Social Construction of Reality

In 1966 Berger and Luckmann published their landmark study, “The Social Construction of Reality”. In their view, the reality that exists for members of a society consists of phenomena they construct by their social actions—by behaving as if they were following conventional rules, as if the phenomenon did exist. This work is based on a long tradition of scholarship from Immanuel Kant to Edmund Husserl and Alfred Scheutz. Kant had shattered the foundations of certainty of knowledge and rested it on the public use of reason. Scheutz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann presume that people create their own social order.

Keywords Berger, Peter; Externalization; Horizon; Internalization; Intersubjectivity; Intentionality; Luckmann, Thomas; Objectivation; Phenomenology; Structural Functionalism; Symbolic Interactionism

Day to Day Social Interaction > The Social Construction of Reality

Overview

What is the world that we perceive and live in with others? What is it made of, how, and by whom? These questions are certainly as old as humanity, or at the very least since humans began philosophical pondering. Social phenomenologists suggest that it is we who make the world as social beings through the relations we enter into. This is, of course, oversimplified.

Reality & Perception

Philosophers have tried to tackle this question. The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) shook the foundations of the general understanding of reality and perception. The bits and pieces of his ideas were floating around for quite some time in the Western scholarly world of the eighteenth century. Between 1787 and 1790, Kant published his famous Three Critiques, which belong on every philosopher's reading list, as much as Plato's The Republic or John Rawls’ Theory of Justice.

Immanuel Kant

It is basically impossible to give a short description of what Kant accomplished in these voluminous works. As with every highly important, equally sophisticated, and complex work in the history of ideas and science, its meaning has been debated and contested many times over and there are many rivaling accounts of its correct interpretation.

Some of Kant's predecessors had speculated on the reality we perceive: whether it exists exactly as we perceive it; whether our sensory perceptions are but a minute aspect of this reality; whether this reality is actually only a figment of our imagination; or whether this imagination is only one imagination and all the other people in it are imagined. This is called solipsism, and while you are reading this, ask yourself whether it would be possible if this text, your parents and friends, and the world outside of the window are all but products of your consciousness and nothing but this consciousness exists. In all of this, Kant asked himself a few supposedly simple questions: What does it mean to understand that things end? What does it mean to think that there could be a god who is immortal? What is time? What is space?

And then he asked what actually is it that our consciousness has to have before it ever has a perception whatsoever and what our mind therefore lays over the experiences we make in and with the world, while accepting that there is a world that affects us. In short, to summarize Kant, the things that make the world outside of our mind, we can never know. They are things-in-themselves, but they affect us. To make sense of the world so we can act in it, the mind does bring to experiences certain things that Kant calls transcendental or a priori to experience, meaning before experience. Most important of these are the concepts of time and space.

The concepts our mind uses to have thoughts of the world and to find direction and orientation in it are therefore not fixed or identical with the things-in-themselves. Therefore, there really is no concept of a truth that is really certain; some things we have to postulate and just take at face value.

So how do we gain any kind of certainty at all? Understanding, reason, and judgment are the tools we have for the task of making use of concepts. And we also know that there must be others like us, entities with minds of their own, each of whom has his or her own ways to find certainty. They and their actions become the touchstone for our judgments and our concepts about the world. We act with others and try our concepts and judgments out to find out if they match with others’. Reason is therefore a public affair. A century after Kant, scholars study this question in much more detail under the term “communication.”

Schopenhauer, Husserl & Scheutz

Many developments in science and philosophy have followed in the wake of Kant. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) published his seminal The World as Will and Representation in 1818–19. For the most part, he accepted Kant's central distinction of phenomena (that which is perceived) and noumena (that which is thought of). He introduced the concept of will to bridge the gap from the side of the thought, of the noumena. The world is therefore willed as a representation for the one who perceives. The phenomena are not independent of that consciousness.

Another version of this distinction was created by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Husserl founded the philosophical discipline of phenomenology. According to Husserl, by "bracketing" away the assumptions we hold in regard to the external world when viewing a phenomenon, we can actually reach the essence of this phenomenon. The consciousness as an act and the direction of the objects are two different things. There is no thought that is not directed, that does not have intentionality. Therefore, our directedness to the object in intentionality does therefore also constitute it. This speculation lead Husserl to another question—namely, what happens when several people refer to an object in communication, what is the "I" to which they are referring, if each subjective mind has its own intentionality and constitutes the object for each person in his or her own way. In the study of communication, this is the problem of intersubjectivity.

Alfred Scheutz (1899–1959) studied law and worked most of his life as a banker. He can be considered the founder of phenomenological sociology. In his native Austria, Scheutz easily gained access to the academic world of Vienna. He was also a known figure in Paris. But his emigration to the US in 1938 denied him the same kind of access that he had in Europe for quite a long time. The philosophical world of the US was long in the process of turning away from idealist and speculative thought and toward British logic and language philosophy, represented by Bertrand Russell and, later, W.V.O. Quine. US sociology was dominated in the 1940s and 1950s by Talcott Parsons' effort to create a common conceptual frame for the fragmented social sciences, which was dubbed structural-functionalism, or social systems theory. Scheutz tried to gain Parsons' attention, which made sense in so far as both thought of "social action" as a central concept of theory and both were deeply influenced by the work of Max Weber (1864–1920). But their correspondence was short lived to the regret of Scheutz, since Parsons had little use for what he called "contemplative philosophy."

Parsons was himself trained in philosophical thinking, economics, and biology, but he was fascinated by conceptual frames that could actually be put to pragmatic use and did not remain mere speculative thought.

The details of this chapter of intellectual history with regard to Parsons and his intellectual and conceptual background have been highly disputed (including his exchanges with Scheutz). Stingl (2008) has tried to give an account that could open up the debate in so far as he can integrate several different accounts.

Berger & Luckmann

Following in Scheutz's footsteps, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality in 1966. Focusing on a perspective of the sociology of knowledge, Berger and Luckmann assume a constant process of creation of knowledge occurring in the interactions of people. This body of knowledge, thus continuously created, becomes socially accepted as a shared reality that the actors experience as both subjectively meaningful and objectively factual.

In their view, the reality that exists for members of a society comprises phenomena each member constructs by their social actions—by behaving as if they were following conventional rules, as if the phenomenon did exist. The most famous example is perhaps the assumption of the existence of social status.

Further Insights

Schuetz's Social Phenomenology

Scheutz tried to conflate Husserl's phenomenology with Weber's idea of subjective understanding, wherein the meaning of everyday social life situations is imputed by the individuals for themselves, and each has his or her own definition of the situation. This is a major difference—that the definition of the situation owes itself not only to the actors' decisions and thoughts, but also to complex patterns of culture and social structures in which the individual has learned to live.

For Scheutz, there exists a stock of knowledge, a set of types or recipes that offer conceptions for behavior as being appropriate (at least so far as the stock of knowledge enables thinking) in types such as clothes, apartments, cars, and CDs. Thus, individuals are constructing their world by passing on these social (ideal) types among themselves as a social group, and in this process, they construct their worlds.

Scheutz's example of writing a letter has become somewhat famous. He demonstrated that people have come to take for granted an orderly world. In writing a letter, one assumes that there exists a mail office, a delivery mechanism, and a mail carrier. Each one is not known personally by the one who is writing a letter, but he or she postulates a cooperative process will be happening with these people in order for the letter to fulfill its purpose.

Berger and Luckmann employ the sociology of knowledge for their task as well. A body of knowledge can be accepted as a reality when it is accorded so by a social process of acceptance. In acting and interacting, people therefore create the reality they supposedly share both on a level of what they think of as objective facts as well as on the subjective side of meaning. In this reality, people bestow meaning in an orderly way to the phenomena they encounter in their everyday experiences.

The meaning is subjective as it affects the individual personally, while social order, such as institutions, is thought of as being objective, which Berger and Luckmann conceive to be a human product. The world is shared with others, therefore intersubjective, and at the same time, it has a past and a future and it has a horizon, so to speak. Using the theatrical language of Goffman, Berger and Luckmann postulate that in order to navigate this social and intersubjective world, people use "scripts." But unlike Goffman, who uses this metaphor to illustrate that people act as if reading preexisting scripts, Berger and Luckmann argue that individuals invent scripts themselves using three key components:

• Externalization,
• Objectivation, and
• Internalization.

Externalization is the first moment of the dialectical process of the social construction of reality. Human beings create their own social worlds continuously, and social order is the result of past human activity and only exists as long as the activity is continued. Objectivation is a process that has individuals apprehend life as an everyday order that they presume to be prearranged and thus, the reality that imposes itself is therefore considered independent of human doing. The order is considered objectified for it is an order of objects that people presume to preexist. People internalize, and thereby stabilize, the social order they have created themselves. Order, however, needs legitimization. A process of socialization guarantees the continual legitimacy.

Viewpoints

Other Perspectives

The school of ethnomethodology, founded by Harold Garfinkel in 1967, is another derivative of phenomenological sociology. Unlike Scheutz, the Harvard-trained Garfinkel sought to bring Husserl, Scheutz, and Parsons under one theoretical umbrella. He integrated the motivations of the actor into his thought. This is a prominent idea in Parsons, but not in Scheutz, since for Parsons these motivations are also influenced by the process of socialization.

Analyzing tapes of jury procedures, Garfinkel (1991) speculated that jury members were using a methodology of their own but that it was rooted in their individual commonsense knowledge as specific to their society and thus also different from scientific knowledge. Social facts, the object of sociological study, according to Durkheim, are yet not facts out there, as Durkheim suggested, but are more taken-for-granted facts by the actors, which they use as the means of interpreting situations and therefore reintroducing into the process. People order their experiences in ways they think social reality is like.

Social phenomenology has also experienced feminist critique by Dorothy E. Smith (1926). She conflated social phenomenology with critical conflict theory. She was interested in exploring how women construct and experience the world of the structures of male domination in their everyday experiences and how they react to these situations emotionally and cognitively. She thereby hoped to "give women a voice" by giving them a sociology.

Language & Reality

In 1995, John Searle, a famous philosopher concerned primarily with language published his seminal The Construction of Social Reality. This investigation followed a career built on the investigation of speech acts, a theory postulated by John Austin in How To Do Things with Words (1976). Austin's insight rested on the fact that words can actually accomplish changes in reality. In a very simple example, a priest's phrase, "I hereby pronounce you husband and wife," invokes a whole set of changes in the actual world.

Following this theory and deconstructionist philosophy and psychology, literature critic Judith Butler (2006) has alerted us to the fact in her study Gender Trouble that with a speech act as simple as stating "It's a boy," a series of events can be set in motion that constructs the psychological gender identity.

In many ways, George Canguilhem in The Normal and the Pathological (1943) illustrates the dependence of medical and scientific practice on the way people think of truth. What we treat as normal and as pathological strictly depends on our social practice. For example, a person does not have cancer, if he or she is not told so. If he or she does not experience physical pain, she or he will feel normal, even if there is a tumor growing in the body for a long time. Not until the tumor is discovered does this person actually have cancer, until then the person and her body are considered normal and healthy by him or her and his or her environment. The declaration of the cancer enables social scripts to be applied that completely change the reality of the person's life. He or she may even reinterpret the recent past from the cancer perspective, completely reconstructing a past reality from the new social situation of him- or herself as a cancer patient.

On the other hand, Searle also addresses the question of language and its effects. He explicitly deals with the concept of intentionality and the effects that speech acts have in the real world. His work Intentionality (1983) establishes that from the point of view of the illocutionary act (the speech act that actually effects real changes), truth is rendered problematic. He begins to revise and update this position by pointing to the fact that for a speech act to become illocutionary and thus valid, it implies certain conditions that need to be satisfied for it to count. One condition that he then introduces as a condition of satisfaction is that certain types of speech acts must actually be true. This is the case for a sentence like "Angie bought her dog Olivia a new toy," which is satisfied only if it is true. An order like "Angie, buy your other dog Coco a toy, too" is only satisfied if Angie actually goes and does as told. Searle calls the first example "word to world direction of fit." The second example is called "world to word direction of fit."

In Intentionality, Searle (1983) speaks of intentional states in a sense as if they accompany speech acts. Saying that Angie has a new toy entails an intentional state that encompasses a belief on the side of the actors' psychology and the actual event of Angie having a new toy. There is, Searle has argued, a so-called background of dispositions, tendencies, capacities, and potentials, which are not part of the intentional states. For example, if we are ordered to drive to the store, we know that have to use a car.

In The Construction of Social Reality, Searle introduces the distinction of collective and individual intentionality. Both are distinct, but the collective intentionality cannot be thought of as a kind of groupthink or collective consciousness. Group decisions still rest on individual intentions that refer to the world. For Searle, the question is how it can be that in a world of physical matter and forces, constructs such as a car, money, or a painting can actually exist.

While philosophers would point out many differences between Scheutz, Husserl, and Searle, from the more pragmatic point of view of applying their approaches to sociological analysis, it must be said that the differences are not that substantial.

The future of social phenomenology seems to hinge on the fact that it has "sunk into" the academic mainstream. There are very few who would deny that, at least in part, people "construct" what they think of as real. Practiced as a strict approach, it has only very few followers left. Symbolic interactionism or ethnomethodology appear to be better equipped to resonate with the academic mainstream, simply because they do not employ the complicated baggage of Husserlian phenomenology. However, it should be noted that in the fields of neurophysiology and psychology, there is an effort underway to give Husserl a reconsideration, because some experimental results cannot be accounted for by the existing concepts and do resonate with subjective philosophies.

Terms & Concepts

Externalization: Berger and Luckmann define the first moment of the dialectical process of the social construction of reality as externalization. They assume that human beings create their own social world continuously, and social order as the resultant of past human activity and only able to exist as long as the activity is continued. Humans therefore either spontaneously create social reality, by choosing to enter a friendship, or reinstitute it, by continuing an established practice, such as paying tax, using the bus, etc. Creation and re-creation are the two dimensions of externalization.

Horizon: What the mind experiences, what we can consider cognitive content always has a horizon. Each experience or problem comes with a "fringe" zone of relations, which are not actually present or central to the current situation, e.g. memories and expectations.

Internalization: Order needs legitimization or some kind of "rest assured." Internalization is a process of socialization that guarantees the continuation of legitimacy.

Intersubjectivity: The existence of others is something that we take for granted in daily life. We assume that others are like ourselves—have a mind, consciousness, needs, and feelings. But at the same time, we each constitute in our own subjective mind our own social reality, as do other people in theirs. Each self would thus live in its own respective world. Yet we do share a world and interact and communicate successfully with one another. Asking for the reasons that make this possible is the problem of intersubjectivity.

Intentionality: Consciousness is always a consciousness of something, directed toward something. The object we have in our mind is therefore always an intentional object, to which we intend meaning, direct our attention, and single out.

Objectivation: Objectivation is a process that has individuals apprehend life as an everyday order that they presume to be prearranged, and thus, the reality that imposes itself is therefore considered independent of human doing. The order is considered objectified for it is an order of objects that people presume to preexist. The main route of maintaining that order is the use of language. People internalize, and thereby stabilize, the social order they have created themselves.

Objective Meaning: Meaning that an observer presumes to guide another person's actions.

Social Construction of Reality: In Berger and Luckmann’s view, the reality that exists for members of a society comprises phenomena they construct by their social actions—by behaving as if they were following conventional rules and as if the phenomenon did exist. The most famous example is perhaps the assumption of the existence of social status.

Structural Functionalism: Structural functionalism in sociology is associated with Talcott Parsons. Structural functionalism argues that various elements in a social system evolved to perform certain tasks within the society by resolving one problem or another. The economy as a subsystem of society, for example, emerged to resolve the problem of efficient allocation of resources. In reductionist versions of structural functionalism, equilibrium is a static state that does not allow for structural variations, social progress through civic engagement, or social conflict to occur as an agent of structural change.

Subjective Meaning: The type of meaning that a person ascribes to his or her own experiences or actions.

Symbolic Interactionism: Symbolic interactionism is based on the idea that human beings act with regard to one another based on the meanings they ascribe to the objects in and situation of the interaction. Meanings, expressed in symbols, are subject to interpretation, which is a dynamic process and also hinges on the socialization an individual has received in learning the meaning of significant symbols.

Bibliography

Austin, J. (1976). How to do things with words. Oxford, England: Oxford Paperbacks.

Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Butler, J. (2006). Gender trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.

Garfinkel, H. (1991). Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge, England: Polity.

Heiskala, R. (2011). The meaning of meaning in sociology: The achievements and shortcomings of Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 41, 231–246. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=65009554

Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2012). On the distinctively human: Two perspectives on the evolution of language and conscious mind. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42, 87–105. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=71934023

Leydesdorff, L. (2011). ‘Meaning’ as a sociological concept: A review of the modeling, mapping and simulation of the communication of knowledge and meaning. Social Science Information, 50(3/4), 391–413. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=65219685

Scheutz, A. (1970). On phenomenology and social relations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. (1997). The construction of the social world. New York, NY: Free Press.

Smith, D. E. (1989). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Suggested Reading

Chelstrom, E. (2013). Social phenomenology: Husserl, intersubjectivity, and collective intentionality. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Curra, J. (2011). The social construction of reality. In The relativity of deviance (pp. 9–10). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=467137&site=ehost-live

Guyer, P. (2006). Kant. New York, NY: Routledge.

Parsons, T. (1949/1937). The structure of social action. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. New York, NY: Free Press.

Stingl, A. (2008). The house of Parsons: The biological vernacular from Kant to James, Weber and Parsons. Lampeter, UK: Edward Mellen Press.