Social Construction Of Reality

6 Pages 1488 Words

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote about the social construction of reality. Within this reading, one can probably conceive that their work is probably another attempt to integrate the two social theories of Durkheim and Weber. Focusing on Durkheim’s analysis on the integrative aspects of social structure, and methodological individualism focused on by Weber, which deals with individual actions as being the basis of social actions and structure. Berger and Luckmann's idea of society can be represented by one word they use many times throughout the book; "dialectic". Humans are viewed to be engaged in the perpetual cycle of the “dialectic” of creating the objective reality socially, while internalizing these very created realities as their own subjectively. As they call their approaches the "sociology of knowledge", they pay a great deal of attention to the role of knowledge in constructing these objective and subjective realities. It is extremely critical to understand that when Berger and Luckmann talk about knowledge, they are not just discussing knowledge based upon ideology, theoretical knowledge, or a type of scientific knowledge, but rather as everything that humans take part in within their everyday lives, giving them the potential to come to know about whatever knowledge might be attainable.
By taking this view of knowledge and putting it into a perspective easier to grasp, Berger and Luckmann seem to perceive knowledge as a tool for social construction of realities, which means that no meaningful creation of either subjective or objective realities would be feasible. Ultimately, where they end up conclusion-wise seems to fit along with the works of Giddens and his ideas on "structure-based analysis" and "individual-based analysis", with the idea that all realities are socially constructed as results of distinctive social actions that individuals perform. While keeping this conclusion in mind, it can be specula...