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So if you were going to create a test for "Is this a social construct?" What would it be? It seems like the definition from your comment would be "Could we tak

So if you were going to create a test for "Is this a social construct?" What would it be? It seems like the definition from your comment would be "Could we take this labeling system, and define different labels or the labels differently?" I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought experiment she proposes she take a continuous trait(height) and arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about how this is kinda silly. But this is something we do all the time, with hypertension, diabetes, disabled, Alzheimer's, the 1%, capitalism, Canadian, etc... And many of these categories are far more continuous than something like sex and gender which as far as categories go are pretty discrete. Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct.

awild 5y ago
> Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct. That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical by-products and might need rethinking or recontextualisation. Being a woman and being of the female sex might seem to be identical, but womanhood is not the same as having a certain genomic makeup, and therefore womanhood is obviously a social construct. The video above even outlines how female-Ness might be considered a social construct but I'm not smart enough to explain that to you where abigail will do it much better.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  I guess another way to put this when someone says "race is a social construct". What are they trying to communicate about race?
  - Traster 5y ago
    Well, when you say something is a social construct it opens the door to find explanations for why that social construct has arisen. You open the door to questioning why those specific categories have been chosen. Why is it that in the early 20th century Italian was a race and now those people would be considered white (in America). It turns the conversation away from what is distinctive about a group and towards why we regard those distinctions as important.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    > What are they trying to communicate about race? That the hard racial boundaries are unscientific (despite attempts to make it so), and that it's artificial and depends on consensus, and therefore is subject to change, and is typically subjective to the involved social group: the "one drop rule" is an example of how arbitrary this can get. As sibling pointed out, in the United States, Italians and Jewish folk used to be not white, but are now widely considered to be white, despite not having any genetic or cultural changes in the interval between the shift in categorization.
  - goto11 5y ago
    That racial categories and the criteria for deciding which category an individual belongs to depends on history, traditions and politics. There is no objective criteria to decide what constitutes a "race".
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  In my experience, the implication is that things which are social constructs have no basis in reality and are thus not useful (and their use is harmful). I'm often inclined to respond, "money is also a social construct", but I'm afraid they would agree and proceed into some anti-capitalist, utopian diatribe.
- golemiprague 5y ago
  That's seems to be more of a comment about semantics and language. Yes, language is a construct in which we classify certain phenomena but you can still argue that the phenomena itself is not a social construct but rather something with some intrinsic "natural" truth, a truth we describe by using language or sometimes we don't because we are afraid to loose our jobs.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought experiment she proposes she take a continuous trait(height) and arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about how this is kinda silly. Something can be continuous but still very clustered, and the extent to which it's "silly" depends on the uniformity of the distribution. It can still be useful to label the clusters in the distribution. Another reason to subdivide a continuous dimension is that there could be a threshold after which some other dependent variable begins its inflection point (think of a hockeystick distribution). For example, there's probably some blood pressure value beyond which we begin to rapidly see serious adverse health effects--it's useful to call this "hypertension" or something. For another example, there's a threshold for the average temperature of the planet beyond which global warming "runs away". These are useful thresholds even though the dimensions are continuous.
bschne 5y ago
This reminds me of Astral Codex Ten's (fka SSC) series on the ontology of psychiatric conditions. Basically, you're often faced with the question of whether something is a binary condition you have or don't have which then translates into a more continuous expression of symptoms, or whether it's more like a spectrum where the extreme outliers are deemed "ill" and the rest is just character differences. It's interesting to think about the various ways to model this, and in many of your cases, the most reasonable model probably depends a lot on context or what it's used for/what statement you're trying to make. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/?sort=search&search=Ontology%20Of%20Psychiatric%20Conditions https://astralcodexten.substack.com/?sort=search&search=Onto...
goto11 5y ago
A lot of the angst around "social construct" is because people think "X is is a social construct" means "X is imaginary" or "X can be whatever you want it to be". Just as an example, legislation and the judicial system is clearly a social construct, but that does not mean it is not real!

awild 5y ago

> Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct. That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical by-products and might need rethinking or recontextualisation. Being a woman and being of the female sex might seem to be identical, but womanhood is not the same as having a certain genomic makeup, and therefore womanhood is obviously a social construct. The video above even outlines how female-Ness might be considered a social construct but I'm not smart enough to explain that to you where abigail will do it much better.

JamesBarney 5y ago
I guess another way to put this when someone says "race is a social construct". What are they trying to communicate about race?
- Traster 5y ago
  Well, when you say something is a social construct it opens the door to find explanations for why that social construct has arisen. You open the door to questioning why those specific categories have been chosen. Why is it that in the early 20th century Italian was a race and now those people would be considered white (in America). It turns the conversation away from what is distinctive about a group and towards why we regard those distinctions as important.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > What are they trying to communicate about race? That the hard racial boundaries are unscientific (despite attempts to make it so), and that it's artificial and depends on consensus, and therefore is subject to change, and is typically subjective to the involved social group: the "one drop rule" is an example of how arbitrary this can get. As sibling pointed out, in the United States, Italians and Jewish folk used to be not white, but are now widely considered to be white, despite not having any genetic or cultural changes in the interval between the shift in categorization.
- goto11 5y ago
  That racial categories and the criteria for deciding which category an individual belongs to depends on history, traditions and politics. There is no objective criteria to decide what constitutes a "race".
throwaway894345 5y ago
In my experience, the implication is that things which are social constructs have no basis in reality and are thus not useful (and their use is harmful). I'm often inclined to respond, "money is also a social construct", but I'm afraid they would agree and proceed into some anti-capitalist, utopian diatribe.
golemiprague 5y ago
That's seems to be more of a comment about semantics and language. Yes, language is a construct in which we classify certain phenomena but you can still argue that the phenomena itself is not a social construct but rather something with some intrinsic "natural" truth, a truth we describe by using language or sometimes we don't because we are afraid to loose our jobs.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought experiment she proposes she take a continuous trait(height) and arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about how this is kinda silly. Something can be continuous but still very clustered, and the extent to which it's "silly" depends on the uniformity of the distribution. It can still be useful to label the clusters in the distribution. Another reason to subdivide a continuous dimension is that there could be a threshold after which some other dependent variable begins its inflection point (think of a hockeystick distribution). For example, there's probably some blood pressure value beyond which we begin to rapidly see serious adverse health effects--it's useful to call this "hypertension" or something. For another example, there's a threshold for the average temperature of the planet beyond which global warming "runs away". These are useful thresholds even though the dimensions are continuous.

bschne 5y ago

This reminds me of Astral Codex Ten's (fka SSC) series on the ontology of psychiatric conditions. Basically, you're often faced with the question of whether something is a binary condition you have or don't have which then translates into a more continuous expression of symptoms, or whether it's more like a spectrum where the extreme outliers are deemed "ill" and the rest is just character differences. It's interesting to think about the various ways to model this, and in many of your cases, the most reasonable model probably depends a lot on context or what it's used for/what statement you're trying to make. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/?sort=search&search=Ontology%20Of%20Psychiatric%20Conditions https://astralcodexten.substack.com/?sort=search&search=Onto...

goto11 5y ago

A lot of the angst around "social construct" is because people think "X is is a social construct" means "X is imaginary" or "X can be whatever you want it to be". Just as an example, legislation and the judicial system is clearly a social construct, but that does not mean it is not real!