And thinks with one too; the words of Quine couldn’t be more apt.
All reviews should have two parts, an objective and subjective analysis, so here goes.
Objective: The book is an important piece of literature. Sociological thought is gaining more territory in academic circles, and the ideas found in the standard social science model are being diffused rapidly into “popular culture.” This book is definetly part of the sociological tradition, having the same views and prejudices of other sociological works. The book has some unecessarily thick language that is best aproached after some overview of sociological thought, but it isnt necessary to get a good understanding of what the authors try to say. This being said …
Subjective: … sociology is rediculous, this book included. The langauge is inexact; words like definition, reality, and institution are never clearly defined, or the clear definitions are disregarded throughout the work. The authors make no arguments, philosophical, scientific, or otherwise, but continually appeal to some sort of perverted common sense. There is no empirical support given for any claim, nor any information as to how the claims could have effects on empirical reasearch; the questions are both skirted with a wave of the hand. As mentioned, the authors use unecessarily thick language, usually for the purpose of obscuring the lack of interesting claims they really make; most things said are either uninteresting or false. For me this book is not valuable intellectually; the train of thought is inexact and sometimes very confused; there is no support for the claims made other than appealing to common sense; there is a strange need felt by the authors (and explicitly stated) to honor and incorporate past intellectual work with disregard for its validity; there is a naive view of society as some conspiracy against each individual within it.
This book should be read. It will either swing you over to the side of sociology with its strange and fantastic claims or will show you how terribly confused the subject really is. There can be some value found in the work, by any person, either way.
Rating: 3 / 5
Well, since the gist of it is in page 1, is reality socially constructed, or isn’t? Careful, here. If you want to answer “Yes!” as most reviewers of this book seem eager to do, I’ll ask, is this book socially constructed? And are you socially constructed and therefore (if the answer has been yes, remember) do not have an independent existence outside this social construction? How can two socially-constructed creatures such as the authors of this book be aware of the socially-constructed reality of others and not mention their own? Who gave them the red (or blue) pill (The Matrix calling)?
Totalizing theories of reality tend to fall hard, every time, down the same hole. The postmodernist version is only slightly more sophisticated, alleging that reality is not only socially constructed, but that there are myriad realities, one (or more) per each human being on the planet. Naturally, jumping from there to the “discovery” that science is nothing but a Western, socially-created invention that has had its run and it’s about time to replace it with “something” else, is not that difficult; it’s even inevitable, and one reviewer makes the Kuhn-connection immediately. Berger and Luckmann have the gift of being able to stand outside this man-made reality, see it for what it is, and denounce it; all of this without apparent contamination from the same socially-constructed reality that has socially-constructed their ideas and theories.
Kuhn made the same mistake; no wonder scientists only smile at his ideas. But “social” scientists, some philosophers, and literary theorists (my field of study) loved The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and they really held on to the concept of “paradigms” as if their lives depended on it. Socially-constructed Thomas Kuhn came up with ideas that Berger and Luckmann, prisoners of their paradigm, develop a bit more. Kuhn announced that “all” of us are trapped in our paradigm, and yet he could escape, see The Truth (yes, capitalized), and come back-to-the-muck to tell us about it. Thanks, Tom. These two authors do essentially the same. They and the reviewers that obviously loved the book (there were a few lucid ones there: hope for humanity, I guess) seem blissfully unaware of how their theory eats itself from the tail.
Rating: 1 / 5
If you’re going to make it the culture-industrial complex (i.e. music industry) you really should have some understanding and insight into how people view reality. Whether you’re trying to get people to buy your record, come to your show or listen to your radio station- it’s all part of the same influencing project, more or less. In a certain sense, the Social Consturction of Reality is probably the only book a non-specialist needs to read about this topic.
This book, in language as clear and straight-forward as you’re likely to get, explains how reality is constructed from social intercourse. The analysis here starts from what normal people consider reality: being “wide awake” and experiencing “everyday” life. All of reality proceeds from face-to-face encounters that occur during the normal course of every-day life:
The social reality of everyday life is apprehended in a continuum of typifications, which are progreesively anonymous as they are removed from the “here and now” of the face-to-face situation. P. 33
Based on these encounters, humans create bodies of knowledge and categories of interactions. As a society grows more complex, these face-to-face encounters become abstracted into “expertise” and then passed down to new members of a society (children.):
Primary socialization thus accomplishes what is the most important confidence trick that society plays on the individual- to make appear necessit what is in fact a bundle of contongencies and this make meaningful the accident of his birth. P. 135
In this schema, it doesn’t matter whether the society is pre-historic, religious, philosphical or scientific- the transmission process of reality via the use of expert knowledge is the same.
Over time, clusters of ideas/knowledge become institutions- like a religion or a mythology for example. People use ideas to explain “why.”
Ultimately, Social Construction of Reality concludes with an observation as elegant as it is profound:
All symbolic universes and all legitimations are human products; their existence has it’s base in the lives of concrete individuals, and has no empirical status apart from these lives. P. 128
In other words- reality is what we make it. Or to be more precise: Reality is what generations of humans living and dying over time make it. No more, no less. This is reality.
Rating: 5 / 5
And thinks with one too; the words of Quine couldn’t be more apt.
All reviews should have two parts, an objective and subjective analysis, so here goes.
Objective: The book is an important piece of literature. Sociological thought is gaining more territory in academic circles, and the ideas found in the standard social science model are being diffused rapidly into “popular culture.” This book is definetly part of the sociological tradition, having the same views and prejudices of other sociological works. The book has some unecessarily thick language that is best aproached after some overview of sociological thought, but it isnt necessary to get a good understanding of what the authors try to say. This being said …
Subjective: … sociology is rediculous, this book included. The langauge is inexact; words like definition, reality, and institution are never clearly defined, or the clear definitions are disregarded throughout the work. The authors make no arguments, philosophical, scientific, or otherwise, but continually appeal to some sort of perverted common sense. There is no empirical support given for any claim, nor any information as to how the claims could have effects on empirical reasearch; the questions are both skirted with a wave of the hand. As mentioned, the authors use unecessarily thick language, usually for the purpose of obscuring the lack of interesting claims they really make; most things said are either uninteresting or false. For me this book is not valuable intellectually; the train of thought is inexact and sometimes very confused; there is no support for the claims made other than appealing to common sense; there is a strange need felt by the authors (and explicitly stated) to honor and incorporate past intellectual work with disregard for its validity; there is a naive view of society as some conspiracy against each individual within it.
This book should be read. It will either swing you over to the side of sociology with its strange and fantastic claims or will show you how terribly confused the subject really is. There can be some value found in the work, by any person, either way.
Rating: 3 / 5
Well, since the gist of it is in page 1, is reality socially constructed, or isn’t? Careful, here. If you want to answer “Yes!” as most reviewers of this book seem eager to do, I’ll ask, is this book socially constructed? And are you socially constructed and therefore (if the answer has been yes, remember) do not have an independent existence outside this social construction? How can two socially-constructed creatures such as the authors of this book be aware of the socially-constructed reality of others and not mention their own? Who gave them the red (or blue) pill (The Matrix calling)?
Totalizing theories of reality tend to fall hard, every time, down the same hole. The postmodernist version is only slightly more sophisticated, alleging that reality is not only socially constructed, but that there are myriad realities, one (or more) per each human being on the planet. Naturally, jumping from there to the “discovery” that science is nothing but a Western, socially-created invention that has had its run and it’s about time to replace it with “something” else, is not that difficult; it’s even inevitable, and one reviewer makes the Kuhn-connection immediately. Berger and Luckmann have the gift of being able to stand outside this man-made reality, see it for what it is, and denounce it; all of this without apparent contamination from the same socially-constructed reality that has socially-constructed their ideas and theories.
Kuhn made the same mistake; no wonder scientists only smile at his ideas. But “social” scientists, some philosophers, and literary theorists (my field of study) loved The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and they really held on to the concept of “paradigms” as if their lives depended on it. Socially-constructed Thomas Kuhn came up with ideas that Berger and Luckmann, prisoners of their paradigm, develop a bit more. Kuhn announced that “all” of us are trapped in our paradigm, and yet he could escape, see The Truth (yes, capitalized), and come back-to-the-muck to tell us about it. Thanks, Tom. These two authors do essentially the same. They and the reviewers that obviously loved the book (there were a few lucid ones there: hope for humanity, I guess) seem blissfully unaware of how their theory eats itself from the tail.
Rating: 1 / 5
Seminal work for a lot of the social sciences. One of the best books I’ve ever read.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you’re going to make it the culture-industrial complex (i.e. music industry) you really should have some understanding and insight into how people view reality. Whether you’re trying to get people to buy your record, come to your show or listen to your radio station- it’s all part of the same influencing project, more or less. In a certain sense, the Social Consturction of Reality is probably the only book a non-specialist needs to read about this topic.
This book, in language as clear and straight-forward as you’re likely to get, explains how reality is constructed from social intercourse. The analysis here starts from what normal people consider reality: being “wide awake” and experiencing “everyday” life. All of reality proceeds from face-to-face encounters that occur during the normal course of every-day life:
The social reality of everyday life is apprehended in a continuum of typifications, which are progreesively anonymous as they are removed from the “here and now” of the face-to-face situation. P. 33
Based on these encounters, humans create bodies of knowledge and categories of interactions. As a society grows more complex, these face-to-face encounters become abstracted into “expertise” and then passed down to new members of a society (children.):
Primary socialization thus accomplishes what is the most important confidence trick that society plays on the individual- to make appear necessit what is in fact a bundle of contongencies and this make meaningful the accident of his birth. P. 135
In this schema, it doesn’t matter whether the society is pre-historic, religious, philosphical or scientific- the transmission process of reality via the use of expert knowledge is the same.
Over time, clusters of ideas/knowledge become institutions- like a religion or a mythology for example. People use ideas to explain “why.”
Ultimately, Social Construction of Reality concludes with an observation as elegant as it is profound:
All symbolic universes and all legitimations are human products; their existence has it’s base in the lives of concrete individuals, and has no empirical status apart from these lives. P. 128
In other words- reality is what we make it. Or to be more precise: Reality is what generations of humans living and dying over time make it. No more, no less. This is reality.
Rating: 5 / 5
I first read this book in the 1970s and it maintains its importance in the canon of how knowledge emerges from human interactions.
Rating: 5 / 5