Social_Construction__1_

Social Construction Nature Sceptical Threat of Individualism Everything is within each person’s Subjective Experience ● No such thing as society and Knowledge of it Society ● People act in organised ways ○ Given the limited cognitive capacity of an individual ○ Laws of Morality and Women's Rights movements ○ Social Construction allows for Knowledge beyond Individual Experience ● Practices not necessarily innate, natural or commonsensical Ideology Describes how groups believe certain things about the world ● Types 1. Belief Structures: Religion and Nation Group 2. Identity Structures: Gender and Race 3. Civilisations: East vs West 4. Abstract Structures: Progress 5. Organisational Structures: Government and Media ● Coherent System between people ● Paradigmatic Nature ● Examples of Social Construction ○ Gender Roles ■ However: Many Gender categories allow for one’s gender to always be in flux ■ However: Gender now cannot be defined objectively; solipsistic ● No falsifiability or verifiability ○ Racial Categories Construction & Validity Social Construction Background Social Values > Evidence → Construction of Knowledge ● Can be extended to all beliefs: Even the Sciences ○ Consensus and Peer Review ○ Agreed upon Arbitrary Scales ● Kant: There is a world independent of the human mind (the noumena) ○ Structureless without categories or facts ○ Structure is imposed on the world through our beliefs

Context of Structuralism ● Knowledge is built on fundamental structures and assumptions/narratives: e.g. the superiority of reason ○ Metanarratives: The entire social world can be encompassed in one all-embracing principle ○ =/= Pluralism in Postmodernism: Co-existence of a variety of situation-dependent ways of life ● Believed in ultimate structures of reality which define objective rights and wrongs Qualities of Social Constructionism 1. A critical stance towards conventional taken-for-granted stances of understanding the world a. Critical of enlightenment-age view that objective reality is accessible through senses and reason i. Contradicts Positivism and Empiricism: That the nature of the world can be revealed by observation + scientific method b. All knowledge comes from a particular structure of beliefs i. Objective and Unbiased Observation is impossible c. Rationale: The categories with which we apprehend the world →/ real divisions i. Wittgenstein: Language finds meaning in pragmatic use of communicating meaning objectively between different agents → Causes us to categorise the world into objective socially constructed boxes 1. Impossible to actually describe subjective experiences ii. Language exists in a particular “game” or context as a family resemblance → Deeply ambiguous and contextual iii. Suggests that our contingent practices could have been different given differing needs of society iv. Conceptual frameworks