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In Conversation

Joint Action, Shared Intentionality and Ethics

University Of New Hampshire, jds{at}christa.unh.edu

The conversational background to our lives is strange in that we cannot turn it around into an object of thought, to be explained like all else in our world in terms of either rules, theories or models. Its strangeness, it is argued, arises out of the fact that all actions by human beings involved with others in a social group are, as Bakhtin (1986, 1990) claims, dialogically or responsively linked in some way, both to previous, already executed actions, and to anticipated, next possible actions. Or, as Searle (1992) has argued: all utterances within conversations are necessarily related to each other, internally; they have shared intentionality. Within situations with shared intentionality, it is as if the situation itself is an ethically active, living entity that, as much as the others around us, requires our respect. Thus, like the others around us, `it' also can exert a formative influence upon what we do within it. Some of the consequences of this extraordinary circumstance for psychology are explored in the article.

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 1, 49-73 (1995)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354395051003


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