This is related to Mills-on-alternative-epistemology that presents epistemologies dealing with social reality. This raises the question of whether there are such things as social facts, and if it is possible that reality itself is a kind of social construction?
Most of what we think and say about the world will bear some traces of our social conditioning and social interests, and so does the acknowledgement that social construction is involved in our understanding of reality entail the rejection of an independent reality?
types of social construction
- causal social construction = something is causally socially constructed when social factors play a role in creating or determining its characteristics (e.g. masculinity and femineity are products of socialization in the causal sense)
- constitutive social construction = something is constitutively socially constructed when its definition makes references to social factors (e.g. gender, as any definition of gender will make reference to a broad network of social relations)
- pragmatic construction = classifications and distinctions are pragmatically constructed when their use is determined, at least in part, by social factors
- weak pragmatic construction = the social factors only partly determine the distinction’s use
- strong pragmatic construction = the social factors wholly determine the use, and it fails to represent any independent fact of the matter
Any scheme of category we employ will be weakly pragmatically constructed, since we need language (a social phenomena) to the devise the categories and distinctions. Strong pragmatic construction, however, is deeply embedded in the arguments against the notion of an independent reality.