What Do Postmodernists Mean When They Say Knowledge is Socially Constructed?

A brief explanation about how social constructivists view language.

According to postmodernism all language is “socially constructed.” This is hardly a new idea, and most philosophers of language would agree that humans construct the vocabulary they use. Where the postmodern thinker makes hay is in the way that this idea is applied and in the conclusions that are drawn from the idea that language as constructed by humans. We use categories not only to communicate, but also as intellectual tools to carve up the world and organize our understanding of reality . We use categories (as well as names, labels, descriptions, and so on) to intellectually break apart to world, to divide it up, and to organize it so we can both think about it and communicate about it.

Because this is one of the more difficult postmodern ideas to understand, let’s give an example:

Think of a forest. The forest contains many objects. Suppose you’re the first person to discover a forest and you want to study it. What you might do is try and figure what is in the forest. So you go walking and see a lot of really tall things with a brown trunk and green leafy things on top. You decide that all the things that are tall with brown trunks are categorized as “trees.” You see things running about roaring and growling. You categorize them as “animals.” You see things fly and chirp and make nests, so you categorize those as “birds.”

We put things in categories to intellectually organize them so we can makes sense of the world depending on what we are trying to do. Of course, we also categorize at different levels. Using the example of a tree the top level is the category “tree.” The next level what makes up the tree: “leaves,” “branches,” “bark,” and “roots.” Going down a level we get things like molecules, atoms and so on. In this process we can make categories that start at the highest level with the category “forest,” move down a level to “trees,” move down to “leaves” we can even categorize the individual and interconnected parts of leaves as seen in this diagram here:

The idea here is that we use categories as linguistic baskets in which we can put objects that are relevantly similar. So in the basket “tree” goes such things as redwoods, evergreens, Oaks, and other tall, leafy, branch filled, bark covered plants. On postmodernism, the idea is that we can construct any category we want, and we can organize things however we want, and (here is the key) the categories we use are utterly arbitrary.

The arbitrariness of categories can be illustrated when you think about how one might organize books. You can organize books in order of author, genre, length, publisher, fiction/non-fiction, or by the colour of the cover:

Postmodern thinkers see that we can organize the world using whatever categories we want to invent and organize it according to whatever our goals and interest are. It’s up to us. There is no objectively right way to do it.

Now, this next bit is the key to the whole thing.