LECTURE: “The Social Construction of Reality” in, The Reality of Everyday Life: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Berger and Luckmann, 1966/ 1991
KEYWORDS: Peter Ludwing Berger, Reality of Everyday Life, Shared Common Sense Reality, Social Construction of Reality, Sociology of Knowledge, Thomas Luckmann
University of Delhi
Bachelor of Arts
Sociological Thinkers
READING TO BE COVERED: Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann, 1966/ 1991, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Penguin Books. Chapter 1, The Reality of Everyday Life, pp. 33-42
Important Points to be Kept in Mind While Study the Article
Try to relate this article with the real-life world, where we are living.
Understand the multiple realities of society.
Try to understand that these multiple realities are existing same time in society.
How the same word and phenomenon have a different meaning in a different context for a different person.
Humans are product and procedure of society.
How have some knowledge and information become confirmative in society?
Expected Outcome
Students will be able to understand the social reality of everyday life. How actor is behaving indifferently in a different situation and how the reality itself has no meaning itself. The term reality can be used differently for the different people or we can say that the term reality assumes differently by different people. Therefore we can say that there is no uniform reality or meaning existing in society. Thus every people are assuming the reality in different ways. The same word for thing or phenomenon can have a different meaning for the different people in different situations. In the end, the student will be able to understand that many different types of realities are existing together at the same time. How human beings are product and producer of society. Students will be able to understand what is confirmative knowledge and information and shared knowledge.
Introduction
Dear students, I have already delivered the introductory lecture on “The Reality of Everyday Life.” I have also introduced the article in the class. Please remember that.
However, for the audience out of my class try to give an introductory lecture, but that is not so needed because I have already incorporated that here in this lecture.
The main aim of this chapter is to analyze the knowledge that guides conduct in everyday life, and we are only tangentially interested in how this reality may appear in various theoretical perspectives to intellectual.
Everybody in society has common-sense reality, which is constructed and influenced by various things.
This common sense is guiding the person throughout life. Whatever we are doing, our action is confirmed by common sense, therefore, o worked as conformity. This is doing and controlling our behaviour in social life.
In everyday life present itself as a reality interpreted by the men and subjectivity meaningful to them as a coherent world.
If we are to describe the reality of common sense we must refer to these interpretations, just as we must take account of its taken-for-granted character but we do so within phenomenological brackets.
Consciousness is always intentional; it always intended or is directed towards objects. This is so regardless of whether the object of consciousness is experienced as belonging to an external physical world or apprehended as an element of an inward subjective reality.
In society, we have various layers of experience, and the different structure of meaning involved in. FOR EXAMPLE, being bitten by a dog, remembering having been bitten by a dog having a phobia about all dogs, and so forth.
OR WE CAN ALSO TAKE EXAMPLE FROM INDIAN SOCIETY that in our society different society has different social experience hence all are seeing the same phenomena in society from different perspectives. These different perspectives are deriving from different experienced social reality. For example, in Indian society, some societies are the victim of the violence, riots, subjugation, exploitation, negation on the basis of caste, religious and gender identity. Therefore the same Indian society or any particular reality or fact can be interpreted in a different way by the different communities.
Hence we can that the multiple realities are existing in society. There is no on reality and the reality may not be interpreted in the same way by everybody.
Dear students, you may remember my lecture in the class in which I had explained to you why the different section of the societies is thinking about social change in a different way. HOPE NO NEED TO EXPLAIN THAT AGAIN. IF IT IS NEEDED PLEASE LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENT.
However, as we have seen earlier that we have the shared common-sense reality. This makes us enable to behave in uniformity. Otherwise many social lives would be impossible. ONE OF THE BEST EXAMPLE is language. Through the shared common-sense reality, everyone understands the same thing in the spoken and written words and sentence. O the other hand this is also possible that meaning of a particular thing is different for another society. In this situation, we cannot say that both have the same shared common sense.
The language used in everyday life continuously provides us with the necessary objectification and posits the order within which these make sense and within which everyday life meaning for me.
The language, through our shared common-sense reality, empowering and enabling us to make the web of human relationship, as a part of everyday reality.
Dear students, here YOU MAY ALSO RELATE THE LANGUAGE with EMILE DURKHEIM’s SOCIAL FACT.
Dear students hope you can recall the language and the social fact by Emile Durkheim. LET ME KNOW YOUR UNDERSTANDING IN THE COMMENT SECTION. LET ME ALSO KNOW IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO UNDERSTAND.
Therefore, P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann say that “the reality of everyday life is organized around the ‘here of my body and the ‘now’ of my present. This ‘here and now’ is the focus of my attention to the reality of everyday life. What is ‘here and now’ presented to me in everyday life is the realissimum of my consciousness.”
The reality of everyday life further presents itself as an inter subjective world, a world that we share with others. This inter subjectivity sharply differentiates everyday life from other realities of which we are conscious.
We may alone in the world of my dreams, but we know that the world of everyday life is as real to others as it is to myself. Indeed, one cannot exist in everyday life without continually interesting and communication with others. The human has many personalities that all are existing together in one person. On the other hand, the same word has a different meaning because of different subjects. FOR EXAMPLE my ‘here’ is their ‘’there’. Therefore the ‘my’ meaning is different from ‘their’’ meaning.
The reality of Everyday Life and Common Sense
The natural attitude is the attitude of common sense consciousness precisely because it refers to a world that is common to many men. Common sense knowledge is the knowledge I share with others in the normal, self-evident routine of everyday life.
The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality. It does not require additional verification over and beyond its simple presence. It is simply there, as the self-evident and compelling facility. I know that it is real. Everyday life is divided int sectors that are apprehended routinely, and others that present me with problems of one kind or another.
DEAR STUDENTS you can take an example from everyday life to understand this. You may also relate it with the previous thinker TALCOTT PARSONS about the expected behaviour. In the everyday real social life, we are going with our SHARED COMMON SENSE. Through this SHARED COMMON SENSE, we not only know how to behave but we also knows that how other people may behave with me. So both side has some expectations and that expectations are real and that is defined by the SHARED SOCIAL CONSENSUS or the SHARED SOCIAL COMMON SENSE.
We can say that our all behaviour is guided by the shared social consensus and shared social common sense.
The world of everyday life is structured both (1) Spatially, and (2) Temporally.
1. The Spatial structure is quite peripheral to our present considerations. Suffice it to point out that it, too, has a social dimension by virtue of the fact that my manipulatory zone intersects with that of others.
2. The Temporality is an intrinsic property of consciousness. The stream of consciousness is always ordered temporally. The world of everyday life has its own standard time may be understood as the interaction between cosmic time and its socially established calendar, based on the temporal sequence of nature, and inner time, in its aforementioned differentiations.
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