Abstract

Social constructivism is concerned with how our social realities come about: how is it that ontologically subjective and epistemologically objective mental representations like identities, states, or security turn into reciprocally institutionalized roles and come to be taken as real and as indisputable as the physical reality we can touch, smell, and see? Social constructivism is interested in how deontic powers such as ‘rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, authorizations, entitlements, and so on’ (Searle 2011: 9) are brought about. From such a general viewpoint, ‘ideas matter’ when they are used to assign and eliminate deontological modalities, i.e., partake in ‘the creation of commitments, the assignment and elimination of rights and entitlements or obligations, the legitimation of expectations, and the like’ (Sbisà 1999: 11).