Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical
language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's people. In
some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be
understood by all humans. It may be the idea of an international auxiliary language for communication between groups speaking different primary languages. A similar concept can be found in pidgin language,
which is actually used to facilitate understanding between two or more
people with no common language. In other conceptions, it may be the
primary language of all speakers, or the only existing language. Some
religious and mythological traditions state that there was once a single
universal language among all people, or shared by humans and supernatural beings.
In a more practical fashion, trade languages, such as ancient Koine Greek, may be seen as a kind of real universal language, that was used for commerce.
In historical linguistics, monogenesis
refers to the idea that all spoken human languages are descended from a
single ancestral language spoken many thousands of years ago.
Myths exist in other cultures describing the creation of multiple
languages as an act of a god as well, such as the destruction of a
'knowledge tree' by Brahma in Indic tradition, or as a gift from the God Hermes
in Greek myth. Other myths describe the creation of different languages
as concurrent with the creation of different tribes of people, or due
to supernatural events.
Recognizable strands in the contemporary ideas on universal languages took form only in Early Modern
Europe. In the early 17th century, some believed that a universal
language would facilitate greater unity among mankind largely due to the
subsequent spread of religion, specifically Christianity, as espoused
in the works of Comenius. But there were ideas of a universal language apart from religion as well. A lingua franca or trade language was nothing very new; but an international auxiliary language was a natural wish in light of the gradual decline of Latin. Literature in vernacular languages became more prominent with the Renaissance. Over the course of the 18th century, learned works largely ceased to be written in Latin. According to Colton Booth (Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England
(1994) p. 174) "The Renaissance had no single view of Adamic language
and its relation to human understanding." The question was more exactly
posed in the work of Francis Bacon.
In the vast writings of Gottfried Leibniz can be found many elements relating to a possible universal language, specifically a constructed language,
a concept that gradually came to replace that of a rationalized Latin
as the natural basis for a projected universal language. Leibniz
conceived of a characteristica universalis (also see mathesis universalis),
an "algebra" capable of expressing all conceptual thought. This algebra
would include rules for symbolic manipulation, what he called a calculus ratiocinator. His goal was to put reasoning on a firmer basis by reducing much of it to a matter of calculation that many could grasp. The characteristica would build on an alphabet of human thought.
Leibniz's work is bracketed by some earlier mathematical ideas of René Descartes, and the satirical attack of Voltaire on Panglossianism. Descartes's ambitions were far more modest than Leibniz's, and also far more successful, as shown by his wedding of algebra and geometry to yield what we now know as analytic geometry. Decades of research on symbolic artificial intelligence have not brought Leibniz's dream of a characteristica any closer to fruition.
Candide, a satire written by Voltaire, took aim at Leibniz as Dr. Pangloss, with the choice of name clearly putting universal language in his sights, but satirizing mainly the optimism
of the projector as much as the project. The argument takes the
universal language itself no more seriously than the ideas of the
speculative scientists and virtuosi of Jonathan Swift's Laputa. For the like-minded of Voltaire's generation, universal language was tarred as fool's gold with the same brush as philology with little intellectual rigour, and universal mythography, as futile and arid directions.
In the 18th century, some rationalist natural philosophers sought to recover a supposed Edenic language.
It was assumed that education inevitably took people away from an
innate state of goodness they possessed, and therefore there was an
attempt to see what language a human child brought up in utter silence
would speak. This was assumed to be the Edenic tongue, or at least the lapsarian tongue.
Others attempted to find a common linguistic ancestor to all
tongues; there were, therefore, multiple attempts to relate esoteric
languages to Hebrew (e.g. Basque and Irish), as well as the beginnings of comparative linguistics.
English remains the dominant language of international business
and global communication through the influence of global media and the
former British Empire that had established the use of English in regions
around the world such as North America, Africa, Australia and New
Zealand. However, English is not the only language used in major
international organizations, because many countries do not recognize
English as a universal language. For instance, the United Nations use six languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
The early ideas of a universal language with complete conceptual
classification by categories is still debated on various levels. Michel Foucault believed such classifications to be subjective, citing Borges' fictional Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy as an illustrative example.
Unlike phenomena that are innately determined or biologically
predetermined, these social constructs are collectively formulated,
sustained, and shaped by the social contexts
in which they exist. These constructs significantly impact both the
behavior and perceptions of individuals, often being internalized based
on cultural narratives,
whether or not these are empirically verifiable. In this two-way
process of reality construction, individuals not only interpret and
assimilate information through their social relations but also
contribute to shaping existing societal narratives.
Examples of phenomena that are often viewed as social constructs range widely, encompassing the assigned value of money, conceptions of concept of self, self-identity, beauty standards, gender, language, race, ethnicity, social class, social hierarchy, nationality, religion, social norms, the modern calendar and other units of time, marriage, education, citizenship, stereotypes, femininity and masculinity, social institutions, and even the idea of 'social construct' itself. According to social constructionists, these are not universal truths
but are flexible entities that can vary dramatically across different
cultures and societies. They arise from collaborative consensus and are
shaped and maintained through collective human interactions, cultural
practices, and shared beliefs. This articulates the view that people in
society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the
existence of people or language to validate those concepts, meaning
without a society these constructs would cease to exist.
Overview
A
social construct or construction is the meaning, notion, or connotation
placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by that society
with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.
The social construction of target populations refers to the
cultural characterizations or popular images of the persons or groups
whose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy.
Social constructionism posits that the meanings of phenomena do
not have an independent foundation outside the mental and linguistic
representation that people develop about them throughout their history,
and which becomes their shared reality. From a linguistic viewpoint, social constructionism centres meaning as
an internal reference within language (words refer to words, definitions
to other definitions) rather than to an external reality.
Origins
Each person creates their own "constructed reality" that drives their behaviors.
In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann
said, "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too
fleeting for direct acquaintance" between people and their environment.
Each person constructs a pseudo-environment that is a subjective,
biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a
degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live in the
same world, but they think and feel in different ones." Lippman's "environment" might be called "reality", and his
"pseudo-environment" seems equivalent to what today is called
"constructed reality".
Social constructionism has more recently been rooted in "symbolic interactionism" and "phenomenology". With Berger and Luckmann'sThe Social Construction of Reality
published in 1966, this concept found its hold. More than four decades
later, much theory and research pledged itself to the basic tenet that
people "make their social and cultural worlds at the same time these
worlds make them." It is a viewpoint that uproots social processes "simultaneously playful
and serious, by which reality is both revealed and concealed, created
and destroyed by our activities." It provides a substitute to the "Western intellectual tradition" where
the researcher "earnestly seeks certainty in a representation of reality
by means of propositions."
In social constructionist terms, "taken-for-granted realities"
are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents";
furthermore, reality is not some objective truth "waiting to be
uncovered through positivist scientific inquiry."[15] Rather, there can be "multiple realities that compete for truth and legitimacy." Social constructionism understands the "fundamental role of language
and communication" and this understanding has "contributed to the linguistic turn" and more recently the "turn to discourse theory". The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that
"language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes [creates] it."
A broad definition of social constructionism has its supporters and critics in the organizational sciences. A constructionist approach to various organizational and managerial phenomena appear to be more commonplace and on the rise.
Andy Lock and Tom Strong trace some of the fundamental tenets of
social constructionism back to the work of the 18th-century Italian
political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist Giambattista Vico.
Berger and Luckmann give credit to Max Scheler as a large influence as he created the idea of sociology of knowledge which influenced social construction theory.
Since its appearance in the 1950s, personal construct psychology (PCP) has mainly developed as a constructivist theory of personality and a system of transforming individual meaning-making processes, largely in therapeutic contexts. It was based around the notion of persons as scientists who form and
test theories about their worlds. Therefore, it represented one of the
first attempts to appreciate the constructive nature of experience and
the meaning persons give to their experience. Social constructionism (SC), on the other hand, mainly developed as a form of a critique, aimed to transform the oppressing effects of the social meaning-making
processes. Over the years, it has grown into a cluster of different
approaches, with no single SC position. However, different approaches under the generic term of SC are loosely
linked by some shared assumptions about language, knowledge, and
reality.
A usual way of thinking about the relationship between PCP and SC
is treating them as two separate entities that are similar in some
aspects, but also very different in others. This way of conceptualizing
this relationship is a logical result of the circumstantial differences
of their emergence. In subsequent analyses these differences between PCP
and SC were framed around several points of tension, formulated as
binary oppositions: personal/social; individualist/relational;
agency/structure; constructivist/constructionist. Although some of the most important issues in contemporary psychology
are elaborated in these contributions, the polarized positioning also
sustained the idea of a separation between PCP and SC, paving the way
for only limited opportunities for dialogue between them.
Reframing the relationship between PCP and SC may be of use in
both the PCP and the SC communities. On one hand, it extends and
enriches SC theory and points to benefits of applying the PCP "toolkit"
in constructionist therapy and research. On the other hand, the
reframing contributes to PCP theory and points to new ways of addressing
social construction in therapeutic conversations.
Educational psychology
Like social constructionism, social constructivism states that people work together to construct artifacts.
While social constructionism focuses on the artifacts that are created
through the social interactions of a group, social constructivism
focuses on an individual's learning that takes place because of his or
her interactions in a group.
Social constructivism has been studied by many educational
psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and
learning. For more on the psychological dimensions of social
constructivism, see the work of Lev Vygotsky, Ernst von Glasersfeld and A. Sullivan Palincsar.
Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner (2013), in Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960-2008,
examine how media has framed the poor in the U.S. and how negative
framing has caused a shift in government spending. Since 1960, the
government has decreasingly spent money on social services such as
welfare. Evidence shows the media framing the poor more negatively since
1960, with more usage of words such as lazy and fraud.
Crime
Potter and Kappeler (1996), in their introduction to Constructing Crime: Perspective on Making News And Social Problems
wrote, "Public opinion and crime facts demonstrate no congruence. The
reality of crime in the United States has been subverted to a
constructed reality as ephemeral as swamp gas."
Criminology has long focussed on why and how society defines
criminal behavior and crime in general. While looking at crime through a
social constructionism lens, there is evidence to support that criminal
acts are a social construct where abnormal or deviant acts become a
crime based on the views of society. Another explanation of crime as it relates to social constructionism
are individual identity constructs that result in deviant behavior. If someone has constructed the identity of a "madman" or "criminal" for
themselves based on a society's definition, it may force them to follow
that label, resulting in criminal behavior.
History and development
Berger and Luckmann
Constructionism became prominent in the U.S. with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common-sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. In their model, people interact on the understanding that their
perceptions of everyday life are shared with others, and this common
knowledge of reality is in turn reinforced by these interactions. Since this common-sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions
come to be presented as part of an objective reality, particularly for
future generations who were not involved in the original process of
negotiation. For example, as parents negotiate rules for their children
to follow, those rules confront the children as externally produced
"givens" that they cannot change. Berger and Luckmann's social
constructionism has its roots in phenomenology. It links to Heidegger and Edmund Husserl through the teaching of Alfred Schutz, who was also Berger's PhD adviser.
Narrative turn
During
the 1970s and 1980s, social constructionist theory underwent a
transformation as constructionist sociologists engaged with the work of Michel Foucault and others as a narrative turn in the social sciences was worked out in practice. This particularly affected the emergent sociology of science and the growing field of science and technology studies. In particular, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar,
and others used social constructionism to relate what science has
typically characterized as objective facts to the processes of social
construction. Their goal was to show that human subjectivity
imposes itself on the facts taken as objective, not solely the other
way around. A particularly provocative title in this line of thought is Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. At the same time, social constructionism shaped studies of technology – the Sofield, especially on the social construction of technology, or SCOT, and authors as Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Maarten van Wesel, etc. Despite its common perception as objective, mathematics is not immune to social constructionist accounts. Sociologists such as Sal Restivo and Randall Collins, mathematicians including Reuben Hersh and Philip J. Davis, and philosophers including Paul Ernest have published social constructionist treatments of mathematics.
Postmodernism
Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the ongoing mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at a time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity. These worldviews are gradually crystallized by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions; given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy; maintained by therapies and socialization; and subjectively internalized by upbringing and education. Together, these become part of the identity of social citizens.
In the book The Reality of Social Construction, the
British sociologist Dave Elder-Vass places the development of social
constructionism as one outcome of the legacy of postmodernism. He writes
"Perhaps the most widespread and influential product of this process
[coming to terms with the legacy of postmodernism] is social
constructionism, which has been booming [within the domain of social
theory] since the 1980s."
Critics argue that social constructionism rejects the influences of biology on behaviour and culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behaviour. Scientific estimates of nature versus nurture and gene–environment interactions have shown almost always substantial influences of both genetics and social experiences, often in an inseparable manner. Claims that genetics does not affect humans are seen as outdated by most contemporary scholars of human development.
Social constructionism has also been criticized for having an overly narrow focus on society and culture as a causal factor
in human behavior, excluding the influence of innate biological
tendencies. This criticism has been explored by psychologists such as Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate as well as by Asian studies scholar Edward Slingerland in What Science Offers the Humanities. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides used the term standard social science model to refer to social theories that they believe fail to take into account the evolved properties of the brain.
In 1996, to illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual
weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, physics
professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to the academic journal Social Text deliberately written to be incomprehensible but including phrases and jargon typical of the articles published by the journal. The submission,
which was published, was an experiment to see if the journal would
"publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded
good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." In 1999, Sokal, with coauthor Jean Bricmont published the book Fashionable Nonsense, which criticized postmodernism and social constructionism.
Philosopher Paul Boghossian has also written against social constructionism. He follows Ian Hacking's
argument that many adopt social constructionism because of its
potentially liberating stance: if things are the way that they are only
because of human social conventions, as opposed to being so naturally,
then it should be possible to change them into how people would rather
have them be. He then states that social constructionists argue that
people should refrain from making absolute judgements about what is true
and instead state that something is true in the light of this or that
theory. Countering this, he states:
But it is hard to see how we might
coherently follow this advice. Given that the propositions which make up
epistemic systems are just very general propositions about what
absolutely justifies what, it makes no sense to insist that we abandon
making absolute particular judgements about what justifies what while allowing us to accept absolute general judgements about what justifies what. But in effect this is what the epistemic relativist is recommending.
Woolgar and Pawluch argue that constructionists tend to "ontologically gerrymander" social conditions in and out of their analysis.
Alan Sokal also criticizes social constructionism for
contradicting itself on the knowability of the existence of societies.
The argument is that if there was no knowable objective reality, there
would be no way of knowing whether or not societies exist and if so,
what their rules and other characteristics are. One example of the
contradiction is that the claim that "phenomena must be measured by what
is considered average in their respective cultures, not by an objective
standard." Since there are languages that have no word for average and therefore
the whole application of the concept of "average" to such cultures
contradict social constructionism's own claim that cultures can only be
measured by their own standards. Social constructionism is a diverse
field with varying stances on these matters. Some social
constructionists do acknowledge the existence of an objective reality
but argue that human understanding and interpretation of that reality
are socially constructed. Others might contend that while the term average
may not exist in all languages, equivalent or analogous concepts might
still be applied within those cultures, thereby not completely
invalidating the principle of cultural relativity in measuring
phenomena.
