‘Now I can go on:’ Wittgenstein and our embodied embeddedness in the ‘Hurly-Burly’ of life [Book Review]

Human Studies 19 (4):385 - 407 (1996)
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Abstract

Wittgenstein is not primarily concerned with anything mysterious going on inside people's heads, but with us simply going on with each other; that is, with us being able to inter-relate our everyday, bodily activities in unproblematic ways in with those of others, in practice. Learning to communicate with clear and unequivocal meanings; to send messages; to fully understand each other; to be able to reach out, so to speak, from within language-game entwined forms of life, and to talk in theoretical terms of the contacts one has made., as an individual, with what is out there; and so on — all these abilities are, or can be, later developments. Wittgenstein's investigations into our pre-individual, pre-theoretical, embodied, compulsive activities are utterly revolutionary. They open up a vast new realm for empirical study to do with the detailed and subtle nature of the bodily activities in the background to everything that we do. The relational character of such pre-theoretical, Ur-linguistic, spontaneous bodily activities—and the way in which they display us as seeing connections from within a synopsis of trivialities — is explored through the paradigm of currently fashionable 3–13 random dot autostereograms.

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John David Shotter
University of New Hampshire, Durham

Citations of this work

“How to Go On”: Intersubjectivity and Progressivity in the Communication of a Child with Autism.Laura Sterponi & Alessandra Fasulo - 2010 - Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 38 (1):116-142.
Coordination in language.Stephen J. Cowley & Sune Vork Steffensen - 2015 - Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies / Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies 16 (3):474-494.

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References found in this work

Philosophical Investigations.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1953 - New York, NY, USA: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe.
On Certainty (ed. Anscombe and von Wright).Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1969 - San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright & Mel Bochner.
The Tacit Dimension. --.Michael Polanyi & Amartya Sen - 1966 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.
Philosophical investigations.Ludwig Wittgenstein & G. E. M. Anscombe - 1953 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 161:124-124.
Tractatus logico-philosophicus.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1922 - Filosoficky Casopis 52:336-341.

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