ABSTRACT
Over the last forty years, a slow epistemological revolution has been taking place – in philosophy beginning with Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), John L.Austin (1962), Richard Rorty (1967), and continuing with John Searle (1969, 1995); and in the social sciences beginning with Peter Winch (1958). It realizes language not merely as a reflection of reality, a simple medium of representation, but as constitutive of reality. In the social sciences this view, increasingly accepted since Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) pioneering work and the anthropological writings of Clifford Geertz (1973), was extended by Ernst von Glasersfeld’s (1995) radical constructivism, Kenneth Gergen’s (1999) social constructionism, and Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) sociological theory of communication.
