ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some prominent approaches to the construction of the social world, paying particular attention to intentionality and collective intentionality in them. It considers questions of social construction as questions about the making or building of the social world overall. The term "social fact" predates Emile Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method of 1895, but it was with Durkheim that the term gained currency. The social construction literature has largely been concerned with showing that what seems to be non-social actually is social: that is, with taking facts that seem biological or otherwise natural, and arguing that they are actually social products in one way or other. Margaret Gilbert, for instance, gives a theory of sociality and of the existence of social groups. Social sciences working in the behaviorist tradition regarded themselves as systematizing the observable behaviors of people, and thought of social facts as patterns of behavior alone.
