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'm not saying that one shouldn't or can't draw a distinction between what might be called 'formations' and 'constructions'. I'm saying that, if - note the conditional - one wants to shed light on what it means for something to be a 'construct', and if one thinks it is important to distinguish between constructs and formations in order to do so, then one ought explain why invoking intentionality or life (note how both you an Un seem to differ on how to index construction and formation) contributes to that project. If you don't care for this double condition, then by all means, make whatever other distinction(s) you like for whatever purpose(s) you like.

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.

There is no reason to believe that multiplying categories for the sake of it would be any more conceptually enriching than it might be conceptually debilitating. Only concrete analysis of actual reasons and arguments advanced for particular cases would provide any measure for thinking such either way. In any case, even if one were to concede your point about 'enrichment', such a goal would simply not be relevant to the double condition I outlined above. Which is fine on its own terms of course.

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.

To bring you back to your own words, you said only that we make certain distinctions 'because we can' and 'because it allows us to produce more categories of things' - as if the sheer qualitative increase of categories would in and of itself lead to conceptual 'enrichment' (which might be true only in the very narrow sense that a qualitative increase sand granules would 'enrich' the grey heap to which they belong); you made no qualification that said distinctions ought to be 'sensible and valid'. And of course, a 'sensible and valid' distinction would presumably be one for which both its sensibility and validity could be demonstrated - which is all I'm asking for.

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.

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. — StreetlightX

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.

It's sufficient to answer that with "That's how the word is commonly used." — Mongrel

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?'.

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. — Mongrel

Yep, that's how all discussions take place. With explanation. 'Common meaning' is merely petrified jargon.

-

It's incredible that one has to justify the ground zero of rational discussion - the giving and asking for reasons - with these ridiculous convolutions.

There are few things more entirely worthless than relying on 'how words are commonly used' in order to aim at conceptual specificity. — StreetlightX

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.

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. — 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.

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?'. — StreetlightX

Descartes wasn't using "cogito" in an unusual way. And he was most certainly using it, not dissecting it.

Yep, that's how all discussions take place. With explanation. 'Common meaning' is merely petrified jargon. — 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.

It's incredible that one has to justify the ground zero of rational discussion - the giving and asking for reasons - with these ridiculous convolutions. — StreetlightX

:-|

You're getting really absolutist about this. You're seeing construction as an unchanging entity. — Mongrel

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.

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. — StreetlightX

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.

Then your role would be to simply discern the intention of the speaker. You wouldn't be asking for justification of use. — Mongrel

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.

Explain. — StreetlightX

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?

Um, no.

Then what norms are we paying attention to here?

Depends on the problem you're dealing with, depends on the concept created to respond to it.

Too vague..

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.

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. — Mongrel

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.

I'm not really following you there, dude. Think about the concept of society. Is it a construction or just an abstraction? Something made or something found?

Now you are trying to force what I say into your traditional socially constructed reference frame. (Not necessarily a wrong thing, but definitely an example of social construction at work.)

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.

OK. But I didn't say or mean to suggest anything about mind or matter. I was asking if society is constructed or discovered.

I think your position is that everything is constructed, except some things are mathematically inevitable.. so not constructed. Is your view contradictory?

As the dude says, knowledge of what's true and real is always a product of uncovering, So perhaps it's both.

Yea, well "the dude abides", even in the inversion of social construction.

I love that movie. I've watched it about a bazillion times.

(Y)

I was asking if society is constructed or discovered.

I think your position is that everything is constructed, except some things are mathematically inevitable.. so not constructed. Is your view contradictory? — Mongrel

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.

Wiki is useful on symbolic interactionism and its attempts to place itself - pragmatically - in the middle of the usual realist vs idealist debates.

This viewpoint sees people as active in shaping their world, rather than as entities who are acted upon by society (Herman and Reynolds, 1994). With symbolic interactionism, reality is seen as social, developed interaction with others.

Most symbolic interactionists believe a physical reality does indeed exist by an individual's social definitions, and that social definitions do develop in part or relation to something "real". People thus do not respond to this reality directly, but rather to the social understanding of reality; i.e., they respond to this reality indirectly through a kind of filter which consists of individuals' different perspectives.

This means that humans exist not in the physical space composed of realities, but in the "world" composed only of "objects". According to Blumer, the "objects" can be divided into three types: physical objects, social objects, and abstract objects.

Both individuals and society cannot be separated far from each other for two reasons. One, being that they are both created through social interaction, and two, one cannot be understood without the other. Behavior is not defined by forces from the environment or inner forces such as drives, or instincts, but rather by a reflective, socially understood meaning of both the internal and external incentives that are currently presented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interactionism

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.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

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.

I just came across this story this morning. I leave it here as an illustrative example of what I'm trying to get at when it comes to social construction:

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)