Customer Reviews

Conversational Realities Revisited: Life, Language, Body and World

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This is an interesting book that synthesises a range of ideas from scholars such as Wittgenstein, Vygotsky and Bakhtin, among others. Shotter's style can be a little challenging at times, but he has some important things to say and it's worth the effort. Social constructionism is a radically new way to conceptualise the manner in which humans make sense of the world around them and within them although, as Shotter points out, the inner world is not quite so inner as we often think. Much of what we think of as our inner world is negotiated and constructed in the social spaces between us. The only real problem with the book is the large number of grammatical and typographical errors - at least one on almost every page. Mostly, these are simply irritating, but just occasionally it is difficult to know what a sentence means. Apart from this, it is a very thought-provoking book and recommended.

Shotter's book is a wonderful exploration of what it means to try to understand our meaning as we live together with others. I once wrote, "the play of life is not written before we play it. It is written as we play it." (from my book RIDING THE CURRENT: HOW TO DEAL WITH THE DAILY DELUGE OF DATA) When writing, the words sometimes emerge on the page by themselves. What John Shotter does in this book is give the background to why my words are true. As I read Shotter, I could see that the words I had written several years ago had come from a deeper place than even I had imagined. I am most grateful for the academic underpinnings that he has so generously offered in this book.

If you are interested in the idea of a life is one lived in the melee of place, time, people, events - all coalescing into meaning from our relationships of each with each - then you will find this book illuminating. At the very end of the book, he says, "we cannot plan our next step ahead of time, we must find the relevant features influencing our next step in what becomes present to us as we take each step." See what I mean?