Social Construction of Reality ~ A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

by Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann

(p.1-p7)Introduction: The Problem of the Sociology o f Knowledge

The basic contentions of the argument of this book are implicit in its title and subtitle, namely, that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyze the processes in, which this occurs. The key terms in these contentions 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 haying 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 different degrees of confidence, that this world possesses such and such characteristics. 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-honored intellectual territory is likely to raise the eyebrows of the man in the street and even more likely to enrage the philosopher. It is, therefore, important that we clarify at the beginning the sense in which we use these terms in the context of sociology, and that we immediately disclaim any pretension to the effect that sociology has an answer to these ancient philosophical preoccupations.

If we were going to be meticulous in the ensuing argument, we would put quotation marks around the two afore-mentioned terms every time we used them, but this would be stylistically awkward. To speak of quotation marks, however, may give a clue to the peculiar manner in which these terms appear in a sociological context. One could say that the sociological understanding of "reality" and "knowledge" falls somewhere in the middle between that of the man in the street and that of the philosopher. The man in the street does not ordinarily trouble himself about what is "real" to him and about what lie "knows" unless lie is stopped short by some sort of problem. He takes his "reality" and his "knowledge" for granted. The sociologist cannot do this, if only because of his systematic awareness of the fact that men in the street take quite different "realities" for granted as between one society and another. The sociologist is forced by the very logic of his discipline to ask, if nothing else, whether the difference between the two "realities" may not be understood in relation to various differences between the two societies. The philosopher, on the other hand, is professionally obligated to take nothing for granted, and to obtain maximal clarity as to the ultimate status of what the man in the street believes to be "reality" and "knowledge." Put differently, the philosopher is driven to decide where the quotation marks are in order and where they may safely be omitted, that is, to differentiate between valid and invalid assertions about the world. This the sociologist cannot possibly do. Logically, if not stylistically, he is stuck with the quotation marks.

For example, the man in the street may believe that he possesses "freedom of the will" and that he is therefore "responsible" for his actions, at the same time denying this "freedom" and this "responsibility" to infants -in(] lunatics. The philosopher, by whatever methods, will inquire into the ontological and epistemological status of these conceptions. Is man free? What is responsibility? Where are the limits of responsibility? How can one know these things? And so on. Needless to say, the sociologist is in no position to supply answers to these questions. What he can and must do, however, is to ask how it is that the notion of "freedom" has come to be taken for granted in one society and not in another, how its "reality" is maintained in the one society and how, even more interestingly, this "reality" may once again be lost to an individual or to an entire collectivity.

Sociological interest in questions of "reality" and "knowledge" is thus initially justified by the fact of their social relativity. What is "real" to a Tibetan monk may not be "real" to an Americana -businessman. The "knowledge" of the criminal differs from the "knowledge" of the criminologist. It follows that specific agglomerations of "reality" and "knowledge" pertain to specific social contexts, and that these relationships will have to be included in an adequate sociological analysis of these. contexts. The need for a "sociology of knowledge" is thus already given with the observable differences between societies in terms of what is taken for granted as "knowledge" in them. Beyond this, however, a discipline calling itself by this name will have to concern itself with the general ways by which "realities" are taken as "known" in human societies. In other words, a "sociology of knowledge will have to deal not only with the empirical variety of "knowledge" in human societies, but also with the processes by which any body of "knowledge" comes to be socially established as "reality." .

It is our contention, then, that the sociology of knowledge must concern itself with whatever passes for "knowledge" in a society, regardless of the ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such "knowledge." And insofar as all human "knowledge" is developed, transmitted and maintained in social situations, the sociology of knowledge must seek to understand the processes by which this is done in such a way that a taken-for-granted "reality" congeals for the man in the street. In other words, we contend that, the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality.

This understanding of the proper field of the sociology of knowledge differs from what has generally been meant by this discipline since it was first so called some forty years ago. Before we begin our actual argument, therefore, it will be useful to look briefly at the previous development of the discipline and to explicate in what way, and why, we have felt it necessary to deviate from it.

The tern "sociology of knowledge" (Wissenssoziologie) was coined by Max Scheler. The time was the 1920s, the place was Germany, and Scheler was a philosopher. These three facts are quite important for an understanding of the genesis and further development of the new discipline. The sociology of knowledge originated in a particular situation of German intellectual history and in a philosophical context. While the new discipline was subsequently, introduced into the sociological context proper, particularly in the! English-speaking world, it continued to be marked by the problems' of the particular intellectual situation from which it arose. As a result the sociology of knowledge remained a peripheral concern among sociologists at large, who did not share the particular problems that troubled German thinkers in the 1920s. This was especially true of American sociologists, who have in the main looked upon the discipline as a marginal specialty with a persistent European flavor. More importantly, however, the continuing linkage of the sociology of knowledge with its original constellation of problems has been a theoretical weakness even where there has been an interest in the discipline. To wit, the sociology of knowledge has been looked upon, by its protagonists ill(] by the more or less indifferent sociological public at large, as a sort of sociological gloss on the history of ideas. This leas resulted in considerable myopia regarding the potential theoretical significance of the sociology of knowledge.

There have been different definitions of the nature and scope of the sociology of knowledge. Indeed, it might almost be said that the history of the subdiscipline thus far has been the history of its various definitions. Nevertheless, there has been general agreement to the effect that the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises. It may thus be said that the sociology of knowledge constitutes the sociological focus of a much more general problem, that of the existential determination (Seinsgebundenheit) of thought as such. Although here the social factor is concentrated upon, the theoretical difficulties arc similar to those that have arisen when other factors (such as the historical, the psychological or the biological) have been proposed as determinative of human thought. In all these cases the general problem has been the extent to which thought reflects or is independent of the proposed determinative factors.

It is likely that the prominence of the general problem in recent German philosophy has its roots in the vast accumulation of historical scholarship that « vas one of the greatest intellectual fruits of the nineteenth century in Germany. In a way unparalleled in any other period of intellectual history the past, with all its amazing variety of forms of thought, was "made present" to the contemporary mind through the efforts of scientific historical scholarship. It is hard to dispute the claim of German scholarship to the primary position in this enterprise. It should, consequently, not surprise us that the theoretical problem thrown up by the latter should be most sharply sensed in Germany. This problem can be described as the vertigo of relativity. The epistemological dimension of the problem is obvious. On the empirical level it led to the concern to investigate as painstakingly as possible the concrete relationships between thought and its historical situations. If this interpretation is correct, the sociology of knowledge takes up a problem originally posited by historical scholarship-in a narrower focus, to be sure, but with an interest in essentially the same questions?

Neither the general problem nor its narrower focus is new. An awareness of the social foundations of values and world views can be found in antiquity. At least as far back as the Enlightenment this awareness crystallized into a major theme of modern Western thought. It would thus be possible to make a good case for a number of "genealogies" for the central problem of the sociology of knowledge.-' It may even be said that the problem is contained in puce in Pascal's famous statement that what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other' Yet the immediate intellectual antecedents of the sociology of knowledge are three developments in nineteenth-century German thought-the Marxian, the Nietzschean, and the historicist.

It is from Marx that the sociology of knowledge derived its root proposition-that man's consciousness is determined by his social being" To be sure, there has been much debate as to just what kind of determination Marx had in mind. It is safe to say that much of the great "struggle with Marx" that characterized not only the beginnings of the sociology of knowledge but the "classical age" of sociology in general (particularly as manifested in the works of Weber, Durkheim and Pareto) was really a struggle with a faulty interpretation of Marx by latter-day Marxists. This proposition gains plausibility when we reflect that it was only in 1932 that the very important Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were rediscovered and only after World War II that the full implications of this rediscovery could be worked out in Marx research. Be this as it may, the sociology of knowledge inherited from Marx not only the sharpest formulation of its central problem but also some of its key concepts, among which should be mentioned particularly the concepts of "ideology" (ideas serving as weapons for social interests) and "false consciousness" (thought that is alienated from the real social being of the thinker).

The sociology of knowledge has been particularly fascinated by Marx's twin concepts of "substructure/superstructure" (Unterbau/ Ueherhan). 1t is here particularly that controversy has raged about the correct interpretation of Mare's own thought. Later Marxism has tended to identify the "substructure" with economic structure tout court, of which the "superstructure" was then supposed to be a direct "reflection" (thus Lenin, for instance). It is quite clear now that this misrepresents Marx's thought, as the essentially mechanistic rather than dialectical character of this kind of economic determinism should make one suspect. What concerned Marx was that human thought is founded in human activity ("labor," in the widest sense of the word) ; in the social relations brought about by this activity. "Substructure" and "superstructure" arc best understood if one views them as, respectively, human activity and the world produced by that activity. In any case, the fundamental "sub/superstructure" has been taken over in various forms by the sociology of knowledge, beginning with Scheler, always with an understanding that there is some sort of relationship between thought and an "underlying" reality other than thought. The fascination of the scheme prevailed despite the fact that much of the sociology of knowledge was explicitly formulated in opposition to Marxism and that different positions leave been taken within it regarding the nature of the relationship between the two components of the scheme.