John Shotter – Conversational Realities Revisited: Life Language & Body and World

Conversational Realities Revisited is a new edition of John Shotter’s 1993 book Conversational Realities. Like the first edition, it contests the traditional scientific view that naturally occurring psychological and sociological realities of a systematic and structured kind are to be discovered underlying appearances. Instead, it claims that such orderly ‘realities’ are both socially constructed and sustained in existence only within the context of people’s disorderly, everyday conversational activities. However, this second edition is much more oriented toward practical issues than the first.

Central to it, is a focus on people’s spontaneous, living, bodily responsiveness to the expressive movements of the others around them, and the dialogically-structured nature of the events occurring in the meetings between them. Due to the irreversibility of living processes of growth and development, such events occur always for another first time. Thus, instead of patterns and regularities, instead of seeking to solve problems, our task becomes the more practical one of struggling to create new ‘pathways’ forward into the uniquely new circumstances we create for ourselves as we all live out our lives together.