The Growth of Understanding Beyond Individuals and Communities

This title is of relevance to all those interested in the debate between individualistic, communitarian and other social explanations of human experience. It presents a consistent and wide-ranging argument against both individualistic and also some social theories of human nature through an investigation into the possibility of shared human understanding. In the first years of their lives human beings come to share in an understanding with others, to be able to participate in social life and to behave in socially meaningful ways. This book argues that the very possibility of the growth of this kind of shared, communal understanding requires that the human world must be from the start essentially social and must involve in particular the negotiation of meaning in intersubjective contexts between persons. It goes on to argue that this implies that approaches to the growth of human understanding which see human life as an intrinsically individual process must be rejected for their inability to explain the fundamental nature of social reality.