Social Construction

Social construction concerns the ways in which features of the social world — money, institutions, and contested kinds such as race and gender — are brought into being and sustained by collective human practices.

Definition

To say that something is socially constructed is to claim that it exists, or has the character it does, in virtue of human social practices, agreements, or attitudes, rather than independently of them.

Scope

Covers Searle's theory of institutional facts and status functions, the distinction between objective and constructed facts, Hacking's analysis of what 'social construction' claims amount to, and feminist and critical accounts of the construction of social categories such as gender and race. Excludes purely epistemic constructivism about science.

Core questions

• Which facts are socially constructed, and what does that claim mean?
• How do collective practices create institutional facts such as money or marriage?
• Are categories such as gender and race natural or constructed?
• What are the critical and political stakes of construction claims?

Key concepts

• institutional facts
• status functions
• constitutive rules
• brute vs. social facts
• looping effects
• the construction of gender and race

Key theories

Institutional facts

Searle argues that social reality is built by collectively imposing 'status functions' via constitutive rules of the form 'X counts as Y in context C', so that brute physical things acquire socially constructed functions sustained by collective acceptance.

Unpacking construction claims

Hacking argues that 'social construction' claims are often unclear and analyses them as typically asserting that some X, far from being inevitable or natural, is the contingent product of social arrangements and could be otherwise.

Constructionist social critique

Haslanger develops an account on which categories like gender and race are constituted by social relations of power, arguing that revealing their construction supports critique and the project of changing unjust social structures.

History

The phrase gained currency from Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966). Searle (1995) gave a systematic ontology of institutional facts; Hacking (1999) clarified the diverse meanings of 'construction'; and feminist philosophers such as Haslanger developed construction as a tool of social critique of gender and race.

Debates

What is really being claimed?

Whether 'social construction' is a clear metaphysical thesis about how social entities exist or, as Hacking suggests, a family of contingency and critique claims often in need of disambiguation.

Construction and objectivity

Whether socially constructed facts (like money or gender) are thereby less objective or real, or whether, as Searle and Haslanger argue, construction is compatible with construed facts being fully real and objective relative to social practices.

Key figures

• John Searle
• Ian Hacking
• Sally Haslanger
• Peter Berger

Seminal works

• searle1995
• hacking1999
• haslanger2012

Frequently asked questions

Does calling something 'socially constructed' mean it is not real?

No. Money, governments, and universities are socially constructed yet entirely real; the claim is that they exist in virtue of human practices and could have been otherwise, not that they are illusions.