This blog post is just about my first glance at a theory called “social constructionism/constructivism” and its simplistic explanations: overview, taxonomy, examples, accomplishments, and critiques.
Since I’ve been a big fan of Yuval Noah Harari’s book: Sapiens, when I came across the term “social constructionism”, immediately I thought he also must have known and examined this concept to organize his thoughts for his book.
If I remember correctly, Harari actually never mentioned the word social constructionism in his books but it seems pretty apparent that the words “fiction”/”inter-subjective reality” frequently used in his books and “constructed reality”, a term in social constructionism can be interchangeable.
Social constructionism is a broad concept that can cover many different objects ranging from gender to science to society. In this article, I mainly focus on the anthropological and socioeconomic contributions that various vital social constructs have brought about.
What is social constructionism?
Social constructionism is a sociological concept that reality we take for granted isn’t objective truth but constructed by individuals’ subjectivities and social consensus. Hence, humans can collaboratively construct shared interpretations about how they perceive objects or events and imaginatively create institutional, notional and normative reality.
Doesn’t it ring a bell to you concretely? Nations, corporations and money are easy-to-find examples of institutional social constructs. And, there are also numerous things that are fallen under notional social constructs, such as religious beliefs, ideology, human rights, ethics, and morality.
These institutions and notions are neither tangible nor existential. You cannot see, hear and smell them, unlike your hands, birds and flowers. I would not say these things are lies but they are not actual *reality* either because no one can verify them with any form of objective scientific evidence.
Taxonomy of Social Constructs
The reality that we take for granted has actually two dimensions that are physical reality and constructed reality. The former is somewhat visible but the latter is not, only recognizable in our minds.
Aside from the physical reality that I don’t aim to explain here, in my opinion, constructed reality can be divided into three parts: Institutional Facts such as Nations, Money, and Religions, Notional Facts such as Individual and God, and Normative Facts such as Human Rights and Morality. And just so you know, there is a boundary between nature and culture among those facts.
Institutional facts as externalized reality are the most fundamental among these facts. They are the environments in which people can internalize notional and normative facts through actual experiences and social interactions, bringing about recursive legitimacy.
Social Construct1: Nation-states
Nation-states are arguably the most noticeable institutional social construct in modern society. Even though it has various forms depending on societal conditions, generally speaking, a nation consists of various common elements: people with its nationality, the territory defined by borders, and law determined by a sovereign power, the government.
Unsurprisingly, none of those elements is an objective reality but an imaginative reality embedded in people’s subjective thinking. People accept these *deceptions* because not being obedient is strategically less reasonable: if one denies its existence and breach rules, they are physically or economically punished.
Apart from the institutionalized incentive structures, it seems like normative fabrications such as nationalism and patriotism also largely contribute to the formation of a state and its robustness in a way that people socially punish one another by accusations if one breaks social codes.
Social Construct2: Money
Money is one of the most understandable examples of social construct. Although banknotes, coins or numbers in bank accounts are visible, they are just representations and are effectively valueless. Yet, people agree that they are valuable and act accordingly because the real value of money derives from its institutional system and monetary belief underlined by social consensus.
Modern currency systems are more institutionalized than ever and constructed by powerful authorities: nation-states. Despite the emptiness of those representations, they are seen as valuable due to the artificially-bootstrapped demand via the monopoly of violence and the taxation instead of natural consensus in the market.
This is called the Tax-Drive Money theory: A currency obtains and attains its value because a nation can force people to pay taxes in it and merchants to accept payments in it, too. If individuals and corporations don’t obey the rule, they have to pay fines or are sentenced to prison. Basically, violence and taxation are the base of fiat currencies.
Of course, normally people do not care about why coins and papers in their wallets have such value. Instead, the majority of people just follow society’s soft consensus: if other people think a currency is valuable, they also think it is.
Social Construtct2+@: Bitcoin
One of the most intriguing examples of a monetary social construct is Bitcoin which people haven’t taken for granted as money yet. Unlike fiat currencies, Bitcoin isn’t issued and controlled by any nation-state but maintained by a distributed computer network, a software program which is a set of almost pre-determined and unchangeable rules, and its enthusiastic community.
The reason Bitcoin is brought up here is that its value isn’t underlined by what institutions like nation-states can provide and force: violence, law and taxation. Instead, it stems from cutting-edge software mechanisms and individuals’ beliefs about Bitcoin’s moneyness: crucial properties that can be observed in a reliable and competitive monetary asset e.g. durability, divisibility, portability, recognizability, and most importantly scarcity.
Since only the people decide its value in the market without any intervention, Bitcoin can be seen as a purer form of money that helps us understand money can be socially constructed and evolved in a way that no institution with the legitimacy ensured by violence is involved.
By the way, interestingly, due to its autonomous and decentralized characteristic, some hard-core enthusiasts even regard it as an invariant nature which seems to fall under the physical reality instead of constructed reality.
It seems plausible but ultimately that’s not the truth since if the vast majority of the community participants, such as node operators, miners and software developers, agree upon, even the most crucial line of the codes like twenty-one million fixed supply can be modified to any arbitrary number like forty-two million. Whether or not it is actually the right decision is totally a different subject though.
Social Construct3: Religion
Religion has been one of the most influential and indispensable social constructs ever since human civilization saw its dawn. Although religion has been playing similar roles with modern nations in education, welfare and cultural developments until it was outcompeted by them, what makes it set apart is the concept of God in my opinion.
The debate about the existence of God is controversial. However, from the perspective of social constructionism, God is effectively a social construct fabricated through fictional, intersubjective narratives.
In religion, churches are in charge of the institutional administrations, practically controlling society based on religious ideologies and instructions. On the other side, God takes a normative role that provides people with ultimate legitimacy, meanings and purposes, resulting in improvements in people’s morality, cooperation and unification. The transcendent power of God made it possible for people to organize well-established and thriving societies.
Most nation-states still largely rely on God to sustain their legitimacy. For example, a new president swears with a bible in his hands in the inaugural ceremony and religious people go to churches regularly. Yet, as nation-states have promoted science and market capitalism unlocking new discoveries, inventions and developments, religious authorities have been dismantled gradually.
Social Construct4: Individual
Given western individualistic ways of thinking, an individual seems like a unique, inseparable and sovereign entity inherently. Hence, every individual possesses an independent will and the right to choose and change their own fate.
It seems like a matter of perspective but the concept of the individual can also be interpreted as a notional social construct since apparently, it is also a metaphysical idea invented for the sake of efficient and practical human interactions in the socio-economic context.
More concretely, it seems to me that the concept of individual functions as an identifier to allocate rewards and impose punishments based on who is responsible for what kinds of events.
Moreover, biologically speaking, it seems pretty challenging to determine what is individual. Humans are not a single chunk but a set of biological programs deployed as units of organs based on the genetic information every person inherits from parents and ancestors. A conundrum is which organs should be included or unnecessary to make one an individual person.
If an alive person lacks the right hemisphere in his brain but the right brain still functions outside his head, which a body with the rest of the organs or the detached right brain is him? If both are him, doesn't it mean an individual is divisible and a dividual? What if they had a disagreement in opinion even though they were originally a unit?
Social Construct5: Human Rights
Human rights have become one of the most widespread and inclusive normative social constructs in the world by the initiative of the United Nations, another institutional social construct. It especially puts emphasises on a couple of other normative social constructs, such as freedom and equality as slogans.
Even though the UN itself still doesn’t have such a compulsory power to force nations to adopt these slogans strictly and change policies, most UN countries actually seem to take instructions into action to some extent. It is intriguing and frightening to imagine that an international organization like the UN possibly obtained legitimacy which is an imperative power with violence in the context of the penetration of human rights.
Why Social Constructs Matter: Social Scalability
Unquestionably, constructed realities have been playing indispensable roles in human society throughout history. It can be said that they are the main drivers that allowed humans, Homo Sapiens more precisely, to achieve tremendous success and flourish civilizations at this level.
But how? How did social constructs contribute to our accomplishments in detail?
The keyword for explaining this matter is Social Scalability: the extent of humans’ ability to cooperate with others to accomplish social endeavours, a sociological term coined by an eminent computer scientist and cryptographer called Nick Szabo.
Before an odd breakthrough occurred to Homo Sapiens’ cognitive ability, they were not so different from other apes in the sense that the maximum number of individuals that can cooperate together as a group was limited to approximately one hundred fifty which is called the Dunbar Number.
However, only Homo Sapiens could get to the point where they can overcome the constrain by introducing a set of more advanced cultural, belief and institutional systems that enable them to minimize the risk and cost of trusting one another and cooperate with a broader number of other individuals.
Believing in the same god or religious objects, participating in the same rituals and festivals, and wearing similar clothes and accessories are some of the noticeable factors that would have reinforced a sense of community. Although certain cultural phenomenons and behaviours can also be observed in other types of apes’ societies to some extent, what Homo Sapiens carry out is far more advanced and sophisticated than theirs.
It is so ironic that only Homo Sapiens are *dumb* enough to believe in complex metaphysical meanings and purposes that their communities fabricate and be willing to die for other members as Kamikaze did: a Japanese aircraft loaded with explosives and making a deliberate suicidal crash on an enemy target.
In a nutshell, social constructs ramp up social scalability, allowing humans to develop more sophisticated methods to coordinate at scale. It is undeniable that humans would not be able to thrive this much without the ability to invent and operate social constructs.
Language and Social Constructs
It seems like language, especially writing can be seen as the base of social constructs. Although imageries in our minds also faintly allow us to think about intangible beliefs and institutions, there is nothing more powerful and useful to grasp and share those ideas than written or vocal languages.
Moreover, not only does language enable us to think and communicate in more intricate and broad ways but also shapes our ways to express ideas and even constrains them. It seems like the development of social constructs and the advancement of languages have gone hand in hand.
Other apes and animals communicate via lower levels of language let alone they don’t have written forms. There is no wonder that those animals and apes don’t have such advanced cultures with various refined social constructs.
Legitimacy of Social Constructionism
Social Constructionism is a theory that either gives us a different way to view how humans perceive objects and society works by stepping back boldly or provides us with a better understanding of the world by looking into phenomenons more closely.
However, since social constructionists’ way of thinking is radical and provocative in the context of the scientific worldview in a way that denies the existence of every single objective truth, it’s been criticized by scientists.
More concretely, it contrasts the theory of biological determinism: individuals’ characteristics and behaviours are solely influenced and determined by biological factors. Contrary to that, social constructionism asserts that only environmental factors matter.
In my opinion, both theories are plausible to some extent and should be mutually complemented to explain how a man thinks and behaves because both ways of viewing help us better understand what the implication of subjective and objective reality is.
Another criticism is that social constructionism is just about how to interpret the world and doesn’t provide any practical solution to real problems. It is true but I would argue that social constructionism in and of itself is an antidote to wrong ways to recognize reality. Without understanding objects correctly, persuading solutions won’t emerge whatsoever.
Conclusion
In conclusion, social constructionism sheds light on the trajectory of how humans could succeed in evolving and out-competing other species with their privileged ability to construct an alternative dimension of reality and utilize it to cooperate more broadly and efficiently. Even though it is seemingly incompatible with some scientific ethos and not geared towards solving problems directly, the importance of understanding this theory should be emphasized more, all things considered.
References
- Wikipedia: Social Constructionism
- Social Constructionist Theory: Our Life is Based on Myths
- Bestseller “Sapiens” Fact-check: Elixirs or Social Construct?
- Social Constructionism Definition and Examples
- What does ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ Mean? — by Dr. Dennis Hiebert
- Money, blockchains, and social scalability
