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In the 1970s, Harry Goolishian and I were inspired by the Mental Research Institute clinical theorists and the constructivist theorists to immerse ourselves in language and its relationship to therapy. We quickly found our way to the contemporary hermeneuticists, social constructionists, and postmodernists, and to philosophers and theorists such as Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin, then to Gergen and Shotter. Our interest in language grew into a concentration on the notions of conversation and dialogue, particularly generating or transforming ones. Over time, the appeal and implications of these notions for conceptualizing and working with human systems influenced a dramatic ideological shift in the way that we thought about and performed our work. Central to this shift was the notion that human systems are language meaning-generating systems (Anderson & Goolishian, 1988): We are in the world "in language"; we are, as Gadamer (1975) suggested, conversational beings; we are dialogical selves (Bernstein, 1983, p. 104). We suggested that "the work of therapy has to do with exploration of these meaning systems through conversation" (Anderson, Goolishian, & Winderman, 1986, p. 5) and that "therapy requires that we be in language with the family within the domain of understanding that they have created" (Anderson et al., p. 10). It was from this shift that the concept of not-knowing-which Harry Goolishian and I introduced in 1988-arose, rooted in our efforts to find more effective ways of working with our clients and to understand and explain the implications of language for the practice of therapy.
Our dissemination of some of the preliminary ideas associated with this ideological shift and the importance for us of not-knowing in relation to client expertise began in the 1988 article, "Human Systems as Linguistic Systems: Evolving Ideas About the Implications for Theory and Practice" (Anderson & Goolishian, 1988). In the summary, we said,
Meaning and understanding are developed by individuals in conversation with each other in their common attempts to understand other persons and things, others' words and action. Meaning and understanding are thus intersubjective. This shift to the world of conversation and dialogue is a point of view that rests squarely on the proposition that the quintessence of what we are, and what we will be, is dialogical. (p. 390)
We continued,
The expertise of the...