I think that simply is how it is generally used, and yes, we ought to use it that way too.
— unenlightened

Why ought we? — StreetlightX

Oh, to maximise agreement, principle of charity, because meaning is use. What a fucking idiotic question.

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." — unenlightened

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.

It's not enough simply to declare that I am wrong, you need to present some argument or explanation. — 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.

Oh, to maximise agreement, principle of charity, because meaning is use. What a fucking idiotic question. — 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.

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.

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.

constructions and constructs, by the English definition, are not limited to the productions of life forms. — Thanatos Sand

Really?

construct
verb
kənˈstrʌkt/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
ˈkɒnstrʌkt/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" — google

I'm not seeing any reference to sedimentary rocks or anything else produced by other than lifeforms.Where do you get your definition?

There can be no error without consensus. Lacking consensus, there is simply a disagreement.

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.

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. — Moliere

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.

construct
verb
kənˈstrʌkt/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
ˈkɒnstrʌkt/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"
— google

I'm not seeing any reference to sedimentary rocks or anything else produced by other than lifeforms.Where do you get your definition?

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.

likewise people start to live out the ideas they internalized. I witnessed it for 12 years in an integrated school system. Females also internalize stuff. Culture becomes reality.

Sure, I can go with that. I don't think the belief that blacks ought to be treated as whites was widespread prior to the civil rights movement. And I don't think that making people believe they should be is how it succeeded either.

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)

If someone can understand things from another person's perspective, then they're pretty much fucking magic... I don't have high hopes for an objective view.

If someone can understand things from another person's perspective, then they're pretty much fucking magic... I don't have high hopes for an objective view. — Wosret

It's tough enough understanding things from one's own perspective. This is what I'm working on.

Amen to that.

Lucky for me, I'm super neurotic, and self-consciousness, self-awareness is the upside of neuroticism.

Look, to olive branch a bit - the justifications for where we draw our elementary distinctions are of profound, profound importance. Our very ability to think - and in turn, to do philosophy - is grounded in the distinctions that we begin with. To posit a distinction between 'construction' and 'formation' indexed upon a further distinction between life and not-life (or 'forms of life' and 'not-forms-of-life') is to imply both that the constructions of life differ in kind from the formations of non-life and that both life and non-life irreducibly differ along the dimension of their respective 'productions'. It's a case of 'baking in' conceptual differences right at the level of terminology, and it irrevocably alters the way which we treat these concepts*. There is nothing innocent, in other words, about the way we articulate the relations between our concepts; those initial articulations foreclose certain ways of thinking about things, even as they open up other paths.

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."

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." — StreetlightX

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:

The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen.

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.

Very briefly, because it's late and I want to reply better tomorrow: the level of abstraction I'm interested in is, to be a little enigmatic, ontological. One can, of course, make all sorts of distinctions for all kinds of purposes: but do these distinctions illuminate, as it were, the nature of terms involved? One distinguishes between children and adults for the purposes of voting; but does one distinguish between children and adults along the axes of being-human? If so, why or why not?

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.

One can, of course, make all sorts of distinctions for all kinds of purposes: — StreetlightX

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?

I don't remember who said it, but there's also this: facts may very well be theory-laden, but we also want our theories to be fact-laden.

(The sort of thing I was talking about here.)

To posit a distinction between 'construction' and 'formation' indexed upon a further distinction between life and not-life (or 'forms of life' and 'not-forms-of-life') is to imply both that the constructions of life differ in kind from the formations of non-life and that both life and non-life irreducibly differ along the dimension of their respective 'productions'. It's a case of 'baking in' conceptual differences right at the level of terminology, and it irrevocably alters the way which we treat these concepts*. There is nothing innocent, in other words, about the way we articulate the relations between our concepts; those initial articulations foreclose certain ways of thinking about things, even as they open up other paths. — StreetlightX

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.

*Spencer-Brown: "There can be no distinction without motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value." — 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.

*Spencer-Brown: "There can be no distinction without motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value." — StreetlightX

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 exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...' — Asimov

what does it mean to say a distinction is "purpose-relative"? How does that work? — Srap Tasmaner

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.

One thing this looks to miss is that what you are socially constructing is a constraint. And so any distinction remains irreducibly vague in practice. It does carve the world up into differences that make a difference. It does impose informational boundaries around the world and its physical dynamics. But a constraint only narrows the scope of a meaning or intent to the degree it is considered (socially or organismically) useful.

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)?

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. — apokrisis

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.

But notice how in your scenario, the very bounds of what it means to 'pick something up' are more or less taken for granted. What is being squabbled over are the exact things to be picked up. But say you tell the kids to pick up all the stuff on the floor, at which point they begin throwing throwing objects around the room. Notice how that what is now in question is what it means to 'pick something up' - the level of analysis has been moved 'one level up', as it were. No longer 'what' to be picked up, but the significance of 'picking up' is now in question: its bounds, its meaning, its relation to other actions. This shift in analytic level is, in analogue, the 'certain level of abstraction' which I want to get to, and which, moreover any analysis of concepts must rely upon.

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.

The elements of a triadic semiotic modelling relation are there. You have an intent. It exists to organise the world. And it is mediated by signs.

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.

Hmm, I think there's a confusion about what is meant by 'value' here. To say that a distinction is motivated by a value is simply to say that a distinction is meant to draw our attention to one kind of thing over another kind of thing. And note: kind of thing, not 'thing'. The 'value' in question is 'epistemic', or rather methodological, and not normative: it doesn't refer to what I 'like' or 'desire' or 'want'. Levi Bryant has a nice discussion of what this means, and he draws a useful distinction between 'distinction' and 'indication' which I think might help clear things up:

"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."