Social Constructivism Essay

812 Words4 Pages

Social Constructivism is a concept within the philosophy of social sciences that aims to examine the development of jointly constructed understandings of the world. The first ‘social construction’ book was titled ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ and was written by Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger in 1966. Today, the talk of social constructions has become common, valuable for social scientists, and familiar to anyone who comes across debates about gender, culture, race, science etc. Ontologically it takes a standpoint from a relativisms point of view, saying realities are multiple and they only exist in peoples mind. Epistemologically it takes a standpoint from subjectivists. If realities exists only in peoples minds, “subjective interaction seems to be the only way to access them” (Guba, 1990, p. 26). To many scholars, the idea of social constructivism is liberating. It can remind us that society and its meanings are not always unchangeable and fixed. In Hacking’s works he uses an example of motherhood and argues that its meanings are not unchangeable. They are the product of social forces, historical events and ideology. Mothers who accept current canons of emotions and behavior may learn that the ways in which they are supposed to feel and act are not ordained by human nature. There is no reason to feel quite as …show more content…

Epistemology has been defined in various ways, and how we see it from a constructivists stand, it is defined well by Auerswald: “a set of imminent rules, used in thought by large group of people to define reality” (Johanna & Niekerk, 2005, p. 51), and in our case it will be applied to the Hip Hop subculture. We have chosen to use social construction, as it is the process by which our reality is created by the observer, and it will help us to shed light on issues of how social problems like identity, race and culture are