In taking the activity of word meaning (rather than word shapes or forms) as a microcosm of human consciousness in this expressive-responsive sense, I will not, of course, be exploring the question: "What is consciousness?," i.e., what mysterious kind of substance can it possibly be? Instead, my exploration will be much more of a Wittgensteinian (1956) kind. By investigating the practical details exhibited in the many and various concrete circumstances that incite us, i.e., to which we are spontaneously responsive, in describing a person's conduct as "conscious" or "unconsciousness," we can come to an understanding of the important practicalities of human conduct that we 'pick out' and attend to by the use of such expressions, and why attention to such practicalities is of importance to us.

Indeed, in focusing on those aspects of our behavior in which we act spontaneously, in an animal way, I will be following Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) major claim, that all our higher, voluntary, mental functions have their origins in lower, spontaneously occurring forms. Higher forms are developed from lower ones by interweaving into them socio-cultural structures of our own human invention, structures passed on to us by those around us which enable us to deploy the 'natural' or spontaneous reactions already available to us according to our own humanly 'invented' ends. While as individuals, clearly, we develop our own abilities to conduct ourselves in ways that are both intelligible to the others around us, and (for the most part) considered by them to be legitimate, we remain unaware of both the relations among our own mental activities and those between them and our surroundings; we are unable to turn around on them, so to speak, to give an account of them to others. It is our being instructed by others in such ways of accounting for our own mental activities, i.e., by them relating themselves to our actions in such a way as to draw our attention, in verbal terms, to the relevant relations, that we can come to free ourselves from our own, immediate, impulsive responses to events in our surroundings. In others words, it is through the words, the utterances, of others, that we can come to act in a voluntary, conscious manner, in a way in which ourselves are responsible, or 'answerable', for our own conduct.

In line with this emphasis on the thoroughly social nature of consciousness, I also want to conduct this exploration in the light of Toulmin's (1982) account of its etymology in con (with)- scientia (knowing) in Roman Law, i.e., in a witnessable or witnessing knowing along with others. As he sees it, for the last 350 years, since Descartes's time, a string of practical, concrete terms, all having unproblematic, everyday uses - whether as verbs ("Do you mind?"), as adverbs ("Did you do that consciously?"), as adjectives ("That was a thoughtful act on your part!") - "have been converted... into so many broad and general abstract nouns, which have then been construed as names for the most personal, private flux of sensory inputs, kinesthetic sensations, and so on" (p.53). In this transition a whole family of words, "whose historic use and sense had to do with the public articulation of shared plans and intentions has been taken over into philosophical theory as providing a name for the most private and unshared aspects of mental life... The term 'consciousness' has thus become the name for a flux of sensory inputs that is seemingly neither con-, since each individually supposedly has his or her own, nor sciens, since the sensory flux is thought of as "buzzing and booming" rather than cognitively structured or interpreted " (p.54).

However, in the con-scientia view of consciousness that I want to explore here, i.e., of it as witnessable knowing along with others, to say that we are conscious in our acting, that we know what we are doing in our acting, is to be able to give an account of our actions to those around us, verbally. That is: we can verbally describe the component acts that made up the action we have just completed, in terms both of their relations to events in our surroundings and their mattering to us, i.e., their reasons, what we were trying to do in our doing of them. In brief, to be conscious, is to posses a verbally expressible, reflective awareness of one's own mental processes. Indeed, it is in just this sense that Vygotsky (1986) talks of consciousness: "We use consciousness," he says, "to denote awareness of the activity of mind - the consciousness of being conscious. A preschool child who, in response to the question, 'Do you know your name?' tells his name, lacks this self-reflective awareness: He knows his name but is not conscious of knowing it" (p.170).

Our project here, then, with respect to those of our utterances in which we make use of the word "consciousness" or any of its cognates, is in line with Wittgenstein's (1953) project when faced with all such philosophically problematic words: "When philosophers use a word - "knowledge", "being", "object", "I", "proposition", "name" - and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (no.116). And here our task is precisely similar: to bring out into the open the really quite large number of crucial distinctions, both in our responses to own actions and in our responses to the actions of others, we in fact make spontaneously in 'going on' with our practical, everyday affairs with the others around us. It is a kind of 'philosophical' investigation that helps to set out "what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions" (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.126), i.e., the usually unnoticed, spontaneous background expectations and anticipations, the responsive expressions, in terms of which we all 'go on' with each other in our everyday practical affairs.

We are not very used, perhaps, to paying much attention to this more spontaneous, and in fact, unconscious aspect of our language use, particularly in the social and behavioral sciences - in which, as I intimated above, in discovering what a psychological function - such as consciousness, perception, thinking, memory, etc. - is, we feel we face an empirical task, rather than a conceptual one. Indeed, although it might pain us to accept it, with respect to our conscious awareness of our own linguistic activities in this sphere, we must liken ourselves to the preschool child Vygotsky describes above: We know spontaneously how to use our words correctly in our everyday practical affairs, but, despite the extensive programs of research in scientific psychology, we still remain somewhat unconscious of the criteria we use in judging the appropriateness of the words we utter in conducting our practical, everyday affairs - we are unable verbally to describe them, and thus, to make them witnessably known.

For Vygotsky, then, each unit, each 'part' of a living whole, retains as a microcosm all the essential characteristics of the macrocosm. This is clearly not the case with the parts of a mechanism. The parts of a machine are, so to speak, objective parts, which have their own character, irrespective of whether they are parts of the machine or not; they owe none of their characteristics to their intrinsic relations with any of the other parts. But the 'parts' of a living whole cannot exist in isolation like this, apart from all the others with whom, quite literally, they have grown into existence. Indeed, the living whole within which they have their being has itself grown from a simple living 'cell' into a richly structured one in such a way that, at any one moment in time, all its 'units' or 'parts' owe, not just their character, but their very existence both to one another and to their relations with the 'parts' of the system at some earlier point in time - that is, their history is just as important as the 'logic' of their relations in their growth. Because of this, it is important to add, it is impossible to picture, i.e., represent, living wholes in spatial diagrams, for such wholes contemplated at a given moment are always incomplete, i.e., even in all their 'parts' they are always on the way to being other than they are. In other words, its 'units' or 'parts' - if we are justified in using such inadequate terms at all - have, necessarily, both a temporal as well as a spatial aspect and thus, by their very nature, 'point' both from a past and toward a possible future (see Shotter, 1984, pp.42-43).

Indeed, time and temporality are central to the nature of people's living activities, their meaningful expressions. Thus, to attempt to analyze them into a sequence of instantaneous spatial configurations, into a sequence of separate, objective parts, each lacking an intrinsic before and after, would, as Vygotsky puts it, result in "products that have lost the characteristics of the whole." Instead, it is important for us to accept that in all living activities, there is always a kind of developmental continuity involved in their unfolding, such that earlier phases of the activity are indicative of at least the style, the physiognomy, i.e., the unique living identity, of what is to come later. There is a characteristic 'shape' to their unfolding in time. Thus, just as acorns only grow into oak trees and not rose bushes, and eggs only produce chickens and not rabbits, so all living activities, it seems, give rise to what we might call identity preserving changes or deformations - their possible ends are already 'there' in their beginnings. In other words, our spontaneous, expressive-responsive bodily activities, our words in our uttering of them, always 'point beyond' themselves, toward a limited set of possibilities in the future.Thus, in having internal rather than external relations to their surrounding circumstances like this, they have an indicative or mimetic, i.e., a gestural, relation to them (even if their surroundings are invisible to those witnessing only the activities) - in other words, rather than simply 'add-on' extras, they are always 'participant parts' in a larger whole. It is the intrinsic developmental continuity of all our living activities that, to repeat, provides us with the usually unnoticed background of expectations and anticipations we arouse in each other by our responsive expressions, the spontaneous expectations and anticipations in terms of which we all 'go on' with each other in our everyday practical affairs. And it is this that makes it possible for them to link their actions in with our's in an intelligible manner. For they also live out their lives from within the same surroundings as we ourselves, and are, or can be, oriented toward the same features in the same way as ourselves. Indeed, it is a central part of what it is for us to be a member of a linguistic community, that we are able to use (to express) a word with the anticipation that the others around us will respond to our use of it just as we expect. If they don't, then we wonder whether they are in fact 'one of us'.

This effect of our expressions, to be able to 'point' in at least a partially specified manner, from a past toward a future, is crucial, as we shall see, in understanding how another's words can be constitutive of our own, conscious activities, and is something quite inimical the Cartesian approach to change and movement. That approach, as is well-known, considers change and movement only as changes in the configuration of a set of independently existing, externally related, independently existing elements, in Vygotsky's terms - an account of change that by its very nature, loses all the phenomena that arise our of our living, expressive-responsive relations with the others and othernesses around us. For it is this non-representational, expressive-responsive use of our words that allows them to be both the means in forming our concepts, and to be the mediational means used in mastering and directing higher mental functions, or consciously performed activities - for in apply our words to ourselves, we cannot not be spontaneously responsive to their use.

At this point, it will be useful to draw attention to various remarks of Wittgenstein, relevant to the beginnings of language-games (for he also emphasizes our deeds in quoting the same maxim from Goethe's Faust): "The origin and primitive form of the language-game," he says (Wittgenstein, 1980a), "is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'" (p.31). "The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word," he notes (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.218). "But what is the word 'primitive' meant to say here?" he asks (Wittgenstein, 1981). "Presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought" (no.541).

I quote these remarks of Wittgenstein's here, to draw our attention to the way in which we can find the possibilities for beginning quite novel and unique modes of thought in our spontaneous, unthinking, responsive bodily reactions to events occurring around us, events occasioned either by the others or an otherness in our surroundings. In such circumstances, the new modes of thought in question are not in any way mere repetitions of, or even rearrangements of, already existing modes of thought, but really are quite unique, first-time ways of thinking in relation to the unique practical circumstances (the others and othernesses) with which we are in fact confronted. Indeed, if we could not begin new modes of thought in some such way, we would be unable in our meetings with new people, come to any grasp of them as the unique individuals they are, with a unique history and inner life that is their's alone. It is these unique 1^st-person expressions that seem to 'come out of the blue' that give us the sense, in fact, of another person as having an 'inner world' that is hidden from us. But irrespective of whether such 1^st-person expressions are accurately linked to a mysterious inner realm or not, they can in fact 'tell' us what the person's anticipations and expectations are, thus enabling us to 'go on' with them, to respond to them appropriately.

In emphasizing the importance of our spontaneous, unthinking, involuntary, unconscious activities, I want to re-emphasize the point already made above: that Vygotsky sees all our higher, deliberately self-controlled mental functions as being constituted in different 'orchestrations' of already existing, spontaneously occurring lower functions. This, along with his emphasis on the internal relations between mental functions and on consciousness only evolving "as a real whole" (p.167), leads him to be critical of all methods aimed at teaching word meanings, teaching concepts; they cannot be 'explained', taught by drilling or memorization (1986, pp.149-156). But they can when influenced by instruction, as we will see in the next section, if the instruction works to systematize, or to give an ordering to the child's already acquired, spontaneous (but disorderly) understandings.

In brief, what I have been emphasizing above, then, something that is to an extent inimical to our current cognitive approach in psychology, is that very little of our behavior is under our own control. Indeed, my concern in this article is almost wholly with, as Gadamer (1989) puts it, "what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing" (p.xviii). This might seem to be of much less interest to us than a focus on our deliberate actions. For it would seem to decrease rather than increase the opportunities available to us for progressing and improving our own lives. But in fact this is only so if we too tenacious in holding on to our individualistic, Cartesian heritage, with its suggestion that all human development must happen solely within us as individuals. The fact is that it is not by our learning yet more facts, yet more information about what already exists for us in our surroundings, that we can change the ways in which we live our lives. Our task is to change the ways in which we relate ourselves to our surroundings, and to do that, we must learn new ontological skills, new ways of being a person (Shotter, 1984). To learn new ways of orienting ourselves toward our surroundings, new ways or styles of addressing and making ourselves answerable to the others and othernesses around us, we must explore what other ways of inter-relating aspects of our surroundings, what other relational-dimensions, we might bring into existence between us, other than the mere extension of our already existing forms of thought.

But to see how this is possible, we must turn to explore further Vygotsky's emphasis on the expressive-responsiveness of our living activities, and how it is this - in people's use of words in their meetings with the others around them - that allows such words, such utterances, to be the means by which the further articulation and development of their consciousnesses can be achieved.

What Vygotsky is doing here, then, is opening up the possibility of consciousness having, at any one moment in time, a dynamic, fluid, and thus continually changing, unitary structure to it, rather than it having an unchanging static structure. And of development as consisting in the gradual complexifying of its structure, not by the step-by-step adding in of extra (externally related) component parts, but by our learning to 'orchestrate' within ourselves, the many different, dynamic, 'mental movements' that can be spontaneously 'called out' as responses in us - responses of looking, thinking, remembering, relating, judging, etc. - by our uttering of different words to ourselves in our own "inner speech" (Vygotsky, 1986, p.182 et seq.).

Although by now, once we have appreciated the unbroken continuity between our bodily expressions and our spontaneous responses to them (the internal relations within the living unity of our speech, our expressive-responsive activities, and us acting in ways the others around us find meaningful), we can also appreciate that our inner speech need not always be strictly structured in (dictionary) words - gestures, facial expressions, tones and rhythms of voice, etc., may all be influential in giving structure to, in mediating, our higher mental functions. Indeed, we find Vygotsky (1986) expressing just this view as follows: "The connection between thought and word... is neither preformed nor constant. It emerges in the course of development, and itself evolves. To the biblical "In the beginning was the Word," Goethe makes Faust reply, "In the beginning was the deed." The intent here is to detract from the value of the word, but we can accept this version if we emphasize it differently: In the beginning was the deed. The word was not the beginning- action was there first; it is the end of development, crowning the deed" (p.255).

This, then, is the power of people's living expressions: they do not just passively represent a circumstance beyond themselves as a dead picture needing interpretation; they have 'life' of their own. Not only do they actively 'call' on us to respond to them in a characteristic fashion, but in 'pointing beyond themselves', so to speak, they expectantly orient us toward, i.e., bodily prepare us for, the occurrence of something to an extent specific not yet visible in our surroundings. In this sense we can say that they are uniquely expressive of invisible but "real presences" (Steiner, 1989; Shotter, 2003), agentic presences at work in an individual's 'world' [20] shaping their conduct. These are the same forms of behavior that, in the process of development, that others formerly practiced with respect to him or her, that the child now begins to practice with respect to him or herself (see Vygotsky, 1966, pp.39-40, quoted as an epigraph above).

To get a more detailed sense of what in practice these forms of behavior are like, let us consider a mother saying to her son, as he comes into the kitchen from the garden, leaving dirty footmarks from not having wiped his feet on the doormat: "Stop! Just look what you've done! There... behind you... on the floor... all those dirty footmarks! Wipe your feet next time." Imagine the sequence, her pausing, her pacing, intonation, her exaggerated facial expressions, her body postures. Imagine the sequential unfolding of her son's reactions as he responds to her utterances. Imagine him not turning to look behind him, and his mother repeating: "Look behind you... on the floor... look when I tell you to look... what do you see? Tell me... tell me out loud!" She doesn't just issue her talk toward him with her eyes and ears closed to his reactions. Only if he reacts bodily at each moment as she expresses her displeasure toward him as she expects him to react, only if he acknowledges at each moment in their unfolding interactions that he understands her as she wants him to understand her, will she go on to her next step in 'teaching him to behave', in teaching him the traditional ways of 'going on' in his culture!

It is by the use of her expressions, her gestural use of her words, that she responsively commands and directs various aspects of her son's behavior: she stops his ongoing movement, disrupts his pursuit of his own aims, re-focuses his attention, and directs him to select distinctive features of his own behavior for attention, and to link or synthesize them to other spheres of behavior in his life - the evaluative dimension of clean/dirty. By her words, she is controlling, directing, and channeling his actions. Indeed, we can see here that some of the most important things we can say to another person, if we are to bring about any changes in their ways of being in the world, are "Stop!, Look!, Listen!" - for it is with these words that we can break into the routine flow of their activity, and can in practice 'deconstruct' (Derrida, 1977) their practices, thus to bring their attention to aspects of their own activity previously unnoticed by them. Indeed, this drawing of our attention to previously unnoticed aspects of our own ongoing behavior, is one of Wittgenstein's (1953) central methods in his philosophy, in his attempt to point out to us possibilities in our circumstances that we have previously overlooked: "... we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook" (no.132).

In all of this, I have de-emphasized the static, representational, picturing function of our words, the purely formal patterns that can be found, spatially arrayed within them, after they have been spoken. The time has now come to emphasize the importance of these formal patterns and the systems, the orders of connectedness that can be set out within them, the discipline they require. For, although the mother described above is instructing him in the traditions of his culture, she is not contributing very directly in his intellectual development. It is here, in this sphere of a child's development, that systematic and orderly forms of talk (often expressed in written forms, or in scientific terms, or both), provided to the child by someone already versed in their expression, can exert a very important influence in their mental development.

There is insufficient space available in this present article to be able to outline fully Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) account of the mediational influence such systematic and orderly forms can exert in structuring our higher mental functions - the influence of learning written forms of speech is, Vygotsky (1986, pp.180-183) claims, of especial importance. It can provide us in its syntax with ordered structures that enable us to conduct our own intellectual activities in ways that, not only can be routinely elaborated far beyond what is known to us in our immediate experience, but are still couched in terms intelligible to others. It is especially by being instructed in scientific schemes, Vygotsky (1986) suggests, that the child makes such intellectual gains. He gives the following example illustrating a young child's understanding of causal relations: "A child of eight or nine uses because correctly in spontaneous conversation; he would never say that a boy fell and broke his leg because he was taken to the hospital. Yet that is the sort of thing he comes up with in experiments until the concept "because" becomes fully conscious. On the other hand, he correctly finishes sentences on social science subjects: "Planned economy is possible in the U.S.S.R. because there is no private property-all land, factories, and plants belong to the workers and peasants." Why is he capable of performing the operation in this case? Because the teacher, working with the pupil, has explained, supplied information, questioned, corrected, and made the pupil explain. The child's concepts have been formed in the process of instruction, in collaboration with an adult. In finishing the sentence, he makes use of the fruits of that collaboration, this time independently. The adult's help, invisibly present, enables the child to solve such problems earlier than everyday problems" (p.191).

In other words, Vygotsky sees our consciousness, our deliberate and voluntary control over our own behavior, as developing, not simply by our ceasing to be spontaneously reactive to events in our surroundings - we must still retain our spontaneous reactivity to be able to 'follow' the activities of the others around us, instantaneously and unthinkingly - but by our learning to master our own reactions by deliberately directing our own attention to certain features occurring in our surroundings, rather than others, by giving ourselves the appropriate verbal instructions. "It is surprising to us," Vygotsky (1966) remarks, "that traditional psychology has completely failed to notice this phenomenon which we can call mastering one's own reactions. In attempts to explain this fact of 'will' [traditional] psychology resorted to a miracle, to the intervention of a spiritual factor in the operation of nervous processes, and thus tried to explain the action by the line of most resistance, as did, for example, James in developing his theory of the creative character of the will" (pp.33-34, my emphasis).

What we have discovered in our explorations, then, is that by turning ourselves outward, toward others, rather than inward, toward our own supposed inner workings, we have found aspects of our relations with the others around us that are crucial to us becoming more conscious (con-scientia) in our relations with them. Thus, far from the others around us being competitors with us for limited resources, unless we all offer each other the resources we need to refine or articulate the 'inner structure' of our consciousnesses further, we will all suffer. This, then, is the influence the utterances of others, of their responsive-expressions, their spoken words. They can exert a constitutive effect on our consciousnesses - especially the words of our predecessors and ancestors, our parents and other teachers, the writers and artists around us. Indeed, just as they gave themselves over to the 'calls' exerted upon them by the words of others in their surroundings, so can we, if we give ourselves over to their 'calls', come to be influenced by their words in the same way - the importance of Vygotsky's words here, being precisely a case in point.

Yet there is a danger: To explore the development of our intellectual capacities, we can begin to explore the effect of (chiasmically) interweaving - as indeed Vygotsky (1978, 1986) did - many other externally devised orderly schematisms into our ways of responding to events in our surroundings: explicit syntactic schemes, numerical schemes, spread sheets, visual diagrams and other displays, and so on, and so on. All of which, in providing us with formal schematisms, to 'logicalize' our thought and in so doing, to render it conscious and voluntary, i.e., within our own individal control. But we must remember that when we 'logicalize' on own inner workings in this way, and orient ourselves toward our surroundings in terms of the 'single orders of connectedness' they provide, we inevitably 'respecify' those events in terms of 'essential' features as determined by the imposed scheme. We thus limit ahead of time how we will respond to them. We can thus quite easily make ourselves deaf and blind to their real nature, to their true, dynamic complexity. In other words, to repeat once again Vygotsky's (1987) most important point, such a move, intellectually, can result "in products that have lost the characteristics of the whole" (p.45) - we can lose our grasp on all the phenomena that arise our of our living, expressive-responsive relations with the others and othernesses around us.

This danger is, in my estimation, most acute in the current form of our everyday interpersonal relations. For it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves here, that all the emotional and moral ambiguities of our outer lives, and the influence of the voices of others in and on our actions, are of necessity carried over and chiasmically interwoven into the structure of our 'inner lives', into the forms of our consciousness, enabling us to (if 'enabling' is at all the right word) master our reactions. But if, under the influence of the systematic words of our teachers and the other intellectual authorities around us, we have mastered our reactions to such an extent that, instead of reacting spontaneously in a bodily way to another person's actions, our spontaneous reactions are always of a cognitive kind, then we have to think how we will react to them, then how we will react is a continual matter of interpretation, choice, and calculation. In such circumstances, we quite literally can be said to have lost touch with one another, and thus become opaque to each other, and perhaps even to ourselves - for our 'inner lives', as we have seen, are revealed only in those of our expressive-responsive activities occurring out in the world between us. As Vico (1968) described it in 1744, in such circumstances people, "no matter how great how great the throng and press of their bodies, ...live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice" (para.1106).

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1. By the term 'historical' here, Vygotsky does not mean we must study events in the past that might have something to do with consciousness now. "To study something historically means to study it in the process of change;" he says (Vygotsky, 1978, p.75), "...to encompass in research the process of a given thing's development in all its phases and changes - from birth to death - fundamentally means to discover its nature, its essence, for 'it is only in movement that a [living] body shows what it is'" (p.75).

2. Here, he claims to draw his inspiration from Marx: "The whole of Capital is written according to the following method: Marx analyses a single living 'cell' of capitalist society - for example the nature of value. Within this cell he discovers the structure of the entire system and all its economic institutions... Anyone who could discover what a 'psychological' cell is - the mechanism producing even a single response - would find the key to psychology as a whole" (Vygotsky, 1978, p.8).

3. "All real and integral understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing more than the initial preparatory stage of a response (in what ever form it may be actualized). And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else's mind (as in Saussure's model of linguistic communication mentioned above)" (p.69). Indeed, let me add here, that Voloshinov (1986) notes that for Saussure's structural linguistics, it is a "system of self-identical forms that becomes the essence of language"(p.56, my emphasis).

4. This is not to say that the orderly patterns or 'logical' systems to be found in our words (retrospectively, i.e., in our completed utterances) are not also, as we shall see, of the utmost importance.

5. This is not to say that the orderly patterns or 'logical' systems to be found in our words (retrospectively, i.e., in our completed utterances) are not also, as we shall see, of the utmost importance. The word theater is, of course, connected with our English word theory. Aristotle used the word theoria to designate those arts in which objects of contemplation can be set out before like characters in a play - whose actions we observe but cannot influence.

7. In Lacan's (1977) terms, the Other is a symbolic order which "organizes the relations between the subject and the real world" (p.xxx, my emphasis).

8. Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: "The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the considerations of our ordinary life? This idea of a difference in kind is accompanied by slight giddiness, - which occurs when we are performing a piece of logical sleight-of-hand... When does this feeling occur in the present case? It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain! - as it were clutching my forehead. -...But I did not utter the sentence in the surroundings in which it would have had an everyday and unparadoxical sense. And my attention was not such as would have accorded with making an experiment. (If it had been, my look would have been intent, not vacant.)" (no.412).

9. As he puts it, to the extent that computers can manipulate arbitrary 'tokens' in any specifiable manner whatever, "we need only arrange for those tokens to be symbols, and for the manipulations to be specified as rational, to get a machine that thinks... Indeed, if that traditional theory is correct [that intellection is essentially the rational manipulation of symbols], then our imagined computer ought to have 'a mind of its own': a (genuine) artificial mind" (Haugeland, 1993, p.4).

10. This paragraph is missing from the 1986 Kozulin translation, but appears on page 126 of the Minick translation.

11. Not present in the 1962 Hanfman & Vakar translation.

12. Note here Wittgenstein's (1953) remarks about whether there is as such a thing as "expert judgment" in this sphere, and whether it can be taught (p.227): "Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can. Not, however, by taking a course in it, but through 'experience'.-Can someone else be a man's teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip.-This is what 'learning' and 'teaching' are like here.-What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgments. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating-rules."

13. Here, I will quote from Minick's (1987) translation, as this issue is spelt out there in much more detail. Indeed, with regard to the three translations of Vygotsky's Thought and Language, or Thinking and Speech, I will mostly quote from Kozulin's 1986 translation - it being now perhaps the most accessible to everyone. But I will quote from the other translations when I think (for my purposes) the phrasing is more evocative. (Given Vygotsky's account of the meaning and the sense of words, he would have much to say about the effect of different translations on our actual, practical responses to his written words.)

14. See note 2 on Vygotsky's (1978) concern to "discover what a 'psychological' cell is..," and his thought that this would lead to "the key to psychology as a whole" (p.8).

15. In using the term chiasmic, I am following the lead of Merleau-Ponty (1968) who entitles chapter 4 - in his book The Visible and the Invisible - "The Intertwining - The Chiasm." I cannot pretend to say what "chiasmic or intertwined relations" in fact are. But what is clear, is that here is a sphere of living relations of a kind utterly different from any so far familiar to us (such as causal or logical relations) and taken by us as basic in our intellectual inquiries. As a hint of what is meant here by referring to the unusual nature of such relations, let me remind you that Bateson (1979), in Mind and Nature, noted that the chaismic interweaving of our visual relating to our surroundings through our two eyes, gave rise to the presence of depth in our looking.

16. Slightly different translation in 1986, p.168, and in 1987, p.183. I quote the 1962 version here, as it has been one of the most influential ideas - the idea that one can only deliberately do something if, so to speak, a 'provision' for it already spontaneously exists in oneself or in one's circumstances (cf., Vico's notion of providence) - in my work over many years.

17. "We do not see the human eye as a receiver, it appears not to let anything in, but to send something out"(Wittgenstein, 1981, no.222).

18. "An 'inner process' stands in need of outward criteria" (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.580). See also Shotter(1984).

19. Just as Wittgenstein (1953) notes that "there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call 'obeying the rule' and 'going against it' in actual cases" (no.201), so we can say the same with regard to word meanings: our understanding of them in these cases is exhibited in our spontaneous responsive understanding of them in the context of their use -- see note 3 also, on Bakhtin's (1986)account of responsive understanding.

20. That is, 'in' the individual's dynamic relations to the others and othernesses in his or her surroundings.

21. See note 3 on Bakhtin's (1986) relationally-responsive account of our understanding of people's utterances.

22. It is worth noting here, Wittgenstein (1953) remark that in such uses of language we can "establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language... not the order" (no.132). It is only too easy to mislead oneself in one's linguistic studies into believing that one has established the order.

23. "A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words.- Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'..." (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122).

24. See Wittgenstein's (1963) remark in note 16.

25. This is where Wittgenstein's (1953) philosophical investigations have their most crucial application: in revealing the 'pictures', the philosophical representations of our human circumstances, that are so extensively interwoven into our everyday uses of language, that we cannot "get outside" (no.115) of them sufficiently to critically examine them.

26. The drawing of our attention to previously unnoticed aspects of our own ongoing behavior, is one of Wittgenstein's (1953) central methods: "... we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook" (no.132).

27. See the discussion in Shotter (1984, p.112, pp.116-117), of the 'political economy of developmental opportunities' that exists in our societies in the West, in which some people clearly gain more of their fair share than others.