Social construction of knowledge

Social construction of knowledge is the view that knowledge is not merely discovered by individuals but produced through social processes — negotiation, contestation, institutionalization, and collective validation. The concept is most closely associated with the sociology of science (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Latour and Woolgar, 1979) but has implications for any domain where knowledge claims must be justified to a community.

The social construction of knowledge is not the same as relativism. It does not claim that all knowledge claims are equally valid. It claims that the criteria of validity are themselves the product of social processes — that what counts as evidence, what counts as a valid inference, and what counts as an acceptable conclusion are established through the practices of knowledge communities. Scientific knowledge is robust not because it is socially constructed but because it is socially constructed through practices that include empirical testing, peer review, and open contestation.

For cognitive engineering, the social construction of knowledge raises a neglected question: how does the cognitive fit of a system change when the operator is not an individual but a distributed network of people, tools, and protocols? The collective cognition problem in cognitive engineering is precisely the problem of designing systems that support the social construction of valid knowledge under time pressure and uncertainty.

• Cognitive engineering — the field whose collective cognition problem this concept addresses
• Collective Intelligence — the emergent cognitive capacity of groups
• Peer Review — the institutional mechanism of social knowledge validation
• Scientific Consensus — the social outcome of knowledge construction in science
• Epistemology — the philosophy of knowledge, of which social construction is one strand