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The Reality Of Social Construction By Dave Elder Vass

Decent Essays

In the Chapter 3 of “The Reality of Social Construction”, Dave Elder-Vass examines the academic views about culture and rules. He calls cultural realism the view according to which culture and rules exist independently of people. In this chapter, the author explains the reason why he does not agree with the academic view of culture.
What is culture? How we can define it? According to Jay, culture can be defined as a combination of “practices, rituals, institutions and material artefacts, as well as texts, ideas and images”. However, Elder-Vass says that is possible to define culture only considering its ontological nature. The culture can be subjective, that is it exists as the mental proprieties of individuals, or objective, depending on something beyond the individual. Elder-Vass affirms that culture has subjective and objective features. Regarding to the subjective perspective, it doesn’t consider one of the …show more content…

Wittgenstein talks about this topic and affirms “what constitutes a rule is our collective use of it”: Elder-Vass argues that Wittgenstein doesn’t consider that everyone is in the same position because nobody is sure about the right understanding of the rule. Turner tries to find an answer to this question he describing two kind of sameness: instrumental sameness and causal sameness. The first one explains how different behaviors can lead to the same practical outcome; the second one occurs when the behavior of different individuals is driven by the same beliefs. The norm circles model consider only the instrumental sameness: according to this, the author affirms that is not necessary to understand the same kind of behavior in the same way, but is important that the members of the group recognize whether any given action conforms to their understandings of the norm and that their understanding are coherent with the

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