How to counter "everything is a construct" worldview?

[HizzleT]

Many of the people in humanities I encounter seem very wedded to mindset I refer to as "construct = everything". For example, they say bazar things such as gender is 100% a construct. They say this as if sexual selection doesn't exist (to be fair, they honestly don't seem to know it exists).

In many ways, I feel as if it's a lost cause. If someone wants to treat objective questions as subjective ones, then we likely disagree on the premises of how to negotiate the world.
I've been involved in experiments where I went in with a strong bias about the outcome, and been forced to accept I was wrong when the numbers just didn't work out the way I wanted. I feel as if many of people I describe here have had no such life experience.

At any rate, I'd be interested hear if anyone has had any luck injecting science into the "everything is a construct", "if it's offensive it must be false" mindset.

 

[mfb]

Every concept is made up by humans - I would not try to argue against that, it don't think that helps. The important point: some concepts we made up are useful to describe the universe. Sex and gender belong to those.
"It is a construct, but it is useful."

I've been involved in experiments where I went in with a strong bias about the outcome, and been forced to accept I was wrong when the numbers just didn't work out the way I wanted. I feel as if many of people I describe here have had no such life experience.

It can be unpleasant to learn how wrong you are (and we are all wrong about many things), and it is often possible to avoid that - in the worst case you have to construct your own phantasy world and extend it a tiny bit more each time conflicting evidence comes up.

 

[jfizzix]

I think we would need some clarification here. Isn't it true that everything in science is actually a construct (by my understanding of the word)?

Ultimately we come up with models and theories which either do or don't agree with experimental data.

These models and theories use concepts like "mass" "energy", and "temperature" because they can be used to better explain and understand what we see.
In that sense, all of science is "best guess" even if it agrees to like eighteen decimal places sometimes sometimes. it is at least reasonable to assume the data agrees with the theory to the same extent as the theory agrees with the data.

Physics (and the physical sciences) have the luxury of studying (in a sense) very simple systems (i.e., described by a relatively low number of degrees of freedom).

The humanities are studying very complex systems; ones where we simply cannot account for all possible causes leading to a given effect, and all possible effects from a given cause. It's not much harder than in the physical sciences to come up with theories explaining human behavior, but disproving them with experimental data is a lot harder because there is often some sort of loophole, or possible factor not accounted for.

If I were to argue about the results of some study to someone who doesn't like what they see, I would use the integrity of the study as a talking point. If they can't see what was done incorrectly in the study, then maybe they can be convinced.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Many of the people in humanities I encounter seem very wedded to mindset I refer to as "construct = everything".

I don't think I've run into this and I'm not sure what you're talking about. Can you elaborate?

 

[Ryan_m_b]

I don't think I've run into this and I'm not sure what you're talking about. Can you elaborate?

I gather the OP is referring to social constructionism, a popular theory in the social sciences that treats social phenomena (like gender) as the result of group interaction over time rather than a physical/objective truths.

@HizzleT with regards to gender I believe part of your objection/confusion is that you are confusing it with sex. Sex is broadly an objective thing (though our definitions for sex vs intersex can be somewhat arbitrary) whereas gender is the social expectations of personality, characteristics and behaviours applied to people of a specific sex.

 

[HizzleT]

I gather the OP is referring to social constructionism, a popular theory in the social sciences that treats social phenomena (like gender) as the result of group interaction over time rather than a physical/objective truths.

@HizzleT with regards to gender I believe part of your objection/confusion is that you are confusing it with sex. Sex is broadly an objective thing (though our definitions for sex vs intersex can be somewhat arbitrary) whereas gender is the social expectations of personality, characteristics and behaviours applied to people of a specific sex.

@zoobyshoe , @Ryan_m_b got it.

Yes. I am aware of the difference between sex and gender. I understand and, to the extent I can, appreciate that difference.
I am not particularly vested in this particular example -- it was simply one example of social constructionism that came to mind.
However, to take the gender-sex example, sex is objective because it's relatively fixed.
Gender appears to be more like a spectrum, due to the seemlingly obvious fact it is both constructed as well as a product of biological realities (fixed).
These biological realities likely inform what is constructed.
E.g., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0163-6383(00)00032-1 .*

Yet, when you say this, it somehow always gets converted to something along the lines of "I believe women can't do math and should just stay home".
This is always baffling to me: I intended and believe nothing of sort (in fact, I think that view is vile). It's not even clear to me how that interpretation is arrived at.
Yet, this is often what I meet when I encounter purported social constructionists (which, granted, is pretty rare and may not be represenative).

What I seem to be encountering is the view that if something unpleasant, it's OK because it has simply been constructed, suggesting
it can simply be changed with the right slogan. This may be true for many things about humans, but everything? I find this notion to be, literally, unbelievable. A meaningful portion of our cognitive architecture appears to be fixed -- and some of the parts of it that are fixed can likely be predicted on this basis of sex, which informs gender. For example, sexual choosiness in women due to higher reproductive risk and burden.

I suppose this can be taken as a comment, unless you have a critique of my view you'd like to offer. I don't doubt it has some holes.

*Last note: the paper I cite above is far from perfect and don't wish to hang my hat on it, so to speak.
It has been critiqued nicely here.

Cheers.

 

[Pythagorean]

Not even sex is as crisp and clear in biogy. Ignoring functional hermaphrodites and sexual function swapping in lots of different species, we can just focus on humans.

Gender has four types: social, functional, gonadal, and genetic. Above, people have chosen to call either genetic or gonadal (or both?) gender "sex" (Which is fine, its accepted semantics, but here I'd like to clearly separate the two types of sex).

Humans aren't always just male or female. For instance, they can be genetically male and gonadally female, or they can be gonadally both male and female. So you have to ask yourself about differences in the brain and if a gonadal female that's genetically male might have a more masculine brain. Or if masculinity in the brain is more of a response to social pressures (that happened to fit men historically in the past but don't anymore).

Further, you have to be careful about drawing conclusions about individuals based on statistical claims? 20% more women do thing A. So what? That could mean 40% males and 60% females. That means you could easily be a male that does thing A, talking to a female thay doesn't and be informing her of what she's capable of.

 

[zoobyshoe]

@zoobyshoe , @Ryan_m_b got it.

OK. I looked up "social constructionism" and found it extends even to science. That made me remember I have run into it before. At some point in the past year I read a science fiction book in which one of the characters maintained mainstream science was a 'mere' construct. He threw out two big names of purveyors of this idea, which I googled at the time.Unfortunately, I can't remember the book or the names. I classified this in my mind as "fringe" and this thread is the first time it's come up again.

What I seem to be encountering is the view that if something unpleasant, it's OK because it has simply been constructed, suggesting it can simply be changed with the right slogan. This may be true for many things about humans, but everything? I find this notion to be, literally, unbelievable.

If I recall correctly from what I googled, there are two Frenchmen who are most responsible for disseminating the notion that science is a construct. One of them wrote a controversial book detailing his visit to a lab to watch the scientific process in action. Instead, he claimed, all he found were lab workers making sure all results came out the way it had been previously decided they should come out. The scary thing was they didn't seem to realize what they were doing was not the scientific method, and considered their procedures to be normal science. In other words, they seemed to embody the crackpot misunderstanding that the Laws of Physics (or science in general) are decided by people and enforced in nature.

I didn't know what to make of that. It sounds unbelievable, but then Feynman tells the story of people faking the results of their replication of the Millikan experiment for quite a while. They weren't getting the same results as he did, so assumed theirs were wrong, and fudged their data to more closely agree with Milikan. It turns out Millikan had been off to begin with.

Anyway, stuff like that would be wonderful fodder for someone wanting to undermine science by asserting it was all a construct.

I haven't actually encountered anyone from this camp and so, am not sure what my reaction would be. It would depend on their specific tack, of course. In any event, the wiki article on "construct (philosophy)" makes it clear that a construct is not a socially negotiated fiction, it is simply not a physical object you can point to.

The obvious trouble, if you read that article, comes with the possibility of misunderstanding the fact that a construct requires a human mind to exist. It certainly takes a human mind to perceive that objects act as if all their mass were centered at one point, but that behavior is in the mass, not the human mind. The construct, "center of mass," is arrived at by observation. Observation requires an observer (a human). Regardless, you could remove all human minds from the universe and objects would still behave in the way that lead to the emergence of the construct in the human mind.

Of course, socially negotiated fictions do exist. Consider the Amish "shunning" someone. They all agree to treat the person as if they simply no longer exist. Under the Nazis it was a "scientific fact" that Jews were racially inferior to "aryans." The latter proving that science can be infected by socially negotiated fictions masquerading as constructs. It sounds from your post like "everything is just a construct," is one of those socially negotiated fictions gaining currency in the service of who-knows-what social agenda.

 

[mfb]

@zoobyshoe: Does that mean ' "everything is just a construct" is just a construct'? ;)

 

[zoobyshoe]

@zoobyshoe: Does that mean ' "everything is just a construct" is just a construct'? ;)

Well, what I meant to say was, "All generalizations are false, including this one."

 

[HizzleT]

Further, you have to be careful about drawing conclusions about individuals based on statistical claims? 20% more women do thing A. So what? That could mean 40% males and 60% females. That means you could easily be a male that does thing A, talking to a female thay doesn't and be informing her of what she's capable of.

At the risk of sounding impolite, I don't believe I did this?
I believe I go so far as to offer a quite thorough critique of the paper I reference.

 

[Pythagorean]

At the risk of sounding impolite, I don't believe I did this?
I believe I go so far as to offer a quite thorough critique of the paper I reference.

I don't know if you did it or not in the discussion you had off the forum that sparked this thread, but it was a caveat worth mentioning.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Regarding sex as a construct this opinion piece published in Nature yesterday has some interesting things to say:
http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

 

[zoobyshoe]

Regarding sex as a construct this opinion piece published in Nature yesterday has some interesting things to say:
http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

Yes, but, there's a difference between saying a thing is a construct, and saying a given construct is so oversimplified it's useless in some cases. Identifying a thing as a construct doesn't say anything about how good or bad a construct it is. The badness, or maybe mere incompleteness, of the construct, "sex," in light of that piece, is the issue, as I see it, not the fact it is a construct.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

In this case pointing out that it is a construct is very useful as it's not something most people would consider, rather they would think that it is a firm physical phenomenon.

 

[zoobyshoe]

In this case pointing out that it is a construct is very useful as it's not something most people would consider, rather they would think that it is a firm physical phenomenon.

OK, but where do you take it from there?

Some people, according to the OP seem to be arriving at the conclusion that, everything being a construct, changing your idea about it will change the thing.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Some people, according to the OP seem to be arriving at the conclusion that, everything being a construct, changing your idea about it will change the thing.

My only response to that is I don't think there are people like that, or if there are they aren't serious researches. I think the OP's perception is a misunderstanding of the field more than anything. I know a few sociologists quite well who think very highly of constructivism, they aren't the type of people the OP seems to think. They use it to challenge preconceived ideas.

 

[Pythagorean]

The phenomena of sex itself isn't a construct (unless you get over-meta about it) but we construct the divisions between what's male and female, both in the lab (genetics and morphology) and on the street (gender). Much like different cultures place the dividing wavelength between orange and yellow in different place. In some ways, it changes the thing (if the thing is one of these categories) since the thing is only defined based on human-devised criteria. Classification systems often undergo change as deeper research reveals more complicated relationships between classes and removes relationships that were only apparent.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Classification systems often undergo change as deeper research reveals more complicated relationships between classes and removes relationships that were only apparent.

It seems to me that this was happening before the advent of Social Constructivism. The concept of gender divisions was getting torn apart by feminists way back when I was in college, and Newtonian Physics was reclassified way back before I was born. I question the benefit of constructing a new construction for the kind of reconstruction that's always been happening.

I'm glad you explained it in terms of color in a way that distinguishes what is firm physical phenomenon from what is an arbitrary human assignment of division.

I see a problem from what is in the wiki article. The thing we mean to illuminate by creating the idea of Center of Mass is going to be there even if we didn't create that concept. And Center of Mass can be rigorously defined. However, there are other things mentioned as constructs that are actually quite slippery: intelligence, gender, race. Some arbitrary division between yellow and orange isn't going to be there, unless we put it there, but objects hung at various point on a moment arm are going to act on it as if their mass is located all at one point whether we observe that or not. So there's a fundamental difference between things getting put in the same set, that kind of buggers the point of making such a set.

Do we need Social Constructivism? We already knew we make arbitrary distinctions sometimes, and we already knew ascribing fixed behaviors to a race or gender was not accurate.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Here's a quote from a lengthy article called "Science as a Social Construct" I found online, which paints a picture of Social Constructionism as anti-science:

In recent decades, whole schools of philosophy and sociology have concerned themselves with attacking science on various grounds: for example, charging that science neglects human values, that it has produced terrifying weapons of war, even that it is merely an elaborate structure based on nothing more solid that frail and suspect human perceptions of the world and the universe that fail to deal with an underlying reality that is unknowable to human beings; and that the whole structure is, therefore, an artifact, an illusion constructed by people who call themselves "scientists." Such, at least, are the most extreme views of science as a mere "social construct," views held by some postmodernists and deconstructionists.A concise description of these views was provided by http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/chagnon/ (1995) in an editorial entitled "The Academic Left and Threats to Scientific Anthropology":

There have been increasing concerns in many academic disciplines, especially the social sciences, about the threat posed to scientific inquiry by a collection of intellectual ideas and academic movements termed "the academic left" by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in their 1994 book, Higher Superstitions: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. Most of us recognize some of these ideas by names like "postmodernism," "deconstructionism," and "political correctness." . . .

The origins of these ideas are complex, but the field of literary theory has played a major role in developing some of the most influential of them and exporting them to other disciplines—ideas from [Jacques] Derrida and [Michel] Foucault in particular. Joseph Carroll's recent (1994) book, Evolution and Literary Theory, provides us with an excellent overview of the development and applications of these ideas, and he attacks them from within literary ranks. He argues eloquently for a view of human nature derived from research inspired by Darwinian theory. He suggests that literature makes more sense once an accurate, informed view of human nature is defined, and argues that the most accurate and informed view can only come from understanding the evolution of humans.

Space does not permit an overview of how the current antipathetic views of science from the academic left have affected specific disciplines (and there is considerable variation). In general, this view of science proposes that there is no such thing as an objective observation, facts are political constructs, and science is an instrument of oppression and therefore must itself be oppressed and silenced (cf. Gross & Levitt, 1994) The natural sciences are less affected than the social sciences, and the humanities are the most affected. Gross and Levitt's book is a good general source on the topic, and the quarterly journal of the National Association of Scholars, Academic Questions, deals with and contests assaults on academic freedom from all varieties of the academic left...

https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~l38613dw/website_spring_03/readings/ScienceSocialConstruct.html

 

[HizzleT]

My only response to that is I don't think there are people like that, or if there are they aren't serious researches. I think the OP's perception is a misunderstanding of the field more than anything. I know a few sociologists quite well who think very highly of constructivism, they aren't the type of people the OP seems to think. They use it to challenge preconceived ideas.

Again, at the risk of being impolite (and I apologize if I come off as abrasive), but I assure you these people are very real and I have encountered a good many of them.
Moreover, I do not believe, at any point, I claimed that these people I've encountered are accredited researchers.

1. If I was unclear in stipulating what I was referring to, let me make a stronger attempt to be clear:
I am referring to Social constructionism. Please correct me if I am wrong, but you appear to be using
Social constructionism and Social constructivism interchangeably.
They are not the same.

2. I agree with Social constructionists when they make the point that the mind constructs models of reality, actively. That is, the mind is not invariably in the "veridical understanding of the world" business, e.g., Stevens' Power 'Law' in cognitive psychology. Indeed, even an extremely veridical model of reality, is only "just a model". That is: model ≠ reality, by definition.

3. I disagree with Social constructionists when they make the jump from the brains can never model the world perfectly veridically to, as Schwandt (2000, pg. 197) puts it, "denying any interest whatsoever in an ontology of the real." As far as I can see, this is the epicentre of their delusions, for reasons too obvious to warrant expanding upon.

3b. Lastly, I wish to return to my main point of social constructionists undervaluing objective reality.
What stems from this view, is a de-emphasis of the principle goal of science: obtaining a veridical understanding of the world -- even if we know such an idealistic goal can never be realized, we try. An "ontology of the real" is quite useful for that (to say the least). It seems to result in a lot of misguided beliefs about what is and, more importantly, can be true.
To be specific, it *seems* to give license to "spooky" ideas, such conflating theories describing reality with theories determining reality. To be clear, I don't mean implementing keynesian vs monetarist economic policy, but simply perturbing a theory changing reality, e.g., moving from men and women are not equal, to saying that they are, when we know women are much less liable to engage in violent behaviour than men.
Just saying something does not make it true, which is the classic mistake of conflating the normative with the descriptive; and social constructionism appears to provide many overly-nuanced and dressed-up ways of doing this.

I'm not really trying to convince you of my opinion or making a strong attempt to defend it (although that could be debated),
I'm simply trying to present it better here.

Thanks for your replies and I apologize for my long reply.

 

[zoobyshoe]

1. If I was unclear in stipulating what I was referring to, let me make a stronger attempt to be clear:
I am referring to Social constructionism. Please correct me if I am wrong, but you appear to be using
Social constructionism and Social constructivism interchangeably.
They are not the same.

I didn't even notice he'd switched, and I seamlessly adopted the different term without thinking.

I feel like this: