The Many-Splendored Society is a multi-volume groundwork that explains how man's language creates social reality. The subtitle of this second volume, An Edifice of Symbols, points to a set of general categories and dimensions, all based on properties of language, for the study of social reality. We learn about norms and contracts, organizations, networks, mass media, folk life, and city life. Most important, we find out how symbols create the societal realms of science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality. These ...
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The Many-Splendored Society is a multi-volume groundwork that explains how man's language creates social reality. The subtitle of this second volume, An Edifice of Symbols, points to a set of general categories and dimensions, all based on properties of language, for the study of social reality. We learn about norms and contracts, organizations, networks, mass media, folk life, and city life. Most important, we find out how symbols create the societal realms of science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality. These realms have different goals and rationalities and exhibit different spontaneous orders. When they join so that no one overwhelms the others, we have a many-splendored society. An Edifice of Symbols ends with a summary in the form of a grand table of societal realms. A chemist might see this table as kindred to his field, for it has some properties of a Periodic System of the type discovered in chemistry in the nineteenth century. When you know the place of any phenomenon placed in this table of social reality, you learn a great deal of its characteristics. This is another of the author's achievements to give the general reader a Chock Full o'Nuts with exciting discoveries in social science, and to give professionals a systematic view of social reality.
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