Practical roots of social constructionism

Ilya T. Kasavin
RAS Insti­tute of Phi­los­o­phy

Prac­ti­cal roots of social con­struc­tion­ism

Abstract. This paper dis­cuss­es the prac­ti­cal roots of social con­struc­tion­ism, inter­pret­ing a social con­struc­tion as an aggre­gate of social roles. The author sub­stan­ti­ates the argu­ment that this the­o­ry part­ly results from psy­cho­log­i­cal prac­tices as such. The study of an indi­vid­ual sub­ject self-report leads to the for­ma­tion of a spe­cif­ic set of texts that con­tains objec­ti­fied descrip­tions of men­tal states, yet not a sub­ject. Con­se­quent­ly, the author defines sub­jec­tiv­i­ty as a func­tion of the speaker’s rela­tions to the spo­ken, what actu­al­ly con­structs its con­tent. The func­tion of the rela­tion to a cer­tain set of propo­si­tions can build up stand­points in a vari­ety of com­mu­ni­ties, includ­ing sci­en­tif­ic ones. 

Key­words: social con­struc­tion­ism, real­ism, social psy­chol­o­gy, social con­struc­tion, the sub­ject.

DOI:10.5840/dspl20181215

Ref­er­ences:

1. Bakhtin M.M. Esteti­ka slovesno­go tvorch­est­va [The Aes­thet­ics of Ver­bal Art] / S.G. Bocharov (ed.). Moscow: Iskusst­vo, 1979. 423 p. (In Russ­ian)
2. Boghoss­ian P.A. Fear of Knowl­edge: Against Rel­a­tivism and Con­struc­tiv-ism. New York: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2006. 152 p.