Intersubjectivity and contemporary social theory : the everyday as critique
Traditional analyses of popular or everyday culture have been couched in terms of, on the one hand, variants of the Frankfurt School view that it distorts or offers a false consciousness of an underlying reality, whilst on the other, the response from discourse theorists and more traditional forms of social constructionism has been philosophically conventionalist in arguing that discourses, definitions and labelling activities directly construct meaning. The argument of this thesis is that it is possible, via Dummett's reading of Frege, to construct a realist account of meaning or, more strictly, sense, which preserves an element of rationality in everyday cultural reception without thereby effecting a radical relativisation of the notion of what constitutes rational processes and practices. This is achieved via Dummett's Context Principle, through which it is argued that the actual meaning of an utterance is not given directly by the conventional meaning of its constituent terms and phrases, but rather that the object picked out, its reference, depends on the context in which the utterance occurs. Hence the terms and phrases offer no more than a clue, a route to the reference, not the actuality of the reference.
Feather, Howard
HM Sociology
Intersubjectivity and contemporary social theory : the everyday as critique. Traditional analyses of popular or everyday culture have been couched in terms of, on the one hand, variants of the Frankfurt School view that it distorts or offers a false consciousness of an underlying reality, whilst on the other, the response from discourse theorists and more traditional forms of social constructionism has been philosophically conventionalist in arguing that discourses, definitions and labelling activities directly construct meaning. The argument of this thesis is that it is possible, via Dummett's reading of Frege, to construct a realist account of meaning or, more strictly, sense, which preserves an element of rationality in everyday cultural reception without thereby effecting a radical relativisation of the notion of what constitutes rational processes and practices. This is achieved via Dummett's Context Principle, through which it is argued that the actual meaning of an utterance is not given directly by the conventional meaning of its constituent terms and phrases, but rather that the object picked out, its reference, depends on the context in which the utterance occurs. Hence the terms and phrases offer no more than a clue, a route to the reference, not the actuality of the reference.
intersubjectivity contemporary_social theory everyday critique traditional analysis popular everyday culture couch term one_hand variant frankfurt_school view distort offer false consciousness underlying reality whilst response discourse theorists traditional form social philosophically argue discourse definition label activity directly construct meaning argument possible via dummett read frege construct realist account meaning strictly sense preserve element rationality everyday cultural reception without thereby effect radical notion constitute rational process practice achieve via dummett context principle argue actual meaning utterance give directly conventional meaning constituent term phrase rather object pick reference depend context utterance occurs hence term phrase offer clue route reference actuality reference