Conversational Realities: Constructing Life Through Language

Front Cover
This imaginative and original book challenges the traditional scientific view that naturally occurring psychological and sociological `realities' are to be discovered underlying appearances. Instead, it claims that such orderly realities are both socially constructed and sustained within the context of people's disorderly, everyday conversational activities.

John Shotter's interdisciplinary analysis highlights the socially contested but imaginary nature of many of the `things' we talk about in social life and illuminates the processes of their construction. He offers a broad-ranging exploration of the rhetorical, argumentative nature of conversational communication, using examples from psychotherapy, management and everyday

 

Contents

Knowing from Within
33
Dialogue and Rhetoric in the Construction of Social
50
REALISM THE IMAGINARY AND A WORLD
65
Social Life and the Imaginary
79
Linguistic Relativity in a World of Events
99
CONVERSATIONAL REALITIES
118
Real and Counterfeit Constructions in Interpersonal
132
Conversations
148
Rhetoric and the Recovery of Civil Society
160
RhetoricalResponsive Social Constructionism
178
Afterword
185
Index
197
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