The Social Constructionist Theory

Social constructionist theory is built upon the observation that many of aspects of our everyday experience are the consequence of implicit social agreement, institutional practices or collective social action rather than objective reality, and only exist within the context of such agreements, practices or collective actions. Thus, many of the things we take for granted are not actually objective facts about the world, independent of human subjectivity, but are instead the products of human inter-subjectivity.

Social Constructs

A social construct is anything that exists by virtue of social interactions, as opposed to objective reality. For example, such things as nations, presidents, money and language do not exist outside of the context of human social behavior. Nevertheless, they exist as integral parts of our social functioning. Some philosophers have described social constructs as epistemologically objective and ontologically subjective because they are meaningful objects of knowledge only within the framework of inter-subjective human understanding.

Social Reality

Social reality is the "universe" of socially constructed knowledge created by virtue of our social interactions. Social reality is grounded in our behavior, our languages, our culture and our institutional practices and colors almost all of our perception. Although it is largely the consequence of our shared inter-subjective practices, we nevertheless occupy it largely without ever becoming explicitly aware of its contingent and constructed nature.

Artifacts

Artifacts are objects that are producible and comprehensible only upon the background of social reality. For instance, a novel is only a novel by virtue of our knowledge about social reality; otherwise, it is just paper bounded together and scribbled on with ink. Without understanding that this is a socially constructed artifact, we have no comprehension of how to go about treating it.

Weak Social Construction

Weak social construction theory holds that social constructs are dependent upon a background of brute facts and that social construction is the collective agreement to assign functions to objects. Consider, for example, money. We agree to understand money as a medium of exchange. We assign this function to little green paper bills and trade these bills for goods and services. This paper has value only insofar as we continue to agree it does, but it nevertheless is dependent on us having an object to use as a medium.

Strong Social Construction

Some critics claim that advocates of strong social construction think all of reality is a social construct, that there is no actual reality, no brute facts upon which to build social constructions. The point of strong social construction, however, is not to make the claim that there is no reality, but rather to point out that our languages and social practices largely determine how we make sense of that reality. For instance, trees are only differentiated from other plants by virtue of the fact that we have all learned to see them as "trees." Likewise, our beliefs about things such as history or nationality are the product of narratives that we have all learned. History still actually happened, but our beliefs about history are dependent upon the narratives we use to understand them.

References

• Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction