Challenges the traditional scientific view that naturally occurring psychological and sociological "realities" of a systematic kind are to be discovered underlying appearances. This text claims that such orderly "realities" are both socially constructed and sustained within everyday conversation.

`[An] immensely thoughtful, informative and persuasive treatment of the "rhetorical-responsive version of social constructionism" via an eclectic blend of, principally, European and American linguistics, philosophy and social psychology... Shotter's book is most important for continuing the work begun by Billig and others bringing recognition via recollection to the rhetorical corpus' - Discourse & Society