My Position

I endorse the contextual constructionist position while being unwilling to reject the basic insights of the strict constructionist. I believe further that realism and relativism are reconcilable through the mediation of rhetoric. These views are developed below by way of a series of subordinate claims.

1. The seeming contradiction between strict constructionism and contextual constructionism can be resolved when once we realize that the two types of constructionist are operating at different levels of reality.

a. Contextual constructionists make reality claims when they assert, for example, that some statistics put forward by missing children claims-makers are more accurate than others, or that child abuse has become real by virtue of a process of social influence leading to a change in cultural consciousness, or that social problems generally are products of modernity.

b. Strict constructionists make reality claims when they "go meta" (Simons, 1994) to contextual constructionists, claiming that they engage in ontological gerrymandering. Woolgar (1983) acknowledges as much in an essay on irony in the social sciences. Even the strict constructionist cannot escape objectivism entirely, he says.

This in no way detracts from the validity of the strict constructionist's insights about the practice of ontological gerrymandering. It is a useful form of epistemological deconstruction. Paradoxically, however, strict constructionism has little to say about the everyday practices of social construction while contextual constructionists perform that very function, even at the risk of appearing self-contradictory. Best (1993:123) puts the matter more forcefully:

The sociology of social problems began with the assumption that sociological knowledge might help people understand and improve the world; strict constructionism sells that birthright for a mess of epistemology.

2. Realism and relativism are reconcilable through the mediation of rhetoric. Claims about relativism cannot escape realism (of a sort), and claims about social reality--e.g., this is a ten dollar bill; female spouses are more often victims than victimizers of their male counterparts--cannot escape relativism (of a sort). With Fuller (1993) and Campbell (1997) I believe that Plato's Socrates misrepresented Protagorean relativism when he conflated it with antirealism. The Protagorean maxim, "man is the measure of all things," need not be interpreted as a case for solipsism. Says Fuller. "Anthropos in its orginal Sophistic use referred to the 'average man' in a community, in terms of whose standards one could tell whether one was in the right or the wrong....Socrates obscured for future generations the possibility that relativism might be aligned with realism--that there might be spatiotemporally indexed 'facts of the matter'" (320).

Rhetoric, as I have suggested, is the glue that can bind realism and relativism together. With Aristotle, I view the practice of rhetoric as potentially a means of arriving collectively at wise or prudential judgments on issues for which there can be no formal proof. But it would be a mistake to assume that rhetoric is always knowledge-generating, in the sense of producing consensually validated fact. Sometimes, as Prelli observed, it is highly polarizing. Sometimes, I would add, it is unjustly unifying. A necessary counterpart of an adjudicative rhetoric is a critical hermeneutics that can assess the adequacy of premises as well as the comparative value of different argument forms. But this too is part of what I think of as the process of rhetorical practice. People argue; others assess those arguments and then respond; still others chime in. Rather than restrict our sense of rhetorical practice to a single episode--a speech or a debate, for example, we would be better off thinking of it in the Burkean sense of an extended "conversation" involving multiple participants that can take place for years or even millennia.

3. Rhetoric plays a significant role in the creation of what Searle calls "institutionalized facts."

The notion of "institutional facts," as opposed to "brute facts," is illustrated by Searle (1995) with respect to ten dollar bills. Searle argues that while "ten dollar bills" are real enough, they are also social constructions, made real and continuing as real by tacit agreement of an interpretive community. The process of construction, as Searle points out, is enormously complex; and, in some contexts (e.g., play money, counterfeit money, torn money), background assumptions warranting some bills as worth ten dollars and others as not are routinely trotted out. One feature of ten dollar bills is that they are "collectively intended" to serve as currency. They serve in this connection as "institutionalized" constructions. Thus, the statement, "This is a ten dollar bill," is an "institutional fact" rather than a "brute fact."

Many institutional facts seem objective, says Searle, in the sense that "they are not a matter of your or my preferences, evaluations, or moral preferences." Examples include that Searle is a citizen of the United States, that his younger sister got married on December 14, and that the New York Giants won the 1991 superbowl. I take Searle at his word about these claims; I have no reason not to. However, with Margolis (1995, I would observe that such notions as citizenship, the United States, kinship and marriage have histories. As Margolis (1995) puts it, these claims are true, given the "saliencies of our age." In previous centuries, for example, the welfare of children was not considered as important as it is today; this, as Best (1990) argues, is one reason why the "fact" of child abuse only recently became institutionalized.

Searle would I think agree that what is taken as objectively true today may be a product of past contention--of argument and counterargument--that has resulted, at least temporarily, in communal agreement. The relativist is fond of pointing out that what is taken as objectively true today may become tomorrow's mythology. This in my view is not a refutation of realism but rather constitutes support for an argument-based realism.

4. Rhetoric (i.e., persuasion) is one among several factors influencing what a group or entire culture takes to be real. Others include technological advancement, social pressures, and the power of rewards and punishments (Best, 1990).

5. Persuasion includes (a) appeals to common ground, (b) taking the perspective of the other, (c) appealing to an authoritative third party.

(a) Opponents in argument may nevertheless agree on what it would take to make a convincing argument. Building on that, one side may eventually convince the other. For example, missing children crusaders have evidently been convinced that their initial estimates of the magnitude of the "stranger abduction" aspect of the problem were exaggerated.

(b) One side can appeal to another's self-interest. On the matter of expanding the definition of date rape, for example, critics of the expanded definition could suggest to feminists that the consequences of such a definition are not in their own best interests. Do feminists wish to perpetuate a stereotype of woman as helpless victim? Do they wish to return to a pre-sixties Victorianism as regards sexual matters? Roiphe argued along these lines with a view toward shaping what our culture will ultimately come to regard as an institutional fact.

(c) Skeptical of their ability to win over opponents, advocates may take their case to the media, or to policy-makers, or to the courts. For example, critics of "recovered memory" claimants have succeeded in the courts.

Best (1990) speaks of the process by which reality claims about problems get tested as involving a complex "dialogue" among opponents vis the mass media and other third parties, each of which has its own interests.

6. There is not one "reality" but several. This isn't just a matter of different levels of reality (as in point 1 above).

(1) Multiple notions of "reality"

a. That which any given individual believes is real. [This reflects an extreme version of relativism, called the solipsistic view. There's no refuting it, but it isn't very useful.]

b. That which "is the case" no matter how many people believe it to be true at any given time. e.g., A minority of people believe that there have been abductions by aliens. That they are in a minority does not dissuade them from the "well documented truth" of their position. Perhaps there have been abductions by aliens.

c. That which is consensually validated as true or real by members of a culture at a given time. e.g., See Pfohl on how child abuse came to be labeled as such (in 1962) and seen as real. See Best on how the definition got radically expanded in the seventies and eighties.

d. But does that mean that child abuse didn't exist before that collective consciousness set in? Hacking says yes and no in answer to that question. He's right. ("Yes," because child abuse, in a sense, is only a social construction. And "yes" because labeling something changes how we think about and act toward it, including how perpetrators and victims of child abuse think about their own actions. But "No" because, from the perspective of today's collective consciousness, child abuse has always existed; people "back then" simply didn't "realize it" at the time.)

Perhaps we need different terms for different meanings of "reality."

7. The foregoing has normative implications for the conduct of the "conversation" about social problems. Without necessarily agreeing on what would count as "progress" as regards the substance of any given given dispute, I believe we could say that the process of discussion would exhibit progress if opposing parties (and also third parties) truly engaged each other's ideas. Engagement means hearing the other out, indicating areas of agreement and disagreement, putting forward counterarguments, etc.