

People "live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones." Lippman's "environment" might be called "reality", and his "pseudo-environment" seems equivalent to what today is called "constructed reality". Each person constructs a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne wrote that, "We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things." In 1886 or 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche put it similarly: "Facts do not exist, only interpretations." In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann said, "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance" between people and their environment. Origins Įach person creates their own "constructed reality" that drives their behaviors. From a linguistic viewpoint, social constructionism centres meaning as an internal reference within language (words refer to words, definitions to other definitions) rather than to an external reality. Social constructionism posits that phenomena do not have an independent foundation outside the mental and linguistic representation that people develop about them throughout their history, and which becomes their shared reality. Ī social construct or construction is the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event. It has been objected that strong social constructionism undermines the foundation of science as the pursuit of objectivity and, as a theory, defies any attempt at falsifying it. Weak social constructionism relies on brute facts – facts that are not socially constructed, such as, arguably, facts about physical particles – or institutional facts (which are formed from social conventions). There is weak and strong social constructionism. This articulates the view that people in society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the existence of people or language to validate those concepts. While some social constructs are obvious, for instance money or the concept of currency, in that people have agreed to give it importance/value, others are controversial and hotly debated, such as the concept of self/self-identity. It has often been characterised as neo- Marxian or also as a neo- Kantian theory, in that social constructionism replaces the transcendental subject with a concept of society that is at the same time descriptive and normative. The theory centers on the notion that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately by each individual. Social constructionism is a theory in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory which proposes that certain ideas about physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of pure observation of said reality.
