Social epistemology
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A social construction or social construct or "the popular imagination" is any institutionalized entity or artifact in a social system "invented" or "constructed" by participants in a particular culture or society that exists because people agree to behave as if it exists or follow certain conventional rules. One example of a social construct is social status.
Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena or objects of consciousness develop in social contexts. Within constructionist thought, a social construction (social construct) is a concept or practice that is the construct (or artifact) of a particular group. When we say that something is socially constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself.
Recent developments in science have shown that many cultural practices and conceptions once thought to be purely social constructions have a strong genetic component (see for instance, Richard Dawkins' explanation for altruism in The Selfish Gene).
See also
- Consensus reality
- Constructivism in international relations
- Constructivist epistemology
- Epistemology
- Ethnomethodology
- Phenomenology
- Phronetic social science
- Parametric determinism
- Positivism
- Science and technology studies
- Social epistemology
- Social theory
- The Social Construction of Reality
- Symbolic interactionism
- Postmodern social construction of nature
- Talcott Parsons
