`This is an admirable book which can be recommended to students with confidence, and is likely also to become an indispensable source of reference for those researching fact construction' - Discourse & Society How is reality manufactured? The idea of social construction has become a commonplace of much social research, yet precisely what is constructed, and how, and even what constructionism means, is often unclear or taken for granted. In this major work, Jonathan Potter offers a fascinating tour of the central themes raised by these questions. Representing Reality overviews the different traditions in constructionist thought. Points are illustrated throughout with varied and engaging examples taken from newspaper stories, relationship counselling sessions, accounts of the paranormal, social workers' assessments of violent parents, informal talk between programme makers, political arguments and everyday conversations. Ranging across the social and human sciences, this book provides a lucid introduction to several key strands of work that have overturned the way we think about facts and descriptions, including: the sociology of scientific knowledge; conversation analysis and ethnomethodology; and semiotics, post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Written for students as well as for mental health practitioners, the book provides extensive overviews of the research areas and includes experiments for the reader to complete that illustrate the main point of the text.
Do all children learn language in the same way? Is the apparent `fast' versus `slow' learning rate among children a reflection of the individual child's approach to language acquisition? This volume explores the importance that individual differences have in language acquisition and challenges some widely held theories of linguistic development. Focusing on one- to three-year-old children, Cecilia Shore describes characteristic differences in terms of vocabulary, grammatical and phonological development. She considers whether distinctive 'styles' of language development can be defined and also examines social and cognitive influences that may explain individual differences. In conclusion, she discusses new language theories - such as the ecological, chaos and connectionist approaches - and considers what individual differences in development can tell us about the mechanisms of language development.
Recent debate has increasingly focused on the prominence of metaphor and rhetoric in psychological discourse. Underpinning this research is the view that psychology offers a unique insight into the creation of persuasive texts and that such a discipline needs to become itself an object of inquiry. In developing this view "Psychology as Metaphor" scrutinizes a wide range of traditional psychological theory including neuropsychology and memory, childhood development, the IQ debate, accounts of emotion, and psychological descriptions of the mind, to show how rhetorical strategies and the deployment of metaphor are central to the work of creating a convincing theoretical account. This book explores the distinction between philosophy and rhetoric, and offers an interdisciplinary analysis of theories of metaphor and language while pointing to future directions for research in the study of scientific rhetoric. Its theoretical breadth is matched by the book's wide-ranging treatment of key thinkers from Darwin, James and Freud, through Watson, Lashley, Piaget, Vygotsky, Skinner and Burt to recent texts from writers in contemporary psychology such as Kamin, Eysenck, Rumelhart and Shallice. This book should be useful reading for psychologists, historians and sociologists of science, philosophers of the social sciences and anyone with an interest in how the study of rhetoric can shed light on the creation of persuasive psychological theory.
What is it that makes language powerful? This book uses the psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism and libidinal investment to explain how rhetoric compels us and how it can effect change. It shows how the production of literary texts begins and ends with narcissistic self-love.
Eco wittily and enchantingly develops themes often touched on in his previous works, but he delves deeper into their complex nature... this collection can be read with pleasure by those unversed in semiotic theory." -Times Literary Supplement
