War Over The Family
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
Peter L. Berger is Professor of Sociology at Boston University and Director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. He has previously been Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New
York. He is the author of many books including Invitation to Sociology,
Pyramids of Saa!fice, Facing up to Modernity, The Heretical Imperative and
The Capitalist Revolution, and is co-author (with Hansfried Kellner) of
Sociology Reinterpreted and (with Br igitte Berger) of Sociology: A Biographical
Approach and The War over the Family.
Thomas.Luckmann is at present Professor of Sociology at the University …show more content…
The key terms in these con tentions are 'reality' and 'knowledge', terms that are not only current in everyday speech, but that have behind them a long history of philosophical inquiry. We need not enter here into a discussion of the semantic intricacies of either the everyday or the philosophical usage of these terms. It will be enough, for our purposes, to define 'reality' as a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot 'wish them away'), and to define 'knowledge' as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics. It is in this
(admittedly simplistic) sense that the terms have relevance both to the man in the street and to the philosopher. The man in the street inhabits a world that is 'real' to him, albeit in different degrees, and he 'knows', with different degrees of confidence, that this world possesses such and such charac teristics. The philosopher, of course, will raise questions about the ultimate status of both this 'reality' and this 'knowledge'.
What is real? How is one to know? These are among the
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
Peter L. Berger is Professor of Sociology at Boston University and Director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. He has previously been Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New
York. He is the author of many books including Invitation to Sociology,
Pyramids of Saa!fice, Facing up to Modernity, The Heretical Imperative and
The Capitalist Revolution, and is co-author (with Hansfried Kellner) of
Sociology Reinterpreted and (with Br igitte Berger) of Sociology: A Biographical
Approach and The War over the Family.
Thomas.Luckmann is at present Professor of Sociology at the University …show more content…
The key terms in these con tentions are 'reality' and 'knowledge', terms that are not only current in everyday speech, but that have behind them a long history of philosophical inquiry. We need not enter here into a discussion of the semantic intricacies of either the everyday or the philosophical usage of these terms. It will be enough, for our purposes, to define 'reality' as a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot 'wish them away'), and to define 'knowledge' as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics. It is in this
(admittedly simplistic) sense that the terms have relevance both to the man in the street and to the philosopher. The man in the street inhabits a world that is 'real' to him, albeit in different degrees, and he 'knows', with different degrees of confidence, that this world possesses such and such charac teristics. The philosopher, of course, will raise questions about the ultimate status of both this 'reality' and this 'knowledge'.
What is real? How is one to know? These are among the