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

0:00 Coleman: Yes, that's right. Thanks for having me.

0:02 Mark: I was thinking that one of the ways that hacking helps us get a taxonomy of different types of social construction arguments is by laying out exactly what. What the form of the argument is. So this is page six in chapter one. There are three steps to the argument, depending on what is being emphasized or how radically exactly what's being claimed. You know how to deal with different types of social construction claims differently. The section is called Against Inevitability. Social construction work is critical of the status quo. Social constructionists about X, about whatever they're arguing about, tend to hold that.

So here's the first number one, X need not have existed or need not be at all as it is. X or X as it is in present, is not determined by the nature of things, is not inevitable. Very often then they go further and urge that number two, X is quite bad as it is. And number three, we would be much better off if X were done away with or at least radically transformed. So I found that useful that he talks about different feminists and their analysis of gender, that a lot of people arguing with social construction really just stick to the first one.

There was a historical process and they kind of leave it to you. This seems to be what we were kind of saying about Berger is to decide like, well, was that good? What is the chance of reform? But usually there's a political point that you want to change that thing.

1:17 Seth: Why else would you question it?

1:19 Dylan: The only reason you'd question it would be political.

1:22 Seth: There has to be some motivation for questioning that things are the way they are.

1:27 Dylan: I mean, I think there's political ones, but, you know, later on, Hacking traces this kind of line about it also partly being the philosophical argument about how the world is. Are you an Aristotelian? Are You a Platonist.

1:39 Mark: So if you're arguing that quarks are socially constructed, probably you don't then make the second move, that our present idea of quarks is quite bad. And then number three, we'd be much better off if we could get rid of the notion of quarks. Like we should actually do that book because I'm speaking out of a position of ignorance regarding it and it sounds cool, but no, it seems like these sociology of knowledge things are. You shouldn't think this is established dogma that this is the thing to which all science was flowing since time immemorial. It's like more of a Kuhnian point rather than we got to get past quarkness. That's old news.

2:15 Dylan: The counter example that maybe would make number two more understandable in science would be the sun is the center of the universe. No, the Earth is the center of the universe. No, the sun is the center of the universe. And they're actually thinking that it's actually, it's quite bad to think that the Earth is the center of the universe. And you might come up with things that are good reasons to say that it's a bad way to think about it.

2:36 Wes: Yeah. So ultimately, hopefully we're interested in the truth because it's not just that we accept the premise of the argument that something is necessarily socially constructed or, you know, we want to find out if it is, if so, to what degree. So for instance, when he talks about gender, he'll say that. So this is at bottom of page seven. One core idea of early gender theorists was that biological differences between the sexes do not determine gender, gender attributes or gender relations. Before feminists began their work, this was far from obvious.

Gender was in the first analyses thought of as an add on to physiology, the contingent product of the social world. Gender in this conception is a constitutive social construction. He's quoting now. Haslanger is a constitutive social construction. Gender should be understood as a social category whose definition makes reference to a broad network of social relations and is not simply a matter of anatomical differences. We might be motivated by some sort of social justice project. And I think a lot of people are to make that claim. But if we're interested in the truth, it's not obvious that just because gender is something that's socially influenced doesn't mean that the psychosocial forces involved in gender don't flow straight from biology.

Just because they have a history, just because they're social doesn't mean they aren't inevitable. And Intimately connected to biology, or they may be somewhere in between. We can't just, without investigation, say that it's, oh, it's an arbitrary thing that just accidentally popped up in culture, gender roles.

4:04 Dylan: But the whole point of this distinction goes back to the way in which that information or that truth is used. One consequence is saying, I want to know what the truth of the matter is. And one thing you have to keep in mind is that it's often the case that for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of things, there will be activities designed to leverage that categorization and that maybe that essentiality of it, or the quote unquote, the truth of the matter in ways that are extensions of that or super added on top of that truth, whichever way it is. And sometimes it seems to me that it's factually beside the point with regards to, say, the political question what the truth of the psychological fact is or the biological fact is. But it ends up being leveraged into the political discussion.

4:55 Wes: A little unclear on what you mean.

4:57 Dylan: We're going to talk a lot more about gender. I haven't read the essays for the gender instance that we're going to talk about later. But let's just take the example of gender is somehow biologically determined. Or on the other hand, gender is completely a social construct. So one of the ways in which either of those distinctions can be used is to either support or not support different political agendas. For the ways in which you treat people differently based upon gender, whether socially constructed or not. And you know, it could be used to undermine it or reinforce it or say, well, you know, it's the truth of the matter that women are different than men.

And therefore because of that, then that means that this litany of things that we do in society is perfectly acceptable because they're fundamentally different. And that jump, I think, is in many ways distinct. It's like Spider man, you know, it can be used for good or ill.

5:52 Wes: Right.

5:53 Dylan: Great power comes, great responsibility, all that stuff.

5:55 Mark: I thought you were saying that the people on both sides think they're arguing for the good. So you might say, no, we have to treat the genders the same because that's what fairness is, or no, because there is an essential difference between them. Fairness actually requires that you treat them differently according to their needs. So they're both claims of fairness based on different conceptions.

6:16 Wes: It's not necessarily that all of that is inconsistent. Right. Just to be clear, what would it mean to say gender is a social construct versus it flows from biology, you think of a hypothetical social development where, okay, there's this basic distinction between the sexes. There are people who will say that even sex is a social construction because the way we view genitalia, there's a strong cultural component to that. But let's leave that aside. Suppose we take sex as something as that's just a fact we read off of the world. Then the question is, well, to what extent do gender roles and certain behaviors, you know, feminine behaviors versus masculine behaviors, to what extent are those just a function of biology and the distinction between the sexes, and to what extent are they arbitrary?

They wouldn't be arbitrary in the sense that the one thing that nature does for us on this picture is it divides things up. It gives us two marks by which to separate two groups of people. And then we ask ourselves, to what extent are all the mores and norms that follow a arbitrary product of culture, and to what extent are they a product of biology? And then you have somewhere in between is all this psychosocial development, right? Which to some extent it flows from biology, and to some extent, you might say it flows from culture. You can conceive of this feedback loop where gender is socially constructed, but it has its origins in biology.

So you have a certain set of basic dispositions that might flow from the fact of being male or female, the sex, and then those will get reinforced through the hacking looping phenomenon, and so amplified. So what might have been minor role differences might get culturally amplified through those looping effects where someone thinks, okay, I'm a woman, and this is what being a woman means. And so that doesn't end up meaning that it's completely arbitrary, as if cultures just pull things out of their asses. Everything's just an accident. But it doesn't mean that you have to live with it, right?

You can change the culture and you can change roles, even if they have their promptings and biological origins.

8:30 Mark: Let's not use gender or race for the rest of this discussion as examples, because you just demonstrate, even though I liked your description, what a freaking thorny bit, how difficult it is.

8:42 Wes: It's only because I'm looking at the gender section and hacking that I use that. But I like the refugee example was simpler.

8:49 Mark: And what I liked about this breakdown by hacking, does he think that claiming that something is socially constructive actually just a performative act? And the way you just described it with gender at least like, no, there's actually something to investigate. We could try to do some science, do cross cultural comparisons, and try to untangle these things. To the extent that it is ambiguous, and it's always going to be ambiguous no matter how much you look into this kind of thing. Then you could say that by making a social construction claim, you are not so much trying to state a fact, but you are putting forward a value. Again, it becomes a performative in the sense that it is not fact stating. It is more like saying boo or yay or something like that.

9:37 Wes: So let's give an example of a performative just so people know what we're talking about.

9:41 Mark: If I say you suck, then like I'm not actually describing that you do any particular sucking behavior. I'm insulting you. I'm performing an action of insulting you. And that's what a lot of supposed. This is very ripe because a lot of people think that if you're making claims about race or gender, you might not actually be making a good faith scientific claim at all. You might just be expressing a preference or an objection or trying to put somebody in a category.

10:10 Seth: Okay, that's not a performative act though.

10:12 Wes: I'm thinking about performatives differently, as in institution establishing statements like marriage and so anyway, I get the basic idea, I guess, of what you're talking about.

10:23 Seth: One of the things I really liked in the hacking, it's on page 19, he brings out the distinction of the three levels. It isn't necessary that X be the way it is. The way that X is is bad. And you know, we should change that. Right. And then through the intervening pages between 6 and 19, he talks through different examples of what that looks like for the self and gender and race and so on and so forth. Right. But he has this section that's called Grades of Commitment. He talks about the constructionist commitment based on their reaction to those three levels.

And he says at the first level there's historical. So they're just noting that some kind of a concept arises out of historical conditions or historical development and isn't inevitable a response to that could be, yeah, well that's fine. It's just noting the fact. And then you could take an ironic stance towards that. You could take a reformist stance as you start moving into thinking that it's bad or reforming and unmasking are two different reactions to it. Unmasking is exposing it to try to take the power away from it. And reforming is staying within the structure but trying to modify it or something.

Then he lists rebellious and revolutionary. Again, I recognize that there's a lot of fine grained distinctions that were missing that we had talked about potentially trying to Hammer out. But I think Hacking does a pretty good job of pointing out that if you use the term social construction in whatever context, it comes with an agenda that is significantly different than the agenda of say, scientific inquiry. A big part of what he does in these first two chapters we look at is just teasing out the different agendas as related to the different types of things that people are interested in.

And he even says I'm not going to talk about people who just blanket do the global constructionist claims. And he doesn't even want to deal with at least what we read, the people who talk about anything related to like science. So the people who say quarks are constructed. There's a sense in which by narrowing the field of discourse to these human traits or human conceptions like self, like consciousness, whatever, then he's really pointing out that using social construction is a political activity. So maybe that's what you were driving at, Mark.

It's not doing science, it's not doing philosophy. It's challenging the status quo in some way, shape or form for some specific ideological, political, social end of some sort of. At which point you then turn and say, okay, if I understand that that's the case, am I really still going to be talking about this as if it's a legitimate challenge to the natural kind that we think is there? Or should we in turn start looking at those political agendas and those aims and asking whether they accord or don't accord with our value systems and you know what I mean, it almost becomes less of an epistemological exercise and more of something else.

13:18 Mark: Yes, that seems to be his agenda, that he's interested in the culture wars as opposed to the science wars, that he sees these as two different things. There was another article that you'd identified, Wes, as an optional what is social construction By Paul Boghossian? And that one really is concerned with the science wars. It's concerned with truth and relativism and is extension of exactly the kind of thing that in our series of episodes on truth we're talking about where this is preparatory to these debates about race and gender in particular, but also economic things.

He brings up the economy, or more specifically one could say the gdp. We regard the GDP as sort of the health of the nation, like that's how the economy is doing. I don't think it's simply a matter of an ethical claim that no, I want GDP to include other things about human well being than merely this particular measure of things. Like it's also a matter of the science of economics. Insofar as that it's a science that. So it's not purely like an ethical consideration. But certainly those elements are both probably present that I'm urging a change in the way that we do the science of economics.

But there's a reason for my suggesting it. In other words, it's explanatory, inadequate, but it also has negative effects socially that focusing on this makes us neglect the value of work that childcare givers, you know, unpaid do and things like that.

14:43 Dylan: I think we should be a little careful about saying that Hacking is not interested in the science question. This strikes me as actually kind of weird to say that we didn't read the third chapter on natural sciences. But even in the first two chapters he frames these sort of culture wars, science wars, the question about the nature of truth as you might have pursued it in sort of science, nominally speaking, versus the kinds of categorizations that we have in the social sciences, roughly speaking, and how they dealt into politics. I think he sees them as very related.

And in fact the discussion of social construction and the social sciences reflects very, very similar, in fact, if not the same kinds of problems that are reflected in the natural sciences, albeit the looping effect question about how people internalize that understanding the world into themselves. That part is sort of a different effect. But in the end of what is chapter one where he's talking about why ask what? He breaks down three aspects of social construction, particularly in the natural sciences. One regarding around contingency as a sticking point, one regarding metaphysics and a sticking point, another regarding stability as a sticking point.

16:00 Seth: Which page are you on, Dylan?

16:01 Dylan: On page 32. Contingency is just a social construction thesis that in a non trivial sense successful science didn't have to develop the way it did. You could have come up with a different science. It could have had different successes evolving in other ways that did not converge in the route it was taken.

16:17 Seth: The history of science could have been different than it is.

16:20 Dylan: The strong version of social construction thesis in natural science is that the very categories that you use to break up the world could have been different. So this is one where typically a lot of scientists, you know, hardcore scientists will say, look, everyone would have come up with electrons. You might have called it a blowvaan, but you would still have come up with electrons and they would have obeyed laws like Maxwell's laws. Strong social constructionists will say, well no, that's not true. That you could have come up with categories that in fact the very laws for describing the world that were different.

There's an interesting question there. They might have been different, but, you know, any scientist would say, well, they'd at least have to be mappable one to another in some kind of imagination, important way. And then there's an interesting discussion to be had about whether or not the picture of the world that you have in one set of laws is while mappable to another one. That is, you get the same numbers out. Is the picture of the world nonetheless different in how you understand the way the world works? And to me, a good example of this is force versus energy.

So if you have a Newtonian picture of the world in which you say that everything is operated on by a force acting on that object and it always reacts to that force, so you're spending all your time trying to figure out what the forces are on it, that's a different picture of the world. Then you talk about balance of energy and that everything tries to get to a lowest possible energy state, and that when something is moving from one place to another, it is changing potential energy into kinetic energy, that kind of language. You have different pictures of the way the world works.

You have different analogies about how we are as human beings and our relationship to the world. But the mathematics of those pictures you can show give you the same numbers. Some problems will be easier to solve in one picture or another. That's one of the ways in which you might be talking about contingency. A social constructionist on contingency will say that you can easily imagine another world in which electrons didn't exist. That's what they would say. Electrons are a social construct.

18:16 Mark: So this is. Yeah, page 33 is where he's going through in detail. And the way you've just described contingency seems to include the second one, which is the metaphysical. If you're a social constructionist, you maintain that the world does not come quietly wrapped up in facts. Facts are the consequences of ways in which we represent the world. It's a species of nominalism.

18:37 Dylan: Yeah. Social constructionist is a nominalist in that the disagreement is metaphysical. So if you were not a nominalist, you would be on the other side of that. But the constructionist is anomalous.

18:47 Mark: He says it is. Constructionist's point is countered by a strong sense that the world has an inherent structure that we discover.

18:53 Seth: Maybe my desire to say that hacking is focused on the culture wars is because I find the science war question significantly less interesting.

19:03 Dylan: It's fine, and I'm willing to just drop it. I think that they're deeply related to one another. I think that the act of categorizing in science is deeply related to the acts of categorizing that we have in the social sciences. And that in fact, when we make that act of categorizing in the social sciences and that lead to the culture wars, it's on the power of the act of categorizing that we have in the sciences. In fact, we routinely refer to that and say, well, that's true. The thing that we're pointing to about the truth and the fact is relying on the kinds of things that we claim in the authorities in science, he

19:38 Wes: draws a distinction at a certain point between some of the different things. And Mallon does this too. That we might construct one of them is just ideas. That's the easiest thing, right? To get our heads around the idea that when we perceive the world, it's kind of theory laden. We look at things through a lens. The lens might have been otherwise those concepts are constructed. It's a stronger thing to say that the objects through which we look at those representations are themselves constructed, somehow constitutively constructed by those representations.

Now, when we talk about refugees and the looping effects of kinds, that's something that makes it plausible, right? If our object is also a conscious being who can internalize the representation that we're using on them, then we have a good model of a social construction in the sense that, you know, our representation of something can actually construct it because they're representing beings as well and they can internalize it with quarks. You don't get that. And so that's why it makes that kind of example much less plausible. Hacking does a good job of satirizing.

It's funny, he's rebutting Stanley Fish's response to the Sokol hoax, where a physicist put together a bunch of constructionist jargon and had it published.

20:57 Dylan: Sort of hermeneutic theory of quantum gravity.

20:59 Mark: Yeah.

21:01 Wes: And Fish pointed out that something can be socially constructed and real, which is true. So in the case of if you have a humankind that's being constructed, that's definitely true. It could be to be socially constructed as a refugee, as a woman refugee. If you've inhabited that role, then it's a real thing. It's not just made up. It's not like it doesn't exist. And then there are institutional arrangements which are even more obvious. So for instance, the one that Fish uses, he says, look, baseball is a social construction. Balls and strikes are socially constructed, but they're also real.

And then Hacking moves on to. So one of our optional readings was Searle Searle's the Construction of Social Reality. There are institutional facts like the existence of money or balls or strikes, and those things depend on our collective agreement. Those things exist only insofar as we collectively acknowledge them to exist. Right? So in the case of money, money doesn't grow on trees. And it's not a natural essence of money that it gets exchanged and used in the way that it does. It's completely by virtue of agreement. And if tomorrow all of us forgot what money is and how to use it, it would cease to exist until we figured out what all those numbers in our bank accounts meant.

That's an example of something that's socially constructed and real. I think that's Fish's example, but that's nothing like the quark example. So strikes are quite evident, self evidentially ontologically subjective, meaning they don't exist independent of our attitudes. He's using Searle's language. Without human rules and practices, no balls, no strikes, no errors, quarks are not self evidently ontologically subjective. The short lived quarks, if there are any, are all over the place, quite independently of any human rules or institutions. Someone may be a universal constructionist, in which case quarks, strikes, and all things are socially constructed.

But you cannot say quarks are like strikes, both real and constructed.

22:56 Mark: See, I just found Searle and Hacking and Boghossian really overly simplistic and not taking seriously the pragmatic arguments against this. If we think about the Quine essay that we read, what there is, I believe is what it was called, which he actually says, that material objects are actually theoretical entities, right? We have all these different perceptions and things and we kind of say what best explains that experience is structured in this way. I'm not even making a guess in the way that Kant would think, you know, that we're making a guess about what's in the thing in itself or something like that.

It's just we're positing these things as theoretical entities. So in that sense it is always the case. I mean, it's really taking seriously this fundamental pragmatic picture of there is just experience is an undifferentiated flow, and that for various reasons, some of them innate to human nature, and some of them a matter of the contingent interaction between individuals and the environment, or things built over time through history, then we come up with particular languages that have particular concepts in them, and that is what makes us pick out, not just in scientific context, but in any descriptive context, once the language is established, yes.

Then we can say that according to this language and the concepts that are in it, then there really are physical objects in front of me. But until we have that structure at all, then there is just is no strong sense in which you know, oh, of course there must be quarks before. And when you get to high level abstractive science, it's even more obvious that like, no, what we have when we talk about quarks is a bunch of readings from some very high tech instruments and we come up with this theoretical entity quark.

24:45 Wes: Yeah, but the thing is, could it have been otherwise? Is there any other theoretical entity that would fit the data at a certain point in history? But I think this is a useful comparison because a lot of this talk does stem from Kant. Kant is really the first constructionist. It's not social though, it's cognitive and it's inherent to the way the mind works. So things are in space and time and work causally because the mind imposes constructs them in that way according to those categories. But even for Kant, there's data. We don't just get to make shit up.

The world has structure independent of the mind. That's the whole point of the thing in itself. And even if the way we're representing it, as in space, as in time, that might have been different, if our minds are different, but the data couldn't have been different and the systematic relations that are implicated, that are determined by the data couldn't be different. So even if we had a different cognitive apparatus and things weren't in space and time, things were radically different, to use Dylan's word. There'd be some kind of mappability.

It's really hard to conceive of. So it's not the same as something like a ball or a strike where we just agree to behave as if certain things are real, there are real mind independent constraints outside of us. And even if the theoretical cognitive baggage we bring to them is to some extent imposed, that doesn't simply get rid of the mind independent entities because otherwise there would be no order. Right. We could just willy nilly, things would appear just as we made them.

26:22 Seth: Combining what you just said, Wes, I was kind of moved by Mark's introduction of the pragmatic argument. Is there a meaningful sense in which if our scientific construct was somewhat different and we structured the world scientifically for the purposes of the way we use science, that we never did the math and figured out that there was a quark or we never built the machines to try to validate that there was a quark, that the way that science evolved, we had different entities that served the purposes that we needed to describe the world in ways that were meaningful and useful to us.

Do we believe that quarks would still be out there? Or would the fact that they'd never been conceived, never been measured, never been recorded, and the taxonomy of things that are in the world was already set out by the system that we had in place that we just say no. In fact, you know, the quarks, they are contingent.

27:17 Wes: There's the famous example of the dinosaurs with pragmatism. If dinosaurs were never discovered, does that mean that there were no such thing as dinosaurs? We really just want to think about the ideal limit of inquiry. What is the case is the same as what we would discover at the ideal limit of inquiry. So historically, whether we've discovered it, that doesn't matter. But the question is, let's suppose that we're at a point in inquiry where quarks are stable. It's not going to ever change. We're not going to ever figure out, okay, we were wrong about quarks.

Let's just take it for granted that we're right. I mean, there's two ways to ask the question, Is there any other history? Two science for us constituted as the kind of beings that we are, in which we reach the ideal limit of inquiry, and there are no quarks? No, I don't think we can say that. Right. And I honestly don't think we can say that. Even if we ask that question for aliens with radically different cognitive apparatuses, if they are capable of reaching the ideal limit of inquiry in physics, then necessarily they will discover quarks. It may look a lot different, but it'll be structurally isomorphic.

The theory.

28:27 Mark: I get your argument. I don't want to argue this anymore because this is not actually something that is in hacking. I'm just saying hacking doesn't take this seriously enough to give the kind of response even that you just gave. He just more or less takes it for granted that the way Searle puts it, which hacking just adapts, is there are some facts that are metaphysically objective and there are some that are metaphysically subjective. The metaphysically subjective ones are the ones that refer in their definition to the desires, to the intentionality of individuals or to groups.

So cultural norms are metaphysically subjective. Now he also makes the distinction between are they epistemologically subjective or epistemologically objective. So the fact that a ball and strike are defined this way in baseball. They're metaphysically subjective because they're conventional, but they are epistemologically objective. You can't just decide or it's not going to depend on the individual.

29:25 Seth: Actually, that's a bad example for that.

29:27 Mark: But really, because the umpire can have a different.

29:30 Seth: Yeah, because the fans can think that something was a ball when it was called a strike and all that. But sorry, your point's understood since Wes

29:38 Mark: brought this up to point out the disanalogy that Hacking says between these two cases. Yeah, of course, it's completely a matter of convention that in baseball a strike counts as one out of three steps to getting out. But if you define strike physically as in the ball is passing over the plate within this space, then, like, that's an objective physical fact, whether something is a strike or not. Again, it's a matter of cultural contingency that we came up with a concept that picks out this particular space between knee and shoulder right over the bat.

But once we've picked that out, it is 100% a physical fact. I think that's very much like what we're doing with quarks, that we've come up with this theory not just whimsically, but because it explains better than anything else these theoretical entities. And again, I was saying that according to Quine, even just saying there's a book in front of me is doing the same kind of theorizing, that it's not a fundamentally different thing.

30:40 Seth: Mark said something that I think is really interesting because I've had this example since Wes led off this section of the conversation around Mark. What you just described was you distinguish between calling something a strike and the terms by which it qualifies as a strike, so to speak. I was thinking about earlier on Wes, when you were. I don't want to use the gender example. I'm trying to think of something else. Maybe the child TV watcher will work or something. But it's the fact that you can have a conversation about the child TV watcher that operates at the level of, let's call it scientific fact.

You can say, okay, if the child is between ages X and Y, and if they sit in front of the television for X number of hours a day, and if they in turn do not read, you know, books, or you can come up with all these things which could essentially be measured in our quote, unquote facts in the world. The child sits there for six hours a day or doesn't. Right. Or five hours or seven hours or Whatever, but that's not what you're talking about. What the term does to the listener is it invokes this web of social meanings and values and all this sort of thing.

I wonder to what extent we get confused about those things, because the terms we use operate almost 100% of the time in our discourse with that web of meaning and with the values associated with it. And you have to work really hard to have a value neutral conversation about something and whether it meets certain criteria, you know, that sort of thing. And so I saw Mark's example like that. I think, you know, when we use terms like male or black or female or whatever, we're doing that. And the argument is with the nexus of meanings that are associated with the term and not with the objective reality of the biology or the behavior of the people.

32:32 Wes: I think the refugee example works here. And also the comparison to more of a social fact in Searle's sense, which are just these overt social facts that social constructions that no one disagrees that they're social constructions like money, by the way, to describe the fact that there's this physical thing, money, or there's the physical criteria for a strike, that's not to describe the social fact itself. Right? The social fact has to do with the way it's used and what you can do with money and the collective agreement about what money is. A woman refugee, by comparison, her existence is not predicated on us agreeing that there are women refugees because there are underlying circumstances, someone fleeing their country, which we should all be able to agree are out there in the world.

And we just read that off the world. And it's not just because we decided to play a game where, hey, this is going to represent, you know, the way that paper is going to represent money. We're just going to decide that this represents the concept of woman refugee. That's really disanalogist. That's why the term social construction is so confusing, because you might get the impression that it's so radical, that it's just simply by by virtue of collective agreement that women refugees even exist. And that's not what it is. To really say that women refugees are social constructions, you need a different concept of social construction, the one that Hacking uses with the looping kinds where our representations can affect other people because they can internalize those representations.

So it's not analogous to money or those other sorts of social facts.

34:15 Dylan: So a child television watcher is a social construction. A child who watches television is not. I mean, that's the distinction that Hacking makes.

34:24 Mark: The Stanford article, since we haven't used this term yet, quoting Barry Barnes, David Blore and John Henry, for example, shift from emphasis on the determination of perceptual experience by culture, right, the strict constructionist kind of neo Kantian, to an emphasis on the. Under determination of belief by perceptual experience, a view which leaves room for cultural determination of belief. So that just occurred to me, Wes, you were saying, you know, at least we have data. We gotta have data. But if you want to stress that, like, the data doesn't actually get you far enough to.

You need the culture to fill in the rest of it, you could have the same data in different scientists, even at the ideal limit of inquiry. Some of them might call it quarks, some of them might call it something else. That's like. Like the same image that we had from Wittgenstein that, like, you have this basic matrix of atomic facts, but you have different ways that you could scoop them up into actually articulable facts. So in that way, sort of different conceptual schemes.

35:22 Dylan: And those conceptual schemes have different implications and different implicit or explicit value judgments.

35:28 Mark: And I liked, like Donald Davidson, his argument that we talked about in a different episode, his argument against conceptual schemes was philosophically sophisticated in a way that I did not see in Hacking, for instance, who just seems to like. Of course, that's a bunch of malarkey. Of course, we have a strong intuition that there is a structure of nature that we discover through science.

35:50 Seth: So, Wes, did I hear you say in that last comment that the benchmark of what could be considered socially constructed is whether it's internalizable?

35:59 Wes: If we're talking about humankinds, I mean, there's a way to talk about institutional facts like money or banks or things like that. Those can be considered social constructions because they are simply matters of collective agreement, collective intention. But then there are people, you know, when we want to talk about the social construction of human traits or human kinds, then the mechanism of that has to be their ability to internalize our representations. So we might say it's not the case, that it's just some natural thing that we classify women refugees in the way we classify them, because woman refugee means so much more than the most rude fact of someone who's fled their country.

It means all sorts of associated things having to do with what it means to be a refugee, what their internal experience is, how we ought to treat them, a large network of other beliefs. And then the female refugees might internalize that and enact those roles so they could be constructed in that way, without that internalization, there's no mechanism for our representations of people to construct them. Right? They don't get constructed in any way just because we agree to represent them in some way unless they can internalize those representations.

Does that make sense?

37:17 Seth: It does. And what it sounds to me like is we've gone back to Berger. Not that I disagree, but it's almost like saying, what's at stake when you talk about the possibility of social construction is the idea that something external to an individual can have. And maybe we need to go back to the causal or constitutive distinction, but essentially can have a causal effect on the construction of an individual identity. Insofar as everything that we say practically, there's some work you could do to try to break down these distinctions. But. But if you're talking about anything related to human behavior, categorizations of humans by political, social, gender, sex, you know, race can have the possibility of being internalized. Then by definition, those are all social constructs.

38:07 Dylan: Are they social constructs or are they just. The fact is that ideas are real in the sense that they can have causal effects on the way we understand ourselves. It might not matter if some historical event took place in reality, but if a bunch of people believe that it did, that will affect their behavior. It doesn't matter if really I am a third rate human being because of my biology. It has real effects if I understand that to be true, because that's the context in which I'm raised. This is back to Hacking's looping effect. It makes a difference, it's real in that respect. It has real world consequences.

38:44 Mark: I also want to point out that the looping effect is possible in human classifications, but it's not necessarily there all the time. It sounded like it's essential that the woman refugee knows that she's a woman refugee and be affected by that. But I think he even explicitly says in talking about this example, no, this might just be. It's a matter of the matrix of the legal system, a complex of institutions, advocates, newspaper articles, lawyers, court decisions, immigration proceedings. That's what determines this category of woman refugee. She might not even speak the language in question at all.

39:18 Dylan: She might wake up and find out, oh, I got thrown in jail because I'm a woman refugee, and she had no idea she was.

39:23 Wes: She can construct the category for herself using the cues from the environment, you know, just even the existence of barriers and infrastructure and guards. She doesn't need to actually be given the representation whole cloth, you know, she just has to be given the matrix,

39:38 Mark: but I think she could still be categorized that way and not even know it. Yeah, like the TV watching child. The part I found least compelling about that is the child might even realize that he's like the TV watching child and reflect on like. No, come on, that's not necessary. That's not the way most scientific experiments on children are going to work, that they're going to have a looping effect on the child.

39:58 Seth: What's come out of the conversation to this point for me, wrapping up the last three things that the three of you have said, is if we acknowledge that ideas can have an impact on the constitution or are constitutive of, of how we become who we are, then with respect to any conversation about social construction, if we're talking about ideas, not necessarily physical things in the world, but anything related to the conceptual framework that we use to model our world for us, then we have to acknowledge that they socially construct in a meaningful way by virtue of their ability to internalize and in the broad sense.

40:40 Wes: But I would add one caveat, which is that we've accepted for the case of argument the could have been otherwise thing that Hacking is on about. So we're accepting for the sake of argument that that representation of women refugees and the whole matrix surrounds it isn't itself inevitable. And maybe it is for the sake of argument, and probably it's not inevitable. Probably there are many different ways to represent women and refugees, but we have to consider the possibility that given our basic psychosocial nature, that that's the way we're going to represent women refugees, all the way down to all the connotations and all the institutional stuff that comes up, that that's just all inevitable and that still can be internalized.

So it just gets reinforced by that. And so you get an amplification of the role based on the internalization of the representation. But it doesn't mean that it could have been constructed in some other way. So that's the possibility that we always have to be open to.

41:42 Dylan: Wes, you just want to preserve the possibility that yes, social construction exists.

41:46 Seth: Yes.

41:47 Dylan: That all the aspects of Hacking's categorization, except for the qualification that social construction also comes with lack of inevitability, you think that's possible? That that piece of it is a misunderstanding of social construction?

42:04 Wes: I don't think Hacking would disagree. I just think he's saying that there's no point in calling anything a social construction unless you think it's counterintuitive, unless you're trying to say it could have been otherwise. I'm saying that the looping effect could occur even if the representation couldn't have been otherwise.

42:21 Dylan: It sounds like you're not disagreeing with me.

42:23 Wes: No, I. But I don't think I'm disagreeing with Hacking either. So I just don't think he explores this horn of the dilemma.

42:30 Mark: He also says that there's no point in claiming that something is socially constructed that is obviously socially constructed. Like the claim that money is socially constructed. But I don't actually think that's the case. I talked about the example of the economy. So you might think, for instance, that, like the job system, of course that's socially constructed. Why would you even argue it? But like. No, that's exactly when we had our episode on that, that people just regarded as. It's just nature. Everybody has to work to have a job. You have to have some form of exchange.

And so there is the same sort of social point in raising that as in a more ambiguous case like gender. And in fact, we just got in Simone Weil, an argument against an argument. Actually, you thought that the entire economic system was socially constructed. But no, it's actually nature itself acting through society that is just inevitable. That as soon as there's a certain amount of expertise, then there's going to be a group which comes out of the necessity that if people start working together, then some people are going to have a greater handle on how all the pieces fit together than others, and those are inevitably going to oppress the rest.

So you might have thought it was merely a social construction, that there's oppression. But no, it's actually just human nature. It's nature acting through these people. So that's kind of a backwards argument with regard to what Hacking's talking about here.

43:52 Wes: Should we say a little bit more about Berger before we.

43:55 Mark: Sure. It's a very poetic picture. Do you want to sketch a little more of it?

43:59 Wes: Yeah, I think Seth gave a kind of overview, but I don't think it's bad to repeat it, that he sees society as this dialectical product where human beings, through their activity, produce this social product, and then it becomes objectivized into what he calls an external facticity. And I'll get into that. Into a second. And then internalized and reappropriated it into subjective consciousness, an internal facticity.

44:28 Mark: He even uses that word facticity at the end of it, internally, too, which is interesting.

44:34 Wes: Yeah. So all the social, cultural stuff we do, that's externalization. He doesn't really go into a Lot of detail about that. He gets right into objectivization, which is the sense in which. And this is kind of what the hacking is talking about with the Matrix. All the sense in which these institutional arrangements shape us. So, for instance, even the existence of a plow will compel us into a certain kind of agricultural activity. The same thing goes with non material stuff like speaking and thinking. Certain linguistic structures, we didn't make them up.

Right. We inherit the language. That's kind of an external constraint on our thinking and on who we become. All the other institutions, language, but also name, legal descent, citizenship, civil status, our own autobiography. The way we understand ourselves occurs within the context of those types of institutions and their effect on us. So the point is that all the stuff that we produce turns around and becomes a coercive. He uses this word, coercive constraint on us. That's the objectivization part to all of this.

45:42 Mark: Yep. We create morality, but then we feel the guilt. We've sort of given it our blessing through socialization. We've internalized it. And so this thing, even though it's just a human construct, it actually ends up ruling us.

45:56 Wes: So institutions impose predefined patterns on us. So like being a husband, being a father. Those roles are models for us. Right. On how we are supposed to conduct ourselves. And we pattern our behavior according to them. So all of this social stuff going on has a profound impact on not just our behavior, but who we are, our self representation, our identity.

46:18 Mark: Basically our thick identity.

46:21 Dylan: The socially constructed world is above all an ordering experience.

46:25 Wes: Eventually, later on, we'll get into the way in which we're screwed if we don't have it right. We can't be people. We have to have something like that. It may be one thing or another, but if it's nothing, then we're on our way to suicide.

46:39 Dylan: Yeah, he's big on that part of it. We talked about this a little bit earlier. We'll go crazy. I put it in terms of madness and trauma. This kind of dissociation that you have between the way the world is or the way the world is telling you to be. And other forces within yourself that is in conflict with that.

47:00 Mark: And since we used nomos and being anomic in our introductions, we better explain that it's like related to norm.

47:08 Dylan: I thought it was naming.

47:10 Wes: No, it's mores or norms. So it's become jargon and sociology now. And Berger was using it according to that. I'm not sure if he's the one who invented it.

47:21 Dylan: Gnomizing page 20.

47:23 Mark: Language nomizes by imposing differentiation and structure upon the ongoing flux of experience. So he's giving exactly this pragmatic picture before.

47:32 Wes: Ultimately, the nomos is mores. It's norms, but it's laws. But it's not laws in the sense of institutionalized in a legal system. And that all begins at the most brute level, just by making certain kinds of distinctions. You've already started that process. And so he's trying to give the most basic example just by saying this, not that is one of his examples. We've started that. It's a very structuralist harkens back to Saussure, right, Where significations are a matter of establishing those linguistic differences.

48:06 Mark: The book Sartre's Nausea is exactly a picture of someone going insane in this way of, like, I look at the stuff around me, and instead of thinking a street is a street, you walk down it, you drive on it. You see it as this just bare, purposeless, pulsating thing. If you become too much in your own head and withdrawn from meaningful social interaction and letting other people really engage in dialectic with you, then, yeah, there's no constraints on the way you perceive things. And it gets gross. David Cronenberg, esque.

48:45 Wes: All of that structuring that's done by nomos structures our consciousness. That's where we get meaning from. That's where we get the sense that life is meaningful and oriented and that there's actually a world.

48:59 Mark: And I do think he's pulling this straight from Durkheim. It's not that this is a hugely revolutionary thought.

49:05 Wes: Well, the idea of anomie. Yeah, yeah.

49:08 Mark: Explicitly had a. What is it to have a meaningful life? Well, it's to figure out based on the socially inherited matrix where you fit into it and be okay with that. That sounds like a very bleak, like, conform that will give you a meaningful life. Which the way that Berger puts it almost sounds like, yeah, that's the norm.

49:30 Wes: Well, he says there's agency, though, as well, so he calls it a conversation. Right. So, yeah, we're not just passive victims of it. We contribute and we still have some agency. We can't just disengage from it, even if we're resisting. We have to be engaged with and understand the norms.

49:48 Mark: That seems the key, that as long as you're in the shared anomic world, then, like, disengaging on certain mores. Why the hell not? Like, of course that's part of the dialectical process, is that maybe you can just say, look, I don't think that the gender norms in my society accurately reflect what I'm feeling inside. And there is a huge, you know, higher rate of suicide in trans folks. Right. So you actually do with that kind of disconnect between social expectations and how you feel about it. There is this danger of anomia, of further disengagement. I think that that's what that would mean. But the mere disengagement in one respect, violating one belief of the shared code. It seems, at least theoretically, that as long as you are hooked up to people in other ways, like your psychology would be fine.

50:37 Wes: Yeah, he does say that deviants, right. You feel not just guilt, but terror of madness. And he uses homosexual panic as an example. Example. It's not that you would feel guilty about having those urges, for instance, or having that orientation, but that you're confronted with the terror of being thrust into outer darkness and being separated from the normal order of humanity. It's ultimately what we're confronted with. If when we do deviate from strong norms in that way, isn't just the disapproval of society, it's meaningless, it's being completely cast out of society.

So what has to change is that I think very early on, if you want to say it's an enormous psychological cost to fight against societal norms and say, no, this is who I am, and it's okay, it becomes different. Right. Once societal norms change. And then you can start to fit it into a more accepting nomos and not let it make you insane. You know, I'm not sure if I agree, but at least according to Berger, short of that, you are confronting true terror and possibility of madness when you deviate in certain significant ways.

51:50 Mark: I'm just seeing a little bit of a parallel to our discussion with Francis Fukuyama in terms of how coherent should a society be that it seems to follow from what Berger is saying that the more coherent, the more univocal, the more defined this shared nomos is, the more secure you will feel. Whereas to us modern people who maybe have a greater tolerance for deviancy, for being rebellious, for being yourself, it seems like you could still establish a dialectic, even if it's a serious minority position. So in other words, if you're trans by yourself and no one else is trans, that is a recipe for feeling seriously disengaged.

But even if 98% of the folks are not trans, but there's a community that you can hook up with. And so this is actually an argument for sort of representation in the media and all that kind of stuff to just have this put out as an option. And that therefore a more pluralistic society that does not have a single set of standards, that has some flexibility, that has some disagreement, that has some push and pull, maybe that's just inevitable given the dialectical nature of this, since every individual has free will and it's going to be pushing back against the system a little bit.

Inevitably, if you're going to fill Berger's picture out here, you're going to have pluralistic elements within it. And actually that's the most healthy, stable kind of society. That was just a disagreement we were having maybe with Fukuyama, that he seemed to feel like you still need a certain amount of consistency for it to be like a coherent society with a civic life and blah, blah, blah. Whereas the truly Rawlsian, we have a shared legal framework. But anything goes as far as morality goes. That seems like the dominant picture, frankly, in today's world, in the Western world.

So you could argue either way, sort of which is the most conducive to human psychological health and having a meaningful life. Were there other things that you guys wanted to say about this before we wrap up here?

53:49 Wes: Well, I just think it's kind of telling. He talks about the way in which the social world intends, as far as possible, to be taken for granted. That on page 31. So this very thing that when people are saying something is socially constructed, they're trying to unmask an ideology and tell us that something that's being taken for granted is actually a construction. And Berger is telling us this is built in to the way the social world works. In fact, we are socialized successfully to the degree to which we take it for granted and the degree to which we think that the social stuff is actually part of the real external, natural world, or as he puts it, you know, part and parcel of the universal nature of things.

And then you reach the highest level of that when you do cosmization. This is the lead into his talk about religion. But basically you get the idea that there's something outside of us which is other than us and enormously powerful, and yet for some reason is addressing itself to us. And that's the sacred. I don't know why that had such an effect on me, but I thought it was such a interesting way to describe the sacred and religion and ultimately the function of religion.

55:01 Mark: Well, and he's saying that if you're going to be a social constructionist, in other words, this kind of deconstructor of the social, you have a lot of work to do because it's sort of the natural state of society to be all consuming and that a society will have a uniform religion and dogmatically believe that this is actually the world and if you defy it, then you're doing the worst possible thing and you'll go insane. Like that's our starting point.

55:27 Wes: And clearly, I mean, Nietzsche was worried about the same sort of problems, right? The advent of nihilism. Once all of this breaks down, we have a serious, serious problem on our hands and we have to figure out what to do with it.

55:41 Seth: So I found the readings to be very useful, informative, I think. I accept the general premise that there's probably, and especially reinforced by Wes's research, that the concept of social construction is not authoritatively established where the usage is consistent and people understand. So this type of clarification is necessary and I'm inclined to just be like a please around the science wars. Although I'm very interested in hearing a little bit more from Dylan about the connection he sees. I think I fall in the camp that I believe we construct our world through language.

And I'm not sure that I can make a stance about natural kinds informing natural categories that are value neutral. But I kind of feel like all of the interesting human activity is not value neutral in the most important ways. All of the interesting concepts that we use where the most is at stake are socially constructed and have that loopback effect. And so it's absolutely reasonable that we should spend time investigating that and interrogating it and exploring why things are the way they are and what that does to us.

56:53 Mark: Dylan, you good?

56:54 Dylan: I'm all good. I thought it was a good introduction for the next meeting.

56:58 Mark: Next time, yes. We're getting into social construction of race. So the readings for that are Kwame Anthony Appiah's Race, Culture, Identity, Misunderstood Connections, Charles Mills, but what Are youe really the Metaphysics of Race and Race, A Social Destruction of Biological Concept by Nevan Cesardik. Go ahead and post on partiallyexaminedlife.com and the blog post associated with this episode or on Facebook what we should have covered here, what great things were missing. We can always circle back to hit some of these details again. Our closing song is the Construction of Light, Part 1 by King Crimson. And I interviewed the bassist and co writer on this tune, Trey Gunn, for my Nakedly Examined music podcast number 21. Check it out@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thanks so much. Good night.

57:44 Wes: Good night.

57:45 Dylan: Good night.

57:45 Seth: Good night.

59:16 Mark: It.