Schemas, Complex Knowledge and Feeling in Moral Concern for the Common Good

This paper argues from research on cognitive social psychology and cognitive sociology that some of the difficulties of explicating and achieving the common good emerge from the relationship of individual people’s schemas to widely held positions of moral concern.  Challenges to common understanding and enactment of the social good occur, in part, because individuals’ schemas, their mental constructs of perceptions and knowledge, develop through individualized yet partially shared experience of social norms and multi-dimensional experiences of feeling, perception, knowledge, and practice. Hence when we speak to one another about the common good, or make efforts to enact it, one person’s multi-dimensional schemas intersect with another’s similarly concatenated ideas. To highlight this, the paper highlights how schemas are not two-dimensional like the images that represent them in textbooks. The common good turns out to be less a tidy picture than a creative collision and ongoing mixing and shifting of schemas.