Social Construction – By Whom?

Abstract

Social constructivists come in a number of variants, but they all seem to hold that our observations could and should not to be taken at face value; that our conceptions of the world and society are historically and culturally contingent and hence relative; that knowledge is a result of human interaction and negotiation; and that how concepts (or things) are explicitly or implicitly categorized and defined often has grave consequences for the people categorized and defined. Therefore knowledge is (always, or often) not (just) description and explanation of brute facts but has a political or power aspect to it.

Ian Hacking 1999, famously, asked: social construction – of what? What sort of entities have been or could be candidates for the value of the variable X in “Social construction of X”? But there is another question about social construction that need to be addressed, if only because it has undergone a series of upheavals. Given that knowledge is socially construed we can ask: Socially construed – but by whom? This paper outlines a number of answers from the gentlemanly cultures of science in the seventeenth century to the current scene were more and more stakeholders want to put the finger in the pie called science.