conceptually downstream: revisiting old tributaries of thought for “new” constructivist ideas...

Running Head: CONCEPTUALLY DOWNSTREAM 1

Conceptually Downstream: Revisiting Old Tributaries of Thought

for “New” Constructivist Ideas and Practices

Tom Strong

University of Calgary

Author Note

Tom Strong, Educational Studies in Counselling Psychology, Faculty of Education,

University of Calgary.

This article is based on a presentation given on July 19, 2011 to the 19th International

Congress on Personal Construct Psychology, Boston, MA, USA.

Correspondence should be addressed to Tom Strong, Educational Studies in Counselling

Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of Calgary, 2500 University Way Dr. NW,

Calgary, Alberta. Canada T2N 1N4. E-mail: [email protected].


Abstract

Contemporary constructivism occurs at the confluence of three tributaries of thought and

practice: hermeneutics, phenomenology and linguistic philosophy. Selectively tracing the

contributions of each tributary, or tradition of thought, a case is made for integrating cultural

meanings and customs, lived experience, and people’s uses of language in a generative and

socially grounded approach to constructivism.


Conceptually Downstream: Revisiting Old Tributaries of Thought

for “New” Constructivist Ideas and Practices

The truth about people, about human nature, then, is not something awaiting discovery,

ready made, like something under a stone on the beach: it can only be made by people in

dialogue, as the product of a social act, in continual mutual interrogation and reply.

(Shotter, 1975, p. 135).

The 2011 International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology in Boston showed

how diverse a ‘tent’ constructivist psychology has become. A range of traditions of thought, all

bearing some affinities to George Kelly’s writing, were discussed. The diverse conference

dialogues were far from rehashes of those traditions, or recyclings of orthodox ideas from those

traditions, however. New was being made from the old. Seemingly channeled by and for

conference attendees, the ideas of these traditions critically and generatively engaged attendees

in dialogues of transformative meaning. My contribution, then and here, has been to trace these

diverse and overlapping traditions as they animate contemporary constructivist psychology.

The Wittgensteinian (1953) metaphor of rivers conveys the sense of movement, vitality

and transformation associated with how traditions of thought find their confluence in dialogues

like those at the Boston conference. Ideas, by this view, have a dynamic and historicized

influence on the people recognizing and using them. “Downstream” from where these tributaries

merge are conceptual resources awaiting syntheses. This paper therefore turns “upstream” to

selectively draw attention to ideas of interest to constructivist psychologists, particularly those

who situate constructivist ideas and practices in social and cultural context. The confluence

proposed draws on familiar phenomenological and hermeneutic tributaries of thought while


including a more recent tributary: linguistic philosophy. It is through language that individuals

are able make sense of experience, and then share or negotiate its meanings with others.

Sense-making at the Confluence of Personal, Social, and Linguistic Experience

The notion that understandable experience is only partly of our own making is hardly

new. Constructivists over the last decade have devoted whole conferences to meaning-making as

both personal and social processes and accomplishments (Chiari & Nuzzo, 2003; Raskin &

Bridges, 2004). Apart from the seminal works of Kelly (e.g., 1963), constructivists have

primarily drawn from two major tributaries of constructivist thinking: phenomenology (e.g.,

Butt, 2004; 2010) and hermeneutics (e.g., Chiari & Nuzzo, 2009; Cushman, 1995). Arguably,

much of social constructionist theory takes the latter approach, particularly if one primarily

articulates narratives and discourses as being hermeneutic in origin and sustenance (e.g., Burr,

2001; Foucault, 2001; Gergen, 1999). Making sense, or making anything associated with our

experience “matter” (Kaschak, 2011), can be seen as both an act and an accomplishment that can

be seen in personal, social, and linguistic terms. Such ‘sense-making’ is bound up in peoples’

diverse ‘sayings and doings’ which helps them keep experience acceptably familiar to oneself

and each other (Schatzki, 2002). Typically, that familiarity is enabled by particular uses of

language. Heidegger (1971) saw language helping people ‘bething’ experience by their names

for ‘it’, while they ‘dwelled’ inside languages of common and accepted use. Vygotskians say

much the same in speaking of language as a tool and a result (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978) of human

interaction. What matters for constructivists are effective understandings (Kelly, 1963).

It takes experiences like the Y2K scare over a decade ago, however, to remind us how

ensnared people can become in their ‘sayings and doings’– computer languages and the doings

associated with them included. Thus, one finds a critical side of constructivist thought and


practice; while a generative side responds to challenges in finding effective vocabularies, the

dark and light sides of constructivism, so to speak (cf., Lock & Strong, 2010). The word

‘effective’ above hints at a few of the traditions and dimensions that cue up the discussion which

follows of what is conceptually upstream. It also denotes a point of departure from some

constructivist traditions that see the seat of meaning and transformation of meaning lying with

the construing possibilities of individuals. The ethical and therapeutically optimistic implications

of constructivist approaches facilitate orienting to clients’ personal views and beliefs, while

offering Kelly’s ‘constructive alternativism’ (1963) in personally modifying them. But, it is

precisely this word ‘personal’ that comes up short for many constructivists whose orientation is

more social or cultural. It is partly this fertile tension in reconciling the personal and the social,

through linguistic interaction, that furnishes the historical plotline that follows.

Three Different Tributaries or Traditions?

Put simply, there are three traditions to recount and reconcile: our personal experience,

our social experience, and the sense-making potentials our use of language enables for both

experiences. Stated differently, there is a) our subjective or phenomenological experience, b) our

social or hermeneutic experience, and c) our ongoing linguistic and inter-subjective efforts in

negotiating a and b. Come down emphatically for any of these traditions and important things go

missing. The individually-oriented phenomenologist can accidentally find her or himself

endorsing a solipsist stance on meaning-making that can come off as psychotic or alienated.

Seeing people as socially determined, in Garfinkel’s (1967) terms, makes them ‘cultural dopes.’

Somewhere between these poles are human beings capable of embodied and social meaning-

making, and beings capable of shifting meanings and ways of meaning-making as well.


The link between language and meaning is well-established, and the languages we use to

make personal and socially shareable experience understandable, are the same languages we use

to negotiate our ways through physical and social reality. Vico’s (1744, 2005) answer to what he

described as ‘linguistic poverty’ was a poetic wisdom (constructive alternativism?) he felt people

and the cultural institutions they populated needed for overcoming a poverty of meaning. It is

perhaps this third interactionist/negotiating tradition that is most difficult to grasp, yet it has been

the province of constructivist ancestors (e.g., Vygostky, Mead, Garfinkel) for some time.

In his groundbreaking, Qualitative Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy, John

McLeod (2001) made the case for hermeneutics and phenomenology as the core traditions of

qualitative research methods. These are the two traditions most constructivists are at home with;

seeing meaning as either individually construed or differently constructed according to the

cultural group or discourse in which one is embedded. There can be a reassuring stability of

meaning that each tradition points to. Each also offers an important departure from the naturalist

or realist view that there is a correctly knowable world, if only we would stop distorting our

perceptions of it. The worst excesses of enlightenment thinking arose from importing ideas and

methods from the so-called hard sciences to purportedly discover ‘how things actually are’ in

realist terms, and to then engineer social technologies from such ‘discoveries’ (e.g., Gergen,

1982). While Newtonian social scientists practiced their craft and prescribed from it, Einsteinian

physicists had long ago moved on using insights familiar to most constructivists. At issue,

however, even for these relativist physicists, was how to negotiate or coordinate differences over

understandings and actions in complementary ways (Kelso & Engstrom, 2006). Phenomenology

and hermeneutics offer accessible understandings of meaning for most constructivists, but they

lack, as I will later elaborate, accounts of these negotiations or coordinations of meaning.


McLeod made his case for phenomenology and hermeneutics underpinning qualitative

research at about the same time as I was immersing myself in ethnomethodology (e.g., Garfinkel,

1967; Heritage, 1984) and conversation analysis (e.g., ten Have, 1999). These latter qualitative

research methods make their focus what occurs in and from negotiations between persons in

social interaction. Where most people regard meaning as fairly stable, as might the

phenomenologist in personal ways and the hermeneutic analyst in cultural ways,

ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts tend to view meaning as kept the same through

social interactions, like conversation. This is another way of saying that it is the sameness of our

efforts in negotiating meaning with each other that keeps meanings stable; we socially anchor the

sameness of our meanings in how we interact with each other – not in the phenomena

themselves. So, while phenomenologists focus on embodied, first person (i.e., lived) meaning,

and while hermeneuts are interested in the meanings of collectives like cultural groups, this third

and relatively recent tradition focuses on meaning as it features in socially negotiated and

coordinated (i.e., performed) interactions. Meaning in these three senses or traditions can be seen

as simultaneously embodied, culturally understood, and socially transacted. Each tradition seems

to have had to account for the other at some point, and that is part of the story I will share. Each

tradition also offers a counterpoint to the modern realist view that there is a correctly

understandable reality, if we align our sense-making and language with it. Finally, there are

conceptual resources offered by each tradition that may have been bypassed, but still are

potentially useful, for addressing therapeutic and other challenges to meaning-making.

A Phenomenological Plotline?


Phenomenology begins from an appreciation for our consciousness of lived experience.

The conundrum facing phenomenologists has been what to make of the fact that we are not all

conscious of exactly the same things when we relate to a phenomenon that is arguably shared as

an experience. Humans have a habit of historically handing over their consciousness of lived

experiences to those who can get it more right than they can. Whether experience is

authoritatively described by priests or lab-coated scientists, there is an enduring human tradition

of regarding consciousness of firsthand experience as suspect (Toulmin, 1990). Objectivity

trumps subjectivity every time it seems, even though it has taken many guises over the years

(Daston & Galison, 2007). However, one’s experience of a delicious red wine or sky-diving

defies an objective third person account; or, as Dan Zahavi (2005), puts it, such an account

misses out on what such experiences mean “for me.”

The history of phenomenology shows an effort to capture this first person experience;

and, in one sense, to wrest it back from those who would purport to tell us what our experience

(including the actions following from it) is or should be. But, it is one thing to be conscious of

something, and another to involve others in that consciousness or what seems to be begged by it.

Husserl (1913; Woodruff Smith, 2007), a pioneer of sorts in this regard, attempted an audacious

move; to bring us back to the ‘things themselves’, by accurately reflecting upon and describing

their shareable and commonly experienced essences. His intellectual journey (downstream in our

direction) was ultimately more interesting than any of his realizations along the way. It seemed

that to get at the pristine, immediate raw data of experience we had to suspend our ‘natural

attitude’ toward such experience. This is a version of what research phenomenologists call

bracketing one’s assumptions so that one can have a direct and culturally or historically

unmediated experience of a phenomenon. Such a move is akin to Baron von Munchausen trying


to lift himself out of his circumstances by his ponytail; to achieve what Thomas Nagel (1986)

referred to as the ‘view from nowhere.’

Husserl rightly abandoned this effort to get experience precisely, according to its real

essences (the things themselves) and his phenomenology ultimately took a more decidedly

hermeneutic turn. The idea that we could hone our senses and consciousness to access raw,

unmediated experience seemed an unattainable ideal. It turned out that to describe reality one

had to use the language that culture and one’s experience of culture furnished – to make what

was ‘real’ understandable to others. Husserl’s students – Heidegger, Schutz and Levinas – all

took this realization from his project, and produced classics on phenomenology, albeit in very

different directions. From Heidegger (1962), phenomenology takes on a tacit and participatory

sense – the kind that leads people to refer to meaning by saying things like ‘it depends on one’s

context.’ Schutz’s (1967) phenomenology was of social life or what sometimes gets described as

‘inter-subjective experience.’ Levinas’s (1998) phenomenology was even more radical; for him,

relational connections precede any meanings humans may bring to their relationships. In a

tangentially related way, Viktor Frankl (1986) equated one’s social conscience with their navel –

with navels and consciences offering evidence of our connections to other humans in deep, yet

often unacknowledged, ways.

Seen one way, phenomenology’s project of accounting for pristine subjectivity runs

aground when the relational or social is factored into one’s lived experience. The very languages

humans use to make sense of and communicate their experiences come with what dialogue

theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) described as having the tastes of others’ meanings. Another

aspect of phenomenology’s social development relates to how social interaction, most notably

conversation, can be seen as a primary mode of being for humans. Who can claim a ‘feral’


childhood or a Robinson Crusoe-like existence? Most of us negotiate our lives with each other in

varied ways, without indulging individualist extremes that would see us in conflict with others,

alienating ourselves, or worse, imprisoned as a danger to others. However, it is hard to deny that

we live a first person, subjective experience. We have thoughts and dreams; negotiate our

personal needs with others, and so on. What is difficult to maintain, conceptually, is a

subjectivity uninformed or unconstrained by our interactions and history with others.

A Hermeneutic Plotline?

Only in a quite limited sense does the single individual create out of himself the mode of

speech and thought we attribute to him (Karl Mannheim, 1936, p. 4).

A cartoonish version of hermeneutics is that, in considering meaning, people are herd-

like and inhabit shared thought clouds that determine their understandings. As cross-cultural

experience often shows, understandings can vary in culturally recognizable ways; so can

people’s related customs. However, for constructivist psychologists, or phenomenologists, any

next step to suggesting that people sharing a culture share the same thought cloud and thus think

exactly alike is absurd. Somehow people who share a history and location can be seen to have

common customs and understandings yet variability and uniqueness that are culturally

recognizable and acceptable. More importantly, when seen hermeneutically, this sharing of

history is a participatory endeavor of people engaged with each other in meaningful ways that

ground their social reality (Heidegger, 1962). Mannheim’s quote above suggests that people may

not be as much the authors of their words and thoughts as they imagined.

The notion of ‘common sense’ is illustrative of people sharing common bases for

understanding and acting in socially acceptable ways. However, what passes for being socially

acceptable can vary according to time and cultural location. The everyday use of ‘common


sense’ seems to imply a universal as opposed to culturally and temporally grounded sense of

meaning. To illustrate, common sense inside today’s Tea Party political movement is clearly

different than the common sense behind the recent Occupy Wall Street movement. Hermeneutics

as a tradition tends to take up a richer sense of what meaning can be than is often conveyed by

contemporary notions of knowledge or information. 19th century hermeneutic scholars such as

Schliermacher were as interested in the ‘geist’ (as in zeitgeist), or animating spirit of any sensus

communus, as they were in the informational content of what was understood. Thus, to do a

hermeneutics of the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movements would entail joining and

tracing the unique meanings, sentiments, and aims engaging members of either movement. One

thing clear about common sense, in this regard, is that one acquires a sense of what is ‘in bounds’

or appropriate inside either movement – learned quickly if one finds oneself out of bounds.

Another sense one gets from hermeneutics relates to something Gadamer (1988) referred

to as ‘effective history.’ Within the social sciences one often finds a very ahistorical sense of

knowledge or meaning, as if the meanings we share with others were not tradition-grounded.

‘Effective history’ refers to a similar meaningful inertia to what is implied by being

“downstream”; that we are typically engaged in currents of shared understandings and actions

that predate us. This is not to suggest that we are inseparable from our traditions, but for the most

part we carry forward what is often tacit and taken for granted from our traditions in ways that

we extend, albeit with new twists and turns responsive to our circumstances. What is ‘effective’

about ‘effective history’ is our engagement in extending traditions, often without awareness.

Hermeneutically speaking, there is no ground zero or tabula rasa with respect to one’s

knowledge. We continue to be engaged in shared meanings and social interactions from which

we cannot even momentarily absent ourselves. At best, we can learn to recognize some of our


assumed meanings and ways of making meaning – something that is enabled through encounters

with others not sharing our assumed meanings and social practices (e.g., Todorov, 2010).

At some point, individually focused constructivists can feel challenged by hermeneutic

thinking because their lived sense of meaning can feel so personal. While cultures may share

traditions in terms of understanding and action, surely the variability among cultural members

must speak to the inadequacy of a hermeneutic view on meaning. We are not herd-like and

engaged in collective forms of ‘groupthink’ – as our differences within our cultural or

institutional groupings make constantly evident. There is nothing in a hermeneutic view to

suggest that to share a tradition means to share an exactly common thought cloud. Another of

Gadamer’s phrases can help here: we share ‘horizons of possibility’, but what we diversely do

within those horizons relates to many things. To each cultural interaction we bring our own

interpretive histories; nuanced effective histories which are not exactly the same, though they

may be transacted in a shared zeitgeist – like post 2008 Banking crisis America. Cultures afford

and constrain possibilities for interaction and meaning (Martin & Sugarman, 1999), but they do

not determine those possibilities with each social utterance or interaction.

Hermeneutics offers a sense of culturally and relationally grounded meanings and actions

– a common sense backdrop against which what we say or do fits (or doesn’t) with the others

with whom we share lives. Backdrop as a word, however, would fail to capture the participatory

sense I have come to associate with hermeneutics – the kind of participation Heidegger (1962)

was getting at when he described humans as being ‘thrown’ in to a social circumstance. In other

words, we learn to responsively join others who are already engaged in particular ways of

understanding and interacting. It is a cultural and relational world in motion, one in which we

learn to participate in ways we not only share but hold each other to.


Most social constructionists and constructivists feel at least partly at home with

hermeneutics. Gone is any naturalist’s sense that there can be correctly and universally knowable

experiences to which we align our senses, language, and actions. ‘Reality’ is differently practiced

and understood across cultural groups, each with its own horizon of possible meanings and

actions. Hermeneutically speaking, therapy or education are activities of embracing the

possibilities a culture and its traditions and horizons affords, but while still working within its

constraints (Martin & Sugarman, 1999). This, however, is a radically different notion from that

of constructing new realities, as if such constructing could ignore the cultural inertia and ground,

as well as relationships in which any new reality would presumably be shared.

The hermeneutic story tends to focus on histories of the present, and our roles in

extending such histories into the future. Histories of the present refer to the ways people carry

forth their effective histories in to the emergent and planned interactions before them. Neither

determined by, nor free of, such effective histories, part of what hermeneutics offers

constructivists is a sense that meaning cannot be separated from the interactions in which it

acquires its significance and relevance. Meaning also is inseparable from its history of use,

prompting dialogue theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) to claim that we ‘rent’ our words from their

prior uses and users – extending to those with whom we currently negotiate our meanings and

actions. In this regard, meaning acquires its vitality by bridging the already said and the yet to be

said – between people bringing different interpretive histories and preferences to dialogue.

Hermeneutics can also be seen as having an historical, narrative trajectory. Beginning as

a method for ‘correctly’ interpreting texts, such as the Bible, hermeneutic scholars were

confronted with issues like how historical and cultural positioning features in ways of

interpreting. Could 21st century readers of the American constitution understand it in the ways


intended by its original authors, who had no internet or voting women, for example? As the

hermeneutic story developed it became clear that historical and cultural positioning – the

horizons of possibility Gadamer described – featured in how people engaged with each other’s

meanings. Unlike the promised universals of pure knowledge idealized by enlightenment

thinkers like Descartes or Newton, more humble, culturally-derived meanings and ways of

meaning-making are the focus of hermeneuts. And, in our increasingly culturally diverse world,

for hermeneutic scholars issues arise as to which culturally derived meanings should be

privileged, and on what bases. One contemporary challenge for hermeneutics is how to approach

meaning or understanding as a cross-cultural phenomenon. For Gadamer, such understandings

occur when horizons of meaning or possibility are ‘fused’ in ways agreeable to both parties. But,

with such a view of cross-cultural understanding comes a particular ethics of openness and

collaboration needed for such fusions of meaning to occur. Like the confluence of two large

rivers flowing into each other, dialogue involves the commingling of people’s interpretive and

effective histories, from which new shared hybrids of meaning can be carried forward.

The Linguistic Philosophy Tributary

When a society lives by the CONDUIT metaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding,

persecution, and much worse are the likely products.

Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 232 (their emphasis)

Whether starting with a first person, phenomenological stance on meaning, or a

hermeneutic cultural stance on meaning, eventually one’s theorizing has to account for what

happens when people interact. What makes such interactions meaningful? Social interaction

often takes us beyond our individual meaning and sometimes transforms the social realities

which engage us. Bring two different voices together, sing two different notes, and a third


harmonic note can result. Bring two different points of view together, in dialogue, and multiple

possibilities can result – well beyond the capacities of any dialogue partners on their own – if the

people holding those different points of view are willing to be changed by each other. The

phenomenological realm is anchored in subjectivity while the hermeneutic realm is anchored in

that of the collectivity. Somewhere in between – literally – we tend to negotiate our meanings

and lives. Still, many turn to information transmission and reception metaphors of meaning

exchange – the conduit metaphor in this section’s lead quote – overlooking their communicative

exchanges as negotiations of meaning.

Within linguistic philosophy one finds various approaches to meaning (e.g., Morris,

2007). While most constructivists do not embrace a correspondence view of language and

meaning (in Rorty’s, 1979, depiction: words as “mirrors of nature”), describing how language

often plays a stand-in role for imagined or conveyed experience can be challenging. This is

especially the case when one moves beyond general to specific uses of language that

ethnomethodologists refer to as “indexical” (Heritage, 1984). Words take on nuanced and

multiple meanings through different ways they are put to use (Wittgenstein, 1953), and for

Bakhtin (1981), the key was how we ‘people’ words with our intentions. That said, Lakoff and

Johnson, in this section’s opening quote, make it clear that we cannot simply transmit our

intended meaning and assume it will be interpreted in ways consistent with our intentions.

A linguistically negotiated view of living and meaning challenges any phenomenological

or hermeneutic sense that our meanings are ‘ours.’ Instead, what matters is how we transact our

meanings with each other to, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) sense, find ways of going on together – or,

not. A negotiated view of meaning starts with what results from our use of language or

interactions – not the meanings and actions we intend. In Bakhtin’s world (1981), we are born


responding and it is in our responses to each other that we make otherwise ‘dead’ words and

actions come alive. In other words, our words find their next-step meanings in what others do

with them; and, then, in what we do with their responses to us – anticipated and actual. It is in

our responding to each other that we bring and reconcile our differences – the source of a

meaning’s aliveness. Even once we negotiate our differences into ostensibly shared meanings

and actions, the negotiations do not stop – they just get more subtle and tacit for those who

embrace an ethnomethodological view (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984).

Particularly challenging about an ethnomethodological view is its focus on meaning as

both performed and grounded in social relations. To ethnomethodologists, what sustains our

social sense of meaning are our accustomed or expected ways of responding to each other.

Questions tend to get answers, we know how to take turns in conversation, habits develop

between partners – these interactions can seem beyond negotiations, since they often happen

without much thought or effort. But, examined up close, what keeps meanings the same is how

they are acceptably reproduced through interactions – accent on acceptably.

A common view from cognitive psychology is that humans are rule and script followers

and that – when social interactions are done right – expected outcomes follow. At a micro- level,

however, this sense of interacting ‘correctly’ is a much more elastic affair, typically evaluated for

how the interactions keep things acceptably familiar between those interacting. Stray too far

from what is acceptably familiar when interacting, and our conversational partners will typically

try to bring us back to what is acceptable for them. From the ethnomethodological view, social

interactions are ‘ad hocced’ (i.e., improvised; Garfinkel, 1967) to some degree – not merely

reproduced (correctly or incorrectly) according to a cognitive script or rule. It is in this ad

hocc’ing that people engage in subtle or implicit negotiations that keep things in bounds or


acceptably familiar – with each other (i.e., as opposed to the cognitive script or rule). While I

may seem engaged in semantic hairsplitting, an ethnomethodological view of meaning suggests a

world continuously worked out in responsive social interactions; whereas a cognitive script or

rule view suggests an abstract form of accountability – beyond these responsive negotiations.

Social meanings and social reality, to ethnomethodologists, are performed in interactions

that are ‘context-shaped and context renewing’ (Heritage, 1984, p. 242). This is in some respects

like people interacting from their “effective histories” – at each responsive moment to each

other, but we are not talking mere replications or extensions of sameness in those interactions

with each other either. Why this view of meaning and meaningful interactions matters to

constructivism or social constructionism relates the possibilities for change or sameness of

meaning in every human interaction. And I am referring to moment-by-moment interaction, as

well as a series of interactions. Those familiar with the ecological and systemic thinking of

Gregory Bateson (1980) would feel at home here. Changes of meaning, from this perspective,

can begin in a single response within a negotiation, over many turns of negotiation, or not at all.

Social interactionists are interested in the pragmatics of human interactions – what occurs

in and from them. For George Herbert Mead (1970/1934), one of the early thinkers about

meaning and social interaction, interaction is where people develop symbolic objects from their

interactions that they can use again in familiar ways. Words are conversational objects in this

sense; they can index a shared experience, experiences which can be remembered by the use of

the word. It is also in this sense that Wittgenstein (1953) came to refer to meaning as being

related to use – as in how words get used in particular ways between people as they converse.

Returning to how these interactions can also be conceived of as negotiations, meaning changes

or new meanings take form in the back and forth of dialogue – as invitations to shared meaning


taken up or declined. Where neuroscientists speak of synaptic gaps, there is a counterpart in the

turn-taking of our dialogues: conversational gaps. Across conversational gaps occur negotiations

of new meaning or sameness of meaning; new ways for people to go forward together, or tacit

agreements on carrying forth what is already familiar and agreed-to.

Over the past 50 years, the interactionist or ethnomethodologically-informed view I have

been describing has increasingly featured in therapy and research methods. The notion that our

talk can perform or accomplish social outcomes is sometimes traced back to a student of

Wittgenstein’s, J. L. Austin (1962). By Austin’s original and somewhat rule-bound formulation,

specific utterances in well-defined social circumstances perform social functions, such as when a

priest in a church utters, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” The adequacy of this

performative view works in a static and well-defined social reality where one’s meanings can be

counted on to get a particular social job done, given an adequate understanding of the

circumstances. However, many of our social interactions are less predictable. In the back and

forth of our communicating with each other we negotiate our ways forward with words and other

means of communication – with some offers taken up and some declined. While most of us

would want our words and actions to be understood by others, as intended, experience shows that

this is often not the case, and that further conversational work is involved to talk our way

forward together with others.

Social interaction has been the research focus of discourse analysts for some time (e.g.,

Reusch & Bateson, 1951; Woffitt, 2005). For psychologists in particular, this focus can be

frustrating because, unlike what phenomenology could offer as personal understandings of lived

experience, discourse analysts offer what occurs beyond the personal, in the in-between realm of

the interpersonal – and not in those earlier mentioned shared thought clouds. No, discourse


analysts observe what is said and done between people and what results from that saying and

doing – that is observable. This focus on what occurs in and from the negotiations between

people suggests that we cannot read minds, we can only go on what we make (or have made)

evident to each other – to go on. Thus, our words, how they are said, our historically and socially

grounded understandings, the circumstances in which we say what we say – all play a role in

how we negotiate social lives with each other. Our immediate interactions also owe something to

larger hermeneutic negotiations in which we are engaged; grounded in the effective histories of

our cultural groupings. Said another way, we also negotiate our effective histories and cultural

groundedness in any interaction – including the familiar cultural discourses we draw on to make

ourselves understood and influential. This is where the micro and macro dimensions of social life

coincide in our interpersonal negotiations. The negotiated, social interactionist, view I have been

describing arises out of a recognition that; when the personal and the social are brought together

in our interpersonal interactions, something beyond prior personal or social meanings can result.

Constructivism at the Confluence of Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Social Interaction

We cannot decide to understand, even under the best of circumstances; we can only put

ourselves in the best position for understanding to occur.

D. B. Stern, 2010, p. 69

Three great traditions or tributaries of thinking are confluent in contemporary

constructivist ideas and practices. In each of these traditions one can trace a trajectory that begins

in a particular view of meaning that invariably comes up short. The personal world of the

phenomenologist, a world familiar to many constructivists, is that of first person lived

experience. At some point, however, there is no escaping what is social or cultural in our

experience – it is even there in the language used to make sense of and report on our experiences.


With hermeneutics, one is presented with how our participation in shared social and cultural

relations comes to contextually shape but not determine our ways of being and meaning. Being

members of these collectivities however, is not the same as being locked into ‘groupthink’ or

acting as ‘cultural dopes’, to revisit Garfinkel’s (1967) pithy phrasing. There is, additionally, a

social world to negotiate – one where our subjective and collective experiences are transacted in

social interactions already grounded in accustomed meanings and social practices. At their

confluence, these three tributaries of thought – phenomenology, hermeneutics and social

interactionism – have much to offer the constructivist practitioner or researcher.

As a counselor educator, my interests lie with presenting these alternatives to students,

alongside the usual Cartesian view that meaning can be correctly known in a detached (i.e.,

“words as mirrors”) way. I want students to struggle with the inadequacies and anomalies that

come with being purists in any of these traditions of meaning. In the phenomenologically-

grounded humanist tradition of client-centered and existential counseling, one finds a privileging

of client meaning and experience, a view suggesting that, if one can authentically articulate

experience, one is on the road to self-actualization (e.g., Rogers, 1961). In phenomenological

research one is taken into the subjective experience of some phenomenon. The inadequacies and

anomalies come up in recognizing that one’s subjectivity cannot be divorced and reported on

apart from one’s social and relational experiences – interviews with counselors and researchers

included. Husserl’s initial view was that subjective experience could be understood in ways

separable from social experience – a kind of objective subjectivity if you will, and a position he

gave up for a more social view later in his life (Woodruff-Smith, 2007). For hermeneuts, what is

recognizably shared in social or cultural ways becomes the emphasis. History shapes the present

without determining it, and individuality still occurs within any collectivity. Social and cultural


approaches to doing therapy can emphasize efforts to gain what is possible given the constraints

and affordances of any culture and relationship. A different emphasis arises if one wants to join

others in transforming relationships and cultures. Action researchers and family therapists join

cultures and relationships to engage them in altering dispreferred effective histories (e.g., Strong,

2010). A social interactionist tends to focus on how the processes and outcomes of social life,

such as meanings, are negotiated in micro and macro ways. The reflexivity of such negotiations

is hopefully clear to researchers and practitioners (e.g., Finlay & Gough, 2003). We do not

influence such negotiations and the relations they occur in from the outside (‘objectivity’); we

inescapably participate in such negotiations contributing to what is produced from them.

Unsurprisingly, for me, a collaborative ethic of practice follows.

Contemporary social constructionism – a close cousin to constructivist thought and

practice – is also articulated in quite varied ways (e.g., Burr, 2003; Gergen, 2009; Shotter, 1993),

each giving slightly different emphases to the three tributaries or stories of thought to which I

have been referring. I would like to conclude with how I see these three stories of contemporary

constructivism informing my prior work with a client.

About 15 years ago I had a single consultation with a man who presented to me with

concerns about anxiety, drinking too much, and troubles in his marriage. Phenomenologically-

speaking, I was interested in his first person account of these concerns, while hermeneutically-

speaking I was also interested in how he had come to make sense of these concerns. So, I asked

him how he came to understand his symptoms the way he did; and what experiences he

associated his symptoms with. He recounted having witnessed a horrific slaughter of Korean

prisoners of war, and that he never had an adequate opportunity to discuss what had happened.

Instead, despite trying, he increasingly felt alone with his larger than life and words experience.


Bearing in mind the reflexive and performative element of my questioning (e.g., Tomm, 1988), I

directly asked the client: “Do you want this story to die with you?!” This elicited a startled and

emphatic response, which catalyzed the client and I to negotiate a course of action that later led

to his audio taping his story, having it notarized as legal testimony, and then led to circulating

transcripts of the story to war historians who were able to confirm his story, and to reconnect him

with members of his regiment who had also witnessed the slaughter. This client and I later

published his story (Strong & Flynn, 2000) and in our last correspondence he told me that he had

a national television news team interview him in his remote British Columbia town.

I share this story because I believe it captures elements of all three tributaries of social

constructionism as I have been describing them. An abstract language of symptoms was

grounded in an account of actual lived experiences (phenomenology), the meanings for the

experiences were explored and reflected on together (hermeneutics), and as a practicing narrative

therapist I very much saw the questions and responses of our therapeutic dialogue as negotiations

of meaning and action. They led to further negotiations of meaning by this client with the larger

society in which he was a part (having his story accepted and circulated). In therapy, as in life

more generally, we have our personal experience, the cultural meanings and histories we live

from, and how we negotiate life with others from these meanings and experiences. While life can

feel non-negotiable at times, this is where constructivist political and ethical challenges begin.


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conceptually downstream: revisiting old tributaries of thought for “new” constructivist ideas...

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