The Social Construction of Reality


Book Description

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.




The Construction of Social Reality


Book Description

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a ‘five-pound note’ with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch. In The Construction of Social Reality, eminent philosopher John Searle examines the structure of social reality (or those portions of the world that are facts only by human agreement, such as money, marriage, property, and government), and contrasts it to a brute reality that is independent of human agreement. Searle shows that brute reality provides the indisputable foundation for all social reality, and that social reality, while very real, is maintained by nothing more than custom and habit.




The Mediated Construction of Reality


Book Description

Social theory needs to be completely rethought in a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality, two leading sociologists of media, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, revisit the question of how social theory can understand the processes through which an everyday world is constructed in and through media. Drawing on Schütz, Elias and many other social and media theorists, they ask: what are the implications of digital medias profound involvement in those processes? Is the result a social world that is stable and liveable, or one that is increasingly unstable and unliveable?




The Construction of Reality


Book Description

This book presents an integrated account of how humans 'construct' reality through interaction with the social and physical world around them.




The Family's Construction of Reality


Book Description

David Reiss presents a new model of family interaction grounded in the subtle and complex way in which a family constructs its inner life and deals with the outside world. Based upon fifteen years of research, the book offers a new understanding of the covert processes that hold a family together and, with distressing frequency, pull it apart.




The Construction Of Reality In The Child


Book Description

This is Volume XX of thirty-two in the Developmental Psychology series. Initially published in 1954, in Piaget’s words the study of sensorimotor or practical intelligence in the first two years of development has taught us how the child, at first directly assimilating the external environment to his own activity, later, in order to extend this assimilation, forms an increasing number of schemata which are both more mobile and better able to inter-coordinate. This study looks at the second part of evolution of sensorimotor intelligence, as the description of behavior no longer suffices to account for these new products of intellectual activity; it is the subject’s own interpretation of things which we must now try to analyze.







The Communicative Construction of Reality


Book Description

This volume advocates a shift from the social constructivism found in the work of Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, to a communicative constructivism that acknowledges communication as an embodied form of action in its own right, according to which social actors, in engaging in communicative action, construct a material social reality that guides, delimits, and enables actions. A study of the importance of understanding the role of communication in an age in which digitization and mediatization have extended the reach of communication to a global level and brought about the emergence of the communication society, The Communicative Construction of Reality shows how communication society does not merely replace modern society and its hierarchical institutions, but complements it in a manner that continually results in conflicts leading to the refiguration of society. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in the sociology of knowledge, communication, and social theory.




The Social Construction of What?


Book Description

Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Ian Hacking’s book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality—especially regarding the status of the natural sciences.




The Symbolic Construction of Reality


Book Description

In 1933 eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) fled Nazi Germany for the United States. His fame in Europe having already been established through a public debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, Cassirer would go on to become a noteworthy influence on American culture. His most important early writings focused on the symbol and symbolic interaction, exploring how human cultures—from early myth-based ones to our own modern, scientifically oriented time—have used symbols to mediate the basic forms of experience. Following this work, Cassirer extended his insights to encompass a broad spectrum of philosophical themes: from investigations into Western epistemological and scientific traditions to aesthetics and the philosophy of history to anthropology and political philosophy. Reflecting this diversity in Cassirer’s own work, The Symbolic Construction of Reality collects eleven essays by a wide range of contributors from different fields. Each essay analyzes a different aspect of his legacy, reassessing its significance for our contemporary world and bringing much-needed attention to this seminal thinker.