p.1 the outcomes of our inquiries as practitioners are not to be measured in terms of their end points - in terms of their objective outcomes - but in terms of what we learn along the way in the course of the unfolding movements they led us into making.

p.3 Elsewhere (Shotter, 2006), I have described such withness-thinking experientially as follows: The interplay involved gives rise, not to a visible seeing, for what is ‘sensed’ is invisible; nor does it give rise to an interpretation (to a representation), for our responses occur spontaneously and directly in our living encounters with an other’s expressions. Neither is it merely a feeling, for it carries with it as it unfolds a bodily sense of the possibilities for responsive action in relation to one’s  momentary placement, position, or orientation in the present interaction. Instead, it gives rise to a shaped and vectored sense of our moment-by-moment changing involvement in our current surroundings - engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might expect in relation to the actions we might take. In short, we can be spontaneously ‘moved’ toward specific possibilities for action in such thinking. (p.600)

p.3-4 Richard Bernstein (1983) described what he called 'the Cartesian anxiety' - the fear that if we do not have absolute certainty, we have no knowledge at all. Historically, this anxiety has paralysed us, Bernstein believes, and we need not to refute it so much as to be cured of it.

p.4 Thinking systemically entails abandoning many of the preoccupations of the Enlightenment, abandoning what we might call the ‘coolly rational’ approach to inquiry.

p.4 As ‘participant parts’ within the very systems we are investigating... rather than being theory-driven, a matter of beginning with ‘good ideas’, we must begin our investigations from noticings, from openings when a next step different from the usual next step might be taken.

p.5 we must learn to think partially while still in the midst of uncertainty as a way of feeling one’s way forward in the present moment, in the present situation.

p.6 as Wittgenstein (1980) has made very clear to us, many of our difficulties in our practical lives are not of the form of problems that we can, by the application of a science-like methodology, solve by reasoning; nor are they are "empirical problems" that we can solve by discovering something already existing but currently unknown to us. They are difficulties of a quite another kind: they are relational or orientational difficulties, to do with discovering how to ‘go out’ towards initially indeterminate aspects of our surroundings with certain expectations and anticipations at the ready, so to speak, appropriate to our finding our ‘way about’ and to ‘going on’ with them without (mis)leading ourselves into taking inappropriate next steps. Where the relevant anticipations are to do with, to repeat again William James’ comment above, sensing whither we might go within our circumstances before actually going there. Thus difficulties of this second kind cannot be solved by our thinking about them within a rational framework in order to arrive at a plan which we then attempt to put into action...  Here [with relational or orientational difficulties], we face a situation which is, at first, indeterminate for us, in which we cannot at a first make out what it is that is important to us; here we must gradually feel our way forward, guided by the incipient sensing of dis-satisfactions and satisfactions as we move this-way-and-that in groping towards the final actualization of an appropriate action. In other words, such difficulties are resolved by the emergence of a ‘local best’ action, a best way forward which develops within our tentative exploratory movements as we sense and evaluate the incipient "signs of directions in thought" that they give rise to within us.

p.6 rather than being aimed at reliable and repeatable results that can be made accessible in some published form so that they can be both publicly criticized and tested and, thus, generalized to apply in indefinitely many different contexts, practitioner inquiries have a quite different aim. They are practice based and practice-oriented. They are concerned with our gaining a sense of 'where we are' in relation to our immediate surroundings and of the surrounding field or 'landscape' of real possibilities open to us for our next steps. Thus, unlike the idealized and de-contextualized nature of 'coolly rational' research, practitioner inquiry is concerned with details in our surroundings crucial to the performance of our actions.

p.10 in Aristotle’s terms, we are aiming at phronesis, a mode of ethical reasoning conducted from within a practice in which deliberation, reflection, and judgement all play a central role. Thus, beginning with a vague qualitative sense of the particular situation we are in, as we begin to explore it, step-by-step, sequentially, we come to experience more and more fragments of it with each movement of our bodies giving rise to each new fragment. If our bodies and brains are undamaged, we begin (in a way that, clearly, has not yet been well-studied) to interrelate them all into a unitary (but still open) whole. Then, as further fragments accumulate, we come to experience the whole in a more detailed, more well-articulated manner, so that eventually, so to speak, we come to know our ‘way about’ within it and are thus able ‘to go on’ within it in a more confident manner. Systemic thinking is thus not aimed at any specific end point or finalized form of knowledge but at our learning how to conduct such experiments in-the-moment from within a particular practice as required.

p.10-11 my main practical aims in all the comments and notes I have provided above are perceptual and not cognitive, are practical and not theoretical; that is, I have been much more concerned with what is involved in bringing previously unnoticed features of our activities to our attention than with trying to discover supposed, hidden, causal mechanisms of a general kind supposedly responsible for their occurrence