ABSTRACT
The social constructivist holds that society is nothing more-and nothing less-than the organized activities of living individuals, among whom may exist various asymmetrical relations which enable some individuals to exert a disproportionate inuence over the social construction process for long periods of time. This, in turn, explains the impression of a stable ‘social structure’ in terms of which social life is then interpreted and explained. Social constructivism is itself neutral with regard to the signicance of these asymmetrical relations, but as we shall see below they can be regarded positively or negatively, which is usually expressed as an attitude towards ‘the state’. It would be easy to think that something called ‘the social construction of knowledge’ is most naturally distinguished from something called ‘the individual construction of knowledge’. While some epistemologists (e.g. Goldman 1999) operate on this assumption, they misunderstand the spirit behind this inuential movement in social science. In particular, they mistakenly focus on the social part instead of the construction part of ‘social construction’. The natural antagonist of the social constructivist is the social determinist, namely, someone who holds that society as such exercises causal power over the character of social life independently of the individuals who constitute the society. In premodern times, ‘tradition’ would be invoked to justify this sense of society, but in the modern era the preferred theoretical term is ‘social structure’, which is something reproduced by default across generations unless explicitly interrupted.
