ABSTRACT
I don’t remember when I first met John Shotter, but it was a long time ago. Our first philosophical discussion occurred in the unlikely venue of the forecourt of the Holiday Inn Motel at SUNY Binghamton. A strange place for deep thought, you might say, but that was when I first got a glimpse of John’s way of looking at the world. I began to sense something deeply different from which would spring his approach to what might be made of the systematic study of human beings thinking, feeling, talking, perceiving and interacting with one another. Even then he was clear that interaction was the source of individual thought. We shared the feeling that the official programmes of research in the psychology departments of universities were at best trivial and at worst pseudo-science. I thought this was down to a mistaken importation of a misunderstood natural sciences methodology as the research tool, but John saw it as a malaise having much deeper roots than current academic fashions.
