Friday, February 14, 2014
Chapter 4
Chapter four was significantly easier for me to comprehend and be able to apply to my own life. This section of reading offered interesting ideas about common sense. The book stated that common sense imposes what "I" know as a universal truth, which is something that is so simple and characteristic of the concept of common sense that it never really occurred to me. Common sense is not something that can be universal, much like 'truth' or 'good' in our current day in age. It also is concept that is highly defined by context and culture as well as social group because sometimes common sense is only 'universal' on a very tiny, minute scale. A group of friends may consider something to be common sense within themselves, yet it could be something completely unknown to the rest of society. The book goes on to claim that common sense "assumes experiential agreement with communicative practices and background assumptions that guide interpretive insight". I think this concept and definition of common sense relates a lot to the cultural differences concerning implicit/explicit or high and low context divisions. In low context cultures, many things do not need to be explicitly stated and people still understand the meaning of discourse, thus can be considered common sense. The opposite can be said about high context cultures, where more things need to be explicitly stated for meaning to be comprehended; thus less common sense is applied to conversations and discourse in general. I also thought this section of the reading was interesting because I have always considered common sense a 'universal' concept, but I have recently found that I was not thinking globally, just in the context of the United States, or even Minnesota strictly. Considering there is a world much bigger and more diverse than just our own particular and specific context is something that more of us need to consider and integrate into our critical thinking processes.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with your opinion that common sense relates to the cultural differences in between high and low context division. Korean communication cultures is more likely to high context that can be different depending social status, ages, closeness of who you are communicate with. However, as you mentioned, many things and context do not need to be considered so it leads to more clear communication in low context cultures. So I think we can communicate better when we know and understand different concept of common sense as well as relations between low and high context divisions.
I liked how you narrowed in on the differences in common sense among cultures because I focused on differences of common sense within one culture, but on differences in people. I think that common sense is easy to generalize because when we consider something common sense, by definition, we think it is a generalized common knowledge. I like how you make the differences of the high and low context cultures because I think that has a strong influence of this idea of common sense. Even though common sense can vary depending on a specific culture, it can vary depending on a specific person, so in general, I think that we cannot create a universal common sense at all because it is all dependent on what we have experienced and practiced.
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