Opinion: The economy of likelihood. An introduction to a praxeological approach to public opinion

Abstract

Summary: Sociology misses the point when it discusses public opinion, for three reasons: it reduces a notion with an important normative role to the status of a descriptive category; it reifies the distinction between facts and opinions; and it ignores its own role in shaping that same socially constructed objectivity by which it measures opinion. This article outlines a new approach to the formation of opinions as a dynamic, normative activity dependent on an internal relationship between personal views and a representative and discursive general opinion, with its objectivization rooted in realities made mutually manifest in everyday discussions and actions.