A little thinking "out loud"...

REALITY...?


Written:
March 9/01

a fine question, and one I'm not even going to pretend to answer, although I will formulate some questions and thinking around the issue...

 

To counter the realist argument that reality cannot be socially constructed (tables and coffee-cups are solid things that just cannot be wished away...) I note that the "social construction of reality" is about the construction of social reality, not about the construction of that hard physical stuff that you bump knees into and fall off of. The "social construction of reality" isn't even supposed to suggest that I might be able to fly off of a cliff just because I think its possible...

While there may be some argument here - even regarding tables and coffee-cups (see skeptics, Ashmore et al) - I am quite ready to accept the reality of the table. I am just not willing to accept the reality of ecosystems or of ethics to the same degree, or in the same way.

I find the heuristic illustrated below (and others) instructive for sorting out some distinctions relevant to this issue, most notably, for recognizing two particular aspects (admitting that more axes could indicate more aspects). First, is scalar considerations. Second is the 'degree of abstraction.' By the latter I refer to a range from the material to the immaterial; from the concrete to the abstract; from that-which-is-sensed to that-which-is-conceptualized. The more immediately sense-able (especially by multiple senses) any particular thing is, the more real its reality. Tables and coffee-cups are more 'real' - less "constructed." Ecosystems - although composed of trees, insects and other such sense-able things - are more "constructed" simply because the term refers to an association, a more abstract thing than the tables and trees. Friendship, an even more abstract thing, is even more "constructed."

Scale is another consideration regarding the degree of realness to the reality we sense/perceive. As we move away from the human scale, toward things that are very small or very big, there is a need for various different types of instrumentation to aid perception (microscopes and telescopes as the most obvious examples) that become mediators involved in the process of negotiation. Such instrumentation contributes to the "constructedness" of such entities as universes and molecules.

Another aspect that could be integrated into these considerations is a distinction between "constructed" (in the sense used above) and "built" (in the sense of manufactured).

Two caveats:

  • Placement of items on this graph, including their relative positions, could be easily contested. Although I will hold to the general relative distinctions between big universes, small cells, real tables and constructed friendships I will not argue for the positions in which I have placed language, societies, friendship with much conviction at all.
  • As a corollary, although I posit this diagram to be valid at the scale drawn, to consider it with detail, or to take it as indicating anything other than a general trend, would be inappropriate.

 

This can lead to a few other discussions, which carry varying relevance, and which are written with varying degrees of 'completeness':

 

There is no single reality, but rather multiple realities, and what is represented depends on one's position in the field of negotiation. The ethnographer's text cannot legitimately claim to represent the truth about the other, or even a particular and limited truth about the other. It is not about the other at all. It is about an ongoing process of negotiating reality (Bird 1987: 258)
What the theory of the observation of observation holds, then, is that the world is not given - as in the traditional, representationalist frame - but is rather brought forth in the dynamic interaction of observer and observed... But more than this, since that bringing forth takes place by means of paradoxical distinctions, it means, as Maturana and Varela put it, that "every world brought forth necessarily hides its origins. By existing, we generate cognitive 'blind spots' that can be cleared only through generating new blind spots in another domain. We do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist" [Rasch and Wolfe 2000: 13]
I remember using in my lecture a short story by J. L. Borges, where the attempt to draw a comprehensive map of the world had to include the map-maker drawing himself drawing the map, and therefore the reader had to consider the impossibility of a fully comprehensive correspondence between the map and the natural reality it attempted to depict. ... The plight of the cartographer in Borges's story can mislead us into the idea that a man or a group could have access to reality in its naked form and that although he (or it) could recognize the problems involved in the actual drawing of the map, he (or it) would nevertheless be able to look at reality from a vantage point. This is, unfortunately, a misreading of the story. The cartographer is never outside the map. His problem is not just how to produce a map that would include himself in the process of drawing 'reality'; his predicament is how to survive the realization that he is himself already in the map, a drawn figure drawing himself (Steuerman 2000: xi)