Social Construct Theory
A social construct is anything that exists as a product of human social interaction instead of by virtue of objective, human-independent existence. Social constructs are said to be the result of social facts, things that are true of our social world or human existence, as opposed to natural facts, which are thought to exist outside of our human existence. Examples of social constructs are such things as governments, money, language, race, gender and nationality.
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Social Reality
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Social reality is the plane upon which social constructs exist. It is distinct from both natural reality and subjective reality in that it exists beyond the minds of individual people but is not the result of natural laws. Rather, social reality is highly contingent and based solely upon social mores, traditions, cultures and institutions.
Inter-subjectivity
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Human beings are often referred to as "subjects" in philosophy. Subjects have a personal reality that is specific to them and is built upon their experience of natural and social reality. Natural reality exists independently of subjects, and social reality exists by virtue of inter-subjective interaction. Inter-subjectivity then denotes the interaction of human beings, and social reality exists because of inter-subjectivity largely because a group of human subjects agree or believe---whether explicitly, implicitly or subconsciously---that it exists.
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The Argument for Weak Social Construction
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Arguments for weak social construction generally posit that social reality has to be built upon natural reality. Under this argument, a social construct takes something that is subject-independently real and by virtue of inter-subjective agreement, treats it like something else. For instance, money has a real existence in that it is paper, but its value as money is a result of our shared belief that it is valuable. Otherwise, it has no natural or intrinsic value. The technical way to say this is to say that a social construct is ontologically subjective in that it exists because of subjects and epistemologically objective in that it exists as a reality by virtue of the knowledge we all share.
The Argument for Strong Social Construction
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The argument for strong social construction is that social reality so permeates our perception, understanding and knowledge of the world that we cannot truly divorce it from our knowledge of natural reality. This is not to say that there is no such thing as natural reality, but rather that we cannot sweep away all of our socially constructed ways of seeing the world to the extent that we can actually see natural reality objectively because we to a certain extent simply are our social reality.
Criticism
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Most arguments against social construction attack the argument for strong construction. Critics claim that strong social construction makes truth so radically relative that we simply could never have certain knowledge of anything. In defense, it can be argued that although strong social construction does make the way we see reality somewhat relative, it does not preclude a partial or working understanding of objective reality.
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