The Social Construction of the Person: How Is it Possible?

Abstract

According to Volney Stefflre (personal communication) theories of category formation can be divided into three general kinds: (a) realist theories, which argue that “people categorize the world the way they do because that’s the way the world is”; (b) innatist theories, which argue that “people categorize the world the way they do because that’s the way people are”; and (c) social construction theories, which argue that people categorize the world the way they do because they have participated in social practices, institutions, and other forms of symbolic action (e.g., language) that presuppose or in some way make salient those categorizations. The “constructive” part of a social construction theory is the idea that equally rational, competent, and informed observers are, in some sense, free (of external realist and internal innate constraints) to constitute for themselves different realities; and the cognate idea, articulated by Goodman (1968, 1972, 1978), that there are as many realities as there are ways “it” can be constituted or described (also see Nagel 1979, pp. 211–213). The “social” part of a social construction theory is the idea that categories are vicariously received, not individually invented; and the cognate idea that the way one divides up the world into categories is, in some sense, tradition-bound, and thus transmitted, communicated and “passed on” through symbolic action.