Constructing Social Reality: An Inquiry Into the Normative Foundations of Social Change
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Some of the most significant obstacles to human well-being today are habits of Western thought that have been exported around the world. These habits include dichotomous conceptions of truth and relativity, cynical conceptions of knowledge and power, and conflictual conceptions of science and religion. Michael Karlberg articulates a framework for reconciling each of these false dichotomies in a critically informed and constructive manner. He does this, in philosophical terms, by reconciling ontological foundationalism and epistemological relativism within a moderate social constructionist framework. Karlberg's timely and accessible argument is offered with a spirit of humility and open-mindedness, inviting dialogue characterized by the same spirit, born out of genuine concern for the betterment of humanity at this critical juncture in history.
Author
Michael Karlberg
Michael Karlberg is a professor of Communication Studies at Western Washington University. His scholarship interrogates the intellectual foundations of Western civilization, including conceptions of human nature, power, social organization, and social change. His first book, Beyond the Culture of Contest, examines the socially unjust and ecologically ruinous consequences of organizing dominant social institutions and practices in a competitive manner. His new book, Constructing Social Reality builds on that work by examining the relativism, cynicism, and materialism the culture of contest gives rise to, and how this undermines struggles to construct more peaceful and just social forms. His current research is examining theories of social change, and their translation into movement practice, with a specific focus on how the relationship between ends and means is conceptualized and enacted.
Reviews
When the paradigm-shifting scholars of this age are remembered, Michael Karlberg will be among them. This, his most recent book, clears a discursive path out of the thick forest that has gathered in the fertile fields of social epistemology, normative values, and social change. He achieves this by describing—in lucid, systematic, and accessible ways—how confidence in our ability to perceive, evaluate, and act upon socially embedded truths and enduring collective values might be restored. Indeed, students, scholars, and practitioners in a wide variety of disciplines will find in Constructing Social Reality many unique and refreshing insights that address the normative and epistemic debates that have eroded confidence in values-driven social action.
Michael L. Penn, PhD, Author of Overcoming Violence Against Women and Girls: The International Campaign to Eradicate a Worldwide Problem (Rowman & Littlefield),and co-editor of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Dignity and Human Rights with Hoda Mahmoudi (Emerald Publishing)
In Constructing Social Reality: An Inquiry into the Normative Foundations of Social Change, Michael Karlberg adroitly leads us to understand that true social change requires change in our ontological and epistemological assumptions, that is, change at the level of how we understand reality and how we understand knowledge. In this text, he systematically resolves key normative tensions in Western philosophy, supporting the kind of radical transformation of thought needed to bring today's society back from the existential threat of self-destruction. Far from leaving us hopeless in the face of such threats, he offers insights which make human oneness, and the spiritual and material prosperity of humankind, seem within reach. An urgent read for those willing to think deeply about the challenges confronting us in these perplexing times and arise to new forms of constructive action.
Layli Maparyan, PhD, Author, The Womanist Reader and The Womanist Idea
Michael Karlberg's engaging new book, Constructing Social Reality, presents a plausible intellectual guide for navigating the treacherous waters of contemporary critical philosophy and the social sciences. In an accessible and fluid prose style, Karlberg demonstrates how we can create a plausible normative and moral framework for knowledge generation. This new framework reveals how the polarities of truth and relativism, knowledge and power and science and religion can be reconciled. Once reconciled, we can generate knowledge that moves us from mere contemplation to constructive action for a just and peaceful world.
Dr. Michael Welton, Professor and author of Designing the Just Learning Society: A Critical Inquiry
Constructing Social Reality is a critical contribution to a Bahá’í-inspired intellectual engagement with contemporary discourses in philosophy, religion, social theory, and approaches to social change. Karlberg opens a path toward resolving the tensions between foundationalism and relativism, and toward rethinking the relationship between science and religion as part of a radically constructive programme for releasing the powers of the human spirit in collective action.
David A. Palmer, Professor of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong
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