The Social Ontology of Everyday Knowledge

In this chapter, I look at the core tenets that have underwritten many of the recent debates around social constructionism and social realism, pointing to the ways in which Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman’s approach to these topics opens productive lines of thinking about them. I then discuss the work of John Searle, who has done much to clarify the meanings of realism and constructionism within the field of social ontology. However, I argue that his insights are overly beholden to the language and strategies of analytic philosophy, and that Berger and Luckmann’s approach, in contrast, includes important conceptual resources that can help clarify or resolve a number of problems within these debates in a manner that Searle’s approach cannot. The phenomenological and anthropological elements that Berger and Luckmann developed here can be understood as more compatible with a critical realist understanding of the social ontology of knowledge than is Searle’s approach.