6 August 2008 - Social Construction of Reality

The Social Construction of Reality

Reality and knowledge... the man in the street takes these things for granted.
"specific agglomerations of 'reality' and 'knowledge' pertain to specific social contexts, and... these relationships will have to be included in an adequate sociological analysis of these contexts" p. 15

the SOK (sociology of knowledge) will have to "deal with... the processes by which any body of knowledge comes to be socially established as 'reality'" p. 15

Sheler coined SOK
It is "concerned with the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises... the sociology of knowledge constitutes the sociological focus of... the existential determination (Seingebundenheit) of thought as such" p. 16

The relationship between ideas and the social, ideas and the historical, ideas and the political...

Three main intellectual antecedents: marxism (that man's consciousness is determined by his social being; ideology or ideas serving as weapons for social interest; false consciousness or thought that is alienated from the real social being of the thinker; substructure and superstructure or human activity and the world produced by that activity), nietzschean (less explicit), historicist (overwhelming relativity)

"The SOK... is the procedure by which the socio-historical selection of ideational contents is to be studied, it being udnerstood that the contents themselves are independent of socio-historical causation and thus inaccessible to sociological analysis" p. 20

Scheler
Human knowledge is given in society as an a priori: a "relative natural world view"

Mannheim (English speaker)
"More into ideology... the object of thought becomes progressively clearer with this accumulation of different perspectives on it" p. 22

Geiger
Ideology as socially distorted thought


Stark
go beyond ideology and look at "the social conditions of knowledge as such"


The SOK should look at what passes as knowledge in society: not theories or ideas as such... it tries not to exxagerate the importance of theorizing for society...

Schutz
What should the theoretical aspects of the SOK look like?
Concentrated on the "structure of the common-sense world of everyday life"
He is into the social distribution of knowledge