The social construction of reality
by Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, David Colacci, Berger, Peter L., Luckmann, Thomas A. · first published 1966
71% recommend29% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Explains how shared beliefs, institutions and everyday routines come to seem like objective reality. It sharpens thinking about assumptions in arguments and helps with questions of identity.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
sociology book
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The Social Construction of Reality[1]. This book helped me in my personal life coming to terms with my identity. But it also helped me understand the art of discourse much more deeply. It gives the tools to easily and quickly identify…
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?” ↗…1984 (George Orwell) Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter) The Republic [imp. "the allegory of the cave"] (Plato) The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche) The Social Construction of Reality (Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (L. Wittgenstein) Dissemination [imp. "The Pharmakon"] (Jacques Derrida) The Quest for Reality (Barry Stroud) Languages of Art (Nelson…
on “Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?” ↗The questions I listed are specifically addressed in works like The Social Construction of Reality[1] and Frame Analysis[2]. From what I gather, they are widely read influential works and to put one in terms of the other, helped me frame modern social currents in a more through understanding. 1. Berger…
on “What are some cools topics one can learn about that aren't software dev related” ↗This book is probably about a very different kind of ”engineering” than what you had in mind, but it’s been highly influential to my thinking: “The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.” Berger & Luckmann 1966. Perhaps the core insight to me is that not only does every practice of engineering exist as embedded in the context of a socially constructed…
on “Ask HN: Good books on philosophy of engineering?” ↗> stocks are purely an abstraction to begin with There's a book called "The Social Construction of Reality." Some of it is a little difficult to grasp as it gets into a lot of social science elements, but the basic gist is that everything in our societies are abstractions we have to believe in collectively.…
on “Dole Food Had Too Many Shares” ↗the social construction of reality. Read and watch your world unravel
on “Ask HN: Which are the most damaging books you've read?” ↗The Social Construction of Reality[1][2] provided me a method of examining the things that I assumed where obviously true and describes the process by which human ideas are transformed from beliefs into real tangible objects and natural…
on “Ask HN: What's a book that fundamentally altered your mental models” ↗I'm making the radical constructionist point based on Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality.
on “The clock does not measure time; it produces it” ↗…personal belief as grounded external knowledge using the copula, but it's an epistemological slight of hand. Like all magic tricks, once you know it it's hard not to unsee it. 1. Berger, Luckmann (1966) The Social Construction of Reality
…the course of months. My final point is that this is the reason why "jokes"[2] are insidious. They will attract people who earnestly believe they aren't just jokes which normalizes harassment. [1] The Social Construction of Reality. Berger, Peter http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reali... [2] A specific kind of harassment designed to habituate abuse while also taking advantage of plausible deniability by ostensibly…
on “People who jump to conclusions show other kinds of thinking errors” ↗Exactly. I can imagine the response to having such a statement pointed out - "Well, it's true, though!" Which of course is a welcomed retort; we're talking about the social construction of reality[1] after all. Indeed, it is this very process of weaving truths by way of social interactions that is being examined. 1. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1991). The social construction of reality. Penguin…
on “It’s time to repeal the Jones Act” ↗…There is a vast difference between the experience of being subjected to either therapy or nihilation depending on the social and material particulars of each. 1. Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Doubleday & Company, New York.
on “It’s Time to Bring Back Asylums” ↗…https://www.kennethmd.com/speech-act-theory-locution-illocut... 3. Or admits that locutionary abilities are coincidences, left to the intrinsic nature probabilities w.r.t. language models. 4. See Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Doubleday & Company, New York for a more thorough explanation. pg 104 https://archive.org/details/socialconstructi0000berg/page/10...
on “The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation” ↗…its particular meaning (it's jargon from Sociology and spread to other areas) or not. I can just imagine how it would have felt to read the article if I didn't happen to know the origin of that phrase ('social construction of reality')—it would seem mostly coherent and would appear to be talking about something of the utmost significance, and yet with some kind of vagueness I couldn't quite place (that's my recollection of running…
on “Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans” ↗…internalize roles and scripts that they act out in daily life with small variations, interpret others' actions in light of performances they have seen before, and collectively build shared narratives in a 'social construction of reality'. How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich. A grand tour of the fallibility of homo economicus, and reality torturing heuristic shortcuts that lead…
on “Ask HN: Good books?” ↗