p.4-5 it is only after we discover a way of relating ourselves to our surroundings,
a way of organizing or orienting ourselves to attend to certain aspects
of our surroundings rather than others, that a situation that was initially bewildering comes to take on a more well structured
form. Our concern is with resolving on a line of action is thus similar, in this sense, to bringing a blurred
image into a clear focus - the higher the 'resolution' of the lens, the more the light gathered.
p.19 meaning begins with our spontaneous responsive reactions. Such reactions can
be thought of as beginning a sequential process of differentiation, of specification, of making something
within a still undifferentiated array of possibilities clear and distinct
p.27 people... find their actions influenced just as much by the actions of the others around them as by
their own interests and desires. Thus in joint activity of this kind... novel possibilities for action are created beyond
those available to any individual acting alone.
p.39 "The work of a philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose" (Wittgenstein,
1953, no.127). For our task is - as I said at the beginning of this chapter - that of both anticipating the future and of
appropriating the past, of anticipating the real possibilities available to us, as who we 'are' in the situation we occupy,
and of drawing from what we know in the service of acting into a possibility available to us.
p.44-45 human problems in psychotherapy... are solved by therapists helping their clients create
new ways of 'going on' in their lives by interconnecting and relating old facts in new ways. In such a process as
this, "we want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in
some sense not to understand," says Wittgenstein (1953, no.89). We seek a way of talking which leads to "just that
understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'" (no.122), which can draw a client's attention
to some of the other possibilities open to them that their current forms of talk led them to overlook.
p.49 not only is a reality with its own kind of existence constructed between us, but also, as
a result of our involvements in such moments, we come to embody a certain selective sensitivity, a sensibility, a certain
way of reacting and responding to our surroundings from within the relations between us constituting them.
p.74 "To understand another person's utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper
place for it in the corresponding context. For each word of the utterance that we are in the process of understanding, we,
as it were, lay down a set of our own answering words..." (Voloshinov, 1973, p.102)
p.74 in this responsive, relational, dialogical view of our inner lives, the 'things' supposedly
contained 'in' them are not to be found 'inside' us as individuals at all, but 'in' the continuously
unfolding relations occurring between ourselves and others (or an otherness), in our surroundings.
p.128 joint action always creates that third entity - the context, situation, circumstance, etc., that the
action is 'in' and must 'fit in' with.
p.199 It is within such ongoing, open, unfinished, spontaneously adjustive and responsive activities
as these, in the course of which we orient ourselves to the others and othernesses around us, that we speak of ourselves
as perceiving our surroundings, of us as being in a perceptual rather than a cognitive relation
to them. Rather than having to 'think out' how to relate ourselves to our surroundings, as the solution to a puzzle, we
find ourselves in such circumstances bodily responding to them spontaneously in a certain manner
- we behave in such moments in distinctive ways which can serve as a beginning for a way of thinking (a prototype)
rather than in ways which are the result of thought. Indeed, in occurring within a complex interplay between both
what we do actively and what just happens to us passively as a result, such events are shaped by a complex mixture
of uniquely local influences... They are partially structured, still emerging events.
p.199 The beginnings of our everyday, responsive understandings, then, can be found
in those (only partially determined) events that 'strike' us, that make a difference in our lives... understanding
in the proper sense of the word, i.e., orientation in the particular, given context and in the particular, given
situation - orientation in the dynamic process of becoming... what is understood here is
not a new piece of information or a fact but, in Wittgenstein's (1953), how to 'go on' in a practical circumstance
