San Antonio College Library

The Social Construction of Reality introduced the term social construction into the social sciences. The central concept of The Social Construction of Reality is that persons and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available...

"Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality."--Jacket.

Forthright and wryly humorous, philosopher Susan Haack deploys her analytic skills on some of the most highly charged cultural and social debates of recent years. Relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action, pragmatisms old and new, science, literature, the future of the academy and of philosophy itself - all come under her keen scrutiny in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate. Haack's goal in these essays is to get beyond fads, fashions,...

Computers have changed our lives; with virtual reality, they will change our very experience, recreating it in an image of our choosing. That, at least, is what the champions of virtual reality claim. It will not simply reshape our view of technology, they say, but our view of ourselves and the world we live in. It is about the increasing power of information technology to create simulated environments, new universes that are neither actual nor fictional,...

The author depicts his instruction by the sorcerer Don Juan in the mystical religious concepts and practices of the Mexican Indians.