As I see it, Berger and Luckman are illustrating a relationship between man, social reality (institutions and their control over human behavior) and what is considered man’s objective reality. Man produces a social reality and this social reality reciprocally controls man’s behavior, thereby institutionalizing him. Together this relationship creates a third party or resultant phenomena: social reality becomes man’s objective reality where man becomes a product. This idea resonates with Pierce and Vygotsky to certain extents as well.
Vygotsky explains the analogous relationship between tools and signs. Although they are not identical in their similarities they are mutually linked. Tools are man’s external method of mastering nature. Signs are man’s internal way of mastering his/her own nature. However, “Man’s alteration of nature alters man’s own nature” (55). This reciprocal relationship illustrates that man’s external activities that are “socially rooted and historically developed,” are internalized. Berger and Luckman express the effect of internalization on society when they write, “A world [the objectivity of the institutional world] so regarded attains a firmness in consciousness; it becomes real in an ever more massive way and it can no longer be changes so readily” (4).
Although I do not fully understand Pierce, I feel he relates to Vygotsky and Berger and Luckman when he writes, “It is that the word or sign that man uses is the man himself. For the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign” (2). Pierce agrees with Berger and Luckman clearly by the statement that man is a product of himself.
Wow, what I wrote doesn’t seem to make much sense.
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