Can social reality be interpreted objectively?

John R. Searle in The Construction of Social Reality makes a distinction between "institutional facts" and "brute facts." The brute facts of the physical universe such as the distance between the earth and sun or the speed of light exist independent even of human existence.
Institutional facts are agreed on by convention. Thus whether, for example, someone is the citizen of a country or whether a couple is considered as married under the laws of a particular country is an institutional fact, dependent on a legal context.
Nevertheless, there is an objective component to many such facts. Either a couple is or is not married under a certain legal system, independent of whether, for example, they deeply love each other or feel a great deal of emotional closeness over an extended period. Similarly, someone born and raised in a country, who may emotionally be quite patriotic and assimilated to a country's culture may not be a legal citizen.
Many social reform movements such as ones concerning gay marriage or DACA focus on this disconnect between an emotional truth and an objective one concerning institutional facts.


Many anthropologists believe that it is not possible to objectively perceive a culture (especially one’s own culture) that exists within the world we also inhabit. We are inevitably influenced by our own sociocultural reality; it is the only reality we could possibly know, for our very subjectivities have been shaped by this reality, and collectively we are responsible for the continual creation and maintenance of this reality. In other words, if reality is socioculturally constructed, we are necessarily the constructors, and therefore bias is inescapable. James Faubion’s thoughts about freedom in Anthropology of Ethics offer a way of understanding this inevitable entrapment within a culturally constructed reality and the possibility of freedom from this structure. Faubion suggests that as social scientists, our best shot at freedom (or objectivity) is to always think critically about the fact of our limitations, to at least acknowledge our culturally constructed reality and the biases that accompany it.
http://aotcpress.com/articles/ethical-subjects-freedom-constraint-anthropology-morality/

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