Social constructs.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Quoting Erik
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm stealing unashamedly from contexts where things maybe made more sense than they do in isolated conjunction.
I find a neat way of elucidating a concept such as 'social construct' is to find the negative space. I guess this is the analytic mode, or possibly the naive mode. Some concepts are constructed - 'property' for example - and others are... what? Found, I suppose. 'Gravity' kind of imposes itself on us as inescapable, whether one has the concept or not.
But then one can equally claim that language itself is a construct, and then one might conclude that every concept inextricably entwines what the analyst wants to distinguish, which is the world and what we make of it.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
Of course it is the analytic science based view - that we can get at the world unmediated by our constructions- that has a use for the notion of a 'social' construct as distinguished from a 'real' or 'physical' one. Whereas the postmodern has no use for this distinction. Not that this is an easy distinction to make or obvious in every case, but it is the scientist, particularly the social scientist who even thinks it worth trying to disentangle the two.
So to come back to BC's quote at the top, one must surely want to say that there are facts of human nature if only that they are social constructers that are not, or not entirely social constructs. And at the same time, one has to accept that whether a Jew or a Negro is fully human is a matter of constructive dogma. Have the postmoderns won, or is there still a use for the scientific view? Is it worth trying to disentangle the construct from the concrete?
Human nature, according to modern Marxist thinkers is constructed.
Quoting Erik
But it doesn't it seem, StreetlightX, that the term 'social construct' is tinged with a certain sense of arbitrariness? Even more than arbitrariness, actually, but downright calculated maliciousness, especially when paired with typical hierarchical relations of power and domination that characterize almost every social and political configuration?
Quoting StreetlightX
the idea that 'the social' constructs anything at all doesn't 'answer' the question of what something is/how something comes about - all it does is shift the answer one step back: what in turn, 'constructs the social' (this is what Darth, I think, was getting at)? In no postmodern-associated text I know (which is not to say all of them!) is 'the social' treated as an explanatory principle - in all cases would 'the social' itself - or at least it's workings - be something to be explained.
This is not to say the phrase can't be used productively, by the way. In fact, it's strongest associations are with the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who are anything but 'postmodernists', and their whole idea was to provide precisely a social theory by which to explain 'how society works'.
I'm stealing unashamedly from contexts where things maybe made more sense than they do in isolated conjunction.
I find a neat way of elucidating a concept such as 'social construct' is to find the negative space. I guess this is the analytic mode, or possibly the naive mode. Some concepts are constructed - 'property' for example - and others are... what? Found, I suppose. 'Gravity' kind of imposes itself on us as inescapable, whether one has the concept or not.
But then one can equally claim that language itself is a construct, and then one might conclude that every concept inextricably entwines what the analyst wants to distinguish, which is the world and what we make of it.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
"Race is a social construct" for instance is neither accurate nor useful, and it by definition discards the genetic reality that modern science holds as the objective differences between races. While it's true a specific distribution of genetic traits exists on a spectrum (i.e: the genetic trends of characteristics which delineate ethnic groups), to ignore that ethnic gene-pools do have different characteristics is to ignore reality.
— VagabondSpectre
But if I remember correctly, the American Anthropological Association Statement on Race says:
1.) There are no biological races in the human species.
2.) Race is a cultural construct based on arbitrary characteristics.
3.) Race was created to justify imperial/colonial subjugation of people.
4.) The genetic variation within racial groups that we have constructed is greater than the genetic variation between those groups.
The American Anthropological Association is a scientific organization, not a postmodern theorist.
Of course it is the analytic science based view - that we can get at the world unmediated by our constructions- that has a use for the notion of a 'social' construct as distinguished from a 'real' or 'physical' one. Whereas the postmodern has no use for this distinction. Not that this is an easy distinction to make or obvious in every case, but it is the scientist, particularly the social scientist who even thinks it worth trying to disentangle the two.
So to come back to BC's quote at the top, one must surely want to say that there are facts of human nature if only that they are social constructers that are not, or not entirely social constructs. And at the same time, one has to accept that whether a Jew or a Negro is fully human is a matter of constructive dogma. Have the postmoderns won, or is there still a use for the scientific view? Is it worth trying to disentangle the construct from the concrete?
Comments (259)
Saying there are facts of human nature doesnt' change the fact that many of those facts are constructed by human choice of classification and that our views and notions of those facts are always mitigated by the human constructs of language, culture, and society.
As to races, they are a separate human construct even from the human construct of biological and anthropological classification as humans are not scientifically classified by the color of the skin or width or breadth of their eyes. So, to say the races arent different, is not only recognizing human constructs in the classification of the races, it is respecting the materially-supported "constructs" of Science, Biology, and Anthropology that reject the notion that racial classification is actually scientific..
I think that what we are at any moment is one tiny manifestation of the human potential. Manifestations are shaped many things, positive and negative.
It must be, or we're back where this all started: staring at amorphous shadows projected on cave walls.
When it comes to the "post-modern" rejection of scientific truth, I believe it is mostly born from a layman's understanding of what science actually is, how and why it works, and hence the nature and value of scientific truth.
For example: disagreement between prominent fields of study/research groups/individual scientists is often taken by layman observers as a sign that science as a whole is questionable because there is no absolutely unanimous consensus among scientists (anything short of absolute certainty is fertile ground for a stubborn rejection). Another severe point of confusion afflicts scientific fields of study which become too complex for most individuals to follow and comprehend. The well-founded conclusions of a complex theory can be easily dismissed by an individual if they misunderstand it and it's implications. The genetics of race is a great example of this: On one side of the layman spectrum there is a growing movement of "race realism" whose understanding of the actual genetic differences between races is non-existent, and yet they constantly talk about differences between the mean IQ of various races as an important point of understanding. On the other end of the spectrum, everyone is so afraid that if we discover genetic differences between races it would lead to racism that to even broach the topic might be taken as offensive, likely made more paranoid by the growing movement of race realists obsessed with IQ test scores.
People also misunderstand the nature of "scientific truth" to begin with (and they conflate different scientific truths with one-another). They expect that if scientists believe something to be true then science must forever agree with them or else science is unreliable and useless. They don't understand that science doesn't claim to begin and end with ultimate and immutable truth, but that it instead tries to close in on truth from a distance by slowly improving itself.
The very fallibility of science which is the basis for the post-modern rejection of it is the same humility and virtue that has made science so powerful (the humility which so much human thought severely lacks). Science admits that it's not perfect, and looks for it's own faults in order to improve them. It is this constant self analysis, constant testing, and [s]willingness[/s] need to question it's own foundations which has driven it reliably forward.
The post-modern dogma which surrounds science isn't so unique in my view. We have always looked to possess immutably true and perfect knowledge, and in our wanton expectation often fool ourselves into thinking that we've found it. That lofty expectation, this god-shaped whole, is what I think mainly drives the dogmatic post-modern rejection of science.
There are no genetic differences between the races.
There is no post-modern dogma concerning science. To what post-modern thinkers and which of their theories are you referring?
I'm skeptical that you're yet informed enough to understand what genetic differences between individuals actually means or look like let alone between races. But let's try anyway...
Genetic differences between individuals can loosely be approximated by comparing their shared genetic markers (all races share mostly the same genetic markers) but more importantly by comparing the prevalence of individual genetic markers within a given individual. For instance if we imagine that some "height genetic marker" exists, and we look at two individuals, the shorter individual will have fewer instances of that specific genetic marker repeated in their genome overall, and the taller individual will have more instances of that specific genetic marker.
So if we look at larger groups, what we might do is take the mean prevalence of a certain genetic marker and compare it to the mean prevalence of that genetic marker in another group.
If we compared say, the mean "height gene prevalence" of the Bantu people (very tall) with the mean prevalence of that same gene in the Pygmy people (very short), guess what we would see? A massive difference (if indeed we've identified an actual "height gene").
The reason why certain groups of people share characteristics is because their genes are clustered around the same average, and if that average is very different from that of another group, then overall there can be noticeable differences in the average characteristics of those people. The reality of gene marker prevalence is what makes traits heritable while also having a chance to be pronounced with variable degrees of strength (some offspring may get more repetitions of a specific genetic marker, others might get less, but it will cluster around the same average)
Saying there are no genetic differences between races is like saying there are no genetic differences between individuals...
Is there a statistically significant difference? Either way, the term wasn't invented to talk about genetics. It's about appearance or culture. Appearances can definitely fail to testify to bloodlines.
Skin tone, height, hair color, eye color, body mass are some examples of statistically relevant differences that come to mind and are immediately apparent.(between some but not all "races". the real question is where to draw arbitrary lines in-bewteen or around continuous groups, sort of like the color dilemma)
Thomas Khun's theory that scientific knowledge does not progress, that it instead just shifts from one arbitrary paradigm to another without ever making any objective gains. As far as I understand it, he argues that the way scientists are socialized into their various fields reduces them to producing inevitably useless bodies of knowledge which contribute nothing of lasting or cumulative value.
The one who isn't informed enough is clearly you, since these differences can occur between two different people of the same race. Try not making "arguments" that undermine your already erroneous ones.
And you undermine yourself again since Bantu and Pygmy arent' separate races. You should try to support your erroneous argument, not unintentionally refute it.
None of this supports your erroneous notion of genetic differences between the races. It's almost entirely irrelevant to anything that could support that.
No, as you've helped show above, saying there are no genetic differences between races is a true statement. Saying there are no differences between individuals is ridiculous. I'm surprised you didn't say it above.
Kuhn never said scientific knowledge didn't progress. You need to read his book again if you ever read it a first time.
I think that racial categories are much more complex than just "black/white/asian/etc...". For instance, the Pygmy people are ethnically different from the Bantu people and the results of those genetic differences are stark and undeniable. Do you deny that there is an observable difference between the average characteristics of the Pygmy and Bantu people which stems from differences in their average genetic makeup?
You erroneously said there are genetic differences between the races. The Pygmies and Bantus are not different races. So, what you wrote doesn't support your claim at all.
They're different ethnic groups, different "racial" groups... If you want call them different sub-groups of the same race go ahead but you're blatantly obfuscating my point...
Sorry, different ethnic groups are a very different thing from different races. So, I didn't obfuscate your point, it was already self-obfuscated. You really need to educate yourself on this stuff; you're a bit lost here.
Quoting unenlightened
I find the axis along which to make that division, in the distinction of the 'conditioned and unconditioned'. 'The conditioned' is what is socially-constructed, the 'reality of consensus', of what 'everyone knows to be true'. The 'unconditioned' is the unmediated experience of peak experiences, artistic engagement, meditative awareness, and so on.
You would agree then, there are evident genetic differences between ethnic groups?
What did he say about it then? Care to offer a correction?
As far as I know he said that science doesn't progress toward certainty because each time we have a revolutionary change we just exchange one uncertain paradigm for another.
There are three human-constructed races: Mongolid, Negroid, and Caucasoid. There are no genetic differences/separators between these races. There are many ethnic groups within each race; they do have genetic differences between them.
He said that while there is progress, it isn't just determined by the truths of scientific practices and scientific observations, as some had claimed, but was also influenced by shifts in modes/practices (paradigms) that were also determined by human bias and flawed power systems and ideologies. He did not deny scientific progress itself.
My thinking on the topic goes somewhat in reverse. Rather than defining social construction by finding its negative, I think it's more interesting to look at what counts as the social and its constructs primarily. If there is something concrete, then that's all well and good -- but we can still try and understand the social on its own regardless of the differences between the social and, say, the physical.
When I think of and speak of social construction I'm actually less interested in distinguishing it from physical reality as I am in distinguishing the social from psychic reality -- Searle is a good example here of someone who clearly explains that he believes social reality is constructed out of psychic reality, and I think it's a commonly believed conception -- that changing beliefs, attitudes, feelings, perceptions, knowledge, and whatever else we may designate as belonging to the set of psychic existents is how we change our social reality. (writing anymore on that, I think I'd get way off topic).
So I'd begin with a list -- what are the social constructs? I'd include things like...
Money, laws, institutions, marriage, war, the state, businesses, unions, guilds, non-profit organizations
. . . as obvious, non-controversial sorts of things. But I'd also include things like...
houses, knives, sewing machines, boats, electrical power. . .
and other sorts of goods and services which, under capitalism, are commodities. That is, many, many, many things are the product of social activity. And then there's another class of social constructs, the sorts more associated with justice, like. . .
gender, race, class, sex, orientation, nationality, ethnicity, age,
. . . which are just as real as houses and money, but are also the result of social activity.
I think the primary motivation for understanding something as socially constructed is that it is, by the same methods of being built, capable of being re/un-built. In order to do so, though, one must actually understand the mechanism of social construction itself.
But, then, it seems to me that the question is more -- can we have a scientific understanding of social reality? Or, perhaps better formulated, is such an understanding worthwhile?
That while we may be made of atoms, what we do together doesn't change how the atoms behave. But, seemingly (and it may be an illusion), what we do does change social reality. It seems to me that in order to have a scientific view, in the sense of the concrete, or in the same sense as chemistry, of the social it would require our sense of social agency to be illusory (or, we may have to loosen what we understand scientific understanding to mean, too -- in the manner of the "soft" sciences, still empirical but not in as much control or taken into a lab, but more embedded with a historical way of understanding)
(Y)
I Like Searle's concept of social vs objective ontology. Our ability to create reality by declaration, as a social function.
But surely 'property' also imposes itself upon us as inescapable; one can't willy nilly ignore that things belong by law to certain entities, without suffering from the consequences (if caught).
The point being that anything 'socially constructed' has no less reality than anything not. That race is 'socially constructed' does not mean, for example, that the institutional or cultural reality of race is any less felt than the force of gravity. Reality is on the side of the social, not set against or beside it.
Of course Gravity has more reality than the socially constructed notion of race. The laws of Gravity have been confirmed through testing and retesting as real outside our perception of the universe. So, while the term "gravity" is a construct and, as Godel showed, our math is still a constructed language, Gravity is tied to a definition extremely more static and rigorous than that of "race. And what is felt is irrelevant here, since reality isn't solely predicated on subjective perception. And no, reality is not on the side of the social, it is on the side of the real, even when the concept "real" is a construct itself.
[b]If you don't know what it means for anything to have more or less reality than anything else, than you should probably stop using the words "real" or "reality" since you have no definition for them and you refuse the standard ones:
"Definition of real
1
: of or relating to fixed, permanent, or immovable things (such as lands or tenements)
2
a : not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory : genuine real gold; also : being precisely what the name implies a real professional
c : having objective independent existence unable to believe that what he saw was real"
Therefore, non-artificial things or non-illusory things like the Empire State Building are more real than the Easter Bunny. There is no point of the word "real" if some things aren't more real than others. It's definition shows they are.[/b]
I don't know what you mean by these terms. But something can't be found unless it was real, so again, you embrace the notions of more or less real, even when you erroneously reject them.
As far as I can see, the very standard definition you've cited contrasts the real with the artificial or the illusory, and at no point does it invoke a scale or gradation of realness. To argue for the reality of the social, is just to argue for the fact that the social is neither 'illusory, artificial, or fraudulent'. Or at least, no more or less so than gravity. Finally, if you don't know what the terms 'constructed' and 'found' refer to, I suggest you consult the OP, where they are used.
That's really nice. Well said.
Happily we also have this point:
Quoting Moliere
So if we believed race and the inherent inferiority of one race to another were part of the natural order, there wouldn't be much room for the idea that lynchings should stop; or, having had such a heterodox idea, it would surely be more difficult to convince people to change their behavior.
Of course it does, since it notes what the real is and what it isn't, therefore it implies a gradation from those things closest to what it established as real and those which are closest to what is not real. So, it didn't need to invoke that scale it already implied.
And based on the standard definitions of "real" I gave, that would be a bad argument, since what is "social" is much less fixed and permanent than Gravity.
Of course it does, unless you're claiming there's nothing between the two points of the binary and there were no directions implied by the binary, and both of those claims would be erroneous.
So, the only objection relying on a different use of words, and a triviality, is yours.
Social reality isn't built out of intentional thought, even subliminally. We can change beliefs, attitudes, feelings, and so on, and yet the social carries on in spite of these things. This is true even collectively.
It's not what we think and believe as much as what we do and produce through collective activity that's important to making social products.
That's persuasive, but would you include talking among what we do?
Everything reduces to experience in one way or another, in my view, but the way it is all put together, and how we should feel about it is structured, as well as the scope of it. Stereotypes are in some sense true, but it's their scope, and origin which can be easily misplaced, or misapplied.
I also don't agree that gravity is any less socially structured than anything else that we think about. The very fact that we use it so often as a firm, solid foundation to contrast the flimsy, or less credible alludes to its function and apprehension far beyond a physical force.
Sure. I should've been clearer. I wasn't talking about including "whatever talk creates" in the social. I was thinking more of the role of engaged civic discussion. I honestly believe that informed citizens sharing their views with each other is crucial to change. Changed minds is a necessary if not a sufficient condition for social change, and talking is how you get there.
However, it is a conceptual mistake of the first magnitude to attribute the causes of such oppression to internal characteristics or traits of those involved. So long as sexism and racism are seen as personal attitudes which the individual sinner must, so to speak, identify in and root out of his or her soul, we are distracted from locating the causes of interpersonal strife in the material operation of power at more distal levels2. Furthermore, solidarity against oppressive distal power is effectively prevented from developing within the oppressed groups, who, successfully divided, are left by their rulers to squabble amongst themselves, exactly as Fanon detailed in the case of Algerians impoverished and embittered by their French colonial masters.
It is not that racist or sexist attitudes do not exist - they may indeed be features of the commentary of those who exercise or seek to exercise oppressive, possibly brutal proximal power. But that commentary is not the cause of the process that results in such proximal oppression and it is as futile to tackle the problem at that level as it is to try to cure 'neurosis' by tinkering with so-called 'cognitions' or 'unconscious motivation'.
This, I think, explains the otherwise puzzling success of 'political correctness' at a time when corporate power extended its influence over global society on an unprecedented scale. For this success was in fact no triumph of liberal thought or ethics, but rather the 'interiorizing', the turning outside-in of forms of domination which are real enough. The best-intentioned among us become absorbed in a kind of interior witch-hunt in which we try to track down non-existent demons within our 'inner worlds', while in the world outside the exploitation of the poor by the rich (correlating, of course, very much with black and white respectively) and the morale-sapping strife between men and women rage unabated.
Once again, we are stuck with the immaterial processes of 'psychology', unable to think beyond those aspects of commentary we take to indicate, for example, 'attitudes' or 'intentions'. The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that anyone will be racist in the appropriate set of circumstances. What is important for our understanding is an analysis of those circumstances, not an orgy of righteous accusation and agonised soul-searching..." (emphasis the author's) -- David Smail, "Power, Responsibility and Freedom".
That's why I put property as the example of a social construct. It's universal and unquestionable, and gets treated as 'natural'.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, I agree it must be, (as a moral imperative). But you cannot blame everything on the poor old layman. It was the high priesthood of science that went looking for a cure for homosexuality. Indeed the high priesthood of science spent a deal of time and effort justifying racialised politics. At the least, it must be conceded to the postmodern that science does not have any methodological immunity from conflating the constructed with the concrete; indeed my understanding is that 'deconstruction' at least purports to offer a method for teasing out the hidden constructs in the monolithic scientific view.
And in this regard, the postmodern is more humble and realistic in not assuming that the separation can ever be complete.
Yes, it is not simple, and 'found' is simply a placeholder for 'not-constructed', that you are very welcome to replace if there is a better term. There is an aspect of this that harks back to the traditional triple of Man, God, and Nature. I can't remember where I stole this from, but my thesis is that without God to hold the ring, the distinction between man and nature collapses. And the distinction between constructed and natural inherits this instability.
But the real effects of total bullshit are not at all in dispute. Still it would be nice if we could stop lynching people for bullshit reasons, and so it would be handy if we could separate to some extent the stuff we make up from the stuff we don't.
One might say that education is the process of construction of human nature. For example, there is a particular education and training that entitles one to call oneself an MD. And we hope, at least, that when one goes to the doctor, s/he will have the expertise to give good advice, and that the domain of medicine is socially regulated so as to minimise the bullshit. It is and should be a contested ground; a recently overturned dogma is that one should always finish the prescription of antibiotics.
But the construct of 'doctor' is built from real, if incomplete and provisional knowledge of the workings of the human body. This does not prevent all sorts of folks from making competing claims to knowledge, and medicine does not seem too averse to adopting stuff that started as 'alternative', when the results look promising - e.g. mindfulness, or the new buzz about gut bacteria, or the ongoing research into indigenous plant remedies.
Yet for all its scientific aspirations and protective regulation, medicine is by no means immune from the distortions of unfounded social constructs; there has been a recent suggestion that ADHD might be one such, and there is widespread concern that the science base is being systematically distorted by the influence of drug companies.
Someone needs to do a Foucault on medicine - Prescribe and Cure. I'm not going to attempt it here. But perhaps there is enough already to suggest that there is a place for construction and for deconstruction: that while there is no disentangling the real from the constructed, yet there is a need to be vigilant and also fairly humble in attempting to do so as far as possible, and also to question whether the constructs we inherit are ones that we want to solidify or to undermine.
I think it might be handy, but it also might not be - depending on the situation. Human rights, for example, are a total fabrication, but I think an incredibly important and useful fabrication. One whose reality has shaped the trajectory of humanity for the better. Bullshit reasons can be awfully useful ones.
Quoting unenlightened
Foucault did a Foucault on medicine - see here. Or else Canguilhem.
Searle talks about status functions as the product of collective intentionality in which we assign subjective reality to certain facts, such as money. It is only collective agreement that such values are facts.
Are they? Human nature is claimed as a construct, but it is one founded on something real that is elaborated. Human rights might have the same foundation. I'm not sure that fabrications are ever 'total'.
I wouldn't call human rights a total fabrication, since we are social animals and our societies came up with them. But they are definitely a construct since there is nothing in our genetics and biology necessitating rights as they do our need to breathe oxygen or drink water. And since our notions of human rights not only differ from culture to culture, but from person to person within each culture, it is impossible to establish what concept of "human rights" is correct. And that doesnt' even counter the hypocrisy of leaders like Obama or Dubya who talk about human rights while they're bombing innocents (and innocent children) in other countries...and with the support of Americans across the political spectrum.
Perhaps, but I don't see any distinction between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated.
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm having difficulty putting these together in a way that makes sense.
Since you use the world "real," you clearly subscribe to it and its standard definition. Knowing that, you should be able to see that water is a real physical reality, despite it's linguistic framing within the word "water", and the concepts of "evil" or "human rights" are constructed since they have no specific connection to a clear material reality.
Because if you see no difference between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated, you couldn't see that human rights are a total fabrication and not real since you've eliminated the distinction between fabrication and real.
I don't know, maybe I'm too stupid. But the only way I can reconcile them is to conclude that everything is a fabrication and we are forever lost in the funhouse with no possibility of escape. At which point further discussion is reduced to a pleasant or unpleasant pastime with no other value. I'm kinda hoping there is some other interpretation.
Why?
Sorry for being pedantic, but what reasons lie behind these conclusions? And further, why is the inescapability of fabrication an imprisonment?
Gravity is found; human rights are fabricated. Both are quite real. When you make something, it's real, isn't it? The difference between gravity and human rights isn't that one is real; it's that we don't have the ability to change or abolish gravity, which we do with human rights.
I would add: there's a difference between, say, fiction and human institutions. Telling a story doesn't make the story true. What is made, and what has effect in the world, is not the content of the story, but the story itself and the telling of it. With institutions, the content becomes real. If you christen a ship, it now has the name you gave it.
If you want, you could say everyone behaves "as if" this is the ship's name, but that just kicks the can down the road. You'll still have to explain the difference between one kind of fiction and the other by explaining what "acting as if" is.
Quoting Moliere
I find this a bit too broad. What would it mean to abolish sewing machines? It's not what I had in mind, though there is clearly some connection. I'm inclined to say that a sewing machine or a pumpkin patch is not a social construct as I mean it, precisely because it is a physical presence. Whereas the notion of property 'that it is my sewing machine or my pumpkin patch' very much is.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes indeed, it is not open to me to abolish property, or to abolish race, just because these are social constructs. I can oppose them, at my own risk - of being treated as a pariah. What is 'generally accepted' imposes itself on me as real, as a physical constraint. I'd better not take pumpkins from someone else's pumpkin patch, or there will be consequences. But all it takes is a revolution, or an authoritative declaration that the pumpkin patch is now common land, and everything is changed. All it takes is the abolition of slavery for slavery to be ended - well sort of.
Yes that's helpful.
But it seems clear to me that the institution of property could conceivably wither away or be abolished or dramatically changed, not by an individual of course, but collectively.
And what if we stop using the term "gravity" in our theories?
To actually get into and tease out the superficial and unhelpful elements within or of a particular theory seems to be what this postmodern approach lauds, but wielded as a broad prognosis it has varying degrees of applicability.
While in reality any given theory is only as good as it's supporting evidence, to many the authority of "scientific truth" seems like a single monolithic package. It's this presumption that all scientific knowledge is infected or equally infected by the incredulity of bias laden social constructs that gets under the skin of so many scientists and scientific thinkers...
Science does get things wrong, and sometimes those wrongs (moral wrongs included) are caused by bias at the outset, but the examples we have of the worst bias and failures of science are well over-shadowed by it's lasting successes. The reliability of many individual and fundamental theories are not brought into question when an unrelated field of study collapses. What possible social constructs exist in the theory of gravity or in our algebraic mathematical proofs? When we started to realize the stupidity of phrenology, mechanical engineering remained unaffected, but as laymen we're set to conflate the authority of the two.
As a merely descriptive diagnosis of science rather than a prognosis of it, the idea that we can never fully eliminate impurity from our scientific theories is much more palatable, but as such it also has far less meaningful relevance. Science has always been about improvement which begins from a state of existing imperfection, and the more we purify it the closer it should approximate truth. If Newton's law of universal gravitation with the additional corrections offered by GR and SR does contain socially constructed impurity, the amount that it contains must be so small as to be immeasurable and negligible.
Using that logic, unicorns are as real as Gravity and Santa Claus is as real as Hillary Clinton (some may argue moreso). And that just isn't the case. Gravity is both nearly fixed in definition and not rationally disputed in existence. Neither applies to human rights since there is debate on both whether or not human rights exists and on what exactly they are.
Except many institutions, such as religious myths and dogmas, and concepts such as human rights are fictions, since none of them can rely on material, scientific fact for proof of their existence. And you can't say everything is equally real then try and make a separation in degrees of reality between fictions and human institutions when discussing conceptions. You've just undermined your previous argument.
And while the contents of a constructed concept may become real, they do not actually become the concept, but take on the less-real concept as part of their more-real selves. A church building doesn't really become a "house of god" but it gets imbued with the concept by the artificial construction of the humans that affirm it is.
Gravity would still exist, and if we didn't replace it with a word or words describing the same ubiquitous phenomena, we would have substantially regressed as a people.
Maybe another way to say this is that the behavior of people is of course quite real, and some of their behavior can be described as participating in the convention of property, or maybe as "practices constitutive of" the convention of property.
It's fascinating how often discussions of late end with "that's not what I said" or "that's not what you said"...
If all you required was that I replace the word "race" with "ethnicity", I don't understand why you bothered to object in the first place. As soon as I clarified that my conception of race goes beyond white black and asian, you should have assented to my position. I guess we're also encountering one of the driving forces behind this post-modern angle: a lack of understanding.
The American Anthropological Association had to release a statement focusing on race as socially constructed because they operate in a political world where anything more nuanced would allow ideologues who misunderstand the science to use it as nesting material. But while they (and you) state that "race" was invented to give perpetual low status to certain individuals, they both abandon the original topic of "race" and move purely into a world of political pandering and poor speculation. Slavery has existed for thousands of years, and generally, but not always, groups tended to enslave people who had different physical characteristics than themselves. They never needed the concept of different races to begin doing it, and even without slavery the concept of different races can be invented even by a child who experiences them.
I'm glad that you do now agree with me though, that different ethnic groups do have statistically significant genetic differences which is what leads to the consistency of characteristics between more closely related individuals (same family, same ethnic group), and deviation in characteristics the more distant the relation (different family, different ethnic group).
That's a ridiculous statement since you were using the term "race," and you kept using it. Once I pointed out your incorrect usage, you should have admitted you were wrong and stopped saying "race." So, the only one doing the faux-Postmodern thing of rejecting actual meanings was you.
That's completely your unfounded opinion. If you want it to mean anything, try backing it up with evidence and argument. Until you do; it's just your fantasy. And there you go using the word "race" again. I told you you were the problem there.
And there you go and prove me right again by using "race" in the traditional way when you rejected that traditional usage. Again, you show you were the problem in our discussion. And while different races have used slavery, in America the slave owners and runners and writers of the slave-owning policies were almost exclusively White and the slaves were almost exclusively Black. That's a racial fact you can't change.
Yes, that's a useful clarification. So the Declaration of Human rights is a fiction, or a pious hope, until it is practiced, and only to the extent that it is lived out socially does it constitute a social construct.
I'm starting feel like I almost know what I'm talking about at last.
Yes, the point is that the science of biology provides no evidence of "races" within the human species. There are no biological races within the human species. To find race within the human species you have to look outside of biology.
And when you look outside of biology and find categories of race that people have constructed you find that those categories are based on arbitrary characteristics.
In other words, no inherent characteristic of a man or woman makes him or her "black" or "white". You could place anybody you want to in the category "black". You could place anybody you want to in the category "white".
In biology, on the other hand, you can't place anything you want to in the category "vertebrates", the category "plants", etc.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, if I remember correctly (I haven't read it lately), the American Anthropological Association Statement on Race says that the genetic differences within the racial groups we have constructed are greater than the genetic differences between those groups.
Again, the categories that we call "race" do not reflect any biological reality.
Point being, that the descriptions of spiritual experience, and drug use are correlated with right hemispheric functions. I think that without the unindividuated self, without the breaking down of the walls between self and other, we can't really even learn from others, can't really understand them. It's where all of the unknown which gets incorporated into the known comes from.
I think that the equality of self and other, the warnings against hubris, hypocrisy, and the notion that we're all equal is true in the most practical, biological, and health sustaining senses imaginable. Culture is founded on these notions, and our ability to mimic, and learn is based in these ideas.
The idea that the qualitative is not as real as the quantitative is deeply misguided, and literally a half-brained scheme...
Sometimes you'll hear economists talk about credit, and the economy at large, this way: that it is sustained by faith or trust, and if something undermines that trust, the world could come tumbling down.
If you want to move past this you can roughly do so by assuming I mean "ethnicity" whenever I say "race" and then see if you still protest...
It all depends on what we mean by "race". "black/white/asian" are incredibly loose and informal. if we begin to define formal sub-groups then we can start to delineate between actual genetic variation.
The problem the geneticists have is that people so often talk about race with no comprehension of the underlying genetic mechanisms and world of diversity. I guess the easy solution is to replace the word "race" with "ethnicity" (so it cannot be mistaken in usage) and then the discussion can continued unhindered by post-modern rebuke.
That's a lie. I never did that. You were using the word "race" incorrectly and I pointed that out. I don't see how we can continue the discussion when you're dishonest and are using the word "race" incorrectly.
No, if you want to move past this you can stop misusing the word "race," and use the word "ethnicity" if you mean ethnicity. You're a grown-up now; you can start using words correctly.
How do you know the meaning I intended when I used the word race? (how do you ignore my intended use after I've clarified twice?)
Because of the way you incorrectly used it. I already made that clear.
How do you keep misusing a word when you know you're misusing it? It's bewildering.
And in the above quote is where you misused it when you said "racial categories" when you were discussing two different ethnic, not racial, groups.
So, use the word correctly or I'm moving on. I have no time for people who refuse to use words correctly.
How do you know I used it incorrectly though? It seems like anytime i've typed "race" you've just said "Aha! incorrect!"
Quoting Thanatos Sand
If the way I use "race" is in line with your conception of what "ethnicity means" then I haven't used it incorrectly at all. You can at least try to acknowledge the intended meaning of my statements rather than to doggedly tell me I'm a problematic child...
Absolutely! They like to call it 'confidence'. Paper money at least is nothing more or less than a promissory note.
Do have we made any progress on your question?
No, I showed you multiple times how your usage was wrong. You are reading as poorly as you are using words.
No, your misuse of "race" is in line with what the standard English definition of "ethnicity" means. So, you have used it very incorrectly.
So, you and I are done; I won't be reading any more of your posts. I have no time to give you the English assistance you need.
I care only about the ideas I've expressed though, and I've clarified what I mean and meant when i say "race". If you're incapable of allowing me to use words as I define them, so be it.
Well yes and no.
Quoting unenlightened
I think I have reached a bit more clarity for my own part on the nature of the distinction between social constructs and - well I still don't have a neat label for the negative space. Which is fine for us analytic scientific types. But I haven't made much progress with the postmodern wing, which I think is also important.
So we are, as it were, embedded in imbued with, and, God help us, constructed by (educated by and into) this constructed social world, and from that position we attempt or purport to make this distinction. This is the deconstruction as I understand it, that we are conditioned by our social constructs to the extent that we cannot distinguish the real from the conditioned. And to pretend that we can - which is all of our discussion - is hubristic overreach.
No, neither Derrida nor any other prominent Postmodern/Poststructuralist philosopher says this. What he does say, building strongly from Heidegger's (the proto-Deconstructionist's) "always already" model, is that we can never fully distinguish the real from the conditioned, since our perceptions of both are already shaped by the language and culture we were "thrown" into. That doesn't mean we can't effectively recognize some things as "more real" (and more tied to material reality) and some as more "constructed," but we can never finalize those notions nor keep them from changing/deconstructing.
Another key part of this is Saussure's structural linguistics that reminds us that our processes of doing these things always inevitably occurs within language, with continual referrals to other words in the language, so the structures and dynamics of our language will always have their share of sovereignty too over any notion we have of fully recognizing the noumena, the-thing-itself.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
Quoting Thanatos Sand
I stand corrected. :D
Ideas are as much a product of the realm of the sensation as they have a influence over it. They are not sovereign over it. What you claim about the nature of ideas reflects a gestalt of your biology/genes, socio/cultural/political upbringing, and your life experiences...and your ontological commitments are greatly a product of those, as well.
It's a common misconception. I've been making that explanation for over a decade now to my less theoretically-inclined colleagues...:)
I think we can do better, but let me think a bit. It goes everywhere.
Point well taken. I don't know what it would mean to abolish sewing machines. Though, on second thought I might know what it would mean to abolish nuclear warheads, for instance, though they have a physical presence. Perhaps the word 'abolish' just requires a sense of importance, unlike what abolishing sewing machines would be, which just sounds silly? Though, regardless, I get your drift here at least. This can be passed over.
The connection between the two I'd hope to maintain, which is what I was trying to drive at at least, is that the slavery is a product -- it's something we create together. It's through our collective activity that slavery becomes an institution. This is more of a genesis and genealogy than a mechanism, I'd say, as institutions begin to take a life of their own outside of our collective activity over time. The structure of slavery comes out of what we do -- which includes concepts but also includes who counts as slaves, treating them as such, informing the authorities when slaves escape, believing they deserve such treatment because of [whatever], the police, the jails, the state...
What is that?
But social reality marches on in spite of belief. I'm not sure how Searle's account of social reality can survive that.
In spite of collective belief that blacks are equal to whites in America, blacks are -- by the stats -- treated worse than whites.
One could take this as evidence that people really believe that blacks are inferior. I'd just say that in spite of widespread intentional beliefs of racial equality, we continue to see white supremacy operate in the world. Not unanimous widespread belief, mind, but widespread.
Also, on the back-end of the civil rights movement, in spite of widespread belief that blacks were inferior, a minority political movement was able to enact and enforce (to a limited extent) laws that bettered their position.
Belief is only a small part of the overall social world, and is often times not even relevant to its functioning and operations.
EDIT: I hope not to get too far off on this, because I mentioned it as an aside more than anything to say that if I were to distinguish social reality from anything it would be from psychic, as opposed to physical reality. This is more to say that there is more to the social world than psychology, and so we can't just look at psychology or the mind and expect to understand social entities by that method.
Concepts become something that is, by definition really, imposed on reality. I haven't quite figured out what image is driving this idea. It seems to have something to do with granularity: we imagine the conversion of our incomparably rich and detailed visual field into grainy pixels, or a paint by numbers, a process something like rotoscoping, boundaries separating one thing from another, foreground from background, drawn in an arbitrary and heavy-handed way, reflective of our needs, desires, preconceptions and preferences rather than reality.
That's not quite it, but it's close. I'm convinced there's an intuition pump at work here, but I can't quite nail it down.
Needless to say, something about this view feels off to me, but I haven't figured that out either.
Considering the difficulty you had defining "indirect realist,' I'm not sure you know the definitions yourself. But nothing I said in my post pointed to such simplistic two-word phrases.
No, concepts are something that arise out of and reflect reality, if not perfectly or always successfully.
One issue as you noted is the problem of knowing what people really believe.
But I agree with just about everything you said. I'd be okay with describing my view as "Changed minds are necessary but very far from sufficient for social change."
This is not quite it; the point would rather be to question the cogency of the very distinction between 'the real' and 'the conditioned' to begin with; that is, it's not a question of epistemic limits: it's not a matter of us being unable to make a distinction that could, in principle, be made, if only we were not conditioned, etc. This is why I keep trying to locate the real on the side of the constructed: if the social is real, if it belongs on the side of the real, then the distinction to be made is no longer oppositional; one cannot neatly parse the social and the real not because of some limitation on our 'finite', human selves - the attempt to go beyond which would be "hubris" - but because the concepts themselves no longer lend themselves to any such neat parsing. It's not a matter of 'from which position' we attempt to make the distinction.
But then we still have the question of how to distinguish what is (real and) constructed from what is (real and) not constructed. I can't tell whether you're suggesting that "neat parsing" is only available when there is an opposition of real and unreal, rather than just a distinction between
whichever one of those you'll go for, or think we should all go for.
I think that question is abandoned entirely. In older parlance, the question of "social construct" was about how something was caused, the whole "nature" vs "nurture" question which tries to ask what people were capable of separate to their own existence. People were trying to sort out whether behaviours, social positions, thoughts, etc. were created (and usually necessitated) by primordial nature of biology as opposed to the actions of human culture.
Nowadays this separation is more or less understood to be incoherent. Biology never does anything without an environment. Culture never does anything without biology. The question of "social construction" has shifted from a means of causation (nature vs nurture) to something more like a description of being-- to be "constructed" means that nature/biology has interacted with nature/culture to form a particular state rather than another.
In this sense, everything is constructed because it has to be formed by a continent state coming into being. There is no longer any opposition of "constructed (not real)" or "not constructed (real)," only the real which is constructed.
So if we are to talk about any state of our society, it amounts to a "social construction," for it is a state of existence of society, constructed out of particular biological and environmental interactions.
See I'm not even sure about this either: I think that if taken to the limit, deconstruction entails that there are, as it were, constructions other than those of the social. That is, the word 'social' in 'social construction' ought to be understood as something that qualifies scope. There are asocial constructions, constructions of biology, of geology, of celestial dynamics, and then there are constructions that pertain to 'the social', each of these with it's own specific mechanisms and modes of functioning. I understand 'social construction' in an entirely naturalist way, as it were. And I think, moreover, this is how it should be understood.
By contrast, I think many people take 'social construction' to qualify not scope, but 'ontological status', as it were. As if 'social constructs' are somehow unreal, or lacking in substantiveness. But I think this is an anthropomorphism: there is nothing special about humanity that somehow locates them outside the sphere of 'reality': as if there is reality on one side, and the social on the other. It's this view that makes Un think that 'social construction' entails a kind of 'imprisonment', I think. But this is only the case if one remains caught in a kind of human exceptionalism in which only humans 'construct'. But once you see that the social is continuous with nature (along a very specific dimension, at any rate), the problem dissipates.
This is similar to what Willow is saying in the post above, I think.
Would you say that blacks and other minorities are being treated better today than say 70 years ago. Isn't it a little quick to assume as in the case of the USA , that 350 years of social constructed prejudice is going to wiped off a cultures minds in one, two, three generations. Social constructs of prejudice are strong, long inbred systematic in our culture, yet we did elect a black president. Social constructs can change, in some cases more rapidly than others.
In some ways yes. In many ways, no. Unarmed blacks are getting gunned down by police in alarming number and with alarming alacrity and the police are almost always found innocent...even if the victims were running in the opposite direction.
Yes, there is a long way to go, the fight is hard, but (and who knows what damage Trump can do) we seem have made some progress. Yes, blacks, minorities, women all the have legitimate right to scream about the treatment they continue to receive the hands of the majority, and I think the only way to get the numb majority to react is for these oppressed social groups to continue to push their cause in any manner they deem appropriate.
Okay, I think I've got it. The "social" bit is easy, The hard bit is understanding what happens to agency, and to the distinction between organism and environment. You can keep that distinction by situating construction not at the level of organism, as something an organism might engage in (a bird building a nest), but a level up, so that construction can be a process that includes both organisms and their environment.
Even setting aside my qualms about this, I'm still going to want to distinguish between construction processes dependent upon organisms acting within an environment and constructions processes that require only natural forces. But if I'm allowed to pick out something and call it an agent, something that can bear responsibility, without denying that its actions are embedded in an environment, then I'm going to question the point of the ascension in the first place.
I hope I haven't misunderstood you, because it's starting to get interesting.
I guess the immediate deconstructive response to this ought to be suspicion regarding the very terms of the question: why are organisms acting within an envionment not considered to belong to the class of forces deemed 'natural'?
Regarding agency and responsibility, I'm not clear, on the basis of your post, what the exact issue raised is. I think you have a worry about what happens to those terms if the organism is too tightly(?) embedded in the environment, but I can't be sure if thats what you meant.
In the same way, a society, under stress, can exert influence on what that feeling of disappointment or frustration is rightly directed to.. it's black people, it's Jews, it's Socrates... kill them and we'll be fine. Now we're looking at society like a large organism. Individuals are themselves given shape by language.
How far one is willing to let this insight grow (until it consumes its own ground?) is a matter of temperament I think. If one is strongly Anglo-philosophical, no mystical shenanigans will be allowed. If one is Hegelian at baseline... oh yea... the whole thing can disappear back to becoming.
There is more permanence to social reality than what we happen to believe, collectively. Social reality is curious in that since it is constructed it can be changed, but that ability for change does not then indicate (nor does construction indicate) that it is not real. Construction's defining opposite is not reality.
Similarly to a house. A house is constructed -- and by my lights, at least, socially so. It is made of wood, metal, cloth, glass, and paper. It can be destroyed or un-built or re-built. It's very real in spite of all these things. Our beliefs about the house do not change the house.
Likewise, our beliefs about social reality do not change social reality. It's a pernicious myth, I think, because reparations, in the case of slavery for instance, can only be achieved through material reparations, rather than good will, contrition, and recognition. (just as a for-instance) (also note that "material" isn't the same thing as "visual" -- much of social reality is not visual)
Similarly, what is often considered "merely symbolic" actually has causal properties. A simple demonstration which disrupts the day-to-day rhythm of life, but is purely symbolic and not used in any other way, effects the paths of social systems.
The civil rights movement is a good example of how belief isn't the main operating force in social systems -- at least, in the change of social systems. Perhaps it has more force in the sustenance of social systems. It began with more people believing it shouldn't succeed, and succeeded, and now more people will say it was a good thing rather than a bad thing. It's a clear case of belief being changed by the social, rather than the other way around.
I think it is reasonable to limit 'construct' to the productions of life-forms. Thus a mountain is a formation, but an ant-hill is a construct. I can then use the same notion of life-forms to make the further distinction between a construct made of formations the ant-hill again, and a construct made of life forms, an ant colony.
I think such a formulation allows a new look at this:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It might have been that he was expecting another building called the university, or, he might have (correctly, I would say) surmised that a university is a social construct, consisting of students and professors and so on, and not the bunch of buildings that they occupy. To see that it is so, simply imagine that all the students and professors have departed; what remains is a tourist attraction, not a university.
Is this reasonable though? Surely this simply widens the circle of exceptionalism to a kind of 'life-exceptionalism' - from anthropocentrism to biocentrism. At the very least one would have to ask about the philosophical utility of such a limitation: what - if such a limitation is indeed reasonable - are the reasons for it? What kind of distinction is the one between 'formations' and 'constructs? What motivates it? Or is the limitation merely nominal, for the sake of conversational convenience?
From the point of view of individuation, it is not at all clear that one can make an in-principle distinction between the kinds of processes involved in either the construction of mountains or molehills. For someone like Manuel Delanda, for example, the processes at work in the formation of both mountains and societies, are, at a certain level of abstraction, exactly the same: "Sedimentary rocks, species and social classes (and other institutionalized hierarchies) are all historical constructions, the product of definite structure-generating processes" ... which Delanda describes, but I'll omit for reasons of space. In any case, the conclusion being that "this conception of very specific abstract machines governing a variety of structure-generating processes not only blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also that between the living and the inert." (Delanda, The Geology of Morals).
As far as Ryle's example is concerned, there's nothing that stops it from being applied to non-human, or non-living things: one simply has to imagine showing someone a ridge, a plateau, a peak, a spur, and having them ask 'but where is the mountain?'. Indeed, Ryle's own criteria for what constitutes a category is entirely 'neutral' with respect to the 'kinds' of things that can or cannot fall under it (here is his rather dry formulation: "when two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them" i.e. one does not 'conjunct' 'the peak, the ridge and the mountain').
Yes, I think it is reasonable to deny non-life a centre, where a centre is a point of view. The distinction between life and non-life I would say is indispensable to almost any kind of sensible talk about the world.
Quoting StreetlightX
One does, however conjunct the anthill and the ant colony, or the university and it's facilities, or more generally, house and home.
I don't understand what a 'center' or a 'point of view' has to do with constructs or formations, and why either would be important to the latter in any principled way. Indeed, it is perfectly sensible to talk about living and non-living formations in the same breath. And note that I'm not denying that arbitrary distinctions are important for sensible talk, but I would hope there is more than arbitrariness involved when we make distinctions that are supposed to have some kind of philosophical import.
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, and?
You said I was biocentric. As if there were another place to be; another viewpoint to take. I must surely be on the right lines here, as I just had the same argument with Banno, that there is no third person point of view, ending here. Quoting unenlightened
As if Delanda were not a lifeform. It is surely a fundamental principle of the forum that if SreetlightX and Banno agree about something it must be wrong.
I think that simply is how it is generally used, and yes, we ought to use it that way too. It is you that wants to suggest that it ought to mean sedimentary rocks as well as things we make with them.
And therefore Ryle's exemplar of a category error turns out not to be one, by his own criteria, and the distinction between the inanimate construction of the university buildings and the social construct of the university itself is a valid one.
Why ought we?
In the absence of a reason or motivation to make a distinction that seems otherwise unnecessary, yes.
Quoting unenlightened
But your examples are not at all clear. One can, for example, conjoin house and home, but whether or not the conjunction is a category error will depend on the use to which conjunction is put. To be shown around a house and to ask 'but where is the home?' is to commit a category error. To speak of 'house and home' in some poetic flourish is not. Category errors are context dependent. Ryle's 'use' of the university and it's buildings is very much a category error, and you are wrong about it not being one.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
To which a perfectly intelligible reply would be, "The university relocated to Inverness during the war, and never came back", or even, "the university is on vacation at the moment."
It's not enough simply to declare that I am wrong, you need to present some argument or explanation. I think I have done enough work here to provide explanations myself to warrant more than your dismissive one line 'so whats' and 'you are wrongs' and 'why ought wes'. I have laid out a fairly coherent analysis of the concept of social construct in terms that are about as uncontroversial as terms get, and all your response seems to amount to in the end is a vacuous all-is-one-ism.
Oh, to maximise agreement, principle of charity, because meaning is use. What a fucking idiotic question.
But the category mistake lies in considering the university a member of the class of which library belongs. Your reply does not make this assumption, and so is not relevant as a counter-example.
Quoting unenlightened
I've only declared you wrong on the specific issue of category mistakes, which are, at any rate, incidental to this thread. Otherwise I've only asked you to justify why you think a 'limit' ought to be placed on the use of 'construction'. Which you seem to have taken great exception to.
Quoting unenlightened
Oh I'm sorry I thought that maybe you had a philosophically substantive and non-arbitrary reason; that it would be a difference that made a conceptual difference with respect to illuminating what we were to understand of the concept of 'construction'. I thought you were more than a kind of vocabulary police. My unreserved apologies for this apparently misplaced faith.
It's not reasonable since constructions and constructs, by the English definition, are not limited to the productions of life forms. Also, Modern philosophy has well shown how "construct" can be used in the abstract, cultural, and societal, so such a restriction is anachronistic and in denial of discursive reality. So, all you're doing is artificially, and conveniently limiting a word to your personal definition.
Really?
[quote=google]construct
verb
k?n?str?kt/Submit
1.
build or make (something, typically a building, road, or machine).
"a company that constructs oil rigs"
synonyms: build, erect, put up, set up, raise, establish, assemble, manufacture, fabricate, form, fashion, contrive, create, make
"the government has plans to construct a hydroelectric dam there"
noun
noun: construct; plural noun: constructs
?k?nstr?kt/Submit
1.
an idea or theory containing various conceptual elements, typically one considered to be subjective and not based on empirical evidence.
"history is largely an ideological construct"[/quote]
I'm not seeing any reference to sedimentary rocks or anything else produced by other than lifeforms.Where do you get your definition?
There cannot be category-errors, since there is no agreement on what this term means, thus there is disagreement.
In rely to the OP, insofar as construction is concerned (I prefer to use creation), this is the providence of the creative mind (in all forms) and it is pretty much what all that it does, i.e create and learn from it's creations. Creations, in a universe of flux, are always undergoing change and this cannot be considered stagnant, but rather a continuously evolving process. Because of this, it is probably hopeless to try to create stagnant ideas and constructions. There are bound to be changes.
Well the belief is that blacks should be equal to whites, because the difference is no more than skin deep. But the fact is that it is better to be white; that is the social construction, that one can no more disbelieve than that money has value. In the same way an anarchist does not 'believe in' government, but this does not mean they deny the existence of governments.
[b]I'm not seeing any exclusion of sedimentary rocks. The real question is where are you getting your definition? And you said "productions of life forms" not "anything produced by life forms" in your original post. So, stop shifting your goal posts and try phrasing your points better.
[/b]
We don't have to stay at the civil rights movement, either. Any social movement begins in the minority position. Hence, why they are building a social movement. And it's not missionary work for converts or reasoned treatises or arguments which enacts social change, but social action which redirects social structures which change beliefs.
What is the argument in a march? What is the reasoned discourse in a strike? Where is the persuasion in a war?
Symbols, signs, slogans, and so forth -- which often allude to arguments in our society, but only allude and certainly don't have to (we just happen to live in a society that values these things) -- take a role in social action, but the target is not the hearts and minds and beliefs of others. Disruption of the day-to-day is more important than whether or not people feel like this is a good time to have a demonstration for change (which they never do, they have work to do after all)
It's tough enough understanding things from one's own perspective. This is what I'm working on.
Lucky for me, I'm super neurotic, and self-consciousness, self-awareness is the upside of neuroticism.
So as a general rule every distinction made ought to be a motivated one; there ought to be a reason for making it, and those reasons in turn will frame the very ways in which one will understand the terms involved. Now perhaps it is precisely the case that one wants to delineate a rigorous distinction between life and not-life, in order to illuminate something conceptually distinct about each, or else to illuminate something conceptually distinct about 'construction' or 'formation'. There is, as it were, two polarized axes of freedom along which we can manipulate relations between terms that shed light on each (life - not-life/ construction - formation). But the motivations behind these distinctions ought to be spelled out. The difference a difference makes needs to be made explicit, least the terms become lodged as reified oppositions: which is the danger par excellence when it comes to talking about 'social constructions' (which almost always becomes 'opposed' to, well, practically everything else; it also feeds into a constellation of other, just as conceptually impoverished 'oppositions' like that between 'nature and culture', or 'appearance and reality')
So it's not unfair to ask, in order to fix our terms and the relations between them: why this distinction? What motivates it? What is it meant to say about 'life', 'not-life', 'construction' and 'formation'? Perhaps it's just a semantic convenience, and you don't mean to say anything at all. And that's OK. But that too needs to be spelled out.
*Spencer-Brown: "There can be no distinction without motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value."
I can see doing this "at a certain level of abstraction" with a particular explanatory purpose in mind, but I'm not convinced that being able to do this somehow proves there is no distinction to be made, or that no distinction can be made; for other purposes we won't lump together the processes that lead to mountains, to trees, to anthills, to the convention of private property. My ability to describe balls and shoes as "sports gear" at a highish level of abstraction, does not prove no distinction can be made between balls and shoes at lower or even at equal levels of abstraction.
My concern, expressed earlier, was the loss of agency. Discipline and Punish is interesting because Foucault shows us something that looks a lot like a purposive action, but no one did it. I'm just not convinced we have to take that as a general rule, rather than what we find (or don't) taking this approach. There are other approaches.
Which oddly echoes what we're talking about here. There's a distinction we can make between what our theory describes and explains and the theory. God knows, that distinction isn't perfectly straightforward, but there is a difference.
Time out to revisit Ryle:
For instance, one answer to "Where is the University?" might be, "Oh, the government abolished education years ago. The buildings remain, and are used for other purposes, but this is no longer a University." And that goes back to pumpkin patches and sewing machines, etc. The "organization" Ryle refers to is social, in at least one sense. You can tear down either one without destroying the other.
And there is agency at work there. We change what we use the buildings for, and thus whether there is or is not a University here.
Now when it comes to, say, physics, tearing down the buildings (i.e., physical reality) is not even an option. But we can designate some as this entity, some as that, propose relations that hold among them, etc. And we have some agency here, power over our own theory to change or abolish it. Seeing this, some people are inclined to treat physical reality itself as a construction we have made, to say, for instance, that particles exist only insofar as we call something in our theory "particle". There is an obvious sense in which that's right, but it's extremely misleading. Using a bunch of nearby buildings now as a university or now as a barracks, doesn't turn stairs into quads, or rooms into storm drains.
So it still seems to me that one of the natural ways to sort things is into what we can change and what we can't. On the the "what we can" side will be things we constructed and things we didn't. The method will be different for each, but just as we could abolish universities, we can blow up a mountain but we cannot abolish the natural forces that formed it. We can describe those forces variously in our theories, but they are what they are regardless of our descriptions.
Similarly, there's no issue with distinguishing between what is and is not in our power, and having our vocabulary follow those lines for those purposes. But is this good philosophy? Is 'our power' the measure of things? Anyway, more to say tomorrow, hopefully that conveys the gist of it.
In fact, it seems more and more of our discussions around here are ending with this point: that if you have such and such purpose, you distinguish A from B, but if you don't, then you don't. (@Fafner, @Pierre-Normand and I had longish discussion about sortals that ended this way.)
I'm feeling an overwhelming impulse to look at that more closely: what does it mean to say a distinction is "purpose-relative"? How does that work?
(The sort of thing I was talking about here.)
I don't agree - surprise! I might au contraire suggest that the only significant difference between a cliff and a retaining wall is how it got there. A stony verticality whatever. There are details of course by which we can tell the difference.
Quoting StreetlightX
Shit. When you quote Spencer-Brown, I have to sit up and take notice. Yes, there is a difference in value, and it relates to property value and labour value. A bird's nest is a bird's labour and property and ought to be respected in a way that a wind -blown pile of leaves does not merit. And the bird's activity merits respect in some proportion to the value it itself puts upon it's labour, which is to say that motives and values are already afforded to living things but not to inanimate ones. I don't know why that is, biocentrism if you like, but it seems like it was the struggle of the ancients to de-animate in the imagination at least, the forces of nature. It certainly makes it easier to manipulate the environment.
In the sense relevant to this topic, theories cannot be fact laden because of the distinction between states and description of states (theory). There is never a point where the world can be defined purely in a theory.
At no point can we take a theory and proclaim it is a rule which "constrains" outcomes in the world, for each new state is formation or creation defined in-itself-- gravity, for instance, needs states of particular behaviour to form if the theory is to apply.
Our desire for theories to be "fact laden" leads us to confuse our theories with what might happen in the world. We jump from our desire for the world to have a particular meaning, to be described by a part theory, to the idea facts laden with that theory are the only possible outcome. It breaks down scientific method. Since we've assumed there is only one possible future outcome, we just take it's going to happen, without bothering to observe the world and check if it does.
Hmmmmm.
Why can't I do all of that the other way round?
Here's a shelf of books; here's shelf of CDs. When I'm looking for something to listen to, I "valorize" the CDs over the books. If I just need an example of "human cultural artifact", either will do -- which is not the same as not distinguishing them, it's just including them both in a larger class.
Even here, it seems odd to say I "value" the CD when I want something to listen to, rather than just saying I recognize a functional difference between CDs and books. Only a philosopher would say you could also listen to the book but are unlikely to find the experience rewarding.
What I'm talking about is something like this:
The most basic way to understand this I guess is as a rather simple linguistic or logical point: any distinction without a difference is… not a distinction. So any distinction worthy of the name always carries on into a second order: a difference, and then the difference that difference makes. It follows that the value of any first-order distinction is only ever given by, or derived from, the second-order difference which it carries along in tow. So this is one way to understand the ‘purpose-relativity’ of any distinction: to ask the purpose of a distinction, is simply to ask what difference a difference makes, without which, it would not be a difference.
(Another way to understand this is that any distinction always involves three elements: the two terms distinguished, and that which relates or articulates [from the Latin articulus, 'joint'] them; this third element is something that Un so far has not countenanced).
This in turn can be taken or understood in a few different ways. Here is how I think it ought to be understood: that humans are not the only things that make distinctions. Or rather, that the human power to distinguish is continuous with "nature's" powers to distinguish. One may consider here natural selection, or, to use Delanda's example, that of rivers which act as sorting mechanisms for rock layer formation. If this is the case, then the best 'theories' are those whose distinctions track those in 'nature' in order to show how those distinctions make a difference. Things get complicated here and we're already off track from the OP, so I'll refer you to a post a while back I made on similar issues in the context of causality and evolution.
So getting back to the question of 'construction', the question is whether or not limiting construction to 'life' is a distinction that tracks anything more than a kind of conversational convenience. If so, then at best it provides a kind of sociological observation (regarding the socio-historical quirks of how humans in a certain time period understand 'life'), and is, as far as philosophy is concerned, simply not very useful. Or to put it differently: does limiting 'construction' to life tell us anything interesting about the concept of construction, or does it simply tell us something middling about 'us'? Insofar as it's precisely the concept of 'construction' that is under discussion, the latter is, more or less, a useless path to take. Hence the poverty of Un's reply, which basically trades philosophy for sociology, and even then, a purely descriptive sociology that explains nothing ('that's just the way things are'... can one imagine a worse banality?).
Suppose I tell my kids to pick up all the stuff on the floor. Within that directive, there is no distinction made, or made use of, between paper, pencils, and toys.
Now suppose, contrary to fact, that I'm the sort of person who has labeled boxes for putting things in. When the kids ask what to do with everything, I could say, "Put everything wherever it goes."
If they put away nothing, on the grounds that there was no box marked "Stuff," I think that's a candidate for a category mistake. The class "stuff" is just the ad hoc class, "things on the floor that could be in boxes." Everything in that class also belongs to a class with a box assigned to it, without me having mentioned these. There's a genuine issue, on the other hand, if something is left over for which there is no box.
We could say that the context of my command is a theory that does distinguish paper, pencils, and toys, even though the command doesn't make use of that distinction. It does make use of the distinction between things that are on the floor and things that are in the boxes.
Now if I value tidiness, I might form the intention to have the kids pick up, and in asking them to, I make use of the distinction between things on the floor and things in boxes, but my intention doesn't create that distinction and neither does my valorization of tidiness. The question is whether a distinction is relevant to my intentions, formed on the basis of my values.
So talking about stuff is vague. It has vast scope in language when it comes to bounding the world with a meaningful distinction. But a combination of words, said in this particular context, then should narrow the scope of an intent with great precision.
Your kids should understand that the intent they are meant to mirror - the constraint they should place on their own physical or dissipative degrees of freedom - don't involve tidying up dead spiders or doing something about the chairs.
The very fact you can imagine labelled boxes - physical constraints of the most literal kind! - for all this loosely referenced "stuff", shows how socially constructed this real world landscape really is.
By the by, all this is precisely what Peircean semiotics and modelling relations approaches make clear.
Spencer-Brown is only half getting it in talking about the triadic nature of the informational side of a model's epistemic cut. He talks about the symmetry breaking that creates the three things of the two domains distinguished and then the third thing which is the boundary or act of division imposed.
The full semiotic view emphasises that the modelling relation is between an informational model and an energetic physical world. There is an ontological duality, a self/world, that is being constructed. But this is triadic in that the self forms signs of the world. It is the whole point of modelling not to represent reality in some veridical way - leaving no gap or epistemic cut between self and world - but to instead form a habitual relation of signs that comes to be our understanding of the thing in itself.
So biologically, the physical energies of the world are experienced by us in a perceptually constructed fashion. We see red and not green as a striking difference when the physical wavelengths may be only fractionally different in reality (and in reality, not at all coloured in any sense).
This is of course where SX goes particularly astray. If you conflate self and world, ignore the epistemic cut, then you start to talk about hues as "the real" and you don't assign them the proper ontic status of being our mediating signs of physical energies - a translation of the material world into the information that habitually constructs a state of mental constraint on our intentionality. Seeing red or green can mean something ... because they are in fact never real. We can then impose whatever intepretation or habit of meaning we like as they are just symbols.
Anyway, this semiotic game is then repeated at the social or linguistically mediated level of experience. We carve the physical world with useful concepts like boxes, kinds of toy, tidiness, parent-child dominance relations, etc.
So going to the OP, semiotics would take it as obvious that our relations with the world are constructed. That is the definition of life and mind - to be a modelling relation where information forms a self in fruitful control of a physical world.
And the typical reaction to this realisation - that conscious awareness is indirect or constructed - is negative. It seems an epistemic problem rather than the necessary basis of an epistemic relation. Most folk are naive realists and want philosophy to get them back to that happy position somehow. But the whole point of awareness is to simplify the complexity of any physical environment and to take advantage of its entropic gradients - tap the flows for useful purposes. So the world has to be replaced by a system of signs. Constructing "our world", our umwelt, is the same as constructing our selves, our own individuated being and meaning.
Humans depend on social construction to be human. It is not a bug but the feature.
The only issue then is whether there is a natural story of progression. Is this a pluralistic free for all where anyone can make up their own valid worldview, or is there a real world out there and so the world construction must converge on some optimal mental model?
Again the answer seems obvious. The scientific view of reality has arisen as a modelling discipline which is most effective at constructing the constraints which can harness material flows. Science is the most life giving way of construing the world.
Of course then you can look around and protest at the state of a scientific society. But any biologist will tell you how out of kilter with nature we have allowed things to get. Modern society is not being rational on the long term view.
But again, the bottom lines are that any relation with the world is a process of triadic mediation. We have to form the signs that become our world and so form our strongly individuated selves along with that. That is the essential epistemic relation.
And then there can be many ways of setting up that self-world point of view. The social constructionist arguement becomes about which socially encouraged stance is evolutionarily optimal. And that question can't be answered without recognising that the relation is between the information that constructs constraints and a world of physical potential that is being thus usefully constrained.
So any epistemology has to be grounded in a natural ontology. And people know that. It is why social construction is treated as such a danger - this idea that folk can construct their own realities rather too freely.
But in fact, against naive realism, it also had to be understood that what constitutes our psychic reality is the third thing of the modelling relation. We shouldn't mourn the impossibility of knowing the thing in itself. The whole point philosophically should be attending instead to forming the healthiest system of signs - the correct mediated view. What would it be to optimise the modelling relation (in some given environmental context)?
This is much more congenial to my own view, though the abstract language I'm not so familiar with. Let me see If I'm getting it right ...
My relation to a pile of wind-blown leaves is an uncaring or exploitative one (ignore or compost) until I notice that a hedgehog has taken up residence. Now my relation to hedgehogs is friendly because they eat my enemies the slugs, so even in entirely self-centred mode, my relation to the pile of leaves has changed, because it has become a source of allies, and now has value for me. But it also has value for the hedgehog, and therefore negative value to the slugs, though they will be unaware of it. My relation with the pile of leaves has become one of negotiating these values, and the difference between a pile of leaves and a hedgehog house is only that the hedgehog is using it, but that is highly significant for all of us.
To explore a concept - in this case 'construction' - is to carry out a similar manoeuvre. A distinction must be made that is not simply 'internal' to the concept of 'construction' - such that one cleaves it in two according to constructions of 'life' and 'non-life', and relabelling the 'non-life' side of it. This literally tells us nothing interesting about what a construction is or is not. It's taxonomy, not philosophy. It's as if, were I to ask you what a computer is, you were to tell me that some are black, and some are white, and yet others still are purple (and that purple computers happen to be called purputers and not computers). You may not be wrong, but - much worse - irrelevant.
As far as the the 'values' that motivate a distinction are concerned then, it is important to note that these values may inform distinctions that do not simply differ by degree, but also by kind. The kind of distinction you have in mind when speaking to your kids (between floor and thing) is of a different kind than that which is comes into play when the 'very idea' of what it means to pick something up comes into question. The latter kind of distinction - that which bears upon the very limits and relations that our concepts partake in, is the only kind that matters here.
So you come to want the long term thing of a hedgehog house. A particular pile of leaves has come to stand for that. You have an informational model in that you have both a theory of a hedgehog house and a measurement, a perceptual sign, of its existence. Where I see wind blown leaves, you experience a hedgehog house. And if I happen to kick through the leaves, you will tell me off then push the leaves back into their proper place. So it is more than just an idea. It is a semiotic relation that is physically constraining the world in a particular way now.
As I say, all life and mind can be explained in these terms - what theoretical biologist Howard Pattee called the epistemic cut. Rate independent information exerting constraint on rate dependent physical dynamics. Like the way DNA manages cellular metabolism in a "knowing" fashion.
So social constructionism is just a rather uncontroversial example of a semiotic relation - a high-level linguistically-anchored version of a basic natural mechanism.
Here's another take: when the kids have to pick up, they pretty much always have to distinguish between stuff they want to keep and stuff to throw away. The latter category amounts to: stuff they do not value.
So how does that work? If you like a picture, you keep it; if you don't, you don't. But you can tell one picture from another without deciding whether you like them; and you can tell apart all the pictures you like. I still don't see values as the source of the distinctions we can or do make here. What am I missing?
I hope I don't seem pigheaded here, SX. I find some of what you're advocating here quite appealing. Sorry not to have gotten back to the issue of construction yet, too, but I want to get clearer about this business first.
"In order to indicate anything we must first draw a distinction ... Distinction is the condition under which indication is possible. Indication, of course, can be anything. It can be what we refer to in the world, how we sort things, what we choose to investigate, etc. In order to indicate or refer to any of these things, I must first draw a distinction. As a consequence, the distinction is prior to whatever happens to be indicated. For example, if I wish to investigate the pathological, I must cleave a space (conceptual or otherwise) that brings the pathological into the marked space of the distinction. It is only on the basis of this distinction that I will be able to indicate the pathological. The pathological never innocently indicates the pathological, but rather presupposes an unmarked space of the “normal” that structures and organizes the pathological. In other words, the conditions under which any observations are possible are those of a prior distinction."
What you seem to be losing in your concern that the differences inherent in distinctions must be "purposive"; is the fact that there is a valid distinction between natural formations and constructions simply in terms of purpose or intentionality. Houses are built with something in mind, and so maybe is even the beaver's dam, although the ant's nest might be a hard sell. It's a spectrum, rich in distinctions that do make a difference to how we find nature, including human nature, intelligible.
So in general, valid distinctions that are founded upon ideas that render things more intelligible enrich philosophy, and indeed the arts and everyday life, and are thus best not dispensed with.
I think we make the distinction, whether in terms of 'life' or 'intentionality' (and no criterion is ever going to be perfect) because we can, and because it allows us to produce more categories of things; which is in general conceptually enriching; it broadens and complexifies understanding and introduces subtlety and nuance.
The other side of this is that human behavior is understood in terms of moral and ethical dimensionailty. So, the purposes for which anything is constructed may be enriching or impoverishing of human life. If a beaver cannot build a dam, it is an impoverished, perhaps even a useless, beaver. The other beavers may ignore, or even alienate it. A river cannot fail in this way; it will form a streambed come what may if it flows at all.
I can't see how making a sensible and valid distinction could be "conceptually debilitating". I'm not denying that there might not be, in some special contexts, good reasons to think about natural formations and human constructions or creations under the same set of concepts. For example, Jackson Pollock's paintings have been studied in terms of the fractal geometry of natural forms. (He once declared "I am nature!").
The distinction between the natural and the human seems to be pretty universal in human discourse, and it's hard to see how losing that would improve our understanding of ourselves. To lose that would itself seem, ironically, to be an artificial move.
And again - and this is the last time I repeat myself on this point - I'm not arguing that we simply drop the distinction between the natural and the human (or life and not-life, or the intentional or the not-intentional - again note how fluid and entirely unrigorous and unprincipled the use of these terms are). Only that, if we want to employ it in order to illuminate 'constructions' - in that very narrow context - then we should specify how it does.
It's sufficient to answer that with "That's how the word is commonly used." There can't be any argument that people aren't using words correctly. Common sense doesn't usually carry any burdens.
If you want to stipulate a special definition, you can invite people to accept it. You'd probably want to build an attractive (or at least intriguing) thesis around that jargon. So it would start something like: "I posit that mountains are constructions." You wait for the audience to register their surprise and then you go to about explaining how that could be.
There are few things more entirely worthless than relying on 'how words are commonly used' in order to aim at conceptual specificity. That 'construction' is commonly used in relation to, well, what is it? - life, humans, or intention? - tells us nothing about construction and everything about the socio-linguistic quirks of a particular community in a particular period of time. And in this case not even a community - so far two people have used three different distinctions in this thread alone. The only possible response that a Descartes might have to the objection that he's using the word 'cogito' in a way not commonly mandated would be 'who gives a flying fuck?'.
Quoting Mongrel
Yep, that's how all discussions take place. With explanation. 'Common meaning' is merely petrified jargon.
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It's incredible that one has to justify the ground zero of rational discussion - the giving and asking for reasons - with these ridiculous convolutions.
Was the OP aiming at conceptual specificity? To just meditate on the meaning of construction? If so, then I agree with you. Common use would close doors, not open them. We would need to look at things like etymology. We could bring some Lacan into it and start looking at words that are phonetically similar to construction, or how it shows up in dreams. Rational investigation? Maybe.
Quoting StreetlightX
You're getting really absolutist about this. You're seeing construction as an unchanging entity. Though humans come and go like waves on the shore, this construction abides. Let us examine it as far as our human minds will allow...
Maybe you're right.
Quoting StreetlightX
Descartes wasn't using "cogito" in an unusual way. And he was most certainly using it, not dissecting it.
Quoting StreetlightX
It's not intended to explain anything. Evocation of common use is meant to shift the burden. If there's another way the word should be taken, let the one who's going beyond common use explain himself.
Quoting StreetlightX
:-|
The opposite actually. It's precisely because what we make of 'construction' is entirely dependant on the use to which we put it that one has to be absolutely rigorous with it's articulation. That there is no absolute, unchanging manner in which 'construction' ought to be understood is the exact reason that it cannot do to appeal to 'common meaning' - or indeed, any meaning that is not explicitly articulated according to the terms specific to it's employment. Not the unchanging but the unequivocal.
Then your role would be to simply discern the intention of the speaker. You wouldn't be asking for justification of use.
BTW.. you are headed toward private language territory here.
Explain.
--
And no, there's nothing 'private language' about this - the whole point is a commitment to the 'publicity' of meaning, for it's ability to be taken up in a way that would allow 'someone to go on', rather than wander blindly in a forest of equivocation.
So Un says construction is about things that are actively built as opposed to things that just sort of passively appeared due to erosion or continental collision. You appeared to be asking why the word should be used that way. Isn't it your position that the only normativity of interest here is the intentions of the speaker?
A couple quick thoughts while I ponder this...
There's some slippage between whether we're talking about how we do, could, or should use the word "construction" or talking about the concept of construction. I don't know a simple way to deal with that.
(Part of the appeal of an extensional approach is that there's no issue there: talking about a class is the same as talking about applying a predicate.)
Now with words, something almost all of us do is the "in a sense" move. So you could say that "in a sense" rivers "construct" riverbeds, where "in a sense" might as well mean "metaphorically." Or it indicates there is a useful analogy here. But you could also say that "literally" rivers construct riverbeds, and that requires adjusting the received meaning of "construct."
In one sense, that just amounts to skipping a step -- metaphors are just not-yet-literal usages, not yet entrenched, and some metaphors never receive wide enough usage or acceptance to become entrenched as literal. On the other hand, a metaphor that is used widely enough to become literal doesn't usually displace existing usage; it gets added on. Displacing existing usage carries a heavier burden.
A point about that. A metaphysical strength distinction does rest on a fundamental opposition. Or to be more precise, not merely an act of negation but an actual inverse or reciprocality.
So yes, the distinction could be between active and passive. But more strongly, the dichotomy would be construction vs constraint. That is bottom-up efficient causality vs top-down finality. That is then the systems frame of meaning that brings value and intentionality naturally into the picture.
Even an eroding mountain is a semiotic relation. The laws of thermodynamics act as a constraint on material constructions. They are a universal desire that is the cause of a generalised tendency towards an equilibrium state. Mountains get worn down and valleys filled up over time just by "accident". Or rather, by the fact of a global balancing drive which limits the scope of acts of construction.
Social constructionism - first best explained by the symbolic interactionism that arose out of Peirce's semiotics - is then about how language can socially construct the perceptual constraints by which we experience reality. Habits of words can organise our thoughts at a very deep level. They regulate what we see or distinguish.
So this is where the confusion starts. There is both construction and constraint in play (as natural partners, being the necessary pairing in any systems understanding of causality). It is not that individuals ever had a choice that they were modelling reality in pragmatic fashion and so their experience was constrained by some natural or evolved intent. But with the development of a new level of semiotic mechanism - articulate and grammatical speech - a new social way of constructing constraints could get going.
Biological minds could be social minds - still in a pragmatic modelling relation with the world, but now from an expanded social point of view which could incorporate social level final causes, or intents and values.
So in my systems science/holistic/pansemiotic ontology (definitely socially constructed), I see abstracta as being concretely real ... in some useful sense. Just as I see concretely material stuff - like atoms or forces - as really convenient fictions, ideas we have about a reality formed of constituent objects.
So when a physicist goes looking for the fundamental material stuff of which everything is made, it has a way of evaporating. It turns out to be an over-concrete idea of what reality really is.
And likewise, finality really turns out to be critical to accounting for reality. Thermodynamics is not just some random idea. There really are mathematically-inevitable constraints that must emerge for anything to actually be.
So yes, it is conventional to see a sharp distinction between the real material world and the realm of human constructed notions - ideas about universities, hedgehog houses or whatever. This is what social construction has come to mean in PoMo especially. It is the basis of postmodernist relativity.
But that is why I prefer semiotic approaches that see reality as a co-construction of information and energy. That replaces the dichotomy of mind and matter with something more ontically general.
I think your position is that everything is constructed, except some things are mathematically inevitable.. so not constructed. Is your view contradictory?
Yea, well "the dude abides", even in the inversion of social construction.
Dude. So many ways to misconstrue anything I say. You keep demonstrating the grip that a socially constructed worldview has on folk's thinking.
You are talking standard reductionist metaphysics and so it has to either/or, and to suggest both implies contradiction and paradox. Instant logical fail. Go to jail and don't pass go.
But you know that the essence of holism or systems causality is about the complementary duality of two kinds of causes in interaction - upward construction vs downward constraint. So anything real is a product of both efficient and final cause. Or to put it another way, material and formal cause.
So in my view - which is pretty much ordinary social science - society is an organismic system. It is a form of holistic order that can learn and adapt. It is rightfully a higher kind of "mind" - mind being put in quotes to signal we are talking of semiotics or a generalised theory of mindfulness, and not wanting to get tied up in the usual old hat Cartesian notion of mind as a soul-stuff or sentient substance.
Social constructionism (or symbolic interactionism) is then getting into the tricky semiotic detail of how this works - again in a way that can be generalised from the social to the biological and even perhaps the physical.
I posted on the triadic nature of sign relations. And I made the point that when it comes to the "constructing", what is involved is the construction of habits of conceptual constraint within a community of minds. Through language, bit by bit, ideas can be built inside everyone's heads. Each new generation can become soaked in the schemas that best make sense of their worlds - or best make sense in a way that works to suit the purposes of the larger social organism.
It is all perfectly obvious. It is just that most people also object to this analysis of the process. An irony of the modern condition is that it is basic to the shared conceptual ideology that we should all be free and individual. So social construction is a really bad thing in that light - a threat to the supposed primacy of the self.
And that enlightenment/romantic model of humanity has of course taken hold because of its very effectiveness in achieving social goals. Fooling folk about the reality of their socially constructed state has had immense payback for the modern western techno power culture that has adopted it as its umwelt or unquestioned world model.
So you've got the best of both worlds. Humans are neither materialistic automatons programmed by social memes, nor is social information some sort of non-existent abstracta. Instead you have the fruitful co-operativity of individual psychologies being shaped by useful cultural habits developed over the long-run. Human intellect is liberated ... but in ways that are imbuded with the pursuit of general social goals.
This is why modern life is strange. Hey, we all could be anything we like - astronaut, president, bum living under a bridge. But then also we have to be that one thing pretty much. We get both huge choice and the necessity of binding ourselves to that choice.
Freedom and constraint go hand in hand. The modern socially constructed mind takes that claimed paradox to the extreme.
This moves along the right path, but I think that in philosophy it's less a matter of 'in a sense...' than it is a more determine and rigorous 'in this sense...' - where said 'sense' must be filled-in and given exact content. With respect to metaphor, for example, Deleuze was always adamant that nothing he ever wrote ever employed any metaphor: that his use of concepts always took on a consistency of their own, with respect to the particular problematic to which they responded to. This is I think the right attitude, and not only with respect to Deleuze but with philosophy more generally: one does not 'displace' existing usage because 'existing usage' simply responds to other imperatives, other problems which are more or less irrelevant to the problem that one is attempting to respond to (see: http://www.piccolorium.net/2012/12/deleuze-and-metaphor-and-non-metaphor.html)
Neither literal nor metaphorical, concepts ought to be exemplary: they ought to exemplify their own use, their sense forged immanently along with the use to which they are put. This is true of all language, of course, but is especially important in philosophy where 'established use' carries little to no weight whatsoever.
https://www.texasobserver.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-freest-little-city-in-texas/
While schadenfreude is easily found in this article, I'd encourage readers to read with sympathy for the butt of the joke to get a better sense of what I mean. Here we have a group of people who had good intents, and acted on those intents to create a social entity. That social entity then, in spite of intent, had causal effects on the relationships between people. The social entity would not exist without the people taking social action -- this is its genesis -- and then the social entity took on a life of its own outside of the intents of people, and people began to act within said social entity.
We can psychologise this. I'd even concede that there's an interesting intersection between the social and the psychological. But I'd insist that the incorporated muncipality is not a psychological entity, but is something which, once created by action, then exists on its own -- like a wall, buildings, streets, and so forth exist on their own.
This is just one example. I think that the more you look at legal entities, like this, the more you'll see how they influence people -- and hence have this quasi-independent status, because, yes, they depend on us to exist, they don't exist without our action, and then we act within them.
The three things I hope to illustrate about social constructs is:
1. They are as real as beans. They exist independently of us, in spite of not existing without us.
2. Our actions create, but do not dictate the mechanisms of social entities. We can influence them through action, create them through action, but mechanism is different from this.
3. Here's a way of looking at the social without taking a stance on their ontological status. We can look at how they work and characterize them, in their own terms, without going further and taking a stance on their metaphysical status (aside, of course, from their reality -- but not with respect to whether social entities are the same as physical, for instance, even if they are both real)
(L)
In my world, we'd call this "stipulative definition." Generally, a speaker can stipulate whatever they like; whether the audience follows the speaker in adopting the stipulated definition is another matter.
Quoting StreetlightX
I've been puzzling over how to respond here.
You might propose a definition as a notational convenience.
You might propose a definition as an account of how a word is properly applied, the traditional "necessary and sufficient conditions" thing we've done since Socrates.
In both cases, it's expected that you can swap definiens and definiendum, so there's always a route back to ordinary usage. In the latter case, your success is measured against accepted usage.
One thing a change in vocabulary by means of stipulative definition cannot lead to is a gain in expressive power, that is, the ability to say things using the new vocabulary that you could not say before.
For instance, in the blog post you linked, there's the interesting bit at the end about seeing the "framing function" as primary and what were heretofore called "frames" as a particular instance. So there are two options here: either we add on a new literal use of "frame" so that frame now has a disjunctive definition (this is the usual way, I'd submit) or the class "frame" is redefined to be more general.
For comparison, "reboot" now has a disjunctive definition, depending on whether you're talking about electronic devices or media franchises. There's an analogy, which is what led to the new usage in the first place, but if you want a non-disjunctive definition, you'll need terms general enough to cover both cases, and that means giving up information the term used to carry.
I don't think there's any point in making a general argument for or against any way of proceeding. We do differ on the respect we're inclined to accord received usage, but I'm not sure what that amounts to.
For it to function as a concept proper it needs to be linked to a problem to which it is meant to respond*. At a very generic level, to claim that say, race is a social construct, is to presumably make the concomitant claim that 'race' is not product of (only) genetics. If so, this in turn opens up a whole train of (possible) entailments: that there are institutional, cultural, economic mechanisms of 'race formation' or whathaveyou. One is then behooved to explain how those mechanisms function in order to make sense of the claim. It's around this point that the concept of the 'construct' begins to take on it's peculiar 'content'. Deleuze will thus call a concept a 'point of condensation' with respect to the various 'components' that make it up, and for which "there are only ordinate relationships [ordinal as opposed to cardinal that is, relations of order and not number -SX], not relationships of comprehension or extension."
Definitions, by contrast, make no reference to the problem to which a concept is meant to respond to; they make of concepts free-floating units of 'meaning' that, in and of themselves, involve no stakes. That is, there is a 'stake' involved in calling race a social construct; we will understand 'race' differently if we accept that it is so constructed. We will understand it differently yet if we do not. Concepts cannot be understood apart from this constallation of relations which alone give them sense, and to change one of these relations is in turn to change this constellation (think of a kaleidoscope).
*Deleuze: "All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning... concepts are only created as a function of problems".
Is it a matter of language? If so, then you would say the Nile or any other river is a social construct if you believe language is purely socially derived. Chomsky argues pretty well that this can't possibly be true. Language capability is innate. Infants at two days old can distinguish the language of their mother from a foreign language.
Some rivers could be social constructions...
But I don't think it makes sense to say all rivers are social constructions.
Quoting Mongrel
I think it is and isn't a matter of language... it seems difficult to imagine the law to exist without language. But I don't think it makes sense to say that just because the Nile is called "the Nile", and language is a social practice, to then infer that the Nile is a social construct. Then everything speakable would be a social construct -- which is something that's interesting to think about, but not really the same thing as, say, gender roles or money or laws or institutions, even if we might argue that all reality is constructed in the same way as gender roles, money, laws, or institutions.
It would be a controversial stance on what counts as a social constrct, whereas roles, money, laws, and institutions are not exactly controversial examples of social entities (even if one might not agree they are social *constructs*, but, rather, ways of talking about biological drives, human nature, or some such other entity to which they reduce the social)
The beginning of the story makes sense. The ending gets nihilistic. A river is a 'fiction on the occasion of sense' (Hume). Having noticed that (and it's a pretty common recognition among philosophical types), the next question is: what is the nature and origin of language?
A meaning as use advocate might say that a river is a social construct in the sense that it's part of social interaction where the universe is carved up according to human needs and purposes.
Quoting Moliere
Those who are devoted to truth are never afraid of controversy.
Which story? I'm not following what you mean by that.
I'd also say I'd much rather avoid importing Hume's definition of anything. Like, I think it makes what's already difficult to understand something more difficult rather than easier to understand. Reducing things to impressions and the vivacity of those impressions doesn't tell me much about the river. It might tell me something about human nature, which was the point of the treatise after all. And if we read the treatise as both a treatise of human nature and a treatise on knowledge and metaphysics, it might tell me something about the world too.
But this strikes me as a very round-about way to just getting to the topic at hand -- social construction, and the possibility of distinguishing it from the concrete (metaphysics) or scientific (epistemology). ((where I'm basically advocating that there's no need to do so at all, we can investigate the social without worrying about its metaphysical nature, and we can investigate the concrete or scientific without worrying about its social girding))
How do you get from Hume's phenomenology to the nature and the origin of language? I don't think I understand that at all. This feels a bit cryptic to me. Maybe your approach is naturally cryptic, so that's the intent, but I'm not quite following.
I sort of feel like debating what meaning is is going to lead us astray, too. But I'm also starting to feel like I'm repeating myself, so I'll just leave it at that.
Quoting Mongrel
I'd say that it doesn't help to elucidate social construction if we use controversial examples. Really, in general, any sort of elucidation wouldn't use controversial examples to make a concept clear, but would go the other way around -- here is where we agree, this is what the concept means, and this is why, even though such and such seems controversial, it actually belongs.
I don't -- really, on either account. I don't think I could defend the notion that meaning is use, any longer. And, I don't think I could propose a better theory of linguistic meaning. What does it mean for meaning to be use, too? Perhaps there's a way of saying it that is agreeable. We can put language to use, and the use-age language is put to can show us its meaning. But I'd [s]hazard[/s] be hesitant to say that meaning is only use. Can't language be useless, after all? And does it then lose its meaning?
And, in the end, do we even need a theory of meaning? Couldn't words just mean whatever it is they mean? Does it matter what our theory of meaning is, if we can put language to use? It seems to me that insofar that we agree words can be used then we can use them for all sorts of purposes, regardless of why they mean what they mean - to include science and social analysis.
I'm surprised an Australian hasn't butted in. I understand that in Australia 'a river' is a slightly different thing from a Eurocentric 'river' (see this article) since Aussie rivers may be ephemeral things.
Otherwise, I have a feeling that slithy toves are gimbling in the wabes of this thread at the moment. I wonder how the borogroves are?
That seems an odd thing to say. A beaver constructs a dam and thereby constructs a lake and diverts the river. The Olympic Committee constructs an artificial river for the canoeing event. Such things are constructions as distinct from 'natural' lakes and rivers, and that seems like a handy distinction to make. But these are nothing like anything generally called a 'social construct'.
There is this thing called money, consisting of coins and notes which are constructed in factories called 'mints'. We have a new plastic £5 note here, and the old paper note is no longer 'legal tender'. It is still a note constructed in the mint, but its social status has been changed. Shops won't accept it and you have to take it to a bank. Compare this with the social status of skin colour.
In prisons, cigarettes and drugs become currency. You don't have to have a habit to trade.
For sure, language is a social construct. This river is called the Nile, because that's what we call it, and if we called it the Umbongo, it would be the Umbongo, but we don't. But that doesn't make the Nile/Umbongo a social construct, only "the Nile/Umbongo".
I am not so certain on language. The river is called the Nile. If we called it the Umbongo, then it would be called the Umbongo. However I'd say the fact that we name things isn't evidence that language, which is much more than naming, is socially constructed. To understand naming one must already understand language and the sign. Naming takes place within language -- it is a linguistic move. So, certainly, if we called the nile umbongo, then the river would be called umbongo. But language would pre-exist this act of naming. Language is what gives us the ability to call the river the Nile (as well as the river the river, for that matter).
Language is an odd duck, a black swan, a chimerical beast. Language speaks man -- and we also turn it into our tool (and retool it). It's hard to categorize.
Quoting unenlightened
Perhaps odd, but I wouldn't say nothing in common -- and what they have in common is relevant. Or at least it seems so to me. In particular, in the origins of each. Both are the product of our activities. Cigarettes and drugs become currency because we use them as such, not because of their status. They gain status in recognition of how they are used.
Simillarly, Jews were black because of how we acted towards them, collectively. Then, they become white through the mechanism of white supremacy. Similarly so for the Irish. There is the origin, how we act, and the mechanism -- in this case white supremacy. Skin color is a part of race, but race is the product of social activity and racial identity is the result of social mechanisms.
The plastic £5 note has a different status because of how its treated -- shops won't take anything but the plastic one.
What is the mechanism of money? What perpetuates money? Certainly money begins to live and breathe on its own with its inception. Especially in a world where even housing and land have a price, and we need to pay to have a place to sleep in, and we aren't given money -- however we want to describe that mechanism, its origin lies in our actions, and then it takes on a life of its own. We begin to live within it. ((I don't name capitalism here because money is older than capital, and certainly exists in economies which are not capitalistic -- I only mention the more capitalistic elements of our society to demonstrate there is a mechanism of money which is distinct from its origins))
Where I think I would agree with you is that the plastic of the £5 note, the water and concrete of the Olympian river, the wood of the beaver dam -- these are not social constructs in the least. That would be a category error. Those are physical entities, not social entities. But I'd still say that while the wood and paper and glass and so forth of the house, which make up the house, are physical entities, that the house is a social one. ((I hope that's not too confusing, because it feels confusing to me... but I'm, woefully, doing my best here))
Yep. When I point out the way the river is a social construct, what I mean to say is that a physicist wouldn't be able to account for the distinctions (or lack thereof) that I make. So I must be assuming that the physicist is finding some real distinctions. If I try to say (as Quine did) that even the physicist's statements have no determinable reference, my philosophy is revealed to be a kind of nihilism.
The two (social construct/discovered truth) go hand in hand, although in this we haven't endorsed realism, but just noticed how we are bound to think. Do you agree with that?
Ephemeral Southern Rivers. Woe... Have you read anything about how music and language are linked?
I'm not sure our understanding of social construction is settle-able, either. But at least we'd be discussing social construction. :D
I don't understand. In what way is a river the product of our activities?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It's all talk on this thread. Nevertheless, what my talk of 'rivers' is intended to point to is just those inchoate bits of reality that on the contrary force the traveller to look for a bridge or a ferry, or a ford. Which is to say, let's try and keep indirect realism hovering, by understanding that the construct of language can - for the sake of argument and by arbitrary construction if you will - be bracketed off.
The picture I provided was a river driven by motors within a concrete bed made for the purpose of luxury. No less a river -- at least in the Eurocentric understanding, as @mcdoodle pointed out -- but only existent because money was spent on crews of men to come out, dig the hole, pour the concrete, fill it with chlorinated water, and install motors of some kind to make the water move.
If it weren't for the acts of people there wouldn't be a river there. So, some rivers are socially constructed, but not all. I don't think the Nile, for instance, is the product of human activity.
Right. In my view this is a misunderstanding of the normal meaning of 'social construct', which does not mean 'stuff we made together'. I'm happy to call it a constructed river to distinguish it from a Nile type river, though that too is constructed in places. What makes something a social construct is that it is made of society, not by society. The artificial river enables a certain structure of human relations, and that structure of relations is a social construct, not the river itself.
So the pyramids are constructions that were provoked by a social construct of religion and government that has passed away, and they now partake of a completely different social construct called 'tourism'.
Group B talks among themselves: "Yes, yes...it's just so."
The two groups never communicate with one another, but their so's are basically equivalent. We know this because we're in a transcendent position.
If the so's are the same, structure is implied either innately among the people or in the world they inhabit. It's not indirect realism that hovers, it's structuralism.
Quine denies that it can ever be determined that their so's are the same. So the appeal to ordinary language fails. There is reason to doubt.
So if it's true that you haven't seen a thing until you've seen its beauty: I've seen post-structuralism. It's not about society, really. It's most certainly not challenging naturalism. It's capturing awareness and bringing it back to something very personal. Look at naturalism endlessly unfolding. Wow.
The whole thing about structuralism is that whenever we talk about something, there is a whole lot of motivation, intention, history, associations, and things all behind its mention, and the very way it is structured. Smaller brooks run into the river, and the river runs into a lake or something, and this matters, and is cut up the way it is for reasons.
Power tends to be a big one, but this is why post-structuralism tends to be so tightly tied into the humanities, and pyschoanalysis and whatnot.
Yeah, they ought to be working together!
Nah, we'll all be aspies engineering better and better sex bots in the future.
No, I didn't think you'd agree with that. I went that way because regardless of the speaker's motivation, this is, in part, what it would amount to in practice, changing the way words are used. Of course, you can agree that the way we use words will change without accepting that this is all that changes.
And I don't have to say that either. But I'm looking at how words are used as a social practice, and that practice, being real behavior in the world, can have real effects. Those effects would largely be what we want to call social construction. That's why it's worth saying that a form of conceptual analysis might involve a stipulative definition. Yes, the intent is to illuminate a concept in an interesting way, to spiff up a tool in the conceptual toolbox, but it is also an entreaty to talk differently.
There was a lot of talk earlier in the thread about race, for instance, and whether and in what sense "race" is a socially constructed concept. I'd submit that whether it is or not, the racist behavior we deplore includes talk, and that talk includes stipulative definitions (what is black, what is white, etc.), and one of the key moves of racist talk is to present the stipulative definition as if it is not stipulative, but only limning a natural kind.
You can ignore that question and say that whatever the status of "race", whatever we believe about it, we can still choose how we act on those beliefs, and call on other beliefs to guide our actions.
But you can also attempt to attack the doctrine itself:
(1) There are natural kinds, but "race" isn't one of them. (The scientific approach.)
(2) There are no natural kinds, and therefore "race" can't be one. (The constructionist.)
(1) can lead to squabbling over genetic markers and ethnicity and the definition of "race" all over again; (2) requires bolstering of some kind to have any effect, either from the ethical considerations above, or perhaps from a genealogical critique -- here's why you have the beliefs you do about "race" -- which leads to squabbling over that. Both hope to gain strength from facts, one scientific, one historical.
Another thing I found myself partly saying and partly implying in my last post was that if a definition is introduced, it is sustained by the existing language in which it is introduced, and since we should be able to substitute in either direction, a definition cannot result in an increase in expressive power, in an ability to say things you could not say before. That's true insofar as definiens and definiendum are tied together.
What can happen though is this: definitions don't always follow a word around as it is used. Once the word, or the new usage, is out there, if it's taken up, its usage will become its own justification. This is another point that both (1) and (2) will attack: (1) would attempt to show how the word could be used in a scientifically precise way (and perhaps having an empty domain, or not connecting to other scientific concepts like intelligence, or perhaps not being precisely specifiable at all); (2) would try to attach current to historical usage -- you say x because these other people said x for y reasons, thus x always carries a trace of y.
One oddity is that (1) and (2) will critique each other's approaches in their own terms: (1) finds (2) scientifically suspect, (2) finds (1) ignorant of its history. What's more, they will judge each other's success at fighting, say, racism, on those terms: (1) thinks (2) leaves truth a free-for-all, (2) finds (1) insufficiently engaged, even naive. But what's even more: (1) will generally take the view that their debate with (2) does not turn on how successful they are at fighting racism, say, but that claim is a common if not universal move for (2).
Which is not to deny that an architect is an amateur of both disciplines.
Social engineering is a leftist thingy. It's a very precarious activity. It tends to go forth building bridges in places nobody ever goes.
This whole paragraph is essentially stuff you already said, @StreetlightX, but you were presenting a more or less happy version (spiffy new concepts) and I'm thinking of the not-so-happy here (you can't get the "race" toothpaste back in the tube).
Who y'gonna call? Structure-busters.
I think I may be in a bit of a frivolous mood at the moment.
I'm grateful to un for starting this thread, it has at the very least sent me back to a book on my shelves, 'The social construction of what?' by Ian Hacking. Hacking dislikes on the whole the language of social constructionism but he has great sympathy for many of the issues raised by the people who use such terminology.
One phrase he conjures up in talking about 'science wars' - between the Weinbergs and the Kuhns, say - is that those of a (natural) scientific cast of mind usually believe in 'inherent-structurism'. In the natural sciences, that is to say, we have arrived at something like the facts about how the world is put together, which has an inherent structure. So we may debate the 'construction' of the idea of quarks as Pickering did, say, but all the same, it turns out that quarks are there, performing spins and so forth, even if we may remain 'nominalist' about them. And, in Nelson Goodman terminology 'irrealist' about worlds, a word I've always liked because it means you can tick a box that few other people even notice is there in realism vs idealism surveys.
How does your version of post-structuralism deal with quarky worlds and inherent structures in natural science?
Quoting Mongrel
Yes I have, although at the moment to be frank I've become more interested in how language and action are linked: how spoken language is integrated into how we act with each other. But I could easily be diverted back into music at a moment's notice :)
Me too.
Quoting mcdoodle
I don't think I could talk about that without going off on some weird, pointless tangent. How do you think about it?
And the model for this, what Goodman called "entrenchment", is over here.
No, I'd be tangential too :)
There are two characteristics [s]about[/s] of social entities which are, at first blush, seemingly difficult to resolve. One is that social entities are real, and the other is that they are mutable by us. In the first instance social entities are part of our environment, in the second we are the artists of products and tools. So how is it that any entity has both of these characteristics? How can an entity be both unchangeable and changeable? How is it that we are able to manipulate something which, at the same time, manipulates us? How is it possible for the same entity to have this double character which is seemingly a contradiction?
What the standard notion of social construct emphasizes is one aspect of this character -- its mutability. But it leaves out the very real part where social constructs take on a reality of their own, influence us, and aren't immediately reconfigurable (and, potentially, *can't* be reconfigured).
Maybe there's another way of resolving this tension, but this is what I have in mind when proposing looking at social entities in terms of genesis and mechanism. The birth of social entities occurs in a different manner from the life of social entities.
When you say "of society", what are the parts? I have tourism, here, made of society. It seems to me that the normal understanding of society is that we are the parts. So if I were to dismantle tourism then I wouldn't go see the pyramids on vacation, for starters, and I'd do what is in my power to stop others from doing so as well. I might write appeals, pass laws, set up blockades, and enforce them with ground to air missiles if necessary.
But I'd say this picture misses on the real parts of social entities -- that they aren't something where we just do stuff and have happen. Those in charge, those purportedly in power, are often caught up within social entities just as those without power are. They don't have the power to change the entities they live within -- they act within the institutions that already exist.
But what would you propose instead, then? Or does this just seem like something which isn't a real issue, to you?
Of course. Indeed the politician is more caught up in the construct of power and governance than the peasant. When the buffalo are stampeding northwards, the one at the front cannot turn west without being trampled. The one at the back is the one with some freedom to stop or turn
Quoting Moliere
We know what a hurricane is, that it is real. We know that the 'parts' are air molecules. But that doesn't help us much. It is more useful to consider that a hurricane is made of movements than to say it is made of air. A stampede is likewise made of movements rather than of buffalo, and social constructs are mass movements rather than static arrangements.
If you want to stop a stampede that you are part of, the first thing to do is to stop trying to get to the front. And that's all you can do, except whatever occurs to you when you are well and truly left behind.
I'm going to try something here that might be a divergence, and it might help to bridge our understandings too. It's long-ish. Sorry. Consider it a play of ideas, ideas that influence why I'm saying what I'm saying, but to which I am not married. I'm open to retooling them.
Here I think the primary point of difference is:
Quoting unenlightened
Where I would say there is no outside to the stampede, when it comes to social movement. Or, perhaps, the stampede is just one movement within a grander dance of movement, so there is an escape from the *stampede*, but not from the social world (hence why it really and truly is a world).
I have in mind movement, constant movement. I have in mind machines, in particular -- large, intricate machines, like a rube goldberg machine, but machines which reproduce and retool themselves. To use Deleuze, there are desiring-machines, organs placed on a body without organs (attempting to eliminate the body without organs), made of partial objects and flows. The flows are coded, chained. The machines produce, and are themselves connected to other machines through the flows.
I only refer to him as a kind of way of looking at social ontology, not as an answer. I think Deleuze is a bit too abstract for my taste -- it kind of reads in a way that doesn't seem specific enough to particulars. It's attempting to reach for something too universal. But he does propose mechanisms for social movement. He proposes entities which are not us. He proposes something which is both us and isn't us, which seems to be the right way of looking at society to me. It is and is not our movement. We all move within, and there is no stopping the stampede. There is no outside of the stampede, the hurricane, or social movement. (or, again, there may be an outside to the stampede, but not to the social world -- sort of depends on how you meant "stampede" or "hurricane" in your metaphor)
My preference is more rooted in historical method, which itself is already multiple. Also, it seems to me that Deleuze is too rooted in psychology for my taste. This misses out on some of the nuances of social entities which are more alien to us than a psychological theory can capture. But what I like is his focus on flows, break-flows, coding and re-coding and surplus code. It's this bizarro synthesis between Marx and Freud which simultaneously rejects them both. I am somewhat skeptical of him, and at times don't really make a connection in what he is writing, but the flows of production makes sense of a good deal of particular social situations, from my perspective -- and not just at the workplace, but also within the state (and other social entities).
Since there is no escape, and yet we can still influence what rules over us, how can we account for that?
Social entities are birthed by collective action. And then we live within them, like children with more power than their parents, or young gods who have yet to find all their powers.
Hannah Arendt has a useful theory about the social for this purpose in The Human Condition. She divides the human condition up into labor, work, and action. The latter, action, is what I have in mind in terms of genesis.
From the beginning section on Action:
Later, in On the Process Character of Action...
This uncertainty I'd attribute to the reality of social entities. We create them and they take a life of their own. So to stop a stampede, a social movement, since to be who we are is to be social beings and to remove ourselves from said movement is to kill ourselves, rather than removing ourselves -- becoming the body without organs, the subject whose ephemera forever hangs outside of the chains of production -- we build other machines. But rather than desiring-machines, I think it would be safe to say that social movements are social-machines whose production can take place outside of the codes of desire.
What might they be? Well, they're novel, as per Arendt. So it's not something we can answer in the abstract, but only together. And then we sort of have to just see what happens, too. Like a child is a part of ourselves, it also has a mind of its own and develops into something outside of our intents.
Hence why I'm saying that social entities -- social constructions -- are made by us, and then what they are made of is determined by the historical method. It just depends on the particular entity -- white supremacy operates in its own fashion, capitalism operates in its own fashion, patriarchy operates in its own fashion, private property does as well, and we see how these things operate by attending to their history.
Ah, but 'in practice' definitions rarely figure into our use of words. Definitions are always derivative, they're still captures, snapshots frozen in time, of language-at-work. Of course 'in practice' pretty much every word is 'define-able' - every 'scene' is 'picture-able' -, but this is always a kind rear-guard action, one that takes place a posteriori. When it comes to concepts, one needs to be in situ instead.
And this is why, while it may be true that definitions don't/can't increase the expressive power of language, the introduction of a new concept, can; and if it is a good concept, it ought to do exactly that. This is why concepts involve stakes; they ought to introduce a difference that makes a difference. Race is a construct and not a...? If so, this implies... ? And not ...? Definitions don't have this implicative structure, they don't point out beyond them to a series of cascading implicative commitments.
This is also why neither history (to which the 'constructionist' appeals - and a faux-constructionist at that, I might add), nor the appeal to 'natural kinds' (that of the 'scientific approach') are of any relevance when evaluating a concept. In a slogan: one evaluates a concept on the basis of the problem to which it responds. Nothing else - natural kinds or history be damned.
Again, Deleuze is my muse here: "There is no point in wondering whether Descartes was right or wrong.... Cartesian concepts can only be assessed as a function of their problems ... A concept always has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation ... Of course, new concepts must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above all, to our becomings. But what does it mean for a concept to be of our time, or of any time? Concepts are not eternal, but does this mean they are temporal? What is the philosophical form of the problems of a particular time? If one concept is "better" than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances, it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out... [distinctions! - SX]".
Quoting Moliere
I think perhaps the more pertinent question - and I think - I hope! - you agree - is what on earth would make anyone think these two characteristics are in any way incompatible. As if we and our creations do not in the first instance belong to the environment!
On a totally side note, there's nothing less less alien to Deleuze than any kind of psychologism but I won't kick up too big a fuss about this : P
That is a good question....
I think it's something to do with how we tend to think about things. I certainly think about the world as something "outside", at times, even while believing that it isn't! :D The play between outside/inside, outside of my power and within my power, world and self starts to look fuzzy when it comes to our social world.
In a classically scientific picture, I have my beliefs about the world. I support or refute my beliefs with reference to either logical consistency or with respect to the facts. I act on the world of which I am a part, but through said action -- through experiment -- I discover the contours of the world which are "outside" of action, "outside" of belief.
Also, I think it has something to do with our political tradition. Nature vs. Nurture, and the state of nature being concepts which seem to oppose ourselves to our environment -- and environment, as a concept, is often set up in opposition to the individual... though I suppose that it is often done does not actually answer, why is it done?
I will say that I am not a naturalist, so we may also differ somewhere on that point. But, as per what I've been saying previously, I think that one's ultimate metaphysical position can be "passed over" in investigating the social.
I agree, but then, I also tend to think that 'the way we talk about things' is laden so heavy with metaphysical prejudice that we ought to trust none - not one - of the classical distinctions we are so used to working with, including and especially those between world and self, nature and nurture, inside and outside. If the social is where these distinctions begin to 'look fuzzy', then so much the worse for these distinctions! In any case, part of what I'm trying to do in this thread is get people to be careful about merely paying lip service to the 'realness' of 'social constructions', only to slip in it's 'unreality' through the back door, drawing it up, in the last moment, against 'nature', 'environment', 'non-life' or whathaveyou.
Part of what's so hard about doing this is precisely the prejudices of 'the way we talk about things', which erects a double barrier - that of thinking the social as the 'unnatural' on the one hand, and that of thinking nature as 'the immutable' (to use your term), on the other (or, to use another stricken dualism - between 'the constructed' and 'the found'). This double barrier renders each side of the pseudo-divide all the poorer for it. And I think your question - how to 'reconcile society and the environment' - brings this to the fore quite nicely. And of course, as they say, this is not a problem to be solved, but rather one to be dis-solved.
Finally, part of the resistance to postmodern thought similarly arises from these prejudices, which, when confronted with statements that declare things to be 'social constructions' (a vulgar understanding of postmodernism at any rate...), continue to operate under essentially pre-modern understandings of what a 'construction' is. But of course the whole point is not only to revise our understanding of the thing so declared to be a 'construction', but the very meaning of 'construction' itself.
But it can turn west. What does being trampled stand for in your analogy?
If that grander dance is the social world, what is the stampede? Also, common sense says that there is always an option, in this case a way out of social world, even if the solution is irrational and too radical to be considered by most.
Well there is no outside to society for humans, just as there is no air outside the atmosphere. But there is air outside a hurricane, and there is an outside to a stampede - there must be for it to be heading somewhere. It's an analogy, so there's no point in pressing too hard, but I think it is a fairly apposite image of the condition of society at the moment and not necessarily throughout history, that it is heading somewhere (a cliff?) at full tilt with everyone trying to be at the front.
Quoting Moliere
Perhaps it is fuzzy, and we are seeing it aright. I always start every thread with a chant of 'all-is-one' for half an hour. And then I get out the machete, for the purposes of filling the internet with complications. Since all is one, I am only hacking at myself.
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, although I am stuff and the environment is stuff and other people are stuff, and society is my environment and I am society and so on, still it is good to talk about woozles and where they aren't. Distinctions cannot be maintained, but they have to be made nonetheless, on an improvised basis. Here is a story about how the individual is moulded by the social constructs that make up the environment. And yet some herd-defying maverick manages to write the critique of the society that made him.
[quote=J. Krishnamurti]It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.[/quote]
[quote=unenlightened] It's not all about you.[/quote]
Don't contradict my fantasies, peasant! Being trampled stands for what happens to you when you deny a social construct, which is that society rides roughshod over you.
May I disagree? If you have no contacts to other human beings (or whatever we want to define society to consist of) you aren't a part of any society.
No you may not. Every little philosopher has a Mummy and a Daddy.
I want to take one more shot at this.
The human custom of swimming for recreation is a pattern of human behaviour; but swimming requires something to swim in, and what you swim in is not a human, but a body of water, either natural or manmade. (Those things, we might say, also have a role in the "language-game" of swimming.)
If you want to modify the human custom of swimming in some way, you could act either on people's behaviour or on the the non-human part of the custom. Both are part of the practice, so changing either will change the practice. You could also act on people's behavior by physically stopping them from swimming, or by changing their intentions to the degree that you can, by command or entreaty, etc.
There is a similarity between, say, draining and backfilling the local swimming hole, and physically stopping people from swimming there. Neither address the intentions of people. To address the intentions of people, rather than their ability to act on their intentions, you would talk to them or engage in some other symbolic action. Talking to a swimming hole does not change the swimming hole.
Building a fence around the swimming hole doesn't stop people from wanting to swim; in fact, it recognizes that they do. But after 350 years of not swimming, the fence probably wouldn't be needed anymore. Without the physical practice to sustain it, the custom of swimming, and the beliefs and intentions that went with it, would wither away. But they could come back.
I'm not sure what your point is. There's nothing I want to disagree with in what you say, but since you don't mention social constructs...
Ok, I'll play with it a little. Say there is a little tribe living by a river. And perhaps they have an area designated for washing and swimming that everyone uses, and then another area where they do fishing. or grow watercress or something. And perhaps there is a sacred place where no one goes except to make offerings to the Crocodile God on Crocodile Day. One might at this point say that the river has been socially constructed into functional divisions - the river itself being undivided.
So Dr Tasmaner rolls up one day, and after looking around, goes to the elders and says, " Look, you need to change things around so that where you grow your watercress is upstream from where you bathe, because you are polluting the water, and then you get liver fluke in the watercress, and that is why you are all ill." You might persuade them, or you might not.
So a place is given a (social) meaning and a function - the bathing place. This matches the meaning and function of money, or the meaning and function of skin colour. How the meaning and function can be changed is for sure a matter either of physical necessity no more water or no more access, or of social change by persuasion that Jesus condemned bathing except of feet, or whatever.
So what's the conceptual problem?
Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression I was disagreeing with you.
I feel like there's more to say on this topic, but I don't like anything I wrote today, so I'll get back to you.
Hey Un!...
I'd like to talk about the following snippet taken from the OP. I've skimmed over the thread looking for others to address my concerns, but there's always a chance I missed it. My apologies if that's the case.
I wonder...
Every answer hinges upon the notion of fact.
If facts are states of affairs, then certainly there are states of affairs involving human nature that are not rightfully called "social constructs".
States of affairs are not existentially contingent upon our awareness. Being a social construct most certainly is.
Gender is a hot topic, for sure...
Have we all but eliminated the determining factor(s), which used to be 'X' and 'Y' chromosomes?
I am so old that I can remember when the facts of chromosomes were not known. In those days the determining facts were genital not genetic. And they determined which public convenience you could use, and what kind of hairstyle you could sport. These days, and consult the guidelines for confirmation, it is not homosexuals and blacks that are rejected from society, but homophobes and racists. The determining facts are political.
Isn't that a central consideration?
If something is not existentially contingent upon language, then it most certainly cannot be sensibly said to be a social construct, despite the fact that our awareness of it's existence requires written language.
Social constructs are all subject to individual, familial, cultural, and/or historical particulars.
How we talk about things is language. What we talk about is not always.
I think it's important, but... R D Laing come to mind, with his talk about rules that include a rule that the rules cannot be talked about. No one actually tells you what you have to do if you have these chromosomes/genitals, and it is somewhat improper to do so outside the consulting room or the academy. Talk is only half of communication - there is show as well as tell.
There can be heavy cultural influence as well. The consequences for crossing established lines could be death or that you become a holy person. Depends on your culture and era.
Not sure I follow you Un...
What I'm getting at, I suppose, is that the notion of social construct is far too vague to be useful. At least, it seems that way to me. If it is underwritten by thought/belief that we cannot get 'beneath' language, it seems that it would be all the more so inclined to arrive at a set of all sets. That is, if we cannot distinguish between our talk and what we talk about in some way or other which allows us to know the differences between our reports and what we're reporting upon, then everything ever spoken and/or written is a social construct.
I think an older critique talked about maps and territories...
Your example of the watercress and liver fluke is perfect.
How do we further discriminate between differing sets of moral belief? By what standard of 'measure'?
I like vague. The vagueness of a screwdriver is such that everyone uses one to open tins of paint, and some of us us it to stir the paint too. Yet it also has the precision that one can fit the hinges of a door with it (once you've cleaned the paint off the end).
You know those city centre maps with a little label on "You are here"? How do they know? It is because the map is fixed in the territory, so if you are reading the map you are where the map is. These days, everyone has a marauder's map that constantly updates itself with its own location, and tells you where you are on the move. It's magic.
But less of this 'we', and 'our talk' here, because in the original sense, you are part of my territory rather than my map. Indeed you are too ephemeral to even appear on my map, and I bump into you unexpectedly here and there. At best there is a vague region marked in hope and ignorance 'Here be creative souls'. Rather, as nations are marked on 'political' maps that become in a few years out of date, and therefore historical, like a map of the Roman Empire. In the long run, the territory is changing, the continents drift, and nothing is fixed. You are here - for now.
Our talk changes the world. Our maps change the world, and they are part of the world and so cannot be absolutely distinguished. Think of town planning policy and its associated maps. They describe and also ordain. Yet a builder has the advantage over a philosopher, that he knows well to build according to the map, but on the territory; there is no confusion in his mind.
Sorry, I seem to be in poetic mode this morning; am I making any sense?
Not sure I understand that.
Odd, isn't it, how one can have the simplest idea in one's head, yet find that other people have difficulty with it? Earlier, I used the example of an ant colony, which is literally made of ants in relationships behaving thus and so, identifying friend and foe, serving the queen, foraging nest building. and all these relationships, habits, hierarchies, constitute social constructs and are quite literally made of ants. I contrast this with an anthill, which is a complex structure made by ants and for ants but is not made of ants but of dirt.
The simplest example of a social construct would be a mating pair - a construct of two elements and one function. And then it develops in complexity with mating rituals, nest-building, and offspring, and so on. The nest is made of twigs, the mating pair is made of birds behaving towards each other.
Our nest is our computer network and the forum software, engineered stuff, but the forum itself is a social construct; it is us in structured relationships.
:-|
So, it seems that this criterion for social construct is one of basic elemental constituency, and yet it doesn't follow typical physical/nonphysical guidelines. Nor does it seem to be able to be determined by things like existential contingency.
An ant colony is made of ants, so it is a social construct. An ant hill is not made of ants, so it is not a social construct.
Where does language sit in this?
Is that one of the things that cannot be absolutely distinguished?
It seems that that points to an existential contingency. Namely, the one I've been working through for nearly a decade. That which is existentially contingent upon language and that which is not. However, that is too simple because the former is too broad in and of itself to be useful.
It also skirts around the efficacy that one's worldview has, which is basically what all the fuss about conceptual schemes was about, in addition to Witty's the limits of one's language is the limits of one's world.