The Social Construction of Reality

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As we go up and up toward the human level, as you become more a d more microscopic, we end up making more choices about how to describe reality. We make up things like rights and privileges and laws, right? Even when we describe the people around us, we make up categories, categories of race or gender or class. Which is fine. They help us analyze the world. There's no choice about it. But there are also things to resist a little bit if we want to be as accurate and as careful as we can in thinking about reality. Part of this social construction idea is that the ideas we make up to struct our picture of reality aren't arbitrary, right? Just

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it’s because those ways provide elegant predictive descriptions or because they serve a more subtle political purpose. To get at the true nature of reality, therefore, it’s important to think about which aspects of it are socially constructed, and why. I talk with Sally Haslanger about these issues, and the techniques we can use to understand the world and make it a better place.

Update (22 March): Our discussion here could have (and did) leave some listeners with the wrong impression of how Sally and I feel about trans rights -- we are entirely for them! My fault for not making things more clear during the conversation. So I have added a brief note during the podcast intro to make our position perfectly explicit. Thanks to everyone who commented.

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Sally Haslanger received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Ford Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among her awards are the Carus Lectureship, the Distinguished Woman Philosopher award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of several books, including Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique.

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