Social Construction

Contextual Quote

"Philip K. Dick, the science-fiction writer, described reality as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” But he also asked, “If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities?” This is where social construction of reality differs from merely idiosyncratic perception. In their definitive work on the subject, The Social Construction of Reality, the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann emphasize “intersubjectivity” or shared perceptions as a means by which reality is constructed. Thus a corollary to Dick’s definition of reality is that a social consensus doesn’t go away when you personally stop believing in it.

Material reality matters, but so does social consensus. If I do not believe in gravity, I will still plummet to my death upon walking off a cliff. A similar fate may await me if I, as a non-believer in Islam, conspicuously blaspheme against Allah and his prophet on a visit to Pakistan. If I, alone among all the members of my paleolithic Amazonian tribe, understand modern genetics, it is still in my interests to encourage my friends who share the tribe’s consensus belief in partible paternity to sleep with my pregnant wife and thereby neither seem like a mate-guarding weirdo nor deny my future child the social support of several co-fathers. That is, what I personally believe matters less than what we collectively believe. There is an interesting tension when our collective beliefs only partially mesh with material reality."

- Gabriel Rossman [1]