8) The problems of social interaction and reality in sociology

Social reality is distinct from biological reality or individual cognitive reality, representing as it does a phenomenological level created through social interaction and transcending thereby individual motives and actions.

The product of human dialogue, social reality may be considered as consisting of the accepted social tenets of a community, involving thereby relatively stable laws and Social representations

Radical constructivism would cautiously describe social reality as the product of uniformities among observers (whether or not including the current observer themselves.^[2]

The problem of social reality has been treated exhaustively by philosophers in the phenomenological tradition, particularly Alfred Schütz, who used the term "social world" to designate this distinct level of reality. Within the social world Schütz distinguished between social reality that could be experienced directly (umwelt) and a social reality beyond the immediate horizon, which could yet be experienced if sought out.^[3] In his wake, ethnomethodology explored further the unarticulated structure of our everyday competence and ability with social reality.^[4]

Previously, the subject had been addressed in sociology as well as other disciplines, Durkheim for example stressing the distinct nature of “the social kingdom. Here more than anywhere else the idea is the reality”.^[5] Herbert Spencer had coined the term super-organic to distinguish the social level of reality above the biological and psychological.^[6

John Searle has used the theory of speech acts to explore the nature of social/institutional reality, so as to describe such aspects of social reality which he instances under the rubrics of “marriage, property, hiring, firing, war, revolutions, cocktail parties, governments, meetings, unions, parliaments, corporations, laws, restaurants, vacations, lawyers, professors, doctors, medieval knights, and taxes, for example”.^[7]

Searle argued that such institutional realities interact with each other in what he called “systematic relationships (e.g., governments, marriages, corporations, universities, armies, churches)”^[8] to create a multi-layered social reality.

For Searle, language was the key to the formation of social reality because “language is precisely designed to be a self-identifying category of institutional facts” - a system of publicly and widely accepted symbols which “persist through time independently of the urges and inclinations of the participants.”^[9]

Objective/subjective

There is a debate in social theory about whether social reality exists independently of people's involvement with it, or whether (as in social constructionism) it is only created by the human process of ongoing interaction.^[10]

Peter L. Berger argued for a new concern with the basic process of the social construction of reality;^[11] and in similar fashion, post-Sartrians like R. D. Laing stress that “once certain fundamental structures of experience are shared, they come to be experienced as objective entities...they take on the force and character of partial autonomous realities, with their own way of life”.^[12] Yet at the same time, Laing insisted that such a socially real grouping “can be nothing else than the multiplicity of the points of view and actions of its members...even where, through the interiorization of this multiplicity as synthesized by each, this synthesized multiplicity becomes ubiquitous in space and enduring in time”.^[13]

The existence of a social reality independent of individuals or the ecology would seem at odds with the views of perceptual psychology, including those of J. J. Gibson, and those of most ecological economics theories^{[citation needed]}.

Scholars such as John Searle argue on the one hand that “a socially constructed reality presupposes a reality independent of all social constructions”.^[14] At the same time, he accepts that social realities are humanly created, and that “the secret to understanding the continued existence of institutional facts is simply that the individuals directly involved and a sufficient number of members of the relevant communities must continue to recognize and accept the existence of such facts”.

9. Durkheim’s Study of Suicide.

Box 1.1. Around the World. Four Types of Suicide

Altruistic suicide	Egoistic suicide	Anomic suicide	Fatalistic suicide
A person feels a deep sense of moral obligation and is willing to place the group’s welfare above his or her own survival. A spy who is captured and swallows a poison capsule, rather than taking the risk of disclosing secrets, has committed altruistic suicide.	This type of suicide is just the opposite of altruistic. It occurs when the individual feels little connection to the larger society and is not affected by social constraints against self-destructive behavior. A lonely person who lives in a skid row hotel room with no friends or family may resort to egoistic suicide.	When a society lacks clear-cut rules of social behavior, anomic suicide can result. Such suicides are particularly likely to occur in a time of great social disorder or turmoil, as in the United States shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. People who lost all their savings and were unable to cope with their misfortune turned to anomic suicide.	Whereas anomic suicide stems from a sense of disorder, fatalistic suicide is related to the powerlessness that people feel when their lives are regulated to an intolerable extent. A prisoner who can no longer bear confinement may find a ″way out″ through fatalistic suicide.
Durkheim’s division of suicide into these four categories forms a typology. A typology is a classification scheme containing two or more mutually exclusive categories (types); it is used by sociologists to better understand different forms of behavior.

Durkheim was primarily concerned not with the personalities of individual suicide victims, but rather with suicide rates and how they varied from country to country. Durkheim went much deeper into his investigation of suicide rates, and the result was his landmark work Suicide, published in 1897. Durkheim refused to automatically accept unproven explanations regarding suicide, including the beliefs that such deaths were caused by cosmic forces or by inherited tendencies. Instead, he focused on such problems as the cohesiveness or lack of cohesiveness of religious and occupational groups. Durkheim’s theory is the first of many introduced in this textbook as a way of better understanding society. One means of classifying sociological theories is by the subject under study; for example, there are theories concerning the causes of criminal behavior or the universal nature of religion. Yet theories can also be distinguished in another way – by level of analysis.