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.
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