Biologiva Perspective

blah blahThe phrase, "social construction of reality," was in fact brought into general use, if not invented, by a book of the same title by a pair of conservative sociologists, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. (They do not give the argument in quite this form, but I think mine is a neater derivation.) It's very curious that the idea has been taken up so enthusiastically by academics who pride themselves on being leftists and radicals. (Though not without precedent; much of Marx's work is an attempt to expropriate the original conservative arguments.) Their reasoning seems to run roughly as follows. Many (if not all) oppressed people are thought of in an invidious, demeaning, repressive way; if we teach people to think in different categories, we'll get rid of those kinds of oppression. But this presumes that we can change the system of concepts, and in a deliberately chosen way at that, which blocks the premises we started from. In any case, Marx and Engels knew all about this kind of optimism a hundred and fifty years ago:

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This honest fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

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