Social Construction and Madness
“Today is a great triumph. There is a king of Spain. He has been found at last. That king is me.” ~ Nikolai Gogol
What makes a “social object” “really real”? What is a “social object”, and what would it mean for anything to be “really real”, as opposed to just plain real? The common-sense (ala naive) understanding, is to suggest that things like chairs and tennis balls and bullets are “really real”, while things like “money” and “borders” and “kings” are only just “socially” real (if real at all). However, depending on the scope of the analysis, it is not so easy to draw the line implicit in the previous examples.