Talk of saying,showing, gesturing,and feeling in Wittgenstein and Vygotsky |
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| Authors: | John Shotter |
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| Institution: | Department of Communication , University of New Hampshire , Durham, NH, 03824–3586 |
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| Abstract: | I have a number of interlocking concerns in this paper. Primarily, I want to highlight the practical importance of introducing new and different words into the ways of talking we employ in conducting our social lives together—and why it is that some forms of talk (talk of feeling and feelings, for instance) are much more difficult for us to employ than others. For although we clearly do influence other people's behavior (and our own) with words, we are still so fixated upon the idea of words as arbitrary ‘forms’ representing states of affairs, that we find it difficult to talk of our words in this way, especially of them as having an influence on our own conduct as thinkers and speakers, as listeners, readers, and writers and so on. We can better understand our words as functioning in this way, I suggest, if we see them primarily as having a relational function, that is, as working to relate us both to each other and to our surroundings in direct, immediate, and practical ways. Both Wittgenstein and Vygotsky discuss this gestural, nonrepresentational, function of words in coming to a grasp of people's psychological nature. Thus my aim in the paper is to explore what they claim is involved, practically, in drawing each other's (and our own) attention to the more embodied, less cognitive, aspects of our own activities in the world, and to bring to attention the power of our embodied ‘voices’ in doing this. |
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