Verstehen

Construction and Reconstruction

Sociology, insofar as we mean it in Max Weber's sense of the term, has disclosed that the human processes of perception, recognition, understanding, and explanation establishes images and constructions of “reality,” believe these constructions to be real, define them as reality, and orient themselves according to them. The transcendentalphilosophical, Kantian development in the theory of perception carried on by Husserl; the social theories and protosociologies of Schütz, Berger, and Luckmann in this context; the anthropological expansion of the phenomenological point of view by Scheler, Plessner, and even Gehlen: all these have contributed to the systematic description and analysis of this phenomenon. A construct's attainment of meaningful intersubjectivity within a monadic community (Husserl), the subjects of the “social constructions of reality” with an egologic perspective (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 1970) the social constitution of the “structures of the life-world” (Schütz and Luckmann 1979, 1984), and the principally symbol boundedness of human perception and action (Peirce, Wittgenstein, Buehler) all serve here as examples.

Sociology as the science of reality aims to comprehend and explain all social constructions: the products of human activity, the forms of socialization and economy as well as the conceptions of the world, interpretive figures, and world outlooks. It presupposes that the symbol boundedness of human perception and action conceives of all social constructions in “symbolic forms” (Cassirer), that we move, interpreting, through a human preinterpreted and overinterpreted world, that we are trapped in our own symbols and fictions or constructions of reality, and that, in the orientation of our actions, we must grapple with the reality or, respectively, with the validity of these fictions and constructions.

It does not follow that the social sciences and humanities must once again fight the battles against realism, empiricism, and idealism fought by Carneades, Augustinus, Kant, and Husserl just because some natural scientists and cyberneticists—quite belatedly and with astounding coarseness—have uncovered (or discovered) what for them are new insights. The realization that subjects construct “their” reality according to their type-specific and individual abilities and that which is collectively held to be “real” is indeed a social construct, is of great consequence. However, this insight is not new. Thus, it should not lead to the repetition of old debates about our inability to perceive an outside world per se. Rather, the social sciences must address the various social constructions and offer comparative explanations for these sketches of reality as a result of their historical and social structural conditions. Sociology is primarily hindsighted prophecy—the reconstruction of social constructions and the conditions of constructions of reality. Thus, sociological prognoses are made up of the—often dubious—attempt to imagine one's self and others on the basis of scientific interpretations and reconstructions of past realities, possibilities, or probabilities of “new” social sketches of reality.

...