Understanding Knowledge: Individual and Social Construction
The Individual and Social Construction of Knowledge
Subjective Construction of Knowledge
There is no knowledge without a knowing subject; this is someone who can know. So, the question of how knowledge arises must be based on studying how it originates and develops at a subjective level.
The Role of Feelings
Living things have in common that they are sensitive to external stimuli. While each organism expresses this sensitivity in different ways, the sense organs are the structures by which the nervous system communicates with the world.
Sensitive systems of organisms respond to specific amounts of stimuli. Each species has different degrees of uptake of environmental stimuli, and thus their experience of the environment is different.
The different types of components continuously interact with the senses, giving rise to the first level of approach to reality: the sensations. To begin to speak of knowledge, it is necessary that these sensations are organized and have a sense, becoming a perception.
The Significance of Perception
The perception of human beings is a process through which information from its surroundings is organized, developed, and interpreted. Perceiving feelings assimilates them with meaning.
So, the act of perception involves the active participation of the subject because it is anticipating, collecting, ordering their world from their experiences, emotions, etc.
When referring to a block, it activates all neurons involved in the analysis of each property of the block. However, the block will not be perceived in the same way by someone who has not eaten for days as by someone who just left a wedding banquet. Perception is a constructive process.
Thinking of the World: Concepts
Sense knowledge is the beginning of the process of knowledge. The next step is the leap to generalization, to the formation of concepts, and ultimately to complex thinking, which builds reasoning.
Human knowledge works with concepts. From the perceptions of particular objects, general concepts are constructed which include the particular information.
Thought represents objects by concepts, which is why a concept is the mental and symbolic representation of an object, regardless of their specific, individual characteristics, reflecting those they share with others.
The Social Construction of Knowledge
Human knowledge is twofold: it seeks to know reality and is a socially constructed product, that is, it only makes sense when several subjects share and build up communication. The human being is the animal with fewer instinctual codes and the greater capacity to learn in their first years of life. This process of acquiring knowledge is always in a social context, which gives a specific order.
Through the socialization process, internalized social norms are learned habits and a number of ethical and moral standards that dictate how to behave. A number of cognitive learning processes are acquired.
This knowledge is prevalent in society as something prior to individual experience, providing the latter with meaning. This organization, although a particular socio-historical situation, is presented to the individual as the natural way of seeing the world.