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Concept
Social reality
Summary
Social reality is distinct from biological reality or individual cognitive reality, representing as it does a phenomenological level created through social interaction and thereby transcending individual motives and actions. As a product of human dialogue, social reality may be considered as consisting of the accepted social tenets of a community, involving thereby relatively stable laws and social representations. Radical constructivism would cautiously describe social reality as the product of uniformities among observers (whether or not including the current observer themselves).
The problem of social reality has been treated exhaustively by philosophers in the phenomenological tradition, particularly Alfred Schütz, who used the term "social world" to designate this distinct level of reality. Within the social world, Schütz distinguished between social reality that could be experienced directly (umwelt) and a social reality beyond the immediate horizon, which could yet be experienced if sought out. In his wake, ethnomethodology explored further the unarticulated structure of our everyday competence and ability with social reality.
Previously, the subject had been addressed in sociology as well as other disciplines. For example, Émile Durkheim stressed the distinct nature of "the social kingdom. Here more than anywhere else the idea is the reality". Herbert Spencer had coined the term super-organic to distinguish the social level of reality above the biological and psychological.
John Searle has used the theory of speech acts to explore the nature of social/institutional reality, so as to describe such aspects of social reality which he instances under the rubrics of "marriage, property, hiring, firing, war, revolutions, cocktail parties, governments, meetings, unions, parliaments, corporations, laws, restaurants, vacations, lawyers, professors, doctors, medieval knights, and taxes, for example".
Searle argued that such institutional realities interact with each other in what he called "systematic relationships (e.
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