SOCI 325 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Symbolic Interactionism, Nominalism, Ian Hacking
Document Summary
Lecture 8 - social construction and the real. Popular and important term in social science that frames how social scientists think about the world. If something is a "social construct" that means that it can be whatever you want it to be. Humans learn about the world through social interaction. Interactions reinforce the things we agree on, and push us to come to agreement on everything else. This process reinforces norms - how we ought to be. Over time, shared expectations become so regular that we do not think of them as something we came to agree on, they become something we know. The meaning of things is not essential to those things. A popular critique of social construction is that it denies the reality of the world. We often think of the social as somehow less real than the physical or biological.
