equally specific imports for them. Firstly, it is maintained that all persons have to confront the natural world and that their embodiment ineluctably confers on them concerns about their physical well-being as they encounter the hard knocks, pleasures and dangers of their environments... Secondly, all persons are constrained to live and work, in one way or another, in the practical world: necessary labour is the lot of homo faber. Performative concerns are unavoidably part of our inevitable practical engagement with the world of material culture... Thirdly, sociality is also is also necessarily the lot of human beings... We cannot avoid becoming a subject among subjects and with it come 'subject-referring properties' ...which convey the import of normativity to our concerns about our social standing.

p.200 the 'internal conversation' ...can monitor, displace and re-order the priorities assigned to the commentaries which they supply. In other words, the first-order of emotional emergence has no authoritative role in relation to the second-order prioritisation of emotions. There is a second supportive consideration, of a substantive nature, which reinforces the refusal to designate any given cluster as 'basic', and this is the simple fact that for most of our lives we confront the three orders of reality simultaneously.

p.223 Since our highest concerns are about what we value most, then reflection is about which commentaries are the best guides to what matters most to us. Rather than trying to rationalise our first-order emotions, we evaluate them as guides to the life we wish to lead, and thus end up embracing some and subordinating others.

p.227 'I says to myself says I', which is the popular characterisation of the internal conversation.

p.228 this ultimate affirmation can only be made after evaluating the consequences for self, taking account of the positive and negative costs to be borne and establishing how much we care. It is this that we do, fumblingly and fallibly through the internal conversation. Basically we 'test' our potential or ongoing commitments against our emotional commentaries which tell us whether we are up to the enterprise of living this rather than that committed life. Since the commentaries will not be unanimous, the conversation also involves evaluating them, promoting some and subordinating others, such that the ultimate concerns which we affirm are also those with which we feel we can live. We may of course be wrong, or circumstances may change, which is why the conversation is ongoing and why the second-order will be progressively revised and elaborated over the life-span of everyone.

p.228-229 Peirce [JLJ - e before i, after P why?]... His basic conversational partner to whom thoughts are addressed is the 'You', one's future self as a second person. Thus a person's 'thoughts are what he is "saying to himself", that is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time'.

[JLJ - This paragraph by Archer introduced me to Peirce (pronounced "purse") and his writings. Note my initial snipe at the spelling of his name.]

p.230 The dialogue is a dialectic [JLJ - a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to find the truth] between our human concerns and our emotional commentaries upon them. Its outcome at any time is the designation of certain concerns as ultimate ones to us, but also ones with which we can live... Emotional commentaries... Where they are decisive is in determining how much we are concerned about these various matters, which cannot but be of some concern to us as human beings.

p.231 In form, this dialogue is more like internal experimentation between thought and feeling. The interplay between them is an interior examination of future scenarios to discover if and how the two can fit together and live together in alignment, were certain concerns to become designated as a person's ultimate ones.

p.231 The conversation is passionate and cognitive through and through. And this is how it must be, for the whole purpose of the dialogue is to define what we care about most and to which we believe we can dedicate ourselves.

[JLJ - For the common man, I would say the conversation is a replay of conversation snippets, attempts to understand the environment, including relationships and change, attempts to understand and manage emotion, and in general a management of the predicament and a reveling in the present.]

p.231 The 'agenda' of the 'I' and the 'You' is to produce a joint articulation of their ultimate concerns... whatever 'I' now think to be of great worth can be questioned by the future self... Similarly the 'You' may propose enhancing some commitment in future time, to which the 'I' replies, 'I can't live like that: this is hard enough.' What the conversation is about is exploring the terms of a workable degree of solidarity

p.231 There are three significant moments which can be distinguished in every phase of the conversation: these have been termed Discernment, Deliberation and Dedication. The DDD scheme is what occupies the middle stage of each morphogenetic cycle and generates second-order emotionality as its elaborated outcome.

[JLJ - There is a fourth 'D' - defeat, when we must regroup and try again if our initial or continuing efforts have not succeeded.]

p.233 Discernment is a preliminary review of those projects we have reasons to deem worthwhile.

p.234-235 the 'You' is a source of commentary on current and potential concerns and it persuasively unreels hypothetical future scenarios with their associated emotional charges. Fundamentally the 'You' is concerned with conservation and change and it works through reproaches and challenges. Where a valued concern is at stake, the 'You' reproaches the 'I' for endangering it. It says, 'How could you...' and runs through a scenario... the 'You' also challenges the 'I' by bringing up an agenda where good is turned into best and new possibilities are explored: 'If you care so much about x, then why don't you...'; 'So what's stopping you from...'; 'You've never even tried...' Again scenarios are unreeled of a life which changes in response to taking certain concerns more seriously.

p.235 Discernment is an inconclusive moment of review... The moment of Discernment served to highlight our concerns without discriminating between them. It can be seen as a logging process in which actual and potential items of worth are registered for consideration... Only those which have been logged-in constitute topics for further deliberation.

p.236 Deliberation is a matter of question and answer... The basic question... is 'How much do you care about...?' and the answer eventually has to be in terms of 'How far will You go?' There are many opening couplets. The basic question may gain the response 'Well, it's not as important as it once was', which is followed by, 'Is it really worth You keeping it up?' - 'Not if I could [do something else] instead.' In an uncomplicated dialog, this is how concerns are discarded... Alternatively, the initial response may be 'Does it really matter?' - 'Of course it matters. You don't have any alternative' - 'But I do, You just won't consider...' - 'I have, but it's too risky' - 'But you know it needn't be if...' Here the challenge... is inconclusive... These dialogues go from the extreme of discarding projects, through contesting concerns, to the opposite pole of preliminary determination. In themselves these represent a very provisional ranking of the concerns with which the self can live, or more precisely feels they can live.

p.237 Dedication... means that the subject has to arrive at a personal judgement of worth and one with which he or she can live emotionally.

p.237 the... project was decisively sidelined: other costs had prevailed. The aim is always to ascertain how costly the enterprise would be, given that discussion has not already ruled it out as too costly. To make headway with their negotiations, questions come from both the 'I' and the 'You' and are of the kind, 'Could you do without x?', 'Can you keep it up?', 'Is it worth it?', 'Could you do it again?' etc... Together they [JLJ - Archer means the 'I' and 'You'] re-prioritise their concerns, demoting and promoting

p.241 The internal conversation is fundamentally a process of forging personal identity. The subjects, meaning the different aspects of the self do not hold themselves apart from their concerns: potential sources of commitment only remain at arm's length whilst they are being inspected and alternate commentaries vie for a hearing during the moments of discernment and deliberation. Instead and in solidarity, the self comes to identify with her ultimate concerns. As the successive moments of the conversation culminate, 'It is these acts of ordering and of rejection - integration and separation - that create a self out of the raw materials of inner life.'

p.248 everything in the internal conversation is pro-tem [JLJ - Latin, pro tempore, for the time being]. We may simply have got it wrong in our assessments of concerns and costs... the dialog is ceaseless and references above to it 're-starting' only indicate discriminable new cycles.

p.249 we do not ever make our personal identities under the circumstances of our choosing, since our embeddedness in nature, practice and society is part of what being human means.

p.249 the internal conversation is never stifled: we remain active subjects in our own lives and do not become passive objects to which things happen

p.283 interrelations (interactions between groups and collectivities which redefine both through re-grouping)

p.285 These initial interests with which Agents are endowed, through their life-chances, provide the leverage upon which reasons (otherwise known as constraints and enablements) for different courses of action operate.

p.297 The internal conversation is never suspended, it rarely sleeps, and what it is doing throughout the endless contingent circumstances it encounters is continuously monitoring its concerns. Inwardly, the subject is living a rich unseen life which is evaluative... and which is meditative... What this subject is doing is conducting an endless assessment of whether what it once devoted itself to as its ultimate concern(s) are still worthy of this devotion, and whether the price which was once paid for subordinating and accommodating other concerns is still one with which the subject can live.

p.298 Part of being concerned about our concerns is also internally to interrogate ourselves about whether we are doing them justice.

p.300 It must, of course, be allowed that we can back-out, because reality may present challenges which the internal conversation fallibly presumed would be manageable... Internally we can fail, fall and pick ourselves up again

p.306 acknowledgement is given to the properties and powers of real people forged in the real world... The most important of these properties and powers is the 'inner conversation', as the mode of articulation between people and reality. Its exploration represents a new terrain for social theorizing to discover

p.306-307 The object of the whole exercise has been to link 'structure' and 'agency' by accepting and accentuating the distinctive properties and powers pertaining to each, and then to examine their interplay. This is captured as a morphogenetic sequence in which structure conditions agency, and agency, in turn, elaborates upon the structure which it confronts. Morphogenesis works by employing analytical dualism to delineate cycles of structural conditioning, social interaction and structural elaboration over time, and according to the substantive problem at hand.

p.307 we humans form society through our activities, but... we ourselves are also shaped by it. Unless one distinguishes between the emergent properties of the 'parts' and the 'people', nothing determinate can be said about their interplay.

p.307 The emergence of a structural property... results from a long interaction chain of intended and unintended consequences, and it only exerts its powers of constraint and enablement by shaping the situations in which people find themselves

p.308 The fundamental task of this book has been to give precision to what is meant by the causal powers proper to agency itself. These are the powers which ultimately enable people to reflect upon their social context, and to act reflexively towards it... Only by virtue of such powers can human beings be the active shapers of their socio-cultural context, rather than passive recipients of it.

p.313 The reflective powers... are dependent upon our ability to prioritise our concerns in the world, including the social world... Our power of reflexivity enables us to prioritise what we care about most in the world... part of our subjective human story is itself shaped and constrained by the causal powers of objective reality.

p.315 the 'inner conversation' is a matter of referential reflexivity in which we ponder upon the world and about what our place is, and should be, within it. Social reality enters objectively into our making, but one of the greatest of human powers is that we can subjectively conceive of re-making society and ourselves. To accomplish this entails objective work in the world by the self and with others. The story to tell is about the confluence of causal powers - those of external reality, and our own which emerge from our relations with it: the two ultimately being mediated through the 'internal conversation'. It is the only story really worth telling, for it is about the transcendental power of human beings to transform the social world and themselves

p.318 The 'inner conversation' is how our personal emergent powers are exercised on and in the world... This 'interior dialogue' is not just a window upon the world, rather it is what determines our being-in-the-world, though not in the times and the circumstances of our choosing... the 'inner conversation' is... necessarily a conversation about reality... It is we human beings who determine our priorities and define our personal identities in terms of what we care about... There is nothing in the world which dictates how we list our priorities

p.319 Value-rationality... it is by means of it that every real person navigates their way through the world... only those with no concerns can be literally aimless... Open out the 'internal conversation' and we discover not only the richest unmined research field but, more importantly, the enchantment of every human being.