Caution: This post is just a collection of concepts linked together with a minimal amount of interesting real-life examples. Its not completely useless but it will be very different from other posts around here. Just wanted to collate my thoughts in some place.
I’m going to talk about taken for granted realities again and its going to be a more refined form of my previous posts, as I’ve more time to digest what I’ve read about 6 months or so ago. That’s what public transport does to ya.
Every one of us has a symbolic universe which essentially constructs our reality. We peer into social reality through this symbolic universe. You could say that this symbolic universe is like a pair of glasses that you wear to be able to make sense of social life around you. Without this pair of glasses, you would go insane and start doing all kinds of weird stuff, since you can’t figure out why things are happening.
Sociologists of knowledge like to talk about two kinds of reality: subjective reality and objective reality. Objective reality is the reality presented to you by the institution, in this case the Singapore government. Subjective reality constitutes a huge part of your symbolic universe. It is the reality that you feel and perceive when you have just left your mother’s womb. Individuals that have just been born into this world have a very skewed view of objective reality and usually reject it (thats why babies cry all the time). This all changes when the infant receives primary socialisation from his or her parents. Primary socialisation is deemed successful when the individual subject to socialisation achieves a high symmetry between the given objective reality and his personal subjective reality. Overlapping parts of objective reality and subjective reality, makes up an individual’s symbolic universe.
Symbolic universes are, fortunately or unfortunately, taken for granted. A huge part of symbolic universes are constructed out of what most laymen call “common sense”. When someone does something that does not agree with a socialised individual’s symbolic universe, we say that our symbolic universe has been impeded upon. Sometimes you hear one of your friends say “that guy has no common sense!”. Your friend has just suffered an invasion into his symbolic universe. He has seen something through his “lens” that does not agree with his subjective reality and thus has to be ejected quickly. Or else his symbolic universe is at risk of being destroyed. His symbolic universe is threatened, and he has to do something about it. Usually, he would solve the problem by getting a coffee and complain about the invasion to you.
Common sense is never verified but accepted by everyone. It is a piece of knowledge that is omnipresent and omniscent. It is functional in the sense that it simplifies the daily interactions between people. It would be difficult to get along in life if you cannot take the people around you for granted, if every sentence that everyone says has to be verified scientifically and empirically. Imagine all your daily conversations with your friends turning into some form of oral defense. That wouldn’t be pleasant, right?
I have said that common sense is accepted by everyone, but what about pieces of knowledge that are not accepted by everyone, but only selected groups of people? When people get together, they will be able to verify whether their symbolic universes overlap and check what kind of knowledge is taken for granted. For example, when one of my peers say “Get a life lar, Kian Wee!”, I know exactly what he means even though I don’t verify what he means down to the minute detail. People sharing the same symbolic universe will be able to use taken for granted knowledge within the symbolic universe. If I say “Get a Life!” to my father for example, his “lens” will not show him the same imagery that I get when one of my peers tell me to get a life, because he has constructed a seperate symbolic universe for himself. These pieces of taken for granted knowledge within symbolic universes are what sociologists call pseudo-science.
Pseudo-scientific concepts, like scientific concepts, have to be understood before they can be applied. But the big difference between pseudo-scientific knowledge and scientific knowledge is that, scientific knowledge at least has some empirical proof behind them while pseudo-scientific knowledge on the other hand, is more based on feel and the symbolic universes shared by people who happen to have to be together. Good examples of a formal pseudo-scientific constructs are astrology and Emotional Quotient (EQ). Even though there is no proper scientific basis for such constructs, their participants still nevertheless actively partake in their usage and promotion.
publice transport AND guard duty hahaha !