Shotter, John (2000) Seeing historically: Goethe and Vygotsky’s ‘enabling theory-method’. Culture and Psychology, 6 (2). pp. 233-252.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
We can study dead forms from a distance, seeking to understand the pattern of past events that caused them to come into existence. We can, however, enter into a relationship with living forms and, in making ourselves open to their movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to them, and in so doing, we can gain a sense of their character. In other words, from within our dialogically structured involvements with other living things, a kind of relationally responsive understanding, quite different from the referential-representational kind of understanding familiar to us in cognitive psychology, becomes directly available to us. Thus, rather than seeking to explain a child’s present activities in terms of their causes in the past, from the standpoint of an external observer, we can turn to a quite different aim: that of perceiving in a present behavior the possibilities and opportunities it offers for further developments. Orientation toward this aim is what I think is so special about both Vygotsky’s and Goethe’s historical methods of inquiry into the development of living forms.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Journal or Publication Title: | Culture and Psychology |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | development • dialogicality • relational-responsive • responsiveness • understanding |
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology |
| Departments: | Faculty of Science and Technology > Psychology |
| ID Code: | 18868 |
| Deposited By: | ep_ss_importer |
| Deposited On: | 05 Nov 2008 11:26 |
| Refereed?: | Yes |
| Published?: | Published |
| Last Modified: | 26 Jul 2012 15:22 |
| Identification Number: | |
| URI: | http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/18868 |
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