The view that some aspect of the world is an artefact of social practices, including language and institutionalized ways of categorizing the world. In his book The Social Construction of What? Ian Hacking reports that books can be found entitled ‘the social construction of X’ for examples beginning with every letter of the alphabet except X itself, from ‘anarchy’ to ‘zulu nationalism’. A phrase like ‘the social construction of heroism’ refers to the way in which common perceptions, myths, images and fantasies go to make up what people understand by the idea. When the aspect of the world in question is not itself obviously social, but taken to include objects of scientific interest like quarks or geological epochs or diseases, the idea of their social construction is apt to be resisted as introducing idealism, although there is no reason why a concept should not have a social history and carry a good deal of ideological baggage, even if the thing it refers to does not.