Social Reality

by Collin,Finn

• ISBN13: 9780415147965
• ISBN10: 0415147964
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781134754076
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-05-23
• Publisher: Routledge
• More Book Details

Summary

Social reality is currently a hotly debated topic not only in social science, but also in philosophy and the other humanities. Finn Collin, in this concise guide, asks if social reality is created by the way social agents conceive of it? Is there a difference between the kind of existence attributed to social and to physical facts - do physical facts enjoy a more independent existence? To what extent is social reality a matter of social convention. Finn Collin considers a number of traditional doctrines which support the constructivist position that social reality is generated by our 'interpretation' of it. He also examines the way social facts are contingent upon the meaning invested in them by social agents; the nature of social convention; the status of social facts as symbolic; the ways in which socially shared language is claimed to generate the reality described, as well as the limitations of some of the over-ambitious popular arguments for social constructivism.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction	p. 1
Social facts as constructions	p. 2
Clarifications of the construction claim	p. 6
Contrasting issues in social science	p. 10
Another programme of social constructivism	p. 13
Construction and causal generation	p. 14
Philosophical issues in constructivism	p. 16
Implications for philosophy and the social sciences	p. 18
Outline of the book	p. 21
Ethnomethodology	p. 25
The Cultural Relativity Argument	p. 47
Social Constructivism and the Sociology of Knowledge: Berger and Luckmann	p. 64
The Linguistic Relativity Argument	p. 80
The Arguments from the 'Meaningfulness' of Action: The phenomenological argument	p. 103
The Arguments from the 'Meaningfulness' of Action: The hermeneutic argument	p. 136
The Argument from the Symbolic Nature of Social Facts	p. 163
The Argument from Convention	p. 185
Notes	p. 237
References	p. 242
Index	p. 247
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