[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

to reach the centre of the earth, which is their  natural place . Other
things, such as flames, rise upwards to reach their assigned place,
which is somewhere beyond the starry heavens. This picture is likely
to be endorsed in a society that (for religious reasons, perhaps)
views the earth as the centre of the universe and which conceives of
the remainder of the universe as being composed of an entirely
different kind of matter. The reader will, of course, have recognised
this example as the cosmological conception of the Middle Ages.
According to another picture, however, all bodies in the universe act
upon each other by gravitational force. This position is likely to be
endorsed in a more secular society that has relinquished the idea of
its occupying a privileged region of space and that, besides, has
devised better means of observation; this is, by and large, our
present-day picture of the cosmos.
As these simple examples illustrate, the laws accepted under
alternative societal conditions are likely to be mutually
incompatible. Such incompatibility will not merely obtain in
respect of the scientific theories of radically different societies, but
even within individual societies, when certain salient parameters of
those societies are varied. By the same token, mutual
incompatibility will inevitably be a feature of relations between
sociology-of-knowledge laws where each claims to specify which
beliefs people are likely to form about the workings of society
under differing societal conditions. Hence, we have to make a
selection from among these laws when we appeal to such
(hypothetical) beliefs as a way of fixing social reality. Which ones
should we adopt? The only sound policy will be to pick those laws
that emerge under conditions most conducive to the attainment of
scientific truth: conditions, for instance, in which rational
discussion and investigation flourish. We recognise immediately
that we have been down this path before, with inconspicuous
results: the occasion was our examination of Habermas s
consensus theory of truth, which defined truth as that conception
that would be formed as the conclusion of an idealised,
hypothetical process of investigation. The problem is that we
cannot pick out, a priori and in the abstract, a social setting in
which an inquiry is guaranteed to produce truth. Or, putting it the
other way around, we cannot define truth in terms of the results
which would command consensus at the limit of some hypothetical
73
The Broad Arguments
investigative process, since we cannot, in advance, single out and
justify a unique truth-generating procedure.
To sum up the argument so far, we cannot define social fact as the
product of a hypothetical societal discussion, whose precise outcome
we leave to the sociology of knowledge to determine. On
constructivist principles, the laws on which the sociology of
knowledge would rely for this hypothetical prediction are
themselves social constructions, the outcome of societal consensus.
The way to break out of the circle would seem to be to accept
such consensual verdicts, and hence such laws, as spring from
specific privileged, idealised conditions of investigation and
discussion. Unfortunately, there is no uncontroversial way of
specifying conditions under which an investigation is likely to
produce truth. This is the familiar and intractable problem of
defining a notion of scientific procedure that is uniquely rational,
and able to be effectively demarcated from all non-scientific
enterprises. Today, most philosophers of science have given up this
project. Thus, the addition of a sociology-of-knowledge component
to the basic constructivist position does not solve the problem of
indeterminacy of social fact. Rather, the facts and laws supplied by
the sociology of knowledge are themselves drawn into the all-
engulfing regress of construction.
An alternative reading of the social constructivism-cum-
sociology-of-knowledge position is one providing for the
suspension of the principle of construction with respect to the
factors involved in the social conditioning of knowledge. The
causal nexus between a belief and its social determinants is
granted some kind of brute existence and need not itself to be
constituted through communal agreement or otherwise. This allows
determinacy to permeate social reality in virtue of a combination
of causal and non-causal generation, with social processes causally
bringing about social facts of a particular kind, namely beliefs, and
these beliefs, in turn, generating further social facts by
construction. I think we find hints of some such view in Berger
and Luckmann. As was mentioned above, the sociology-of-
knowledge component of their position makes play with the
Marxian distinction between substructural aspects of society,
which enjoy a substantial mode of existence, and superstructural
ones, whose reality has a merely derivative status. Social
constructions figure primarily in the latter category. Berger and
Luckmann call them  legitimating universes , and they comprise
74
Social Constructivism and Sociology of Knowledge
those abstract metaphysical speculations that societies will produce
to justify the current social order. The distinctive character of
Berger and Luckmann s work resides precisely in this marriage of
a Marxian and a phenomenological approach, the latter being part
of the legacy of Alfred Schutz. While social facts social
conditions are claimed to generate certain knowledge structures,
the converse also holds: knowledge structures generate social facts
by bestowing certain  meanings upon them. The determination
runs both ways.
The trouble with this suggestion is its capriciously hybrid
character. Certain social facts are allowed to enjoy brute existence;
others exist as the determinate causal effect of the former; yet a
third kind exist only qua social constructions. What is the principle
of categorisation? It will hardly do to say that the only social facts
enjoying brute existence are those which do not embody cognitive
states (intentional contents or  meanings ), since this class is empty.
As Berger and Luckmann themselves emphasise, all social facts
somehow include, directly or indirectly, elements of human thought,
understanding or  meaning . Thus, no brute social facts would exist
to set in train the process of social construction. Before we need
feel committed to taking it seriously, the hybrid view must offer us
some coherent and plausible formula that specifies which segments
of society enjoy what kind of existence.
The constructivist position argued in The Social Construction of
Reality is quite ambiguous and many-faceted; the discussion above
was not intended to exhaust this rich and suggestive work, nor was
the criticism meant as a rebuttal of all readings of its constructivist
tenet. Another thesis advanced by Berger and Luckmann under the
 construction label is that human beings generate the social world by
their actions, especially in so far as these actions are institutionally
fixed and thereby  objectified . Human action, considered in terms of
its dependence upon specific normative and institutional constraints,
makes up social reality and hence  constructs it. I have no quarrel
with this position, which in fact I referred to briefly at the beginning
of this book, but put aside as a truism scarcely worthy of further
attention. It is, however, possible to put a more interesting gloss on
this argument which would stress the intentional content of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]