Summary
Contents
Subject index
ߢThis 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 constructionߣ ࡆ 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.
Semiology – Post-Structuralism – Postmodernism
Semiology – Post-Structuralism – Postmodernism
The loose perspectives of semiology, post-structuralism and postmodernism provide an approach to fact construction very different from the positions discussed in the previous chapters. One of their major characteristics is a profound distrust of the idea that referential language works through mirroring or mapping reality. To consider facts to be guaranteed by inspecting some scene ‘in the world’ is to fail to recognize that they are dependent on something much broader. In semiotics this is a system of differences between signs; in much post-structuralism and postmodernism it is a discourse or a regime of truth. Researchers in these traditions have attempted to explore fact construction by bringing these production systems into the open. That is, they ...
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