A Field Guide to Social Construction

Abstract A wide range of discussions throughout the humanities and social sciences include claims that various phenomena are “socially constructed.” Many academics associate “social constructionism” with the so‐called “science wars” in which social constructionism is identified with some sort of radical anti‐realism about reality in general, or the findings of science in particular. But the move to radical anti‐realism is only one way to develop the central idea of constructionism – that human decision and human culture exert profound and often unnoticed influence – and much of this work remains interesting and provocative within a broadly naturalist and realist framework. Here the author reviews and explores a variety of constructionist claims, including the plausible suggestion that social constructionist hypotheses have special purchase in discussions of human kinds.