Social Reality - Objective/subjective

Objective/subjective

There is a debate in social theory about whether social reality exists independently of people's involvement with it, or whether (as in social constructionism) it is only created by the human process of ongoing interaction.

Peter L. Berger argued for a new concern with the basic process of the social construction of reality; and in similar fashion, post-Sartrians like R. D. Laing stress that “once certain fundamental structures of experience are shared, they come to be experienced as objective entities...they take on the force and character of partial autonomous realities, with their own way of life”. Yet at the same time, Laing insisted that such a socially real grouping “can be nothing else than the multiplicity of the points of view and actions of its members...even where, through the interiorization of this multiplicity as synthesized by each, this synthesized multiplicity becomes ubiquitous in space and enduring in time”.

The existence of a social reality independent of individuals or the ecology would seem at odds with the views of perceptual psychology, including those of J. J. Gibson, and those of most ecological economics theories.

Scholars such as John Searle argue on the one hand that “a socially constructed reality presupposes a reality independent of all social constructions”. At the same time, he accepts that social realities are humanly created, and that “the secret to understanding the continued existence of institutional facts is simply that the individuals directly involved and a sufficient number of members of the relevant communities must continue to recognize and accept the existence of such facts”.