Social Construction & Sentence Construction
I don't know what I'm talking about. I thought I did, but I realized I don't. I found myself immersed in sudden confusion. A new arrival in Aporia. 'Social' means of society, concerning society, communal, many. 'Construction' means 'construction' but does construction implicate design? an architect?
In the absence of an actual understanding, I tend to use other concepts as substitutions for 'social construct' to set up affirmative-negative positions on any particular point. I tend largely to think in terms of a centrally planned economy (as seen in the USSR, Mao's China, and to a lesser extent Japan) vs decentralized markets. Which in turn I tend to analogize into 'intelligent design' versus 'natural selection' arguments.
That is to say, I get the impression that when 'social construct' is invoked, the general idea is that it's something we consciously constructed. This I am no longer sure about.
For example is a termite mound a social construct?
Does a bee nest qualify as a social construct?
Could social construction actually be referring to 'evolution by natural selection' the fruits of extended phenotypes? Are people describing a process whereby norms arise from multiple iterations of behavioral experiments and learning in changing environments?
Have I been talking past people because I don't know what social construction means?
Well, why don't I just look up what it means?
Being a fan of Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' I long ago endeavored to read it's inspiration 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad. It's heavy heady stuff, but I found while reading it that my eyes often moved mechanically over the page, which in turn were turned and after three or four pages I would glance up and ask myself 'wait. what's happening?'
It's not a long book, but it is one of the hardest I've ever read as it's very much a moody piece written in an almost stream of consciousness way:
So I have a bias towards plain speech despite what my own writing might indicate. I'm aware in literary appreciation circles there's people who would nominate James Joyce as greatest of all time and highly recommend reading Proust. I probably linger with the unseemly crowd who think nothing beats George Orwell for his amazing ability to speak plainly. An ability I don't have and feel like a moron for.
However, is a metaphorical descent into hell and madness aboard a riverboat as one travels away from civilization in search of a mysterious defector is probably a more interesting and compelling narrative than a farm where the animals take over and try to run it for themselves.
On the flip side though, in my experience Orwell is often cited to criticize totalitarian ideas and practices, so much so the short hand 'Orwellian' is well understood. I would posit that plain speech creates works that have broader influence than the domain of literature. If anything the richness of Conrad's prose obfuscates the horrors of the Belgian Congo by making it an abstract nightmare that is backdrop to the internal journey of the narrator, much as Coppola's movie uses the Vietnam War as backdrop for the journey of Martin Sheen.
If communication is the shared understanding of meaning; a process of encoding, transmitting and decoding the meaning... I'm not really qualified to lecture in communication and linguistics. But you know 'quiero comer un manzana' 'ore wa ringo o tabetai' and 'I want to eat an apple.' are three seperate encodings that depending on languages spoken can convey the exact same meaning to a listener.
However in the same language, encoding can move along a spectrum from obvious to obscure. There are many motivations to move along that spectrum. Necessity might demand you be more obvious 'Help! Police!' or more obscure 'Hello officer, yes [wink] I'm alone [wink] in the house. Nobody [wink] is holding me hostage. [wink wink wink]'
But I guess when people say 'x is a social construct [wink]' I am now a confused police officer standing on the doorstep 'so are you being held hostage or not sir?' 'don't [wink] assume my gender [wink, wink]' 'Are you hitting on me?'
This is a rhetorical trick I use. I admit it, which is to say when I admit that I don't know what something means, it means I don't know what you mean, nor do I possess the competence to know that you know what you mean. I use it to try and get people to commit to a position that can then be argued. It's sometimes effective.
I also use a rule-of-thumb to manage my attention. In my head I call it 'heavy lifting' and I recognize it as people going to a lot of cognitive effort to make a case, while rejecting a much simpler case. It's a real red flag when obscure technical language creep into heavy lifting, particularly if the content is directed to a an audience consisting of the general public.
With that in mind, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia's page on Social Construction of Gender. I really like Wikipedia, regard it as one of the best things on the internet. I use it to assess lecturers that I feel should do at least as good a job of explaining concepts and technical jargon as the relevant Wikipedia page. Anyway here we go:
Without interpretation, the text is but white-noise, and I am not confident of my interpretation. This is an explanation of a concept on Wikipedia that is quoting its originator accompanied by commentary, that I find hard to understand.
I pick on Butler, because she features in this Onion video I find amusing:
I think it is an example of applying obscure language artfully, such that the joke can be interpreted multiple ways. My initial visceral interpretation was that it was painting a picture that ideas, like Butler's being disseminated widely through society, is pure fantasy. It ridicules the theories presented but I can see how another perspective could interpret it as ridiculing Trump voters, because they really don't 'get it'.
I don't get it, but I don't mean that in a hostile way. There appears to be no market sufficient to my need to have 'social construct' explained in plain language, as to a 6-year old. Instead I have to look to the examples offered and try to infer what is meant.
Like 'Money' appears to be a non-contentious social construct. It is an invention or contrivance of society, that allows me to walk into a building, fill a basket of food, tap a piece of plastic against a plastic box, and strangers let me walk away with all that food without a word.
The thing is though, 'social construct' seems to imply that money could be anything we all agree on. Bananas, Tree leaves or poems. But money or currency is subject to selective pressures. It's a social construct but it will butt heads with reality from time to time, and often lose in the form of asset bubbles bursting, hyperinflation, and sovereign debt defaults. In Economics you learn a list of criteria, or the selective pressures money is subject to: Generally accepted, relatively scarce, a store of wealth, a unit of account and perhaps portable.
Bananas won't survive as a currency because they are perishable and hence can't be a store of wealth. Tree leaves won't survive as a currency because they are also perishable, too irregular to be a unit of account and not scarce enough. Poems wouldn't work because it's not even a medium of exchange, someone can pay you for a poem, but can't really pay with poems because you would retain the poem that you have just supposedly traded. I just realized how ridiculous it is that I am arguing against poems-as-currency.
My argument is that the social construct of money can be explained by a process of evolution. People have come along and tampered with the social construct, and generally the tampering works or doesn't work. We see money evolve - milled edges, non-intrinsic worth, promissory notes, bank notes, credit cards, eftpos, pin and chip, tap and go, block chain. Economies collapse, liquidity in the market dries up etc. We know people constructed bitcoin, but it thus far has failed to become a real currency because it can't meet the money criteria while there's rampant volatile speculation as to it's price which is crazy given that it's only intrinsic utility is as a currency.
However, some people have agreed to let a dog use leaves to purchase biscuits. But if the societal norm is that only higher primates engage in trade, and identity is performative with no doer pre-existing the deed, is that dog in fact a primate? What I'm sure we can all agree on, is that it is very cute, and it would be hard not to give the dog a biscuit. Apparently he has had his visit to the shops limited to 3 a day though, lest the dog get diabetes and the ready availability of leaves bankrupts the school store.
I tend to view the 'big three' social constructs as Religion, Nations and Gender. However I appreciate that Religion is only a non-contentious social construct regarding every other religion but one's own, although often some reciprocal altruism is extended by believers to the rights of all religion. Gender is somewhat contentious, but in the circles I move it tends to be whether there's a distinction between sex and gender, where sex is biological and gender a construct...
Alas, these examples provide no clarity either. A case can certainly be made to explain religions with evolution through natural selection, right down to specific religious practices. Since that was really the debate of the 00's though, I won't dig into that.
Nation states as a social construct are also bound by selective pressures though. Borders tend to follow geographic features like rivers, mountain ranges, seas, island chains. The borders have to be defended from neighbors or other invaders to survive. They also depend on internal political stability lest they subdivide, not to mention the climate which has wiped out more nations and civilizations than people have.
Cuisine is a social construct, techniques and recipes can be altered, but these too tend to be shaped by selective pressures. We can add as much salt to a recipe as we care to, but our pallets will react in order to preserve our kidneys. If we make poison, those recipes tend to die out as go to meals. We can observe the correlation between use of spices and climate, and also how foods high in salt, fats and sugar lead to addiction almost as if our ancestors had no access to such an abundance of cheap calories.
I'm beginning to convince myself that 'social construction' must be a euphemism for 'natural selection' however my impression of what I'm supposed to decode is: 'it's arbitrary; accidental or malicious'
This then in conclusion is the gist. I cannot read minds, but my suspicions are aroused when terminology becomes popular that is incredibly hard to explain and pin down a meaning for. Sure concepts that are hard to conceive of like infinity, intelligence etc. we can 'know when we see' but I specifically suspect that in the market of ideas, there's always a demand for permission to believe what we want. We will find people willing to do torturous, strenuous heavy lifting to turn 'we are what we do' into a sentence so convoluted we can interpret it as 'we are who we think we are.' or something. I can only hope there is always demand and supply for pop-science writers to interpret for me.
In the absence of an actual understanding, I tend to use other concepts as substitutions for 'social construct' to set up affirmative-negative positions on any particular point. I tend largely to think in terms of a centrally planned economy (as seen in the USSR, Mao's China, and to a lesser extent Japan) vs decentralized markets. Which in turn I tend to analogize into 'intelligent design' versus 'natural selection' arguments.
That is to say, I get the impression that when 'social construct' is invoked, the general idea is that it's something we consciously constructed. This I am no longer sure about.
For example is a termite mound a social construct?
Does a bee nest qualify as a social construct?
Could social construction actually be referring to 'evolution by natural selection' the fruits of extended phenotypes? Are people describing a process whereby norms arise from multiple iterations of behavioral experiments and learning in changing environments?
Have I been talking past people because I don't know what social construction means?
Well, why don't I just look up what it means?
Here's the thing. I don't know what that means. The first paragraph I would interpret as basically saying 'society has norms it adheres to' and the second paragraph I interpret as 'the investigation as to where norms come from is ongoing.'A social construct or construction concerns the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by the inhabitants of that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.[6] In that respect, a social construct as an idea would be widely accepted as natural by the society.A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are developed, institutionalized, known, and made into tradition by humans.
Being a fan of Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' I long ago endeavored to read it's inspiration 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad. It's heavy heady stuff, but I found while reading it that my eyes often moved mechanically over the page, which in turn were turned and after three or four pages I would glance up and ask myself 'wait. what's happening?'
It's not a long book, but it is one of the hardest I've ever read as it's very much a moody piece written in an almost stream of consciousness way:
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.After reading this paragraph a few times, my personal 'solution' to this paragraph is 'The value of sailors' stories is derived from the embellishment they make not the description of true events.' Or something.
So I have a bias towards plain speech despite what my own writing might indicate. I'm aware in literary appreciation circles there's people who would nominate James Joyce as greatest of all time and highly recommend reading Proust. I probably linger with the unseemly crowd who think nothing beats George Orwell for his amazing ability to speak plainly. An ability I don't have and feel like a moron for.
However, is a metaphorical descent into hell and madness aboard a riverboat as one travels away from civilization in search of a mysterious defector is probably a more interesting and compelling narrative than a farm where the animals take over and try to run it for themselves.
On the flip side though, in my experience Orwell is often cited to criticize totalitarian ideas and practices, so much so the short hand 'Orwellian' is well understood. I would posit that plain speech creates works that have broader influence than the domain of literature. If anything the richness of Conrad's prose obfuscates the horrors of the Belgian Congo by making it an abstract nightmare that is backdrop to the internal journey of the narrator, much as Coppola's movie uses the Vietnam War as backdrop for the journey of Martin Sheen.
If communication is the shared understanding of meaning; a process of encoding, transmitting and decoding the meaning... I'm not really qualified to lecture in communication and linguistics. But you know 'quiero comer un manzana' 'ore wa ringo o tabetai' and 'I want to eat an apple.' are three seperate encodings that depending on languages spoken can convey the exact same meaning to a listener.
However in the same language, encoding can move along a spectrum from obvious to obscure. There are many motivations to move along that spectrum. Necessity might demand you be more obvious 'Help! Police!' or more obscure 'Hello officer, yes [wink] I'm alone [wink] in the house. Nobody [wink] is holding me hostage. [wink wink wink]'
But I guess when people say 'x is a social construct [wink]' I am now a confused police officer standing on the doorstep 'so are you being held hostage or not sir?' 'don't [wink] assume my gender [wink, wink]' 'Are you hitting on me?'
This is a rhetorical trick I use. I admit it, which is to say when I admit that I don't know what something means, it means I don't know what you mean, nor do I possess the competence to know that you know what you mean. I use it to try and get people to commit to a position that can then be argued. It's sometimes effective.
I also use a rule-of-thumb to manage my attention. In my head I call it 'heavy lifting' and I recognize it as people going to a lot of cognitive effort to make a case, while rejecting a much simpler case. It's a real red flag when obscure technical language creep into heavy lifting, particularly if the content is directed to a an audience consisting of the general public.
With that in mind, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia's page on Social Construction of Gender. I really like Wikipedia, regard it as one of the best things on the internet. I use it to assess lecturers that I feel should do at least as good a job of explaining concepts and technical jargon as the relevant Wikipedia page. Anyway here we go:
"gender proves to be performance—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed".[29]I find this quite obscure language, it is however a quote devoid of context. I interpret it (or decode it) to be saying 'We are what we do' something in the field of clinical psychology has been described to me as 'we are what we do' (as opposed to who we think we are, or who we say we are). I'm all about that. I make idiotic arguments, I am an idiot, even if I claim to be a genius. Let's continue.
In demystifying this concept, Butler sets out to clarify that there is indeed a difference in the terms gender performance and gender performativity. In doing so, Butler states in an interview: "When we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role; we're acting in some way…To say that gender is performative is a little different…For something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman…we act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or simply something that is true about us. Actually, it is a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time."[30] Thus, Butler perceives gender as being constructed through a set of acts that are said to be in compliance with dominant societal norms. Butler is, however, not stating that gender is a sort of performance in which an individual can terminate the act; instead, what Butler is stating is that this performance is ongoing and out of an individual's control. In fact, rather than an individual producing the performance, the opposite is true. The performance is what produces the individual. Specifically, Butler approvingly quotes Nietzsche's claim that "there is no 'being' behind doing… 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything."[31] Thus, the emphasis is placed not on the individual producing the deed but on the deed itself. Although a seemingly difficult concept to grasp, gender performativity is realized throughout many aspects of our lives, specifically in our infancy and young childhood, our teen years, and finally our adult lives.Again, given how inarticulate and incoherent I am, I find this hard to decode what is actually being said or asserted. It appears to be a restatement of 'we are what we do' and adding 'we can't separate an individual from their environment.' Perhaps even 'we are the sum total of our actions that are shaped by feedback from the environment.'
Without interpretation, the text is but white-noise, and I am not confident of my interpretation. This is an explanation of a concept on Wikipedia that is quoting its originator accompanied by commentary, that I find hard to understand.
I pick on Butler, because she features in this Onion video I find amusing:
I think it is an example of applying obscure language artfully, such that the joke can be interpreted multiple ways. My initial visceral interpretation was that it was painting a picture that ideas, like Butler's being disseminated widely through society, is pure fantasy. It ridicules the theories presented but I can see how another perspective could interpret it as ridiculing Trump voters, because they really don't 'get it'.
I don't get it, but I don't mean that in a hostile way. There appears to be no market sufficient to my need to have 'social construct' explained in plain language, as to a 6-year old. Instead I have to look to the examples offered and try to infer what is meant.
Like 'Money' appears to be a non-contentious social construct. It is an invention or contrivance of society, that allows me to walk into a building, fill a basket of food, tap a piece of plastic against a plastic box, and strangers let me walk away with all that food without a word.
The thing is though, 'social construct' seems to imply that money could be anything we all agree on. Bananas, Tree leaves or poems. But money or currency is subject to selective pressures. It's a social construct but it will butt heads with reality from time to time, and often lose in the form of asset bubbles bursting, hyperinflation, and sovereign debt defaults. In Economics you learn a list of criteria, or the selective pressures money is subject to: Generally accepted, relatively scarce, a store of wealth, a unit of account and perhaps portable.
Bananas won't survive as a currency because they are perishable and hence can't be a store of wealth. Tree leaves won't survive as a currency because they are also perishable, too irregular to be a unit of account and not scarce enough. Poems wouldn't work because it's not even a medium of exchange, someone can pay you for a poem, but can't really pay with poems because you would retain the poem that you have just supposedly traded. I just realized how ridiculous it is that I am arguing against poems-as-currency.
My argument is that the social construct of money can be explained by a process of evolution. People have come along and tampered with the social construct, and generally the tampering works or doesn't work. We see money evolve - milled edges, non-intrinsic worth, promissory notes, bank notes, credit cards, eftpos, pin and chip, tap and go, block chain. Economies collapse, liquidity in the market dries up etc. We know people constructed bitcoin, but it thus far has failed to become a real currency because it can't meet the money criteria while there's rampant volatile speculation as to it's price which is crazy given that it's only intrinsic utility is as a currency.
However, some people have agreed to let a dog use leaves to purchase biscuits. But if the societal norm is that only higher primates engage in trade, and identity is performative with no doer pre-existing the deed, is that dog in fact a primate? What I'm sure we can all agree on, is that it is very cute, and it would be hard not to give the dog a biscuit. Apparently he has had his visit to the shops limited to 3 a day though, lest the dog get diabetes and the ready availability of leaves bankrupts the school store.
I tend to view the 'big three' social constructs as Religion, Nations and Gender. However I appreciate that Religion is only a non-contentious social construct regarding every other religion but one's own, although often some reciprocal altruism is extended by believers to the rights of all religion. Gender is somewhat contentious, but in the circles I move it tends to be whether there's a distinction between sex and gender, where sex is biological and gender a construct...
Alas, these examples provide no clarity either. A case can certainly be made to explain religions with evolution through natural selection, right down to specific religious practices. Since that was really the debate of the 00's though, I won't dig into that.
Nation states as a social construct are also bound by selective pressures though. Borders tend to follow geographic features like rivers, mountain ranges, seas, island chains. The borders have to be defended from neighbors or other invaders to survive. They also depend on internal political stability lest they subdivide, not to mention the climate which has wiped out more nations and civilizations than people have.
Cuisine is a social construct, techniques and recipes can be altered, but these too tend to be shaped by selective pressures. We can add as much salt to a recipe as we care to, but our pallets will react in order to preserve our kidneys. If we make poison, those recipes tend to die out as go to meals. We can observe the correlation between use of spices and climate, and also how foods high in salt, fats and sugar lead to addiction almost as if our ancestors had no access to such an abundance of cheap calories.
I'm beginning to convince myself that 'social construction' must be a euphemism for 'natural selection' however my impression of what I'm supposed to decode is: 'it's arbitrary; accidental or malicious'
This then in conclusion is the gist. I cannot read minds, but my suspicions are aroused when terminology becomes popular that is incredibly hard to explain and pin down a meaning for. Sure concepts that are hard to conceive of like infinity, intelligence etc. we can 'know when we see' but I specifically suspect that in the market of ideas, there's always a demand for permission to believe what we want. We will find people willing to do torturous, strenuous heavy lifting to turn 'we are what we do' into a sentence so convoluted we can interpret it as 'we are who we think we are.' or something. I can only hope there is always demand and supply for pop-science writers to interpret for me.
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