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Showing posts from May 30, 2014

New Perspectives Concerning Interpersonal Conflict and Repair

One of the key themes found in contemporary philosophy and psychology revolves around the recurrent idea, perhaps initiated by Saussure, that we do not employ language to express meaning or ideas, but rather that our meanings and experiences are actually creations of language. Our thoughts don't commence as something outside of words, which are subsequently placed into language to be communicated  from one person to another, its the inverse: We have meaningful experiences, that we wish to exchange, because we live embedded in language. And this in turn means that our very consciousness is profoundly social, for language does not exist in the individual, it is transpersonal, arising between us, a set of communally established, self-referring realm of symbols. This insight dovetails nicely with the profound evolutionary realization that the human brain's size and structure didn't precede societal organization, but rather was a result of the complex processing requirements...