Social construction is not arbitrary

In a rather stupid discussion on tggp's blog I managed to articulate a point about social construction that I have not previously seen made in any reasonable and concise form, so I'm pulling the thought out and expanding on it here, for the edification of the world.

The point I was trying to make is that while many things are socially constructed, that doesn't imply that they are 100% arbitrary. We make the world but we do not make it just as we please. Whatever is constructed must conform to the structure of physical reality and of human cognition. So, for instance, while religion is a paradigmatic example of a socially constructed system, with different cultures having very different religions, they all have some broad similarities based on the cognitive and cultural role of religion (eg, to use one of Boyer's examples, all religions posit supernatural agents that care about human action -- there is no religion that has indifferent supernatural beings).

When it comes to the social construction of science, there is a great deal more confusion, which I'm not going to clear up in a blog post. Without going into the details, suffice it to say that even the most radical of constructionists of science (like Bruno Latour) don't believe that scientists can just make science anything they want to.

The subject of the original discussion was the ontological status of mental illness, which seems like a great example -- it's clearly a socially constructed category, since what counts as a mental illness varies greatly over time (homosexuality used to be, now it's not, for instance). Yet it's also quite clear that in at least some forms of mental illness there is something objectively physical going wrong, although we don't know what it is. So our categories for them, as detailed in the DSM-IV, are quite obviously made up but also reflect something going on in reality. People like Thomas Szasz argue that it's entirely made up and therefore illegitimate, but anyone who has had to deal with a genuinely disturbed person is not likely to buy into his view.

Anyway, here's the interesting parts of the earlier discussion, initiated and provoked by the sort of rampaging halfwit-convinced-of-their-own-genius that one finds on the internet.

melendwyr:

Do you believe agents of the Party can fly around the room if they so will?

me:

Saying something is socially constructed does not meant that it is wholly arbitrary. This is a common confusion.

The quote about “agents of the Party” is funny and telling. You assume that society is some oppressive outside force. It isn’t. You’re soaking in it. You make it and it makes you.

And, to back off a little bit — not everything is a social construct. Reality is what it is (an instantiation of the Schrödinger equation, let’s say). Some concepts are biologically innate (color, objects, up vs down). But everything interesting that we talk about is a sociocultural construct. Not arbitrary, because it all rests on the other layers, but highly malleable and subject to all sorts of primate politics

This produced some sputtering insults from melendwyr that I won't bother to reproduce. Me again:

Let’s see. You said that social construction implies that people can fly at will. I pointed out that that is not, in general, what social constructionists believe. To repeat, Saying something is socially constructed does not meant that it is wholly arbitrary. You haven’t produced anything that supports your position over mine.

...There should be no doubt that some things are socially constructed. Institutions like the US Government or Microsoft are built out of people’s social practices, and obviously could be constructed differently than they are — but not arbitrarily (it would be hard, for instance, to have a government with sovereignty over left-handed people rather than over a particular geographic area).

To take a more challenging example, take Newton’s laws of motion. Are these social constructs? Well, sort of — that’s why we attribute them to Newton, and he himself admitted to standing on the shoulders of giants who presumably were also part of society. Also, the fact that we call them “laws” — an implied and imperfect metaphor based on human law is significant, as is the fact that they are an imperfect approximation to the actual regularities of the physical world. But, that doesn’t mean that Newton pulled them out of his ass, or that he could have just as easily come up with an inverse-linear or inverse-cube law of gravity.

Job titles I envy, #2 in a series

Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

This job title is currently held by Pascal Boyer, whose book Religion Explained I have been recommending for a couple of years now, and who I occasionally mention here.

Here's slides and audio (iTunes required I think) of a talk Boyer gave on at a Transhumanism conference sponsored by the Templeton Foundation (!), called "Considering the evolved mind: Constraints on transhumanism".

And here's a pretty good Jonathan Miller interview with Boyer.

And some papers here, as well as the introduction to a special issue on the relationship of brain and self that looks very interesting.

Unitarian Jihad

This has been around awhile, but it's new to me and amusing:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Of course, Mencius Moldbug thinks that the Unitarians already rule the world. Which would explain why peace, harmony, tolerance, and rationality are so widespread.

No sect owns child molestation

My regular reader Michael was giving me grief about my alleged anti-Catholic prejudices, based on my mentioning priestly pedophilia and not casting a similar eye on my own faith, such as it is. The answer to this ridiculous criticism is that I am not particularly anti-Catholic, I am anti-authoritarian, and the Catholic Church simply happens to be one of the oldest and most powerful authoritarian institutions in the world. The pedophile stuff is really just a typical example of the inevitable abuse of authority.

I believe I also said something to the effect that there is no strong central authority in Judaism, which is rougly true, although various branches of Judaism have governance structures which are more or less authoritarian. And as you would expect, the more authoritarian branches have the same sort of problems. I can't say I am a bit surprised by this.

Random links

Report from the doom conference.

Wingnut discovers link between Obama and psychedelic theorists Terence and Dennis McKenna. (h/t some commenter on Poor Man).

But it turns out that Western culture is built on those very same sacraments!

Rightwingers really just don't get the concept of humor.

Bad new word: "warfighters". (via)

You can purchase Zimbabwe's hyperinflated currency (current top denomination: 50 billion dollars) on eBay.

I am a science fiction character

I happened to rewatch 2001 on DVD the other day. Although I've seen this film probably a dozen times, I never before noticed that my real surname appears in the dialog (well, background sound). It's in the scene on the space station when Haywood Floyd is calling home on the At&T Picturephone. During this there is a a PA announcement that says: "Will Mr [x] please contact the Met Office...". Which just goes to show, you can rewatch something you know practically by heart and still pick up something new.

In addition the surprise of finding myself in this world of the future of the past, I was also surprised to find myself moved almost to tears by the Blue Danube sequence -- also very familiar, but just so beautifully done. Also learned from the commentary tracks that when the thrown bone-club turns into a spacecraft in the famous 4 million year jump cut, that craft is supposed to be some sort of orbital weapon. Which makes sense, but how was anybody supposed to know that? I have a hard time imagining what it's like to view this movie for the first time, without having the benefit of having read the novelization so you have some idea about what is going on. For instance, the movie doesn't make a single mention of the reason behind HAL's malfunction and its connection with the mission, which leaves that whole storyline untethered to anything else.

A more significant use of my name occurs in J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, which is structured as a series of vignettes, most featuring what appears to be a single character whose name varies between Traven, Talbot, Trabert, Tallis, [x], and other variants, who wander through desolate landscapes of obscurely-purposed research institutes. I used to have this quote posted on my door in grad school where I was getting into conflicts with the administration:

...the director watched [x] with his unpleasant eyes. His aggressive stare had surprised [x] - seeing himself confused with the psychotic patients was too sharp a commentary on his own role at the Institute, a reminder of his long and wearisome dispute...

What these two very different pieces of imaginative fiction have in common, besides using my name, is that they are radically uncompromising works. Kubrick and Ballard don't give a fuck if they've left the viewer/reader in the dust. Such is the privilege of genius.

My name is neither very common or very uncommon (it's ranked at about the 4900 most common in the US, with about 2.85 occurrences per 100,000 people), so it's hardly a big deal to see it around. There are a 2 or 3 fairly famous holders of the name, but they are no relation to me since my father pulled it out of a hat when he emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Britain as a youth.

Number One with an Umlaut

Internet polls are almost entirely worthless, but this is kind of interesting anyway...apparently the top 10 public intellectuals in the world are all Muslims, most of who I've never heard of, and most of them are theorists of moderate Islam, which the hysterics in the US and Europe like to pretend doesn't exist. Top spot goes to Fethullah Gülen, "the modern face of the Sufi Ottoman tradition".

A few random observations: Chomsky (who was #1 last time around and is still the highest-ranked non-Muslim) might deserve it, but for his linguistics, not the political writing that makes him trendy. His political writing has never been displayed much intellectual depth, IMO, although it's been sadly accurate.

Al Gore has the spot underneath that, which is just plain silly.

Richard Dawkins (19) is the first scientist to appear, and doesn't really deserve it; he's more of a popularizer than an original thinker, and his writings on religion don't have much depth.

Rather surprisingly, there are no computer people on the list at all. Closest are Lawrence Lessig (52), a lawyer, and Neil Gershenfeld (98), a physical scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Computists have produced some profound ideas but I guess they aren't in the right form for this kind of list. Probably Richard Stallman deserves a slot in terms of impact of an idea.