Ep. 227: What Is Social Construction? (Hacking, Berger) (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 227 is what is social construction? And we read the first two chapters of Ian Hacking's the Social Construction of what from 1999, Peter Berger's religion and World Construction, which is the first chapter of his book the sacred canopy from 1967, and the Stanford encyclopedic philosophy article Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction by ron Mallon from 2008, revised in 2019. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, anomic in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Seth: This is Seth Paskin externalizing in Austin, Texas.

0:44 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trying to stay nomic in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey erecting an edifice of nomic bricks to keep out the potent alien forces of chaos.

0:55 Coleman: This is Coleman Hughes, with a painfully simplistic and straightforward introduction from New York.

1:03 Mark: Welcome, welcome.

1:04 Wes: Yeah, welcome. Thanks for coming on.

1:06 Coleman: Thanks for having me.

1:07 Wes: This started because someone tweeted to the Partially Examined Life and to you at the same time saying that we should have you on. And I had actually read some of your work and admired it. So, yeah. You've been writing about politics and I know you're still an undergrad in philosophy, right?

1:26 Coleman: Yes, I'm in my senior year.

1:27 Mark: Where are you at?

1:28 Coleman: Columbia. And, you know, majoring in philosophy, but as your podcast introduction would predict, thinking better of doing that as a career.

1:39 Wes: You did launch a philosophy podcast recently, right?

1:42 Coleman: Yes, I co host a podcast called Dilemma with my friend Jay Shapiro. We go through one dilemma each episode and interview one guest. It's fun. I think listeners to this podcast would like it. Not trying to poach your audience, but trying to poach your audience.

1:58 Wes: I think the first one it was about the dilemma was rescuing. Either you rescue the Mona Lisa from a fire or a person, and then it all comes down to how well you like the person. That's how you.

2:10 Mark: Was it the person? The Mona Lisa?

2:11 Coleman: Yeah. We do fun ones. We do Star Trek's Prime Directive. I had to learn what that was for the first time.

2:18 Wes: What is that? Not to screw around with the aliens.

2:20 Coleman: Yeah. Not to interfere with the natural growth of a civilization, even if that means letting them die or do horrible things to each other.

2:27 Wes: All right, so thanks for coming on this. I thought you might, given some of your interests and what you've written about, this might be up your alley. And something I've wanted to do for a long time because the phrase social construction is something that gets thrown around so much in public discourse. But I think usually people don't really know what they're talking about when they use it. And it actually, as it turns out, we found out from these readings it has quite a different number of meanings. And I think politically that elision between different types of meanings is.

It's used for ill. So for instance, you know, I think it's very popular to believe that race and gender are socially constructed. And maybe they are in some sense, but I think for a lot of people that means that they're not real or they don't exist. And we'll explore whether social constructionism implies that sort of thing and try to nail down the concept in this episode. And then in the next episode we'll discuss race, the tentative plan. What do you guys think? I'm kind of the one who pushed us into this and I don't know how exciting it was for the rest of you guys.

3:33 Dylan: I've been wanting to do this for a long time. I bought Hacking's book when it came out. Oh, there's a relationship between the culture wars and the. We'll call it the science wars in this respect. One of these constructing books is constructing quarks.

3:46 Wes: Yeah. Coleman, Dylan is a physicist, so I think I know how you feel about the idea of constructing quarks. Dylan. Right.

3:56 Dylan: Well, I'll be interested for us to get more into it because I think Hacking has a nice way of talking about how this plays out in natural science. There's just some really interesting aspects to it. I agree with him when he talks about it going way, way back to long held philosophical disagreements.

4:14 Mark: But there are distinct philosophical issues. Whether we're talking about things in natural sciences like the construction of quarks. That kind of bleeds into the multi episode run we had on Truth. So folks that are arguing against social construction are often just arguing against relativism. That if you say everything is socially constructed, then it's like, well, everything is relative to a culture. That's a distinct issue from the idea that particular things, they say it's global versus local and within the local that particular things obviously related to human affairs. Right. Are socially constructed. So race and gender I think fall into that category as opposed to the same arguments you'd be having about quarks.

4:56 Dylan: I think that that is exactly where the argument is.

4:59 Mark: Mark.

5:00 Dylan: I don't think it's that simple. I think in the end though, there Are degrees on this that there are very overlaid aspects of the sort of truth, fact, nature of truth question, as well as the is this socially constructed in sort of a product of society kind of way? I think we'll get into it. Just starting out today.

5:24 Mark: Coleman, had you read any of this stuff before in preparation for the kind of stuff you've been writing on?

5:29 Coleman: Actually, no. I'd never zeroed in on the topic of social constructionism on its own and really thought about it. I thought about it in piecemeal ways, specifically on the topic of gender and race, but never as a coherent phenomenon in itself. Trying to make sense of actually what ties everything together that's thrown under the label socially constructed. And I found the global versus local distinction to be really useful in the sense that you might say everything is socially constructed, including truth. That's a pretty easy, I think, philosophy to argue against because it eats its own tail.

6:06 Mark: Yep. It's just relativism. Yep.

6:08 Coleman: Right. Many people have pointed that out. But I think it's much stronger to argue that, no, there is such a thing as capital T, truth. It just so happens that many things are contingent in the sense that they could have been otherwise, and those are the things that are socially constructed. Our laws could have been different. The borders of our nations could have been different. Perhaps you think race or gender could have been very different. We could be talking about 12 races of humans rather than four or five, or however many we do, three genders rather than two. Those more narrow claims, the local social constructionist claims, I think, are the more interesting ones to think through.

6:47 Dylan: One way to think about it to me is how do you articulate the meaning of contextuality? When we say that we have a history, we have a genealogy, either biologically or intellectually or socially or culturally, and we just admit, okay, we're dependent on all kinds of contexts. In the end, how does that cash out in terms of both? Something like what we'd call truths and facts, but also how we understand ourselves, how we make decisions, judgments, and agree or disagree about them.

7:18 Wes: So, Coleman, the distinction you were making about between global and local, it's one that Ron Mallon makes. We read the Stanford Encyclopedia article on naturalistic approaches to social construction, and I did a lot of reading and just trying to figure out what we were going to read. And Mallon is one of the big names in all of this stuff, and he's written a lot. He's one of the more coherent writers on the subject. And so I thought this was probably the best Overview I read of all the things and he also published article called A Field Guide to Social Construction, which is okay, you could read that as well. But the Stanford Encyclopedia article, which he updated very recently, is an excellent overview for anyone who, if you're curious and people are using the throwing around the phrase and you really want to get on top of it, this is the place to start.

8:05 Seth: I guess this counts more as an introductory conversation, but pointing to the if your experience of the term social construction or this is X is socially constructed, comes with a strong ideological, political or emotional component, these readings will be disappointingly philosophical. All three of the sources are excellent, they're well written, they're clear, they help break down some distinctions. But the hacking comes closest. But none of them get into the way in which the concepts are used or deployed to make points or to argue for specific points of view or ideologies.

So it's a very conceptual exercise in these essays. And so being somebody who's very much on the outside of this and coming to it neutrally, I sort of expected something very different from the reading. So for anybody who's maybe apprehensive about approaching, I can tell you these are as neutral and as clear and as sort of well articulated as I think you're, as you're going to find in sort of philosophical literature that's accessible, very taxonomic.

9:10 Mark: The hacking in particular. He has some like snide comments here and there, mostly about people who are using this term social construction without knowing what it is. But so much of it, just as in the Stanford article, is just laying out here's the kinds of different things that people mean by social construction and why that distinction that I was just making that Dylan didn't like was taken just right from this article is the conclusion of it in separating out social construction of representation versus construction, human kinds and human traits.

To say that those are talking about the fact that ideas that we come up with, whether in science or anywhere else, have some sort of human history. And so insofar as that history could have been different than the ideas we use to represent the things in the world seems like they could be different. And we've had lots of episodes in pragmatism that suggest that the whole idea oh, they're Eskimos, have so many words for snow and we only see one kind of snow, that old hat example that there seem to be different kinds of snow, kinds of ways you could break down the natural world.

Maybe everything just is an undifferentiated flux until we come along with our Innate ideas and our languages, and we cut it into different things. That's that kind of social construction. As opposed to how concretely individual societies shape the ideas that apply to humankinds, which are race and gender being obvious examples. But also, I guess Hacking writes a lot in psychology. So the idea of just mental illness in general and a lot of specific mental illnesses, those are often described here. Also emotions. Are emotions actually universal, just part of human nature?

Or are they a matter of contingent social forces?

10:48 Wes: The way Mallon carves this up, what we're basically talking about, and this is what gets confusing is all we're really talking about most generally is the way in which some things are the result of psychosocial stuff or broadly, culture rather than nature. And they might have been otherwise if culture were different. There are things that are not simply inevitable. So, you know, take the example of race. In the next episode, we'll look at people who say there is no such thing. Or it's socially constructed in some sense. It's not simply a biological category.

It's not a natural distinction. But it's the result of our conceptual activity, which is not to say it's not real. And this is one of the confusing things about the various ways in which the term is used. Because as Mallon points out, and as Hacking points out, when you think about what is being constructed, it can mean representations, like concepts themselves. So it could mean the way we think about race or the way we think about quarks. Those are socially influenced, those are constructions, those representations, those concepts. But it's kind of odd to call those constructions.

So it's a kind of sexy, radical sounding term. It's not new that our ideas are influenced by cultural factors. And it's not even new if you move on to human beings. To think of human beings, of course, as influenced by culture. So representations on the one hand, and then there are facts. So you might want to say quarks themselves. You might want to make the radical claim that quarks themselves are constructions. So it's not just the idea that we have about quarks. There's something about the ideas that we have that are constitutive of the object.

And then the final distinction that Mallon makes is just. And I think this is mostly what people are thinking about in public discourse is things we might say about human beings, especially what kinds they belong to. Man, woman, black, white, and various other categories too. So one of the examples Hacking uses is the idea of a woman refugee. It's a good example for thinking about what Social construction might mean and what the object is, if it's a representation, if it's the woman herself, and so on.

12:59 Mark: We might as well just get out right here that part of this strong distinction between the things in the physical sciences and the things in the human sciences are just that while it seems weird to think you have to give an epistemological explanation of why the idea of a quark could affect quarks themselves. Like, no, it seems like the idea refers to the thing in the world. But if you have the idea of a group of people, if the people in question that it refers to have to live with that label, then like that label actually does affect them. So the social construction of the label in turn affects the. The people who are so labeled. And so Hacking calls that the looping effect of humankinds.

13:35 Coleman: The added part to that, which I think was in the Stanford Encyclopedia article, is we tend to talk about social construction in the passive voice, as in X is socially constructed. But it might be more useful to think about it in terms of who is doing the social constructing. So Y socially constructed X. You might say that white people socially constructed race so as to give themselves an advantage. You might say men socially constructed gender so as to give them an advantage. Which is why in the political realm, the notion of social construction is more emotional.

14:12 Dylan: Part of it comes down to what you're saying actually exists. That's one of the things that's in there in both in positive and negative ways. That actually existing part can be used negatively to say somebody or some group has an attribute as a result of which we're going to marginalize them, or claim an attribute so that they can get honors and preferences as a result of them. But by putting that word constructs out in front, one thing you can be doing is making a political statement to undermine the notion of that attribute or that characteristic being essential in some way. Whereas previously that essentiality of it was part of its strength, part of what gave it power, by adding that constructs word to it, then you undermine that. That's one of the things that can be going on.

15:04 Seth: We talk about naturalism and I thought of like natural kinds, but it's really essentialism. Social construction is in broader sense is a response to the notion that there are essential characteristics. Essential human nature, essential racial categories, essential sexual or gender categories, whatever. And when you talk about that, if you buy into a notion of essentiality, you're buying into a certain adherence to causal laws and a kind of fatalism like with respect to what those categories Outline for you as you happen to fall into them or not fall into them.

And so social construction, when you say something is constructed, I think what's at stake here is really the notion that there is some kind of essential nature or essential being associated with whatever it is you're criticizing. And I want to say that prior to what Coleman was talking about, who's doing the constructing, there's the question of, is there any essentiality to be had? And then we can talk about how the concept of that essentiality gets constructed, or how if there's no essentiality, how some sort of category gets constructed.

16:12 Wes: Well, maybe we could use Hacking's example of women refugees as a kind of neutral example. I like it because it's less politically laden than some of the other examples and because, you know, as Hacking points out, this idea of essentialism that we're talking about is really just a way of saying that the social constructionist is coming along and trying to say that something that seemed inevitable or natural or something like that is in some covert way, actually a product of our activity.

16:44 Dylan: Uses the word unmasking.

16:46 Wes: Yeah. So in the case of female refugees, you might think, well, look, how is that a social construction? Someone has to flee their country. There are real social circumstances that create that problem. She goes to another country, she goes to Canada, and she's a refugee there. That's another real situation. In what sense is that socially constructed? It sounds silly in a way.

17:08 Mark: It sounds like it's read straight off of the facts. That would be the alternative to social construction.

17:13 Wes: Exactly. There you go. That's what we're replacing now with the concept of essentialism. It's just that this is. Yeah, you read it straight off the facts. And it's not simply a matter of our classifications that we're imposing. Hacking makes sense of it, though. And I think of this in a way as connotation. There's some bare sense in which factually, a woman refugee is something you just read off the facts. But then there are all these sorts of connotations to the concept which complicate things. And as Mark pointed out, there are these looping effects to humankind so that the women can internalize these sorts of classifications.

So, for instance, as Hacking points out, there's a matrix of institutions that surround this whole thing. You arrive as a refugee, there are advocates, there are newspaper articles, lawyers, court decisions, immigration proceedings, and then even the material infrastructure, barriers, passports, all that stuff. And then to be classified in a particular way, and all the sorts of connotations that go along with whatever it means to be classified as a woman refugee in Canada. Someone who's just arrived can quickly internalize that label and then start enacting it.

So that's the sense in which a female refugee, both the idea in some sense be constructed, the representation, and then also individuals, possibly because they can internalize those ideas and enact those roles. Those roles for them can be constructed. And in that sense that kind of trait or kind for them can be constructed. So instead of just being something that a role that is strictly read off the facts that it's something that we add a lot into. We do it institutionally, we do it through our representations. But there's a lot socially that goes into that.

19:03 Mark: If that sounds like a weird example, one of the good things about hacking is he's really surveying every book ever written before this book came out with the word social construction in it. So that's by helene Moussa, a 1992 book specifically about this. But you know, you could connect this to even just an undocumented worker. Like what makes that. Obviously it's a matter of the law, sort of who counts as documented or undocumented. I mean, is there anything different that seems a comparable case?

19:32 Dylan: No, there's another example of a child television viewer. It's the same kind of idea that it sounds like you've just read it off.

19:39 Wes: The facts get social scientists and they're studying the effect of television viewing on children. And then they come up with this theoretical. It doesn't sound all that theoretical, but it becomes that in the way that it's treated in the literature, this category of the child television viewer, who fills this sort of profile, does this sort of thing and that sort of thing.

19:59 Dylan: There's a paragraph on page 27, once we have the phrase the label child television viewer. In this case, we get the notion that there's a different kind of person, the child viewer. As a species, this kind of person becomes reified. Some parents start to think of their children as child viewers, a special type of child, not just their child who watches television. They start to interact on occasion with their children, regarded not just as their children, but as child viewers. Since children are such self aware creatures, they may become not only children who watch television, but also in their own self consciousness, child viewers.

They are well aware of theories about the child viewer and adapt to react against or reject them. Studies of the child viewer of television may have to be revised because the objects of study, the human beings being studied, have changed that species. The child viewer is not what it was a collection of some children who watch television, but a collection that includes self conscious child viewers. And I think you could replace in that paragraph child viewer with all kinds of other things.

21:00 Coleman: Thinking of children in general as a concept, I've heard it said, I don't know if it's true, that in fairly recent history the idea of a teenager didn't exist. There was just children, and then at some point you were an adult.

21:13 Dylan: The whole idea of adolescence.

21:14 Coleman: Right. So that's a perfect example of something that is socially constructed in the local sense. One thing I didn't see in the readings, but that touches on a lot of arguments I've had about conceptual distinctions and where one draws the line, for example, in abortion or other similar debates where lines are fuzzy, is that there is an ethical component to how we carve reality into concepts. To begin with. The reason it's useful to have the concept of an adult and the concept of an adolescent and the concept of a child is not because those concepts are given in nature, they're not simple facts in that sense.

It's because we have justifiable intuitions about what it makes sense to allow a human of a certain age to do and what it makes sense to not allow humans of a certain age to do. So we draw the concept after we've grounded ourselves on ethical intuitions. And I think that pervades the social construction conversation. If you think about mental illness as well, the difference between someone with quote unquote ADHD and someone without that, in recent history, you would have just called that. Timmy's an active kid now. Timmy has adhd. Why does that make sense if it does make sense?

It makes sense because we have Adderall and we have ways of making a kid that struggles to sit still. We have ways of helping that kid. So only once we have that way of helping him does it make sense to create the category. And I would argue in a lot of cases when we're talking about social construction, we're talking about if it's useful to create a category, if it's ethically useful.

22:56 Dylan: That case is interesting. Like what the force is of saying, I'm going to help this kid because he has adhd. And so somehow that labeling has that, as you said, ethical dimension that maybe tailors or enables certain reactions by individuals and by communities as opposed to a kid who has trouble sitting still. And that might bring to bear different sorts of things, but you also expect different things of them.

23:21 Mark: Yeah. Pathologizing them.

23:23 Dylan: Could pathologizing.

23:24 Coleman: Yeah.

23:25 Mark: Make it so that this then becomes a group that is ridiculed. But I think more likely it is, oh no, no, it's an illness, it is forgivable in some way. Whereas just being fidgety is like, well, get over it.

23:37 Coleman: My intuition, and this runs the gamut from race to gender to mental illness to the concept of adulthood, is that if you could get rid of the conceptual distinction and nothing bad would happen as a result, then I'm inclined to side with social constructionism. In that case, if the distinction is actually tracking some ethical intuition, then I tend to be on the side of the people who say, well actually that's a category out there in nature. For instance, I read this piece recently from George Packer at the Atlantic talking about how they got rid of gendered bathrooms at a public school in New York.

24:16 Wes: That was a great piece.

24:18 Coleman: Yeah, he was describing how his seven or eight year old kid came home from school one day and told him that there were no more boys in girls rooms. Describing the scene there. We were talking about confusion, right? Kids don't know where to go to the bathroom. Kids are holding it in all day. Boys are kicking in the door on the stalls for girls. It's just kind of chaos. And then over time they naturally decide, the kids, the seven, eight year old kids, they decide to make one bathroom the boys room and one bathroom the girls room, because it was too difficult before that.

And then eventually they created a third bathroom, a gender neutral one. So that suggests that there was an ethical logic to the categorization to begin with. So that's a case where I would be tempted to side with the people who are saying, well yeah, gender is not a social construct, it's real. However, there are other cases I think, where you could get rid of the category. Probably race might be such a case, although I'm not quite sure where you could get rid of the category. And I don't see any terrible consequences happening. And then I'm tempted to side with the people who say, yeah, that's a social construction.

25:23 Mark: So the Peter Berger reading that we've not brought up yet, but it's chronologically the first one, 1967.

25:30 Wes: What's the first book that used that phrase in its title? You know, I did a lot of research on the history of the term and it's kind of opaque. I didn't find a good overview before this book by Berger, the Social Construction of Reality.

25:41 Mark: So the one we read was the one after that, which is the Sacred Canopy. And we just read the first chapter. It's a book about religion.

25:47 Wes: Because that chapter is basically a summary of the previous book. Yeah.

25:51 Mark: And he seems to be describing that. All of the distinctions, even if they don't have an explicit purpose. You could, as you're saying, Coleman, get rid of it. And there would be no necessarily adverse effects. That just the entirety, no matter how arbitrary of the concepts. The practices that are built up. Are ways that the society sustains itself. Ways that individuals are socialized in the society. That society is kind of a fragile thing. That is only kept alive by collective belief. And collective obeying the rules. It has mechanisms within it. So that conformity is enforced by other members of the society. By these institutions that have been created. And to the extent that you throw off any of society's dictates in this way. You sort of are at the edge of an abyss.

26:48 Wes: Madness, I tell you. Madness.

26:50 Mark: Yes. That these social mores are what give us a way to identify ourselves. Like if we're just on an island by yourself. Especially if you were just dropped there from birth. And are not shipwrecked later. Then you'll have no sense of self whatsoever. You'll be purely an animal. The thing that gives us a chance to have a meaningful life in the strong existential sense. To not pitch over into nausea and despair. Is having a social nomos that you've internalized. And you can identify yourself as a member of this society, as having this role in this society, et cetera.

And so that seems to be an argument, if there was any argument coming out of Berger's account. That there really isn't a hard and fast distinction between the kind of social rules that are optional, we could get rid of them. Or the kind that, like, you absolutely need those. Because all of them serve this basic social function.

27:45 Seth: I feel like the vast majority of the essay is focused on the mechanism of culture. What he says, in brief, is human beings are social creatures. We exist in societies. And those societies, the rules, everything that makes up a culture and a society is created by individuals. That the very act of being an individual Is to externalize your internal drives or your actions. You build, you eat, you, you walk, you create. Human beings externalize what's inside of them. When they do so in groups. It creates this culture or society. Which then, at a certain point or over time or whatever, gets objectified.

So he talks about the three stages. Externalization, objectification, and internalization. So by objectification or objectivization, sorry, it starts with an O, ends with an N, has an ism in it. It's the act of. Basically, you Cease to see this thing as something that's the product of human beings and that it somehow gets reified. And then once it's reified, you turn around and start to internalize it. So subsequent generations that are born into this thing don't see it as, hey, dad and mom created that, or 16 generations of people have created this society.

They just internalize it. But the point he makes, which I thought was very subtle and very good, is he talks about how human development. We don't come out like most mammals, essentially more or less able to take care of ourselves and functioning in an ordered society in a particular role based on how we're born. He's like, the whole process of becoming a human being is socialization. It is internalizing from the parents and from the family and from the society. What he's trying to say is not that you stand at the edge of abyss if you're dropped on an island by yourself.

I think what he's trying to say is we're essentially social creatures. We're constructed in the sense that who we are is determined by the way in which we interact with other human beings inside of these structures. I think he's saying there's no getting around that. But it doesn't preclude the possibility that you can question those structures, particularly once you recognize that they're created by human beings, that they're essentially products of human activity and not some sort of ontologically prior thing that just stands out there on its own.

30:00 Wes: He says world building is a function of our biological constitution. So he talks about dog world versus man world. Dog world is basically complete. Once you're in the world, once you're born, dog world is basically there, meaning

30:13 Mark: the undifferentiated, massive experience is cut up in ways that are useful to dogs. Right. Friend versus foe. Smells.

30:20 Wes: Developmentally, they're where they need to be to make meaning in the world and do the things that they need to do in the world and make dog

30:27 Dylan: meaning of the world.

30:28 Wes: Yeah, but for human beings, there's a lot more work that has to be done once you're born. And if you don't get it, you know, if you're on the island, as Mark talked about, you don't actually become human. And I'm not sure you're. You're anything. Human beings just aren't designed that way because obviously there's evolutionarily. There's a feedback loop between culture and biology. And the cultural stuff is actually necessary. It's necessary for us, and it's also intimately Related to. To biology. That's one of the really interesting things about this Berger reading.

Is that the whole point of the concept is to pry apart the biological and the social. Berger makes it clear just how intimately related that they are. And so it's unclear. Despite the fact that so much is socially constructed. It's unclear what can actually be thrown out. Because we don't know what's optional. We don't know what's so systematically tied to biology. That despite the fact that it's socially constructed. Perhaps it couldn't be constructed in any other way.

31:26 Seth: Laws, we can throw those out.

31:29 Wes: It's a difficult question, right, for any institution. The husband role, for instance, is an institution. What might have been different culturally or socially? There are a lot of things, as Berger points out. That are constant enough between cultures. That they're interesting objects of sociological study. And it's not clear that they could have been otherwise. In Hacking's sense, maybe they are. But it's a really complicated and interesting question. So we can't just say because something is socially constructed. It could have been otherwise. And it's something that can just simply be changed.

32:01 Mark: In the part of Berger that we read. There wasn't an explicit political point. Like you could see Berger's book as being Hegel or Nietzsche, chapter one. And then as soon as that's over, Nietzsche would proceed to say, yes. When your incomplete human nature means you need to be filled out by your society. And your society is only too happy to fill in all those gaps. And give you a place in the world. And give you a way to feel meaning and make you feel secure. But that is the infancy of man. And you must actually choose your second nature. Rather than having it thrust upon you.

If you're an actual, mature, existentially aware being. Berger doesn't say that. My initial interpretation of Berger was the opposite of that. Was to point out, yeah, actually, if you are throwing away some of those social mores. Then you're basically busting your human nature. You fall into risk of collapse. But you could go either way. Given his basic picture of how the mechanism works.

33:06 Dylan: I thought he was pretty strong on this about two thirds of the. Maybe three quarters of the way through. Where he talks at length about the danger of separation of the individual from society. Where they become ungrounded. And there's. He talks about the danger of meaninglessness. It made me think a lot about trauma. And the way in which people that are members of marginalized groups. End up experiencing the relationship of their individual identity with the rest of the world in a traumatic experience. Experience.

33:38 Coleman: It's interesting to think of the concept of PTSD as a social construction as well. It used to be called shell shock when it was in the context of war, and before that, who knows how many humans had PTSD as we would understand it today at a time when it was so commonplace that it was just. That's who you are, you know, like in a context where slavery and war and famine were commonplace. You have to predict that maybe not a majority, but a substantial minority of most humans and most civilizations may have had something that today we might call ptsd, but we didn't conceptualize it that way. It's an example where the concept is socially constructed because we find it useful to do so ethically.

34:28 Dylan: I think I'm wondering a little bit about the way you described it. Coleman is. I might have another story that says, well, I've clarified a way of understanding the world. I've found something, a way it cleaves apart that allows me to understand it better. That really doesn't seem that much different than many, many other kinds of inquiries of distinguishing things and finding patterns in the world and saying that there are atoms or that there's something called electricity and magnetism. And I develop a way of understanding it that it's absolutely true, that it becomes to exist because I broke it apart that way.

This is the part about social construction that to me, is really, really interesting. The way in which that activity of breaking the world apart into things has an ethical dimension to it and also has an understanding dimension to it so that I can refine my knowledge about the world and myself along the way.

35:20 Coleman: That's a crucial point when we're talking about the natural sciences. The reason we cleave the world conceptually into categories from the raw data of reality is to get something like predictive power. What marks a good conceptual distinction is one that, as you said, gives us understanding. There isn't that much of an ethical dimension. If we're positing different theories of, like, fundamental physical particles or something, there isn't a big ethical dimension there. What we're going to argue about is whether your theory that posits these three types of particles has more predictive power or more explanatory power than my theory, which posits, say, four types of particles when we're talking about the social domain rather than predictive power or explanatory power.

I think in many cases what we're talking about is something like utility, like ethical usefulness, because I could imagine, for instance, on the race issue, someone saying, well, we have however many billion humans on planet Earth, lots of genetic variation, people don't look identical. How do we carve them up into categories conceptually? And I can imagine people saying, well, actually the most parsimonious way to do it in terms of making the buckets coherent are like the five races that we're used to. On the other hand, you could say, well, ethically it actually makes more sense to really emphasize that there is only one human race.

I could imagine there being a tension between what makes sense in terms of predictive power and what makes sense ethically. I can imagine that on a few of these hot button issues, I guess

37:06 Mark: I would just lump these both into pragmatism. And if you look at ethical, it implies that you're trying to do the right thing. Whereas I think a lot of the reasons that people are divided up, I just think of the growth of the word nerd or geek or other specific kinds of what makes an asshole an asshole when you're referring to a person? These are things that evolve over time. Look, when you're in authority, you gotta deal with the assholes this way and

37:33 Seth: the dicks this way.

37:34 Mark: You know, there's not like necessarily something in a guidebook, but it's through the fashion of the time we're picking out this type of person that the dominant groups are deciding is particularly annoying and we want to label them this way. So it's a practical reason, but not an ethical reason.

37:53 Coleman: Well, couldn't it be an ethical reason, though, if the term asshole is meant to stigmatize certain behaviors that we find to be bad? And we can ask the further question, well, is someone an asshole if they do X? And then maybe not. Doesn't the term kind of have an ethical dimension in that sense?

38:11 Mark: I mean, I guess if you want to just look at like being a dork and being an asshole are both undesirable, but they would elicit a different amount of scorn. And so social corrective attempts. Sure. If we want to give a theory of insults that goes along those lines, that seems rather charitable to the insulters rather than people have a tendency to want to just carve up and easily label everybody around them. And there are probably evolutionary reasons for that, that not necessarily anything that's hooked to even a current utility. Right. They could be evolutionary reasons that just date back to a situation that we're no longer in what we're doing.

38:50 Wes: When you call someone an asshole, you're going from a specific behavior at a given Time and place and circumstance. And then you're creating a theory of a type of person who has a disposition to behave in that way. So when we're carving it up, we're doing more than just categorizing types of behavior. We're creating these theories about human kinds as if they were natural kinds. As if they were something, just a natural inevitable feature of the world. And of course, anyone can be an asshole at one time or another, and it may not be fair. On the other hand, some people do seem to fit that category and have as a character have a consistent set of dispositions to behave in that way. So it's a kind of essence that we're attributing when we think about people's characters in general.

39:39 Coleman: That was the most erudite way I've ever heard it said that some people are assholes.

39:45 Wes: That's why I try to explain to assholes when I'm correcting them.

39:48 Coleman: Yeah, well, you're not an asshole. You just have a set of dispositions that I would qualify as asshole.

39:55 Wes: Ish.

39:55 Coleman: Asshole ish. You meet the necessary and sufficient requirements for douchebaggery. You're not a douchebag though.

40:01 Mark: No assholes, just socially constructed. It's not my essence. Come on.

40:07 Coleman: Here's the thing.

40:07 Wes: I mean, that's actually a good point of departure because we're talking about socially constructed as if it doesn't mean it's real. Right? I think we may have lapsed at various points into that tendency. But for hacking the looping effects of humankind means that to the extent that those social constructs become part of people's self conception, part of others conception of a person, so that they treat them that way, and part of a person's self conception, they may inhabit that role in such a way that they do have those dispositions. So it can become a real thing. It's a kind of self fulfilling prophecy.

40:44 Seth: Yeah, it's real. It just doesn't have to be that way. It's not essential. This is why it gets back to when I was talking earlier on about this. It seems to be a counterposition to the idea of essentiality is to say someone's an asshole. Even if the concept of asshole is socially constructed, which it is, it doesn't mean that that person's not really an asshole. It just means they could be.

41:03 Coleman: Otherwise, I thought it meant that our concept of an asshole could be different such that they weren't one.

41:09 Seth: Well, it could be both of those things.

41:12 Wes: It's equivocal between Both of those things, yeah, that's the problem.

41:16 Seth: The equivocation was actually brought to mind when Coleman was talking about the point of science being to predict and the point of other terms having some kind of ethical dimension. And I'm trying to wrap my mind around that because the hacking piece he does a disservice, I think a description of Thomas Kuhn's the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I think he mischaracterizes it in that article. But Kuhn's point was the idea that science is on an onward linear march towards capital T. Truth and everyone in its service is dedicated to uncovering and discovering the truth is not really how science works.

You have paradigms that get established and then people spend a lot of time, a lot of time and energy and lifetimes and careers trying to make things fit inside that paradigm. And then somebody comes along and busts the paradigm open and they're thought of as a lunatic. And then ultimately truth or reality wins out, the paradigm shifts, and then a new generation of people are going to come in and try and justify that paradigm. And we keep hoping that we're getting closer and closer to the right paradigm or the final paradigm or something like that.

But Kuhn's discussion is really more about the motivations and the practices of scientific practitioners and the scientific communities as opposed to what the point of science is or what have you. Coleman, when you talked about prediction, I was thinking, ah, okay, you know, prediction and then ethics. But what kind of came across when you guys were talking about assholeishness is that ultimately we're talking about the use of language. In the case of science, the language is mathematics, biology, biology. Okay, well biology has a language of its own too.

It has symbolization, it has representations. We use metaphors in whatever native language we have to help cash that out. But in theory, the language that's used to describe the natural world doesn't have a lot of value laden elements to it. And we're not really describing the natural world in terms of its value, we're describing the natural world in terms of its behavior.

43:20 Mark: Isn't there like the top quark, the bottom quark and the asshole quark?

43:23 Seth: There's a shorthand way of thinking about social construction in the sense of saying we create the world through language. And language has inherently a value structure to it that's used a power structure and a value structure so we can debate between science and human traits. But in my mind, almost everything we do that involves our use of language is going to have some kind of connotation of the sort that Coleman was talking about.

43:48 Wes: We have to distinguish between language being socially constructed and then the things that we're talking about with language being socially constructed, because those are two different things.

43:57 Seth: The way we describe the world is

43:59 Wes: with language, but that doesn't mean that what we're describing is itself necessarily socially constructed.

44:05 Dylan: We mean multiple things. By socially constructed, maybe the Berger is least ambivalent about it, but there's at least in the Mallon and the hacking, a range of things that you can be referring to when you say socially constructed. In fact, parsing that out and the different pieces of that is really helpful.

44:24 Mark: Coleman, I know you had to go, so thanks so much for being here. We'll catch you on the philosophy of race discussion.