Social Construction of Reality

Intellectual Foundations of Social Constructionism

Ideas about a socially constructed reality were introduced by the early phenomenologist philosophers Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. In their efforts to understand the structures of consciousness, they observed that the mind can be directed at real things (e.g., the dog barking in your backyard), as well as nonexistent things (e.g., your anxieties related to dogs barking in your backyard). The term was actually coined by Alfred Schutz, who sought to employ a phenomenological approach to more fully explain Max Weber's sociology of social action. Schutz's ideas about how ordinary people structure the commonsense world of everyday life inspired sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann to write an essay on the role of knowledge in society, titled The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, originally published in 1966. The Social Construction of Reality is essentially a critical assessment of the fragmented state of structural theories of sociology (particularly the structural-functionalism of Emile Durkheim and the conflict theories of Weber) and Freudian psychoanalysis, approaches that were in vogue at the time. Berger and Luckmann saw a connection between these three seemingly disparate approaches and envisioned the sociology of knowledge as a method for a comprehensive understanding of the interactions between the individual person and society. Their ideas have since given rise to the study of how knowledge systems are produced, organized, stored, and distributed within society. How people think and behave is a function of the knowledge systems they have access to. Hence, the realities of a Latino gang member, a biology professor, or an Islamic jihadist vary in content, quality, and texture.

Basically, our everyday reality has a complexion made up of three domains: objective reality, subjective reality, and inter subjective reality. Objective reality is the real world independent of our thoughts, wishes, and beliefs. Subjective reality is the world as we perceive it through our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. In ter subjective reality is the perceived world we invent in communication with other individuals as we construct ad hoc, agreed-upon views of the world.

These domains constantly intersect but are rarely congruent. Most often they collide like cars in a demolition derby. This “collision of multiple realities” has been a subject of interest among philosophers, especially phenomenologists, social scientists interested in the sociology of knowledge, and clinical practitioners, in particular cognitive-behavioral therapists.

Beginning in the Renaissance, scholars began to reexamine the cultures of antiquity and discovered that the ancients' view of reality differed from their own. This awareness of a world of multiple realities was reinforced during the Age of Exploration as Europeans came into contact with foreign cultures with radically different world views.

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