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Social construct

Concept made real by collective agreement

Summary

Concept made real by collective agreement

A social construct is any category or thing that is made real by convention or collective agreement. Socially constructed realities are contrasted with natural kinds, which exist independently of human behavior or beliefs.

Simple examples of social constructs are the meaning of words, the value of paper money, and the rules of economic systems. Other examples, such as race, were formerly considered controversial but are now accepted by the consensus of scientists to be socially constructed rather than naturally determined. Still other possible examples, such as less empirical and more abstract concepts which underlie particular scientific theories, remain the subject of ongoing philosophical debate.

Relationship with objectivity

During the 20th century, philosopher John Searle and sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann argued that some socially constructed realities—such as property ownership, citizenship, and marital status—should be considered forms of objective fact, and posited the existence of such socially constructed objective facts as a philosophical or methodological problem to be explored.

Others, such as György Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer built upon the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx to argue that a fallacy of reification is responsible for the practice of treating socially constructed facts as though they were natural—a phenomenon Lukács referred to as "phantom objectivity".

More recently, biological anthropologists and public health experts have determined that, while race is a social construct, the persistence of racism has objectively demonstrable negative consequences for the health and well-being of marginalized groups.

References

References

  1. "Social Constructionism".
  2. Searle, John. (2010). "The Construction of Social Reality". Free Press.
  3. Elder-Vass, Dave. (2012). "The Reality of Social Construction". Cambridge University Press.
  4. Stern, Paul C.. (1990). "The Social Construction of the Economy". Challenge.
  5. "Race".
  6. (2019). "AABA Statement on Race & Racism".
  7. (2023). "Using Population Descriptors in Genetics and Genomics Research: A New Framework for an Evolving Field (Consensus Study Report)". [[National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine]].
  8. Stephen L., Goldman. (2022). "Science Wars: The Battle Over Knowledge and Reality". Oxford University Press.
  9. Mallon, Ron. (11 January 2019). "Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction".
  10. (2011). "The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge". Open Road Media.
  11. Epstein, Brian. (21 March 2018). "Social Ontology".
  12. György, Lukács. (1967). "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat". Merlin Press.
  13. (2002). "Dialectic of Enlightenment". Stanford University Press.
  14. Gannon, Megan. (5 February 2016). "Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue". Scientific American.
  15. "Tackling structural racism and ethnicity-based discrimination in health".
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

sociological-terminology social-constructionism
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