Is Reality a Social Construction ?

Contrary to an earlier suggestion, the inside of my skull is not a dark place. Perhaps once it was so, but not since the sixties, when it went...well, if you've walked through Las Vegas at night....

I spent a good while on various abuzz threads with a couple of you here trying to build some bridge between meat and meaning and it was great fun. But I'm anxious that re-living those good times might become a disappointment, like trying to remember kissing Valerie Weins behind the backstop. To ensure the integrity of Valerie's moist 13 year old lips, I've deemed it proper to read only the last few posts.

There is, of course, a difference between a 'thing' and its properties. One has some difficulty conceiving of mind or consciousness occuring without something very much like a brain and complex nervous system, unless writing for Star Trek, it goes without saying. I'm not terribly perplexed by this, though usually quite happy I'm along for the roller coaster ride of it.

Nor am I terribly perplexed by the gap between the external and our apprehension of it. Perhaps this is a function of age. I do remember trying to establish whether this ridiculous universe might contain a feature such as 'chairness', but now I really just want to find anything approaching an instance, and sit down.

Miss Lola...I beseech your pardon. I promised to resolve this debate for you so that you could get on with your exciting plans for the weekend, but as you will find, coming to know me better, I can be counted on to construct only the flimsiest of social realities with so many odd apprehendors about. I find myself, as it were, a fish out of water, a cliche out of context, a Bush out of Texas. Perhaps I may be a more useful and compelling advocate for the unity of body and mind in some future context.

My dear Blatham,

Feeling only mildly disappointed in your present effort here, I'll look forward to your future attempts to set things straight. We may discover a new unity with brainness. In which case chairness may come in handy as well.

fresco, allow me to say once more, "reality" IS what's "out there." Look it up. How about using words that mean what you want to say, instead of redefining words to confuse the issue?

I think that we all agree that any group can construct a set of beliefs about reality and that adhering to that set of beliefs will influence how they perceive the world.

People who live in theistic cultures will see the hand of God in natural phenomena.

People in scientific cultures see the world differently than people who believe in ghosts and magic.

But the underlying reality is the same for each, no matter how their perception of it is altered by beliefs, drugs and alcohol, psychoses, age, experience, brain defects or injury. There is a physical universe "out there" that produces the photons that interact with our senses. More about that later.

Certainly the language of a culture affects the way the majority think, but language itself is a social construction. Creative people invent whatever words they need to express their ideas. Perhaps uncreative people can only think about concepts they have learned from others, and if there is no word for it, they cannot conceive it.

People in a culture rich with words for and established folklore about gods, demons, angels, ghosts, incubi, witches, omens, blessings, curses, and magic may be predisposed to identify inexplicable phenomena as supernatural.

But does our PERCEPTION of reality change that reality? No, we cannot "believe" Santa Claus into existence or change the path of a hurricane by prayer.


It is possible, as twyvel suggests, that the reality we perceive does not actually exist, and some mind created it all out of nothing and for some unexplainable reason wishes to deceive most of us into thinking that a physical universe exists outside of our minds.

Those who see beyond this "deception" congratulate themselves for their superior perception, but fail to explain to the rest of us why the deception exists in the first place, and what purpose renoucing belief in it serves.

Are those who transcend belief in an objective reality any better able to explain the physical phenomena that are consistently observed by a majority of human beings, predict the future, solve social problems, or anything else? If not, how do they KNOW that the belief that "all is illusion" is anything more than a delusion constructed by those who cannot come to grips with the scientific reality that consciousness is a function of our physical brains, and when our brain dies it will simply cease to exist.

It is not easy to face mortality. Far better to construct a "reality" in which the bad things that happen are not real, and no one ever has to really die.

As somebody famous opined; only two things in life is for sure, death and taxes. That's 'our' reality. c.i.

Terry,

You don't or won't get it.

The "physical reality" of Santa Claus is irrelevent except in comparison to the "physical reality" of Dad in in a Santa Claus suit. What matters is the UTILITY of the concept "Santa Claus". Its "reality" is the fact that our actions/thoughts/relationships are altered by the concept, ...that we use "Santa Claus" as a unit of communicative exchange etc. It reflects our culture and our zeitgeist...it is part of a gestalt or complex group of interconnections.

Now all this can be said of ANY concept. Physical reality is merely a measure of our mutual confidence in CONTINUITY of an external state, but such "continuity" is relative and a function of our lifespan. "I", this chair, my car, and the planet earth etc are as transient as an ocean wave in cosmic time, as are the conjectured sub-particles that we assign to them.

Now this is not to say that "all is illusion". What it means is that "illusion" is a disagreement between observers as to their confidence in the nature of particular states, which may differentiate their subsequent actions.

So we are not talking about "deception" we are talking about recognising that concepts have predictive utility, and that such utilty is transient.

fresco, Very well put. Your ideas about Santa Clause is very good way to explain our 'reality.' It's the concepts that counts. c.i.

truth
Terry insists that "reality" is "out there" without recognition of the necessity of recognizing its "in here" status as well. It's like insisting that the universe includes only what is on the OTHER SIDE of the telescope. (pardon me, I've said this before somewhere).
The question, Is Reality Socially Constructed?, involves a trap of sorts. When we ask if God exists, our language suggests that He does exist (no ontological problem here) but can we "know" that for sure (that it's an epistemological problem). Similarly, when we ask if Reality is Socially Constructed, we can suggest two problems: (1) do we make pictures (i.e., worldviews) of a Reality that exists objectively and external to our minds? Or we can suggest by the question (2) that our minds construct a world picture (Reality) out of cultural constructs and primitive and essentially meaningless/raw sense experiences (of whatever source). Which way does one want to bias the question and then take on those SOBs who choose the alternative bias? That's the real question as seen from our behavior so far.

REALITY is -- WHATEVER IT IS.

We may know what REALITY is -- we may be close to knowing what REALITY is -- and we may be completely deluded.

I acknowledge that I do not know what the REALITY is.

I strongly suspect nobody else does either.

Although listening to a bunch of guesses about it is always entertaining.

truth
I can't disagree with that statement. Reality is whatever it is, and Reality isn't whatever it isn't
Yogi Bera

I think Yogi's name has two r's in it. :wink:

I think the single "r" is correct.

truth
Thank you gentlemen, but frankly, Scarlett, I don't.... (one or two Ts?).

That's "sch....."

Berra just emailed me to say that there are no r's in Yogi.

He's got a point.

And he also said reality has to do with selling houses -- and we're all a bunch of morons.

Apologies for weekend absence.

By asking "Is Reality a Social Construction ?" our attention is drawn to those aspects of "the world" which may be "acquired" through socialization as opposed to those which are considered to be "fixed" or axiomatically "real". The strong form of the hypothesis implies nothing is axiomatic or external to the observer who then segements "reality" according to cultural linguistic. categories. By saying "reality is what it is" or similar, this merely closes the door to further discussion.

Only if you have a closed mind.

If you have an open mind, you can see that saying "reality is what it is" allows the discussion to proceed with speculation about reality. That, after all, is more respectful, honest, and ethical than the pretenses at "sharing the truth" some of you folks are trying to peddle.

truth
Reality is whatever is. This cannot be denied, even though it may not tell us enough, leaving room for elaboration. Tautologies are self-evident truths, but, like all analytical statements, they tell us nothing new about the world, as do so-called synthetic statements. But if a tautological truth statement leaves us room for elaboration, that's all the more to its credit. It has heuristic value and is not the final word.
I didn't get much sleep last night. Indulge me.

truth
Fresco, consider a situation where a group begins with the self-evidently true but empirically vacuous axiom, "Reality is whatever is", and invites everyone to talk about this "whatever is", to fill in the empirical gap afforded by the axiom. In such a case, if I'm right, the tautology heuristically OPENS the door for discussion rather than CLOSING it. In the case of epistemologically "softer" TRUISMS, expressions of popular consensus (and not just true-by-definition as is the axiom about reality), it seems that research and reflection that disproves them does society a great benefit.

Re: truth



Thank you, JL.

I get a bit testy when people claim that the agnostic position closes arguments -- when in fact, they often allow the arguments to proceed along a more brightly lit path.