The not so common sense : differences in how people judge social and political life / Shawn W. Rosenberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosenberg, Shawn W., 1951-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social perception.

Cognition and culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource (xiii, 424 p.))

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In this fascinating interdisciplinary book, Shawn W. Rosenberg challenges two basic assumptions that orient much contemporary social scientific thinking. Offering theory and empirical research, he rejects the classic liberal view that people share a basic "common sense" or rationality. At the same time, he questions the view of contemporary social theory that meaning is simply an intersubjective or cultural product. Through in-depth interviews, Rosenberg explores the underlying logic of cognition. Rather than discovering a common sense or rationality, he finds that people reason in fundamentally different ways, and these differences affect the kind of understandings they craft and the evaluations they make. As a result, people actively reconstruct culturally prevalent meanings and norms in their own subjective terms. Rosenberg provides a comprehensive description of three types of socio-political reasoning and the full text of three exemplary interviews. Rosenberg's findings help explain such puzzling social phenomena as why people do not learn even when it is to their advantage to do so, or why they fail to adapt to changed social conditions even when they have clear information and motivation. The author argues that this kind of failure is commonplace and discusses examples ranging from the crisis of modernity to the classroom performance of university students. Building on the ideas of Jean Piaget, George Herbert Mead, and Jurgen Habermas, Rosenberg offers a new orienting vision, structural pragmatics, to account for these social phenomena and his own research in cognition. In the concluding chapter, he discusses the implications of his work for the study of social cognition, political behavior, and democratic theory.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One. Postmodernity, Not Learning, and the Not So Common Sense

Chapter Two. A Structural Pragmatic Social Psychology

Chapter Three. Linear Thinking

Chapter Four. Systematic Thinking

Chapter Five. Sequential Thinking

Chapter Six. Epistemology, Methodology, and Research Design

Chapter Seven. Results of the Empirical Research: Julie, Barbara, and Bill

Chapter Eight. Overview and Concluding Remarks

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 411-420) and index.

ISBN:

9786611730277

9781281730275

1281730270

9780300129465

0300129467

OCLC:

1024031100