Ok buddy.

Charming retort.

I take it as the clearest example I know of of the kind of thinking I disagree with.

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.

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. — Moliere

That's persuasive, but would you include talking among what we do?

Could go either way. In a loose sense, sure, we all talk. But it's not quite the same as the law, states, or money and property, either. More often than not we use language in the process of constructing the social. It's more like the tool than the product. And one way to understand a hammer is to look at the nails it's designed to hit, but you wouldn't confuse the nail for the hammer either.

I think that socially "structured" is better than "constructed". Although the latter no more implies from scratch, or out of nothing at all.

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.

"There is of course no disputing that in modern Western society whites often oppress blacks and men often oppress women. This is bound to be the case in a social context in which people are forced to compete for scarce resources and to differentiate themselves from each other in any way which will accord them greater power, however illusory that power may be (nothing, after all, could be more pathetic than the belief that 'whiteness' confers personal superiority or that men are in some way to be valued more highly than women).

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".

The point being that anything 'socially constructed' has no less reality than anything not. . — StreetlightX

That's why I put property as the example of a social construct. It's universal and unquestionable, and gets treated as 'natural'.

Is it worth trying to disentangle the construct from the concrete?
— unenlightened

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. — 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.

I'm not sure what it means for anything to have 'more' - or 'less' - reality than anything else. Nor do I have any idea what kind of distinction that between reality and the real is. I simply mean to complicate the distinction in the OP between that which is 'found' and that which is 'constructed'. To put it in it's terms, that which is 'constructed' may well also be 'found'; even if found as constructed. Finally, by 'felt reality', I simply mean that if you're about to be lynched by mob because you're black, it will do little good to plead that 'race is a social construct'. — StreetlightX

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.

I thought it might be interesting to see how things play out in a particular case, and I have chosen one where it might be possible to see social constructs in a positive light.

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.

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. — unenlightened

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.

Someone needs to do a Foucault on medicine — unenlightened

Foucault did a Foucault on medicine - see here. Or else Canguilhem.

↪Cavacava I take it as the clearest example I know of of the kind of thinking I disagree with.

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.

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.

Human rights, for example, are a total fabrication, — StreetlightX

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'.

Human rights, for example, are a total fabrication,
— StreetlightX

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.

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'. — unenlightened

Perhaps, but I don't see any distinction between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated.

Human rights, for example, are a total fabrication — StreetlightX

I don't see any distinction between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated. — StreetlightX

I'm having difficulty putting these together in a way that makes sense.

Why?

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'.
— unenlightened

Perhaps, but I don't see any distinction between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated.

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.

Why?

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.

Why? — StreetlightX

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.

I think there is a difference between observer dependent facts such as the value we assign to paper currency and observer independent facts such as the paper currency it is printed on. Trump the president, and Trump as a human being, ...

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. — unenlightened

Why?

Sorry for being pedantic, but what reasons lie behind these conclusions? And further, why is the inescapability of fabrication an imprisonment?

No, it's your turn to clarify a bit.

What would you like me to clarify?

Some say language sets out what's there, and so what's real. We wouldn't call that fabrication.

Never mind, then.

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.

Yes, I've no argument with that, really. I'm fumbling for the right language a bit. But then there's this:

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. — 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.

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. — 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.