Harre , Vygotsky , Bakhtin , Vico , Wittgenstein : Academic Discourses and Conversational

Now actually, I happen to agree with Harre's claims here wholeheartedly. As I shall argue, conversation is a kind of ultimate reality for us. We cannot turn it around to understand its nature in terms of any particular models, theories, rules, or conventions, for, unless we can discuss such entities conversationally, we have no way of justifying to each other that we are indeed applying them aright. Thus they cannot themselves be a prior condition for such joint discussions; rather, they must be a consequence of them. In other words, the intelligible shaping or structuring of such discussions must be due to other means. But, is this what Harre in fact means in his claims above? If"discourse considered in a broad sense [includes] all sorts of symbolic manipulations according to rules" (Harre, 1992a, p. 7), does he mean that conversations should also be understood in that way too? What does he think is implied in his claim conversation is a primary human reality? In a previous appreciation of his work (Shotter, 1990), I collected together many of the properties Harre has ascribed to conversational realities, so I will not repeat that list now. What I want to do here is to explore their properties