The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann
Introduction
The thesis of this book is not that society determines reality in some metaphysical sense. The authors clearly acknowledge that what they are examining exists within the scope of sociology and questions regarding the absolute reality from which all social realities flow is something belonging properly to philosophy.
What then is the subject of analysis? The question at hand is how does what passes for “knowledge” and “reality” within a given social situation or context achieve this status? How do groups of people come to share an agreed upon “reality?” This is not a question regarding complex matters of theory, rather it pertains to the commonplace world that is shared by everyone.
As the authors note, this book is not a work of epistemology. It’s interest is not in establishing once and for all what we know or how we know it, but rather, it is an examination of how beliefs come to be taken for knowledge. Therefore, I will repeat the same note given by the authors that all mentions of knowledge within the following should be read as if they were enclosed in quotation marks.
Ch. 1: Foundations of Knowledge in Everyday Life
The method used by the authors is phenomenological, regarding the subjective experience of events. The foundations of knowledge come from the experience of the waking, everyday world that is shared by others. While I may experience other realities (religious, scientific, dreamed), I experience them as isolated enclaves within the larger, surrounding reality of the waking world. Because this world is able to impose itself with such force and consistency on my consciousness, I prioritize it above all other realities (at least this is the default setting). Any attempt to doubt in this reality and prioritize another requires a great effort of will.
I also experience this reality as being shared with other people like myself. All parts of this reality and my interactions with other people may become routinized or “typified” by various mental abstractions which I use to save mental effort and relieve tension. Whatever aspects of this reality and the people within it that I am able to take for granted, ease my anxiety and uncertainty. Thus, in my interactions with others, I am constantly applying these typifications to their behaviors, but in the “face to face situation” they are constantly able to reveal themselves as something that extends beyond and transcends these typifications in their unique individuality.
What is called “knowledge” or “reality” is simply the aggregation of shared assumptions between the members of a given social context. Its validity is taken for granted.
Ch. 2: Society as Objective Reality
This chapter concerns the ways that human interactions with both the world and one another result in various kinds of institutions which carry modes of action and being into the future by presenting them as objective reality to future generations. This process is sometimes known as reification.
Institutions
Institutions arise whenever there is a habitualization of certain kids of actions by certain kinds of actors. Much like the way in which typifications are used to navigate interactions with other people, institutions arise out of the need to reduce anxiety and increase predictability in conduct with others. Each individual relates to the other in a reciprocal process of habitualization. A does some action and B responds with a corresponding action, each able to rely on the other for their part in the process. “Here he goes again” becomes “Here WE go again.” These institutions in turn become guides to and controls on future behavior.
However, this process of institutionalization is not completed until a new generation encounters these institutions. The children do not encounter them in the same way that their parents did because, for the parents, these things were spontaneous creations, which might have been otherwise, but for the children, this aspect of free choice and alteration is not seen. They encounter these things “reified,” belonging to an objective order outside of humanity. They interpret these institutions as factual and arising out of or even demanded by nature. In order for these institutions to persist, they must be transmitted to the next generation. Different social situations are interpreted through these institutions via various definitions and these definitions are what must be passed on as the children may be tempted to provide their own definitions. These definitions and the roles and institutions that are constituted by them are understood as KNOWLEDGE.
This transformation by which spontaneous human arrangements become seen as features of an objective system of reality (possibly even as universal laws) is known as reification, the human coming to be viewed as non-human.
As society develops, especially in such a way which allows a large degree of freedom in the types of pursuits, and a large degree of division of labor ultimately leads to the emergence of many sub-universes of knowledge which are ruled over by specialists. The lay person does not need to know the content of these fields in his everyday dealings, but it is important that he be able to navigate this field of specialists in order to know how to access their knowledge when necessary. Without this, things become very confusing.
Things become equally confusing when these different fields begin to compete with each other, producing different stocks of knowledge which attempt to discredit or erase the other as well as producing a different TOTAL UNDERSTANDING of society.
Symbolic Universes — LEGITIMATION
With the emergence of new generations, there is a need for society to develop a means of transmitting its social structures to this new generation. To do this, there must be a means of granting cognitive validity to these social structures. This is the role of the symbolic universe.
The symbolic universe is the reality confirming legitimization par excellence, providing the conceptual machinery that allows a society to justify its existing roles and institutions and giving the individual access to motivating reasons for participation in them.
The simplest form of these symbolic universes are myths, which do not need to be integrated with each other and may contain contradictions that exist in plain sight but are unseen. These issues are only discovered after the mythology has become problematic for some reason or another.
Theoreticians emerge with the need for more sophisticated explanations and defenses of the symbolic order and are often the ones to discover problems within the conceptual machinery and symbolic order. As the problems become more elaborate, so must the sophistication of the theory, resulting in a bifurcation between the masses who believe in a crude theory of the symbolic and the specialists who possess a sophisticated version.
It is often important that specialists maintain exclusivity and this requires them to erect certain barriers against outsiders using the “knowledge” that they have developed. The non-accessibility of their “lore” must be institutionally established through the use of credentials or esoteric language which guards against outsiders obtaining the information, something which is usually not that difficult to do.
This is referred to as the Social Distribution of Knowledge. Even when an individual does not know something, as long as he knows which class of specialist DOES possess the knowledge, he can remain within the reality scheme unbothered. However, as the distribution of knowledge becomes more complex, it gives rise to competing schools of knowledge which may begin to compete with one another for reality status.
Ch. 3 Society as Subjective Reality
This chapter deals with the ways in which the individual subject acclimates himself to his social world, coming to identify it as reality and identify himself within it.
Primary, Secondary Socialization, Re-socialization
Primary socialization is what draws the newborn into the social world from a state of pure animality and is (historically at least) performed by significant others such as parents and relatives. It is inseparable from the adoption of language because language is the a form of symbolic universe in itself and the means of transmitting all other legitimations.
Successful socialization is defined as a situation in which there is a high degree of overlap between the objective social structure and the individuals subjective attitudes toward it. The successfully socialized person has internalized the social structure in which he is located and has formed an identity which corresponds to his roles in that society.
In societies with a high degree of division of labor, there arises the need for a secondary socialization in which new reality principles are added by others. This is has traditionally been the role of teachers, particularly higher education teachers.
This secondary socialization relies on the previous primary socialization, but it may sometimes work against it by attacking the reality principle of that social scheme. So a child from a rural background may be taught to view the social patterns which he had previously understood as “how things are” as “parochial.” However, one obvious advantage enjoyed by primary socialization is that during it, the child does not recognize the socializers (parents) as institutional functionaries, but simply as representatives of reality itself. Once secondary socialization begins to contest some aspects of primary socialization, the clever student may begin to understand this process–however clearly or obscurely–and the “massivity” (essentially obviousness or incontestability) of that reality scheme is reduced.
Another interesting possibility is that of alternation or re-socialization. In this case, a second and distinct reality scheme competes with that of the primary socialization, offering a totally different perspective of the world. Through a long process, the subject may recognize a zone of marginal events which these two realities fight over. Eventually, this dissonance may be resolved by adopting the new reality scheme. This is the process behind indoctrination.
Final Thoughts
A fascinating book, especially during this time of bifurcating realities. The applications for this theory are clearly far too numerous to even begin to account for them, but the concepts of reification (a term with which I was previously familiar with but had understood only as an abstraction) and the distribution of ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowledge’-producing institutions are of special significance to our moment.
