Social constructs are real and they matter

[Timsup2nothin]

Yes, I think we all say we believe scientific reports because somebody's done tests and worked it all out, but how many of us actually investigate for ourselves how they came to their conclusions? To be honest, in many cases I doubt I'd be able to make a really informed judgement about how trustworthy a given scientific report was. So I don't think the line's as defined as we might make out.

Well, scientific reports aren't brought down off a mountain etched into stone tablets, so they have that going for them.


Er...that may perhaps give them even less weight than the other.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Was this remark directed toward me?

Nope. Just pointing out that the science true believers have their very own minority group spouting their equivalent of hellfire and damnation upon the heretics. Another parallel between religion and science that I had not pointed out previously but will in future.

 

[warpus]

I'm back from the virgin sacrifice - so that the theory of gravity continues for yet another year without any hiccups. What did I miss?

 

[Farm Boy]

An accurate assessment of what's being compared!

 

[Borachio]

Well. That just tells me that the social construct of gravity is a very, very strong one. Many social constructs are.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'm back from the virgin sacrifice - so that the theory of gravity continues for yet another year without any hiccups. What did I miss?

Apparently the fact that what you are calling gravity functions equally well if you appease it with virgins as if you appease it with math...or even if you do not appease it at all.

 

[Senethro]

Too meta.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Nope. Just pointing out that the science true believers have their very own minority group spouting their equivalent of hellfire and damnation upon the heretics. Another parallel between religion and science that I had not pointed out previously but will in future.

As long as you understand that not all scientists are the same. It's like how non-atheists screech about how "all" atheists want to burn down churches, forbid Christmas, and the rest of the pile of nonsense we get accused of.

Back in my college days I met an art student. We hit it off pretty well, and things went fine until he was "born again" and then conversations ceased to be about what they had been before and became rather preachy. I caught him out in a misquote one day, and he said in frustration, "If you know so much about this, why don't you believe it?"

I told him that in my anthropology class on Native North America I studied everything from Tsonoqua to Changing Woman and the Hero Twins to the Aztec gods and I don't believe in any of those, either. I find religions rather interesting, but I don't think religion has the right to dictate public policy on things like medicine (ie. refusing a woman an abortion or even contraception itself because of "sin") or forcing religion on students in a public school or dragging religion into government (the Canadian Prime Minister - a Catholic in his private life - who brought in the legislation to allow same-sex marriage in Canada was actually threatened with excommunication).

Apparently the fact that what you are calling gravity functions equally well if you appease it with virgins as if you appease it with math...or even if you do not appease it at all.

That's the thing about gravity or the Sun/Moon... they exist in and of themselves and don't require humans for that. If all life on Earth ceased tomorrow, Earth would still exist and so would gravity.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

That's the thing about gravity or the Sun/Moon... they exist in and of themselves and don't require humans for that. If all life on Earth ceased tomorrow, Earth would still exist and so would gravity.

But they would be neither Earth nor gravity. They are neither Earth nor gravity now. Those are one word explanations for them that we have developed in our desperate need to make things explainable.

I am fully capable of explaining gravity in a hundred words, a thousand words, or fifty thousand words (though I would have to be paid for that one)...but none of those explanations is the actual thing either. No matter how many words, the explanation is just a social construct that is only empowered by agreement and has no more actual effect than 'the volcano god holds us all down'.

 

[Borachio]

I think you're doing very well if you can explain gravity in no matter how many words.

Physicists can do a more or less good job talking about the various characteristics that gravity has.

But I think that's a long way from explaining it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

But they would be neither Earth nor gravity. They are neither Earth nor gravity now. Those are one word explanations for them that we have developed in our desperate need to make things explainable.

I am fully capable of explaining gravity in a hundred words, a thousand words, or fifty thousand words (though I would have to be paid for that one)...but none of those explanations is the actual thing either. No matter how many words, the explanation is just a social construct that is only empowered by agreement and has no more actual effect than 'the volcano god holds us all down'.

It. Doesn't. Matter. what you call them. HOWEVER you describe them, they would still be here. Nature itself doesn't give a damn what humans call its various parts, how its various parts are described, or even if there's anyone capable of such.

 

[warpus]

I agree, the name we use to describe gravity is just a placeholder. The placeholder might be a "social construct", but the idea and concept that it represents is not.

 

[Flying Pig]

It absolutely does matter what you call things - so much of how we understand and interact with the world depends on which things we group together and which things we hold apart. True, it doesn't matter if you call a cat a 'chat', but it absolutely would matter if you stopped thinking about it as 'a slightly bigger hamster' and start thinking of it as 'a slightly smaller tiger'. Whether nature would care if we weren't here is beside the point: we are here, and we construct the world ourselves.

 

[Traitorfish]

If it affects us in a distinct way even if we haven't socially constructed its existence, it's probably not a social construct. Suns, birds, and cats, not so much. Jowls would be, unless we have a distinct biological propensity to act on them (say, we naturally find them attractive). Race wouldn't be, although melanin content (a fairly separate phenomenon) would matter for geography a bit. Money cannot exist outside society. An office tower, could. That it's zoned commercially could not.

I'm not sure that an office tower could exist outside of society. A great mass of steel and glass, sure, that could exist, but "office tower"? "Tower" is a specific type of building, and in the sense of a tower-block an even more specific type of building. "Office tower", even more so, supposes a society with a fairly specific division of labour, a society which includes a certain kind of person who does a certain kind of work in a certain kind of environment. We couldn't imagine an "office tower" in a society of stone age hunter-gatherers; what is an "office" to people without writing or a division of labour? What is a "tower" to people who don't build permanent structures? Put somebody from the deepest Amazon in the London financial district and he will see a lot of things, but he will not see a single "office tower", because the category "office tower" presumes a specific way of thinking about and interacting with the world, and those ways are entirely alien to him.

To talk about "social constructs" doesn't mean denying that those constructs can refer back to brute material realities, but it means that those material realities are not taken up simply as material realities, but that they're always mediated through an existing cultural framework.

 

[Borachio]

I'm not sure we do construct the world ourselves. I think we're a result of the world, not vice versa.

I do think we construct how we perceive the world. But that's different.

 

[warpus]

It absolutely does matter what you call things - so much of how we understand and interact with the world depends on which things we group together and which things we hold apart. True, it doesn't matter if you call a cat a 'chat', but it absolutely would matter if you stopped thinking about it as 'a slightly bigger hamster' and start thinking of it as 'a slightly smaller tiger'. Whether nature would care if we weren't here is beside the point: we are here, and we construct the world ourselves.

"A slightly smaller tiger" is a descriptor, while "cat" and "hamster" are names - placeholders. That makes all the difference, imo.

 

[Flying Pig]

Maybe. But those names don't exist in isolation. The classic example is 'terrorist' versus 'freedom fighter' - if you take two identical people and label them with each of those, different things will happen to the 'terrorist' compared with the 'freedom fighter'. We already know that people think negatively of 'government spending' but quite like 'public services'. Names are sufficiently important that the writers of referenda spend huge amounts of time and money phrasing their questions.

 

[Lohrenswald]

To talk about "social constructs" doesn't mean denying that those constructs can refer back to brute material realities, but it means that those material realities are not taken up simply as material realities, but that they're always mediated through an existing cultural framework.

But surely the sun is simply a material reality?

 

[Farm Boy]

Names are descriptors as well as placeholders. They can be neutral or not. Cat is pretty neutral. It gets easier to see when referring to people. Jew, for example.

 

[Flying Pig]

But surely the sun is simply a material reality?

It's just a collection of particles - if we didn't care where its boundaries were, why would nature?