Conversational realities

John Shotter (Professor of Interpersonal Relations, Dpt. of Communication, U of New Hampshire). Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. (Inquiries in Social Construction). London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE, 1993.*

Converational Realities challenges the traditional scientific view that naturally occurring psychological and sociological 'realities' of a systematic kind are to be discovered underlying appearances. Instead, this book 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 interesting examples taken from psychotherapy, management and everyday life.

Drawing on psychology, communication studies, anthropology, sociology, history and socio-linguistics, this imaginative and original book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in current debates across the social and human sciences.


From the reviews:

`I like this book, will recommend it to colleagues and students, and expect it to become a staple citation in articles and books I publish... Sometimes books an academic reads enable a person to make connections among previously disconnected pieces of experience, recurring preferences and passions, and particular life decisions. Reading Conversational Realities accomplished this for me... it is theoretically rich, philosophically thoughtful and experientially evocative' - Human Studies


`[An] immensely thoughtful, informative and persuasive treatment of the "rhetorical-responsive version of social constructionism" via an eclectic blend of, principally, European and American linguistics, philosophy and social psychology... Shotter's book is most important for continuing the work begun by Billig and others bringing recognition via recollection to the rhetorical corpus. He claims to target his recovery of these materials toward psychologists; readers in related disciplines will certainly also benefit' - Discourse & Society

`This book is fascinating... It is important for several reasons. First, it provides an overview of an approach to the social sciences known as social constructionism... Second, Shotter maintains that the fundamental human reality is persons in conversations... Third, Shotter is concerned with practical implications, not just theoretical conceptions' - Studies in Second Language Acquisition

 Montaigne y la construcción social de la realidad

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