A social construct is any category or thing that is made real by
convention or collective agreement.
Socially constructed realities are contrasted with
natural kinds, which exist independently of human behavior or beliefs.
Simple examples of social constructs are the meaning of
word
A word is a basic element of language that carries semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguist ...
s, the value of
paper money, and the rules of
economic system
An economic system, or economic order, is a system of production, resource allocation and distribution of goods and services within an economy. It includes the combination of the various institutions, agencies, entities, decision-making proces ...
s. Other examples, such as
race, were formerly considered controversial but are now accepted by the consensus of scientists to be socially constructed rather than naturally determined.
Still other possible examples, such as less empirical and more abstract concepts which underlie particular
scientific theories, remain the subject of ongoing philosophical debate.
Relationship with objectivity
During the 20th century, philosopher
John Searle and sociologists
Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann argued that some socially constructed realities—such as
property ownership,
citizenship
Citizenship is a membership and allegiance to a sovereign state.
Though citizenship is often conflated with nationality in today's English-speaking world, international law does not usually use the term ''citizenship'' to refer to nationalit ...
, and
marital status—should be considered forms of
objective fact, and posited the existence of such socially constructed objective facts as a philosophical or
methodological problem to be explored.
Others, such as
György Lukács
György Lukács (born Bernát György Löwinger; ; ; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and Aesthetics, aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an inter ...
,
Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer built upon the ideas of
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philology, classical philologist, turning to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, aged 24, Nietzsche bec ...
and
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
to argue that a
fallacy of reification is responsible for the practice of treating socially constructed facts as though they were natural—a phenomenon Lukács referred to as "phantom objectivity".
More recently,
biological anthropologists and
public health experts have determined that, while race is a social construct, the persistence of
racism
Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one Race (human categorization), race or ethnicity over another. It may also me ...
has objectively demonstrable negative consequences for the health and well-being of marginalized groups.
References
{{Reflist
Sociological terminology
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