These days, we could all use a a little Wittgenstein. Like this gem. One is often bewitched by a word. For example, by the word "know." Ludwig Wittgenstein ...
I want to introduce you to a unique activist-scholar community that played an especially important role in my development. It's the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (also known as LCHC or, simply, the Lab). Housed at the University of California San Diego since 1979, the Lab is a community of...
Renowned scholar John Shotter passed away on December 8, 2016 after a long illness. John loved to talk and to listen, to create conversation about everything, most especially about conversation itself. His contributions to social constructionism, Open Dialogue and a radically humanistic psychology are acknowledged and studied the world over. I...
What is under consideration is not the ontological state of affairs, but the ontological commitments of a discourse. What there is does not in general depend on one’s use of language, but what one says there is does. American philosopher W.V.O. Quine (1908-2000) ...
If there is something you wish to know and by meditation you cannot find it, my advice to you, my ingenious friend, is: speak about it with the first acquaintance you encounter. Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking” ...
It’s time to change how we think about and relate to people whose makeup is or appears to be different from the norm. We now think of what’s different—let’s say a biological or neurological difference—as the main source of disability and difficulty, and we focus help and treatment on this....
If I were an historian I'd want to be as creative, eloquent, passionate and rigorous as Kurt Danziger (Professor Emeritus at York University in Toronto). A few times a year, I return to his wonderful books, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research and Naming the Mind: How Psychology...
This week's words are from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass—a very playful practical-philosopical book containing hundreds of thinking/speaking muddles. Here's two of them. I. White Queen: Let's consider your age to begin with—how old are you? Alice: I'm seven and a half exactly. White Queen: You needn't say "exactually: I can believe it without that....
This week's words to ponder are a few of the wonderfully ponderable quotes atrributed to the great Yogi Berra—baseball legend and a bona fide American wordsmith. (There are lots more in The Yogi Book.) Yogi Berra passed away September 22, 2015 at the age of 90. “I really didn’t say everything I said.” “Don’t...
On Wednesday October 21, I'll be speaking at Penn State's Center for Language Acquisition in their Invited Speaker Series. My topic? Performing Other—The Life of a Languager In his essay on the development of personality in children, Vygotsky wrote that the preschool child “can be somebody else just as easily as he...