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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: June 11, 2004
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Latest Update: June 23, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

The Social Construction of What

A browsable copy of Ian Hacking's Social Construction of What is on the Harvard Press Site.

The metaphor of social construction is over-used today in the sense that whatever people create, as a group, like the conception of the world as flat, is socially constructed. The idea that the world is flat is not a real thing in reality out there that you can run into or trip over. Plato considered ideas real, but you can't trip over them either. So reality is bascially made up of two kinds of things: things which have mass and consume space and can be encountered in this time dimension AND things which are ideas or barriers we have created together through our interactions as human beings. Both are equally "real," and our world is composed of both. But it's kind of important that we be able to tell the difference if we want to manage democratic governance.

More soon . . . jeanne June 11, 2004.