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THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
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The basic contentions of the argument of this book are imp licit in its title and sub-title, namely, that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyse the process in which this occurs. The key terms in these con tentions are 'reality' and 'knowledge', terms that are not only current in everyday speech, but that have behind them a long history of philosophical inquiry. We need not enter here into a discussion of the semantic intricacies of either the everyday or the philosophical usage of these terms. It will be enough, for our purposes, to define 'reality' as a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot 'wish them away'), and to define 'knowledge' as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics. It is in this (admittedly simplistic) sense that the terms have relevance both to the man in the street and to the philosopher. The man in the street inhabits a world that is 'real' to him, albeit in different degrees, and he 'knows', with difefrent degrees of confidence, that this world possesses such and such charac teristics. The philosopher, of course, will raise questions about the ultimate status of both this 'reality' and this 'knowledge'. What is real? How is one to know? These are among the most ancient questions not only of philosophical inquiry proper, but of human thought as such. Precisely for this reason the intrusion of the sociologist into this time-honoured intellectual territory is likely to raise the eyebrows of the man in the street and even more likely to enrage the philosopher
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann - Personal Name
10 9 8 7 6
NONE
Social Science
English
1-125
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