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population believe that they are better off than before the upheaval, or
that 1 per cent of males under 30 years of age have emigrated. In the
present argument, all such concrete facts partake fully of the
indeterminacy. Not only will global social institutions disappear,
concrete statistical facts will as well.
The outcome is that if social fact is generated by applying certain
autonomous, although relative, coherence conditions (standards of
rationality) to bodies of non-social data, then social facts are once
again rendered radically indeterminate. We are in the same
predicament as before: social constructivism lacks a non-constructed
basis from which social reality can arise. Instead, it leaves social
reality completely free-floating and indeterminate. This constitutes a
refutation of the version of social constructivism that is based upon
the relativity of rationality.
63
CHAPTER III
Social Constructivism and the
Sociology of Knowledge: Berger
and Luckmann
There are social scientists who combine the basic commitments of
constructivism with a doctrine that might seem to draw the teeth of
the refutations adduced in the two previous chapters. The resultant
position is a version of the sociology of knowledge that claims that
we can explain human knowledge in social terms. Such a doctrine
purports to show whence the determinacy of knowledge derives:
human knowledge is causally determined by various social factors.
Hence, human knowledge, including that commanding communal
agreement or consensus, is not dependent for its determinate content
upon some infinite hierarchy of negotiated agreements, nor is it fixed
by standards of rationality that are themselves relative to the social
settings in which knowledge evolves. Instead, determinacy is derived
from certain laws specifying the causal, social determination of
cognitive processes. Such laws spell out how social cognition is a
product of certain other factors, such as class interests, or the power
structure of the group.
The italicised words are crucial lest we miss the difference
between the position we are about to examine here and the one
treated in the previous chapter. There, we discussed the view that
(social) reality is constructed (i.e. generated in a non-causal manner)
within each community in the sense of emanating from standards of
truth, reality and rationality that differ from one community to
another, each set of standards being distinctive of a given community.
The alleged correlation between a community and a specific set of
standards was a highly abstract one that did not imply that the
standards associated with each society were necessarily embraced in
that society. In a rather speculative (and somewhat highhanded)
fashion, the possibility was left open that the standards of truth and
rationality appropriate to a society at any particular stage of its
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Social Constructivism and Sociology of Knowledge
development might diverge from and be at variance with the standards
actually endorsed in that society a theme familiar from social
theorising in the Hegelian and Marxian tradition where it is expressed
in terms of the concept of ideology. The present chapter, on the other
hand, is concerned with those constructivist theories that maintain that
social reality is generated by the actual and empirically ascertainable
habits of thought prevalent in a given society; and these, in turn, are
claimed to be fixed through being the causal product of certain other
aspects of social reality.
I shall address this view by examining the most celebrated text in
the social constructivist tradition, namely Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann s The Social Construction of Reality (1967). This book is
distinguished by its attempt to combine constructivism with a
sociology-of-knowledge stance. Social reality is claimed to be a
human construction; but conversely, man and his habits of thought are
said to be shaped by social factors. Berger and Luckmann put it
succinctly: Society is a human product. Society is an objective
reality. Man is a social product (ibid.: 79, authors italics).
On the constructivist side, the book presents an argument that
combines several distinct strands of reasoning, all of them familiar
from our present exposition in which a separate chapter has been
devoted to each. One such strand is the argument from cultural
relativity, which we examined in the previous chapter. Another is the
phenomenological argument, which will be introduced, in a
significantly less radical version, in Part Two. Berger and Luckmann
were deeply influenced by the phenomenological thinking of Alfred
Schutz and his doctrine of multiple realities , such as are
constituted by the different attitudes which agents may adopt to
their experiences. Strong affinities with the argument from
convention (also to be assessed in Part Two) are exemplified too in
the two authors account of the genesis of institutionalisation. They
show how humans create social institutions as their iterated and
typified social actions gradually congeal into a fixed form,
supported by a sense that this form is somehow mandatory.
On the sociology-of-knowledge side, there are extensive
borrowings from the Marxist tradition. Berger and Luckmann
operate with a distinction reminiscent of the Marxian duality of
substructure and superstructure, with the former comprising the
fundamental economic features of human society, the latter its legal
and political system as well as the intellectual and cultural life of
society. According to Marx, the former factors largely determine the
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The Broad Arguments
latter. Berger and Luckmann accept this general framework, but
soften it to accommodate the fact that two-way determination
obtains here: social reality indeed determines man; but man also
determines social reality.
I shall argue in this chapter that the combination of social
constructivism and the sociological determinism expounded in
Marxism and other sociologies of knowledge does not resolve the
problems of the former, but rather throws the problem of determinacy
into stark relief.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
INTERPRETED
Before we go on, however, a few exegetical remarks on The Social
Construction of Reality are called for. This book is a bible for social
constructivists and has given this school of social science its name.
Yet, surprisingly, a close scrutiny of the book reveals that its
commitment to constructivism is not unequivocal. A crucial source of
ambiguity lies in the fact that, early in the book, the authors present a
disclaimer that might seem to render their account of the nature of
social reality irrelevant to the entire issue as defined here. On page
13, they write as follows.
What is real? How is one to know? These are among the most
ancient questions not only of philosophical inquiry proper, but
of human thought as such& . It is, therefore, important that we
clarify at the beginning the sense in which we use these terms
in the context of sociology, and that we immediately disclaim
any pretension to the effect that sociology has an answer to
these ancient philosophical preoccupations.
If we were going to be meticulous in the ensuing argument,
we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned
terms [ reality and knowledge : FC] every time we used them,
but this would be stylistically awkward. To speak of quotation
marks, however, may give a clue to the peculiar manner in
which these terms appear in a sociological context& the
philosopher is driven to decide where the quotation marks are in
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