Social Construction

Emily asked, "What is the relationship between social constructs and cognitive constructs of knowledge?"

I would argue that social constructs are the result of cognitive constructs. As we, as a species, began to create these sorts of cognitive constructs that we currently hold, one of the natural uses of this ordering was to create a system to organize communities. As our species developed in terms of cognitive ability and began to build more complex systems of knowledge by which to understand the world around us, we built increasingly complex systems of organization, chief among them being the written word, which enabled the development of our complex systems of language, a requisite for mathematics, science, philosophy, government, religion, etc, etc, etc.

These systems became widely accepted (the precursors of our society today) through the appeal of the mental processes that went in to their creation. It is a human universal, the creation of communities and societies, for while each society, culture, community, what have you, looks different, and has its own rules and regulations, all of them were generated by the same cognitive processes.

To end with a question: How might a radical constructivist explain social constructions like governments, religion, etc?