Social constructionism | Society and Culture | MCAT | Khan Academy — Transcript

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1. 0:01I'm sure everyone has thought at some time, is this real?
2. 0:06But the important question is what makes something real?
3. 0:09Most of the time the things we experience in this world
4. 0:12are just constructs.
5. 0:14We have opinions about everything,
6. 0:16and we experience the world through that lens.
7. 0:19Social constructionism is a theory
8. 0:21that knowledge and many aspects of the world around us
9. 0:24are not real in and of themselves.
10. 0:27They only exist because we give them
11. 0:29reality through social agreement.
12. 0:31Things like nations, books, even money
13. 0:34don't exist in the absence of human society.
14. 0:38Nations are groups of people who happen
15. 0:40to share a language or history.
16. 0:42Books are paper with scribbles.
17. 0:44And money is just pieces of paper and metal
18. 0:47that have no value other than what we have assigned them.
19. 0:51The concept of the self can be considered
20. 0:53a social construct, too.
21. 0:55Our identity is created by interactions
22. 0:57with other people and our reactions
23. 1:00to the expectations of society.
24. 1:03There are two threads of social constructionism, the weak
25. 1:06and the strong.
26. 1:08Weak social constructionism proposes that social constructs
27. 1:11are dependent on brute facts, which
28. 1:14are the most basic and fundamental
29. 1:16and don't rely on any other facts.
30. 1:19Brute facts are kind of difficult to understand
31. 1:21because it is so strange to think about something that
32. 1:24can't be explained by something else.
33. 1:26So for example, take the computer screen
34. 1:28you're looking at.
35. 1:30Your screen works because of changing voltages and bits
36. 1:33of metal, which can be explained by movements
37. 1:35of subatomic particles, which are made from quarks, so
38. 1:38on and so forth.
39. 1:40None of those are brute facts.
40. 1:42The brute fact is what explains quarks
41. 1:44or what explains the explanation of quarks.
42. 1:48Those brute facts are separate from institutional facts which
43. 1:51are created by social conventions
44. 1:53and do rely on other facts.
45. 1:55So for example, money depends on the paper
46. 1:59that we have given value.
47. 2:01Strong social constructionism, on the other hand,
48. 2:03states that the whole of reality is dependent on language
49. 2:07and social habits, that all knowledge
50. 2:09is a social construct, and that there are no brute facts.
51. 2:12So it would say that we created the idea of quarks
52. 2:15and everything we use to explain it.
53. 2:18There are no facts that just exist.
54. 2:22The main criticism to social constructionism
55. 2:24is that it doesn't consider the effect of natural phenomenon
56. 2:28on society.
57. 2:29And, at least for strong social constructionism,
58. 2:31it even has difficulty explaining those phenomena
59. 2:34because they don't depend on human speed or action.
60. 2:38Strong social constructionism only explains reality
61. 2:41through the thoughts of humans, not
62. 2:43by using fundamental brute facts.