The Intellectual Legitimacy of Participatory Action Research -its grounding in the Interactive Moment

John Shotter

Abstract: Action research is often criticized for not being properly scientific, for not being properly based in facts. But with what kind of science should it be contrasted? Hanson (1958) distinguishes between classical, finished sciences and research sciences. Finished sciences are conducted wholly within a disciplinary discourse consisting in a single system of ordered statements representing changes in an idealized “subject matter” in terms of momentary configurations, i.e., they are represented in a stable, pictorial manner. Research sciences, however, cannot be conducted within such a strict disciplinary discourse. Speakers do not ‘regiment’ or sanction each other’s utterances in a research conversation in terms of a limited set of foundational metaphors or ‘grammatical pictures’. To inquire into possibilities not yet actualized, research sciences must be conducted conversationally. But this does not mean that just ‘anything goes’. What can be said at any one moment in such conversations cannot be arbitrary. The moment of utterance, or “interactive moment,” is crucial. For everyone’s utterances must not only be responsive to previous utterances, be answerable for and to a speaker’s present position, and be addressed to particular listeners, they must also be responsive to things and events in their surroundings. It is their participation in a shared, dynamic grammar of felt, moment by moment changing expectations, that enables researchers to ‘go on’ with each other in unconfused ways. Thus, what is precluded within a disciplinary discourse – the exploration of the multidimensional and detailed richness of uniquely new ‘things’ or ‘events’ – is possible in researcher’s conversation entwined activities. Indeed, their openness and lack of a predetermined, idealized order, is a strength in conversational inquiries, not a weakness. For it is in the disorderly details that come to light within such inquiries, rather than in the confirmation of past actualities, that we can find the beginnings of new possible “forms of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953). In this respect, not only is it more accurate to compare action research with research sciences than with classical sciences, but action research finds its legitimacy in the same sphere of human conduct as all of science – in people being responsibly accountable for their own actions to the others around them.

“Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.373).

“Grammar is not accountable to any reality. It is grammatical rules that determine meaning (constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary” (Wittgenstein, 1974/1978, no.133, p.184).

“The decisive point is to recognize that the description of the experimental arrangement and the recordings of observations must be given in plain language, suitably refined by the usual terminology. This is a simple logical demand, since by the word ‘experiment’ we can only mean a procedure regarding which we are able to communicate to others what we have done and what we have learnt” (Bohr, 1963, p.3, quoted in Stapp, 1972, p.1106, my emphasis).

“Heisenberg: I’m a photon. A quantum of light. I’m despatched into the darkness to find Bohr. And I succeed, because I manage to collide with him... But what’s happened? Look – he’s been slowed down, he’s been deflected! He’s no longer doing exactly what he was so maddenly doing before I walked into him! Bohr: But, Heisenberg, Heisenberg! You

also have been deflected!... The trouble is knowing what’s happened to you!” (Frayn, 2000, p.69).

Action research is often criticized either for not being properly scientific, or for not being proper research, or both (Toulmin, 1996). My purpose in this paper, however, is to show that inquiries in participatory action research can draw on the same processes of human communication and interaction as those in fact used in natural sciences, when viewed as unfinished, unsettled research sciences. This is because, prior to, and during the conduct their experimental manipulations and the making of their observations, a community of scientific researchers must all be able to communicate amongst themselves in nonmisleading, unconfusing ways about uniquely new possibilities not yet actualized; and to do this, they need ways of checking out each other’s claims then-and-there, in the ongoing context of their employment. Just as in everyday life situations, scientists also must be able to distinguish between that for which they are responsible, and that which merely happens, irrespective of their agency. For, only if they can sense, when acting in accord with their theories of what the world might be like, whether the results of their actions accords with, or depart from, the expectations engendered by their theories, can they ever put such theories to empirical test. People’s sense of their own responsibility for their actions is, then, at the very basis of science itself. Scientists lacking any sense of their own participation in events occurring around them would be unable to do experiments. In other words, scientists in natural scientific research face communication problems not unlike those faced in action research.

Why have we not realized this before? Because, as Hanson (1958) has noted, philosophers “have regarded as paradigms of physical inquiry not unsettled, dynamic, research sciences like microphysics, but finished systems, planetary mechanics, optics, electromagnetism and classical thermodynamics” (p.1) – and action research has been judged in these terms also Endnote . But, in unsettled research sciences, as we shall see, scientists both adopt a much more everyday, conversational form of talk than in their more formal presentations, and most importantly, as a result, a much more participatory role in the phenomena they are researching into. Central to the constitution of their talk in this special realm, is the spontaneous observance by participants of a shared grammar. And it is just this that allows them to achieve amongst themselves particular contextualized indubitable certainties prior to, and as a condition of, being able later, to claim the empirical truth of decontextualized theoretical propositions as required in an official, classical science.

There is not sufficient space in a paper as brief as this to explore this second realm of scientific expression, in which the final results of a research science are re-expressed within a non-participatory, objective, justificatory rhetoric (Bazeman, 1988; Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Myers, 1990). Although it will, I hope, become clear in the course of this article as to why this style of writing, in which scientists seek to ‘erase’, so to speak, their own involvement in producing matters of “objective fact,” is in fact quite unsuitable for expressing the results of action research projects – for clearly, action researchers are not at all interested in representing already fixed, eternal truths purged of all openings to human involvement Endnote . They seek effective instructive expressions – expressions consisting in indications and exemplars to others as to how they might change their relations to their own unique surroundings – thus to constitute new, concrete and particular possibilities for action within them. And this form of talk is very like that used by managers, and by other participants in institutional contexts, researched into by action researchers (e.g., Cunliffe, 2001).

Thus, with this rather different context in mind, the context required for the conduct of a research science rather than the context required for the public representation of its finalized results, I want to explore what is involved in people making and justifying claims as to the expected possible nature of the outcomes of their actions. For, as I see it, it is no more difficult to justify claims made as to the general value of particular outcomes in action research, than in a research science in the natural sciences. Indeed, to the degree that action research is concerned with the outcomes of human activities – activities in which we ourselves are agents

and can, thus, control to a much greater extent than natural processes – a greater degree of surety becomes available to us. Understanding what is involved in making something happen between us once, we can be sure about specifying the conditions appropriate to making it happen between us again.

Especially crucial in this respect though, is the role of our spontaneous, living, expressive and responsive, bodily activities. They make available to us a previously unnoticed kind of understanding spontaneously occurring within our ongoing involvements in our ordinary, everyday, practical activities, a relationally-responsive understanding to be contrasted with the representational-referential forms currently more familiar to us. And it is this that allows us to be more sure as to the nature of our own ‘makings’ in such activities, than the nature of ‘naturally occurring’ events beyond our agency to control. And it is the role of this aspect of our communicational activities that has until very recently been ignored not only in the study of scientific practices, but also in the conduct of our everyday lives.

Participatory activities in a ‘research science’

Although always available to us, it is only recently, with the work of such thinkers as Wittgenstein (1953), Merleau-Ponty (1962), Bakhtin (1981, 1986), and Voloshinov, (1986), amongst others, that the character of the spontaneously occurring, background forms of participatory understanding, occurring routinely within our everyday conversational activities, has come to our intellectual attention. Like fish being the last to discover water, the great power of Wittgenstein’s ‘philosophy’ (if we feel it can still be called philosophy) lies in his outlining of a set of methods that enable us to come to an understanding of the nature of our own human ‘doings’ from within the middle of our doing of them. He thus describes the nature of his philosophical investigations as follows: “What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes” (no.415). His philosophy, then, is of a practical-descriptive kind. It is a philosophy without a subject-matter, aimed outwards toward helping us to become more actively related to subtle, previously unnoticed aspects of our surroundings in the present moment, rather than inwards toward thinking, prior to any action, as what features we should approach or address in our inquiries. This, clearly is a very different kind of goal from the theoretical goals pursued in the classical, metaphysical philosophies of the past. Instead of providing preliminary theories or models as to the nature of the world around us and our knowledge of it, his aim is to alert us to what in actual fact is occurring in our own involvements with each other, and with our surroundings, which make such theorizing possible. Thus his kind of philosophy “simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us. One might give the name ‘philosophy’ to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions” (no.126).

And it is precisely this that I will try to explore further below. For, as we shall see, common both to action research and to the conduct of classical (experiment and theory based) scientific research, is a realm of creative human activity to do with the possible establishing of new human communities. Within this sphere, people develop, not only new ways of relating themselves to each other, but also as a result, new ways of relating themselves to all the other othernesses in their surroundings as well. Thus central in this realm, although so far very little examined in the philosophy of science, is the choice of what we might call the styles of address adopted by members of a research community, both to each other and to the othernesses constituting the subject matter of their research.

In this respect, Kuhn (1970) has noted that, prior to the conducting of the relevant experimental manipulations and the observing of their consequent results (or in the course of such activity), a new scientific community of researchers, all able to communicate in unconfused, nonmisleading ways amongst themselves about unique possibilities not yet actualized, must be established. Hence, he observed: “Effective scientific research scarcely begins before a scientific community

thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may be legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions?” (Kuhn, 1970, pp.4-5). In other words, the claimed truth of scientific results established experimentally rests in fact on particular sets of sureties or certainties of practice established prior to, or progressively clarified in the course of, the relevant research activities – our scientific truths are grounded in these certainties (Wittgenstein, 1969) Endnote .

These sureties or certainties of practice, the social rootings or groundings of our scientific claims to truth, and the styles of address upon which they depend, have, usually remained in the background unexamined in our studies of the nature of scientific research. The outstanding practical successes of the natural sciences, achieved with very little examination of the role of such sureties Endnote , have instead been taken as a general guarantee of the efficacy of its methods. As a result, we have no way of checking whether the sureties of our research practices are in fact as well grounded in reality as we believe.

This leaves us in the position of being no more sure as to whether our ‘relational experiments’ in establishing new research communities in the natural sciences, are any more intellectually well justified than any of our other ‘relational experiments’. Thus, at least in this respect, action research would seem so far to be at least as well grounded – or more accurately, no less well grounded – than our research activities in the natural sciences. Indeed, if the initial establishment of a new research community, just as much as in an action research project, requires orientation more toward imagining and grasping new possibilities than toward understanding current actualities, and members must fashion between themselves new shared or sharable sense of how they might go on together to act in new ways. In other words, the issue here is not a matter of discovery but of creation.

Hanson (1958), influenced by Wittgenstein (1953), drew attention to this issue long ago. The task of understanding “unsettled, dynamic research sciences like microphysics” (p.1), he pointed out, cannot itself be conducted according to classical scientific methods, the methods use in “finished” sciences. For what is often at issue between scientists in a research science, is not so much how to describe (represent) its subject matter accurately as to determine (constitute) what it might be – a difference between, not what the facts are, but of how they hang together, their meaning. To bring out what he means here, he compares Mach’s use of a formulaic proposition in carrying out a calculation with Hertz’s use of it. Both would, he shows, get exactly the same answers. But while Mach “construed dynamical laws as summary descriptions of sense observations,” Hertz treated them as “highly abstract and conventional axioms whose role was not to describe the subject-matter but to determine it” (p.118) – the difference between an ‘after-the-fact’ (Mach) and a ‘before-the-fact’ (Hertz) use of the formula. This would mean that, “though they get the same answer to the problem, the difference in their conceptual organization guarantees that in their future research they will not continue to have the same problems” (p.118, my emphasis).

These differences might seem to be subtle differences mattering very little in practice. And indeed, as Hanson (1958) shows, in doing calculations, making predictions, and in providing explanations when working with scientific formulae, these two scientists might not differ at all in these activities. The difference between them – to do with the connections and relations they sense as existing within the phenomena of their inquiries – would show up “only in ‘frontier’ thinking – where the direction of new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined” (p.118). But, to try to force the thinking of those in a research science, when they are creating new possible forms of research, into the mold of classical text-book sciences (when creativity is supplanted by systematizing), is, Hanson (1958), is to mislead ourselves into thinking that new research is merely a matter of rearranging old facts into new formal patterns – simply a quantitative matter rather than a matter of unique, once-only, first-time changes of a qualitative kind.

Thus, cautions Hanson (1958), in outlining what is involved in studying dynamic, research sciences, “let us examine not how observation, facts and data are built up into general systems of physical explanation, but how these system are built into our observations, and our appreciation of facts and data” (p.3).

This is precisely my point here too: action research is precisely research into the formation – not necessarily of a new natural science, although it may be – but of new communities of inquiry, new self-developing and self-organizing communities, of one kind or another. Indeed, all the human activities of interest to action researchers have this same feature of openness, of unfinishedness. And it is this feature in the conduct of scientific research that is no more well understood in the natural sciences than in action research. How do we manage to communicate in unsettled, research situations in nonconfusing, nonmisleading ways? How have we managed in the past to relate ourselves to the othernesses in our surroundings in a manner that has enabled us to share the knowledge we gain as individuals with the others around us? What are the styles of address we have used in the past in disciplining our inquiries? Do we use these same styles of address at every stage in our inquiries, i.e., both in research and in finished sciences, or are different style of address used in the early compared with the late stages of an inquiry? Is there a crucial transition involved in reformulating accounts of the results of our research activities, gained in open, dialogically-structured circumstances, to re-situate and to re-express them within the terms of closed, single, systematic orders of connectedness – thus to render them as ‘scientific’ truths, rather than merely as sure grammatical possibilities within a particular living context? These and other such similar questions are the kind of questions I want to explore further below.

Creating “liminal worlds” and new human communities to inhabit them

Scientists must try to talk in precise and unambiguous ways at every stage of their research. But in its early stages, when they clearly do not yet know ‘what’ they are talking about, they work, as Ochs, Jacoby, and Gonzales (1994; & Ochs, Gonzales, and Jacoby, 1996) show in their research in a physics laboratory concerned with solid state physics, in “liminal” (almost fairy-tale) worlds of their own (narrative) devising. Thus at first, their talk within their own research community has more than merely a conversational quality; they communicate with each other via dramatizations of their understandings of their own and others’ work. It is “in these scientific dramas,” as Ochs et al (1994) note, “the participants take on a variety of roles, including set designer, author, director, actor, protagonist, and audience” (p.152). And it is in the unfolding course of these ‘dramas’ that participants in a research community work out between themselves, by testing and checking their understandings of each other’s utterances in the course of their ongoing involvements, as to whether they are communicating with each other in an unconfusing manner. The dynamic nature is these conversational forms of communication have not previous been taken seriously.

Past studies of the discursive practices employed in science (e.g., Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Bazerman, 1988) have suggested that scientists oscillate between employing two basic practices, a more impersonal, objective, formal style in their scientific texts written for publication, and a much more everyday, subjective, informal style in their laboratory interactions and other research discussions. In the first “physics-centered” account, scientists foreground the physical concepts of research interest and tend to mask their own subjective involvement in constructing the circumstances of their research. Typically in such accounts, they might write such (theoretical) statements (propositions) as the following: “Depending on the combination of temperature and strength of magnetic field, atomic spins in a diluted antiferromagnet will exhibit different kinds of order. At a given magnetic field at high temperatures atomic spins in a diluted antiferromagnetic system are uncorrelated... As the magnetic field decreases and/or the temperature lowers, the system undergoes a phase transition and moves into a partially ordered (“domain”) state” (given in Ochs et al, 1996, pp.333-334). While in the second, “physicist-centered” account, they often refer to themselves as the thematic agents and experiences of the phenomena they think of themselves as

researching into – the quotation from Michael Frayn’s (2000) play Copenhagen, being a case example in point Endnote .

But as Ochs et al (1994) point out, the rhetorical choices outlined in the past, “presuppose a fundamental discreteness between scientist as subject and constructed physical world as object” (p.170). In contrast, their studies of research discussions brought to light “a third pervasive rhetorical practice, which, through the media of language, visual representation [i.e., graphs], and gesture [toward aspects of the graphs], conjoins physical entities and physicists in two ways: (1) as coexperiencers of physical conditions and processes, and (2) as coreferents of personal pronouns in grammatical constructions composed of a personal pronominal subject and a change of state predicate” (p.170, their emphases, my additions). In this realm, “when members of the physics laboratory journey across visual displays through talk and gesture (or in their imagination), they may construct themselves grammatically and somatically both as subjects engaged in interpretative activity and as objects of interpretation... [And] this conjoined social identity conflates animacy and inanimacy and thrives in a liminal zone between here-and-now interaction, visual representation, and represented physical worlds, rather than in any single constructed world” (pp.170-171) Endnote .

A typical expression demonstrating these involvements – in a discussion amongst a set of solid state physicists studying phase transitions – is illustrated by a researcher moving toward a diagram on the blackboard and, while pointing first to the right of the diagram and then to the left, saying: “When I come down I’m in the domain state” (see Ochs et al, 1996, p.331). In such an utterance as this, as Ochs et al (1994) point out, interlocutors are living in an unsettled, multi-dimensional, liminal context, “which is neither entirely here (i.e., in the interactional setting) nor entirely there (i.e., in the constructed physical world)” (p.164). Thus it is possible, in the moment by moment unfolding movement of the laboratory discussion in such a context, to direct each other’s attention to many different possible referents, many possible aspects of the relevant phenomena, all currently co-present, each one of which might at some point be of importance in determining the final outcome of their research. And it is only in the little dramas that they stage, that they can create between them at each moment in the context of their discussions a sufficiently determinate sense of ‘where’ they are and what their ‘next step’ might be, that they can all as research physicists agree, as to what their current laboratory results show with respect to what their next experiments should be.

The crucial nature of the moment of utterance in providing orientation of this kind, to do with one’s current ‘positioning’ in the unfolding ‘movement’ of communication, ‘where’ one is, cannot be over emphasized: in coming at a particular moment in the already ongoing flow of contingently intertwined activity occurring between the researcher and his audience, in pointing in their gestural expressiveness from ‘this past’ toward ‘that kind of future’– the change in conditions that bring about the “domain state” – the researcher is orienting his audience toward seeing a connection between events of a previously unnoticed kind Endnote .

There is insufficient space in this short article to examine this most important work in further detail here, but I hope I have said enough to make clear the following point: that to the extent that these kind of communications involve unique people making unique points to each other about new possibilities, they cannot be communicating with each other in terms of already established conventions of usage. These forms of communication are truly creative to an extent of new, first-time, shareable events.

How is this possible? How is it possible within our communications with an other to ‘enter into’ the unique world of their experience, for them to teach us a new way or style of looking at (or listening to) the world around us, a new sensibility? Is there something about the nature of human communication that we have missed in our studies of it so far? I think there is. What Ochs et al (1994, 1996) bring to our attention, is the importance of our spontaneously occurring, living, bodily, expressive and responsive activities that, prior to the work of Wittgenstein (1953) and the others mentioned above, has languished in the background to all our other intellectual activities unnoticed – due, as we shall see, to the unremitting Cartesian

emphasis in the past on thought and on events hidden inside the heads of individuals. But, as Ochs et al (1994) comment, in “trying to understand physical worlds that are not accessible to any of their perceptual abilities... [research physicists] bridge this gap, it seems, [by taking] embodied interpretative journeys across and through see-able, touchable two-dimensional artefacts [graphs] that conventionally symbolize these worlds” (p.163, my additions).

Thus, in the interweaving of their talk and their pointing and gesturing, speakers provide a dramatized representation of an experimental procedure which affords those in their audience “a sense of having directly perceived and been involved in its undertaking, enlisting them in the validation of experimental claims” (p.163). It is the (gestural) power of people’s embodied living expressions to ‘call out’ embodied responses from those around them, and in so doing, begin a new style of relationship, inaugurate a new language-game, that we have failed to take proper account of in our previous studies and language and communication. Due to ineradicable, expressive responsiveness of our living bodies, something very special happens simply in our initial meetings with the others and othernesses around us.

Wittgenstein (1980) draws our attention to this issue thus: “The origin and primitive form of the language-game 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’ [quoting Goethe]” (p.31, my addition). “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). But how can this be? How can something primitive be the origin of something complex, a bodily reaction be the origin, a first-time occurrence, of something cognitive? There must be something very special in such meetings, a strangeness in the nature of the interplays between us and the others and othernesses around us that has still not been properly charted. How might we describe it?

The dialogical- or chiasmic-structure of research sciences

The strangeness of our activities in such meetings arises out of the fact that, when someone is spontaneously responsive to events occurring around them, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own. Rather than originating wholly from within them as self-enclosed agents, it is partly ‘shaped’ by their responsiveness to the activities of the others and othernesses around them. Thus, when two or more people interact, instead of one of them first acting individually and independently, and then the next replying individually and independently of the first, they all inevitably act conjointly, as a collective-we. Indeed, to the extent that their joint activity is undifferentiated as to whose activity it is, we could say that all participants now have their being as such ‘within’ it. And they do all this conjoint-acting bodily, in a ‘living’ way, spontaneously, without them first having ‘to work out’ how to respond to each other. This is what is most crucial in their meetings. Within their conjoint, mutually spontaneously responsive and expressive activities, they create a unified, non-individual, all-enveloping agency within which they all become involved as participant parts – a new and unique “form of life” (Wittgenstein (1953), a unique indivisible whole with a ‘life of its own’, is created in each meeting afresh. And participants within it, rather than being related externally, as a set of individuals who retain their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are a part of the whole or not, they become internally related to each other, in that at any one moment in time, they owe not just their character but their very existence as the people they are, both to each other and to their relations with the ‘participant parts’ in the whole at some earlier point in time.

This is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins (see the accounts of “joint action” in Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993a and b). The dialogically-structured activities occurring in our meetings consist in a complex and intricate intertwining of not wholly reconcilable, mutually influencing movements – with, as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both ‘centripetal’ tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as ‘centrifugal’ ones outward toward diversity and

difference on the borders or margins. This makes it very difficult for us to characterize their nature: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character. Nor is there a separate before and after (Bergson), neither an agent nor an effect, but only a meaningful whole which cannot divide itself into separable parts. Indeed, to the extent that the temporal unfolding of intertwined activity in this realm is shared in by all, it is non-locatable; it is neither ‘inside’ people, nor is it simply ‘outside’ of them; it is ‘spread out’ or distributed amongst all those participating in it. It is precisely this lack of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those involved in them, in practice – while remaining (usually) quite unaware of their own role in having done so – that is the central defining feature of social activities of this kind.

But it is precisely this that makes this sphere of embodied social activity crucial to us in our explorations here into their role in action research and in research sciences. For firstly and most importantly, as Wittgenstein (1980) pointed out above, they make possible a first-time, shared creativity, the creation of new language-game intertwined forms of life. In the interweaving of action (both of a gestural and of an instrumental kind) and talk, participants are able to ‘work out’ in their ongoing practices how to ‘go on’ with each other. In so doing, rather than a passive, de-contextualized depicting (representation) of a shared research topic, they make possible its living, responsive-expressive, contextualized enactment; they make it possible to expressive its own peculiar ‘inner life’, so to speak, within its own ‘liminal world’ – thus making it possible for research scientists to ‘play out’ amongst themselves how they might, in the midst of all the multidimensional complexities involved, go on to refine and elaborate their own actions viz-a-viz their research materials, thus to extend them into novel spheres where their consequences are as yet unknown to them.

We can call inter-activity of this kind, following Bakhtin (1981, 1986), in which participants have an active, responsive (as opposed to a passive representational) understanding of each other’s utterances, dialogically-structured activity. Crucial in this sphere, is the possible participation of different voices who (which), in all being responsively inter-linked with each other, can create amongst themselves, as we have seen, new and unique living unities. Indeed, as we have already seen in the work of Ochs et al (1994, 1996) reported above, it is quite possible for individual participants in scientific research projects, brief moment by brief moment, to speak in many different voices, and for these all to be responsively understood as contributing in some way to the further articulation of the shared project.

However, although the designation of this activity as being dialogically-structured draws attention to many of its significant features, I want to suggest that we must go even further, and re-think some of the very basic taken-for-granted assumptions constitutive of our current forms of philosophical inquiry – especially in their new aim of orienting us toward becoming more actively related to previously unnoticed aspects of our surroundings, in the present moment, rather than toward thinking, prior to any action, of the features we must address in our inquiries.

To this end, I want to follow Merleau-Ponty (1968) in his suggestion that we must “recommence everything,” and “reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves,” thus to install ourselves “in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over’, that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and object’, both existence and essence, and thus give philosophy resources to redefine them,” (p.130). We can, following Merleau-Ponty 1968), characterize the spontaneously occurring, responsive inter-activity between us, as chiasmicly-structured Endnote , i.e., as radically intertwined. And indeed, as Ochs et al (1994) point out, this is precisely the character of the “liminal worlds” constructed by their research physicists: “sharp boundaries are not drawn linguistically between subject (i.e., researcher) and object (i.e., the physical phenomena under study)... the physicists’ grammatical choices deconstruct place and identity, and a referential indeterminacy results” (p.164). In other words, this is just the kind of almost totally open dialogue required amongst researchers at the early stages of their research, if all the new

possibilities they can think of are to be expressible in some way between them – the dialogue cannot be wholly open for, as we shall see, certain constitutive restrictions must already be in place to constitute their ‘dramatizations’ as scientific rather than literary dramas.

Time and grammar: the ‘placement’ of a sequential expectation

Besides the complex, intertwined nature of such dialogically- or chiasmicly-structured activity, we must also emphasize that as living, expressive, gestural activity, in always engendering consequent responses, it has a meaningful, temporal dimension to it. Thus, more than merely an expectation or anticipation within an individual of a particular response to their current action, to the extent that an extended sequence of activity has a temporally unfolding pattern to it – either visually as in: ***//***\\ ***// ***??; or auditorily as in: di-di-di-der/ di-di-di-daa/ di-di-di-der/ di-di-di-d?? – it gives rise to shared styles or patterns of expectation, to a shared ‘grammar’, to a shared “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1977), to do with anticipated ‘ways’ of ‘going on’. The dialogical space itself exerts ‘its’ own requirements on participants. As Bakhtin (1986) puts it, “the word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet but a trio)” (p.122) – three, not just two, active agencies are at work in shaping all our utterances. Yet, once within this sphere of activity – with respect to both to their individual contributions to this joint creation, and it exerting an agentic influence back upon their actions – individuals have no sense of contingency or consequence within it. Possessing expectations relevant only to responses to their own immediate actions – which they feel are satisfied (or not) by the reactions of the others to whom they are addressed – participants lack all awareness of their own joint creation of these agentic influences upon their actions. This feature of social activity is well expressed, I think, by George Mead (1934) in his claim that: “The mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning it has” (pp 77-78).

This claim, then, that our human activities are not just formless, that not just anything can follow or be connected with anything, is clearly connected with Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1974) claim, that most (although not all Endnote ) of our activities on investigation seem to have a “grammar” to them. And, as he sees it, it is their shared grammar that we must observe if our expressions and utterances are to be intelligible to those around us, and they are to follow us is an unconfused manner. It is this – not the constraints imposed on us externally by a physical reality – that makes it impossible for us just to talk as we please, to claim that just ‘anything goes’. “Grammar is not accountable to any reality,” he claims, “it is grammatical rules that determine meaning (constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary” (Wittgenstein, 1974, no.133, p.184). In other words, just as we have seen Bakhtin claim above, in our dialogically structured activities, our surroundings take on a dynamic, agentic character; they do not remain just the neutral, objective containers of our actions – they ‘speak’ back to us.

But in making these claims, we must appreciate that Wittgenstein is using the word ‘grammar’ here in his own special practical sense. This is a sense quite different from us having a special, conscious experience of consulting something like a meaningful rule or propositional statement somewhere in our heads, but is to do simply with us ‘going on’ with each other in our practices in an unconfused manner – he has already (in Merleau-Ponty’s sense) rejected the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and installed himself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished Endnote .

Here, then, if we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against the others and othernesses around us, and adopt a less impersonal, more intimate style of address toward them, one which allows us to enter into an inter-involvement with them, then, due to the expressive, responsiveness of our living bodies when involved in such meetings, a very different form of understanding becomes available to us in our relationships with them. Again, as Ochs et al (1994) note, in intertwining with their gestures talk using many dynamic grammatical constructions – such as talk of coming, and going, leaving and crossing over, as well as cutting,

cooling, freezing, and heating, and so on – physicists can “bring to life the otherwise stationary quality of a two-dimensional representation” (p.162, my emphasis). And as Wittgenstein (1953) notes, “our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (no.284).

In other words, something very special occurs when two or more living beings meet and begin to respond to each other – much more happens than them merely having an impact on one another. There is in such meetings the creation of qualitatively new and quite novel dynamic but invisible forms, sensed or felt forms which are more than merely averaged or mixed versions of those already existing. We can call such invisible forms – which are neither wholly alive (as self-maintaining organisms) not wholly dead (as self-contained, inert objects) – “real presences” (Steiner, 1989, Shotter, 2003). And what is of crucial about such “real presences” or “relationally-responsive” understandings, is not that you ‘get the picture’, so to speak, but that as gestures (of either a mimetic or indicative kind), they spontaneously ‘call’ you or ‘move’ you immediately to respond in a certain way. Research physicists thus experience bodily the barriers and resistences, the movements and energies, etc., available to the antiferromannetic materials in their phase transitions from stable to unstable states, through partially- or meta-stable “domain” states. In short, the real presences generated in their dramatizations, although invisible, have agency, and like another person can exert that kind of personal force upon us.

But the dramas staged by research physicists, clearly, are not at all like the human dramas of literary playwrights. They must function within a very different tradition. To qualify as a member of a scientific community very generally, one must already have been trained in and be sensitive to a whole set of evaluative attitudes, styles of address, possible forms of connection and relation, facts that are already known for certain, or that are unquestionably take for granted, i.e., to the shared ‘landmarks’ on a shared ‘landscape’ to do with ‘where’ and ‘who’ they all at present are. And all these landmarks – while not perhaps in the forefront of the research scientist’s mind while engaged in the ‘dramas’ staged during his or her research – must ultimately be constitutive of the final public ‘stories’ individual scientist-dramatists produce when talking about their work with other non-collegial, possible critics of it, and when finally writing it up for publication. In rhetorical terms a whole set of common-places must already be shared within the general scientific community at large prior to any attempts to establish within it a new sub-culture. As Hanson (1958) points out, what is created in a research science eventually has to be presented in the form of a finished science. This entails scientists in representing the results of their inquiries within the terms of an after the fact justificatory rhetoric that minimizes the scientists’s own subjective involvement in their research activities, and renders scientific accounts of their experiments as objective and factual – as in the “physics centered” example given above.

Two styles of address - viewing the other from afar versus being up close and personal

As we noted above, Hanson (1958) suggested that in studying the dynamics of research sciences, we need to study how certain general systems of physical explanation are, and have been, built into our observations, and into our appreciation of facts and data. Given the kind of liminal realms within which a research science functions, in which scientists adopt conjoined social identities, in which animate and inanimate aspects are inter-related dialogically, in this section, I want to link this comment of Hanson’s to Bakhtin’s remarks about addressees and addressivity in speech communication. As Bakhtin (1986) sees it, all our responsive expressions are “related not only to preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain of speech communication... [Thus] from the very beginning, [an] utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created” (p.94). In other words, all our signifying expressions are addressed to someone, and, to the extent that they are treated as continuously present in the constitution of our utterances, “both the composition and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend on those to whom the utterance is addressed... Each speech genre in each area of speech communication has its own typical conception of the addressee, and this defines it as a genre” (p.95). As is perhaps already

apparent, in the account of the work of Ochs et al (1994, 1996), research scientists employ an engaged, dialogical style of address, rather than keeping other scientists and the subject matter of their research fixed at a distance, they adopt a dynamic ‘up close and personal’ approach.

But as we have already noted above, there is a tension between the systematicity required in classical, finished sciences concerned with regularities, and the first-time creativity sought in research sciences. Thus, quite different from in our living involvements with our surroundings, the classical vision of the world is precisely that, a world available to us, seemingly, only in vision – but in a form of vision as we imagine it to be, i.e., conceptualize it. Thus, it is the world as seen by, as addressed by, the (single) eye of an uninvolved observer, viewing it as if through a window from afar – a two-dimensional world seen as if a picture or as a representation. Indeed, as Heidegger (1977) puts it, in his The age of the world picture, the term “world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture... The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age” (pp.129-130). So, although we may order everything we observe as occurring within a perspectival relation to one another, they cannot appear as arranged in relation to each other in depth, in 3-D, for that requires binocular vision – which, as we shall see, cannot be arrived at by any kind of quantitative mixing or merging of different 2-D views. For it is an embodied experience of a qualitative different kind, to do with one’s sense of what is within and what is not within one’s grasp, quite a sense different from any one-eyed view of one’s surroundings (Todes, 2001).

As a style of visual address, linear perspective is quite different from how we view our surroundings while involved in moving around within them. In the practical living of our lives we do not at all think of the persons and buildings before us as changing their size in accord with our distance from them. Indeed, rather than having different sizes within different perspectives, we clearly presuppose that things in our surroundings retain their size – which is got by us being up close and measuring them while in contact with them – unchanged irrespective of our distance from them. Linear perspective, although placing things in a rational order in relation to one another, in representing the distance of objects from us, represents the degree of impossibility of our being in contact with them and able actually to measure them (see Bergson, 1965, pp.73-76). In other words, the seemingly multiplicity, indeterminacy, or irrationality of the different views (sizes) possessed by things in different perspectives, rather than precluding the unity and wholeness of our lived space, presupposes it – it is to be expected. Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) notes: “The classical perspective is an optional interpretation of spontaneous vision... In free perception, objects spread out in depth do not have any definite ‘apparent size’. We must not even say that the perspective ‘deceives us’ and that the faraway objects are ‘bigger’ for the naked eye than their projection in a drawing or photograph would lead us to believe – at least not according to that size which is supposed to be a common measure for all backgrounds and foregrounds” (pp.48-49).

The emergence of the modern world, a world that can be contemplated as an objective world by an individual subject in terms of a static, single order of connectedness, from a single point of view – a rational order – seems to some to be related to the emergence of a style of one-eyed visual address invented by Brunelleschi in 1425 and codified by Alberti in 1436 (Chandler, 2002) Endnote . Others, however, would relate it to events much earlier. As Hanson (1958) notes, the invention of the “theoretical attitude,” and the provision of explanations within an “imaginative framework,” began with the early Greek natural philosophers in their attempts to explain the many physical properties of things, such as colors, odors, tastes, and textures. Democritus, says Hanson (1958), in his theory of atoms, was the one who saw that if his atoms were to explain the properties of objects, they could not themselves already have the properties in question – for atoms being already ‘colored’ would only push the problem of explaining the existence of color in the world one step further back: “Democritus’ atomic theory,” however, notes Hanson (1958), “avoids investing atoms with those secondary properties requiring explanation. It provides a pattern of concepts whereby the [primary]

properties the atom does possess – position, shape, motion – can, as a matter of course, account for the other ‘secondary’ properties of objects” (pp. 121-122).

But what we get here, though, in the adoption of the theoretical attitude, is a double reduction of our lived, embodied, sensual and sensed involvements with the others and othernesses around us. Our anticipatory sense of what might possibly occur next, given what has happened so far in a sequence of changes, is eradicated, and our overall perceptual involvement with our surroundings is reduced (seemingly) to the seeing of static objects (with movement being seen as a sequence of transitions from one static configuration of elements to another) – in other words, time is reduced to another spatial dimension. But even more than this, there is also the reduction of vision to seeing not only from a point of view, within a perspective, i.e., as if through a window while rooted to floor, but also from within a perspective that is ultimately an imaginative one. For the creation of the “theoretical attitude,” as we have seen, leads to a stance in which a constructed or hypothesized entity apart from all possible perceptual experience begins to assume the value of the ultimately ‘real’ – yet, for all this, like the infinitesimal points, and lines without width in geometry, such entities retain certain visual properties ‘conceptually’. This is how, if we are to address our surroundings objectively, we must approach them. Is this anything like our visual relations to our surroundings in our everyday lives? Is it anything like the visual involvements of the research scientists described above while involved in their research discussions?

Let us note first, that when in our everyday involvements we look over a visual scene, a landscape or another’s face, and our eyes flick and jump from one point of fixation to the next, we nonetheless still all nonetheless see a seamless whole, a ‘something’ to which we can relate ourselves. Similarly, when we read a written text made up of quite separate printed elements, we develop a sense of the elements as all contributing toward, or as playing a participant part, in constituting a meaningful whole. And moreover, in such activities as these, we all more or less see the same whole, the same landscape, or the same face; we all take it that we read the same story, or set of technical instructions, or whatever – and if there are some disagreements over exactly what it is before us, we can make use of what we do agree on to discuss those features we see differently. In other words, in many of our temporally unfolding activities (but not in all), as we have already seen above, there is something special in their sequencing, in their temporal succession. If all the separate elements we encounter seem to ‘hang together’ in a special way, not just haphazardly but according to a certain style, then they can give rise in all who encounter them, prior to any thought or deliberation on their part (i.e., spontaneously), a shared or at least shareable sense, in terms of which their individual actions in such circumstances can have a meaning intelligible to others – for others can spontaneously respond to the circumstances in the same way.

As we have already seen, we can connect this claim with Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1974) claim, that most of our activities have a “grammar” to them, in that they arouse in the others around us a structured set of felt anticipations and expectations as to what might possibly happen next, and that it is this, not the constraints imposed on us externally by an already existing physical reality, that makes it impossible for us just to talk as we please. We must express ourselves in ways which the others around us can follow, can ‘relate to’.

Now to many, this may seem as outrageous a claim as the claim that there is no prior, already fixed and categorized physical reality to which to appeal in adjudicating the worth of our claims to truth. But it has at least the implication that, prior to any of the claims as to the nature of things and events in our surrounding that we might as individuals address to those around us, all such claims must be couched in a certain shared style. If they are not, then they will not be properly understood by those to whom they are addressed; they will be confusing or misleading. In other words, although there may be no prior criteria to which to appeal in judging the truth of a person’s claims – for their truth must be investigated in terms of their entailments – there are criteria immediately available as to their intelligibility in the context of their utterance. These criteria arise out of the fact that all the elements involved are mutually

determining, interwoven, or inter-related with each other in a certain way, according to a certain style or grammar.

Above, I suggested, following Bakhtin (1981, 1986) that we should we call these kind of activities, in which every feature is in a relation of ‘mutual determination’ to every other feature, dialogically- or chiasmicly-structured activities. In choosing this second term to emphasize the radical intertwining involved in our activities, I followed, to repeat, Merleau-Ponty (1968). Here, I want to emphasize a further, quite amazing feature is this chiasmic intertwining. Both Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968) and Gregory Bateson (1979) take binocular vision as paradigmatic of the very special nature of our living, chiasmic relations to our surroundings. To quote Bateson (1979):

“The binocular image, which appears to be undivided, is in fact a complex synthesis of information from the left front in the right brain and a corresponding synthesis of material from the right front in the left brain... From this elaborate arrangement, two sorts of advantage accrue. The seer is able to improve resolution at edges and contrasts; and better able to read when the print is small or the illumination poor. More important, information about depth is created... In principle, extra “depth” in some metaphoric sense is to be expected whenever the information for the two descriptions is differently collected or differently coded” (pp.68-70).

In other words, much much more is happening here than the mere ‘conceptual’ blending or interweaving of separate constituents which remain identifiably separate even when complexly interwoven. Indeed, something quite radical is entailed, as we shall see, in the recognition of the fact that our bodily relations to our surroundings are not just simply relations of a causal kind, or of a systematic, logical or rational kind either, but are living, dynamic, continually changing relations. Something uniquely new and utterly novel is being created, over and over again, each time afresh as we scan over our surroundings visually, and orient ourselves within them accordingly, in terms of the possible movements we might make within them.

The move to a participatory world is, then, a move toward a much more dynamic, relational world, a world in which “things” do not have a separate existence, but owe their character to their relations to their surroundings, both at any one moment spatially, as well as over or through time. It is the move into a world in continual motion within which we are all, along with everything else within it, also participant parts within it. Such a complex, richly inter-connected world as this only becomes known to us in terms of the differences occurring in the sustained meetings between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us over or through time. Thus, rather than an approach to such othernesses in terms of frames or perspectives, in separate instants of time, our styles or ways of addressing these others and othernesses in our behavioral and speech genres (Voloshinov, 1976; Bakhtin, 1986) become crucial. For only certain styles of address – those in which we are responsive in certain ways to the expressive activities of our co-participants – will allow the emergence of dialogical relations between us. To address an other or otherness with a frame or perspective in mind, from a single point of view would, is, in Bakhtin’s (1984) terms, to address them monologically: “Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other’s response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force... The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue” (p.293).

Conclusions

Clearly, in science as in life, there is a tension between the desire for systematicity and creativity, between the urge for order and the avoidance of disorder, between work and play. Above, I have been exploring some aspects of the conduct of our practices in research sciences – in which creativity rather than systematicity is at issue. Their central feature, a feature which makes them very different from what we take, officially, to be the proper conduct of our inquiries in science, is that they can be (and often are) conducted in ordinary, everyday, conversational language – in what Niels Bohr (see Stapp, 1972) called “plain language,” but which in another sense (as we have seen) is not plain talk at all. For crucially, such talk makes

not merely a literary form of creativity possible within a social group – with all its potential for enable us to experience the immense richness of subtle but fictitious detail in a possible, rather than an actual world – but the creative exploration of possible material aspects of our surroundings in similar such subtle and precise experienceable detail.

In the past, we have been strongly influenced by the idea of world views, of the world as conceived and grasped as a picture, as seen from a point of view, within a framework. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) notes, we were held captive by this picture, “and we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and repeated itself to us inexorably” (no.115). We thus felt that, if we could not construct a mental picture of a process that was puzzling to us, then we could not explain it – and, if we could not explain it, i.e., give a decontextualized, ‘rational’ account of its nature within a theoretical framework, then we could not justify instructing others in how to implement that process within their own activities. But as the work of Hanson (1958) and of Ochs et al (1994, 1996) shows, scientists do not communicate in terms of such decontextualized accounts in research sciences. Instead of objective-talk, they engage in participatory-talk, rather than talking of occurring events ‘over there’, they talk of events as occurring ‘in here’, in the “interactive moment” (Shotter, 1993a, p.135 & b, p.53) of their living engagement with the others and othernesses around them. And the different voices available to them as they speak – the voice, say, of an energized, moving particle; the voice, say, of an undulating medium within which the particle is moving; the voice of an observer only able to see its place and measure its velocity intermittently; and so on – make it possible for them to construct themselves, both grammatically and somatically, as beings able to shift in their talk, moment by moment, between all these roles, and to ‘play out’ to the others around them the entailments of each, rather than merely being forced, as individuals, merely to think always within the terms of a single constructed world, a single logical or mathematical order of connectedness.

Indeed, as we have seen, the orientation provided by an utterance to those listening to it are such that all those involved in interacting with each other can sense that, at each point in time a word is being used in a particular way, or is related to a particular action. In other words, all those involved can find within their involvement the ‘grounds’ or ‘roots’ for their ways of making sense of what occurs, and, if others are puzzled as to their meaning or their understanding, they can express the relevant “essential references” in explanation (see note 7).

In the classical conception of philosophy as ‘underlaboring’ (Locke) in the interests of science, philosophy as metaphysics has sought to underwrite what constitutes legitimate scientific knowledge. It has thus functioned, especially in the human sciences and now in critical appraisals of action research, as (seemingly) a necessary preliminary and intermediary step that one must complete, prior to undertaking a research project. It has thus given rise to a whole realm of critical theoretical or meta-theoretical activity deemed necessary as a preliminary, or accompaniment, to empirical research – thought of as the application of theories appropriately legitimated by examination within such an activity. Elsewhere, a colleague and I have been severely critical of this activity (Shotter & Lannamann, 2002). It is a superfluous (and in fact misleading) step in judging the efficacy of our own human practices in achieving our own human ends; and I hope I have said enough above, to show that this is the case here too. An account of a possible social process need not be judged, prior to attempts to implement it in places other than its original ‘birth-place’, in terms of whether it provides a picturable mental or mathematical image of events out in the world itself, whether it provides in classical terms a claimed ‘rational’ representation or explanation of them. Indeed, as we have seen in the discussion of people’s activities within research sciences, it is highly unlikely that the structural form of such events can in themselves be placed in any simple one-to-one correspondence with the types of structures our mental process can form.

To view science as a quest for metaphysical understandings that lie beyond history and currently existing social institutions, is to view it as Descartes (1968) viewed it, to picture the world itself as a picture. It is to ignore the role of the felt grammars created between us in our

meetings, the shared anticipations and expectations that enable us in fact to inter-relate with each other in our practical affairs with some degree of unproblematic surety, and to see our actions instead as ultimately rooted in an external, non-human authority, i.e., in God’s “established laws” (p.62). It is to be a slave to a dogma – the dogma that there must already be rules, laws, or principles ‘out there’ awaiting our discovery, Endnote for how else might we be able to make sense of our world? Indeed, for Descartes (1968), taking it as utterly basic that “that the things we conceive very distinctly and clearly are all true” (p.54), he felt forced to conclude that such truths “must have been put into me by a being whose nature was more truly perfect than mine... that is to say, in a single word, which was God” (p.55).

Giving up the discovery of God’s-already-established-laws as the quest of science does not, however, mean giving up science. Instead, we can view it as the creative or inventive quest for new forms of communication between us, new ways of intertwining talk and activity that alert us to new relational features within our own activities previously unnoticed. And just as the historically and culturally established talk entwined forms of life, already incorporated in our everyday practical lives together, enable us to relate to events everywhere in our surroundings in an anticipatory manner in subtle and precise ways, so can our new forms once (literally) they become incorporated, i.e., embodied, in our everyday practices. As Stapp (1972) remarks with respect to the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Theory, “the claim that we can make valid inferences about the world itself acquires credibility only to the extent that a truly adequate picture of the world itself can be constructed. No such picture exists at present” (p.1112) – nor for the purposes of action researchers, need it exist.

Thus I will end this article as I began it: to the extent that Stapp is correct, action research would seem to be no less well grounded than our research activities in the natural sciences. Indeed, it seems to me, it is one of the functions of action research now to come to a better understanding of what it is in our many unique activities, that will uniquely enable us to refine and develop them further, in ways more suited to what happen to our contingent needs – an understanding that we now realize cannot be stated in terms of a set of eternally true, abstract, general principles, but which will need stating in terms of a whole set of particular details, unique to the activities in question. Thus if this is so, it is not action research as a form of scientific inquiry that needs abandoning, or re-fashioning as something that it isn’t, but the requirement that, if it is to be a proper science, it still must have as its final aim the discovery of God’s pre-established laws. That is an aspect of fundamentalism (or foundationalism) which I think we can now live without. Instead of the either-or oscillation between formal systematicity and creativity as fixed and static ‘points of view’, surely there is now a need in all of science to understand how, dynamically, we can move between them, and in so doing, dialogically or chiasmicly relate them in a meaningful relations with each other.

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