So the study did not set out to prove the thing you wanted it to prove, and therefore did not have anything to say on that topic, so you decided that made it bad science? You can't just pick up a random piece of literature and say, well, this wasn't what I wanted to read today, therefore it has no merit.
Gotta love when the OP accidentally makes a post about regular science, but disagrees with it for vapid reasons, thereby accidentally making something that could be posted here unironically
The paper is not proving that social constructions exist in general. That has already been proven by previous work. It is showing the existence and extent of one particular aspect of one particular (previously established) social construction.
Can you share other studies which have proven social constructions exist? I would be interested to read that.
Why does this paper need to establish social constructionism at all, if that isn’t one of the key points? If this one particular social construction (I’m assuming you mean the stereotype that men are rational) has already been established, why does this paper need to investigate it?
There are lots of sources to get you started here.
The relevant social construct is gender. Like most social constructs, it's a very complex phenomenon, so there are a lot of different papers written about different aspects of it. This is sort of like asking why we need to keep writing more papers about monkeys, when we've already established that monkeys exist.
“the foundation of this theoretical framework suggests various facets of social reality—such as concepts, beliefs, norms, and values—are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members, rather than empirical observation of physical reality.”
So.. empirical observation of physical reality, or what we call science, is false, and we should take up the mantle of social constructionism instead? I’m simply asking because this is a science-based subreddit, yet your link to Wikipedia seems to be discounting science. Social constructionism is diametrically opposed to science, and that is obvious from the above sentence.
No, it's not opposed to science at all. In fact, social constructs, social norms, culture, and language are all subjects of scientific study in various fields, despite the fact that they are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members rather than, say, natural forces. It doesn't really matter very much how something comes into existence - if it exists, it can be studied scientifically.
Let’s take your example of gender, then. Your theory states that gender is socially constructed, doesn’t exist outside of that, and is wholly subject to the culture in which it exists. A bio-essentialist theory would state that gender is inherently tied to sex, and in reality, doesn’t differ much at all from the biological sex. How can you conduct any study on gender, then, without choosing one framework or the other? Would you be able to conduct a study which determines whether gender is socially constructed or biological? Has such a study ever been done? Even if you want to believe that gender is a biological reality, social constructionists will argue that our understanding of that reality is itself tied to the culture and system in which our understanding resides. Therefore, according to social constructionists, we cannot know, or study, whether gender is reality or not. Our own understanding of it gets in the way.
I brought up this point within my original critique. I pointed out that authors of this study suggested it would be impossible to conduct any study determining whether men are more rational or women are more emotional, because we cannot know what it means to be “rational” or “emotional”. This is an extremely post-modern argument to make, where they are so concerned with the words’ usage, that it seems we cannot know what the words mean. Only a social constructionist would make this argument. Because it flows down from the constructionist viewpoint: since words are themselves socially constructed their true meanings do not exist outside of their social understanding. This is why the authors suggest we cannot study the concepts behind the words. (Studying those concepts would constitute an empirical observation of physical reality, or science, as we tend to call it.)
All those things that you say were "assumed" are in fact well known facts established by previous research. You should read about social constructs, like, in general. We don't start every paper restating well known facts, we don't start by saying a²+b²=c² in mathematics, we don't start by saying "concrete really works for construction, guys" in civil engineering.
You have some serious catching up to do. Go read a book.
Then you might want to go deeper on Social Construction overall, just start by the wiki, there is a list of authors at the end of Origins section.
If you wanna go deeper on gender specific, start with Judth Butler, any book. If you want to go chronologically start with Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988).
If at ANY POINT you feel like you're not getting, or that they're talking non-sense that means you reach a wall of previous knowledge. They're not talking non-sense they're just in another league. So you have to go even further back to find your league. Maybe get a Sociology 101 or a Philosophy 101 text book in this case.
I read the link you sent. I found it quite interesting. While reading, I came across this sentence:
“Most philosophical discussion of social constructionism has been concerned with the so-called “science wars” which means that they have been concerned with evaluating the inference from the numerous and complex social influences operating in the production of scientific theories to the social construction of the facts those theories purport to represent, or to the failure of accounts of scientific rationality, or scientific realism, or scientific process (e.g. Laudan 1981, Nelson 1994, Fine 1996, Kukla 2000).”
Doesn’t this mean that social constructionism is primarily concerned with dismantling science as we know it?
I read further, and found this sentence to support my claim:
“Because naturalists are typically committed to science as a central, if fallible, avenue of knowledge about the world (i.e. some variety of epistemic fundamentalism), naturalists will want to explain how this can be if, as social constructionists about scientific representations note, empirical observation is theory-laden and scientific theories are themselves subject to massive social influences.”
So, how can you defend social constructionism on a science-based subreddit, given this? If, apparently, all science is flawed unless we know the social influences which gave us those scientific conclusions, then science no longer exists, only social constructions.
Doesn’t this mean that social constructionism is primarily concerned with dismantling science as we know it?
No. That just means it is part of scientific process, it has been fully incorporated in Sociology for instance. I don't think there is a single sociologist that on analysing something they won't pay attention to the social constructs involved.
You're reading "The Social Construction of Representations" and the text tells you that the naturalists have issues with constructivism in that regard. But just is 2 paragraphs below it shows that
"naturalistic responses to constructionist claims about representations (including beliefs) understood as human traits have been far more sympathetic to constructionist approaches"
Then it lists three main ways naturalists agree with constructivists on "human traits".
So the answer for "So, how can you defend social constructionism on a science-based subreddit, given this?" is because scientists, even naturalists, who study those things do too.
all science is flawed unless we know the social influences which gave us those scientific conclusions, then science no longer exists, only social constructions.
Now your conclusion is absurdly illogical. Words are social constructs, do you think words exist? Marriage, countries, system of government, law. All social constructs and all exist.
You should understand what a social construct is first, then go back to that article.
Perhaps you can explain to me what a social construct is, in more depth? Since I read the entire article and don’t seem to understand your point.
Words exist, yes, but the meaning behind those words is socially constructed. Therefore the question is not whether words exist, but whether the concepts behind the words truly exist. Because those concepts — the meanings of the words — may reflect an actual reality, or they may simply represent the idea which society has constructed, and then represented with a word.
Do you think money exists? As it currently stands, we use little bits of paper and plastic as stand ins for economic productivity that we use for obtaining goods and services. Is there a particular reason why a $10 bill and a $100 dollar bill should be valued differently for non-social reasons? I mean, they're both made of the same stuff, in the same basic arrangement.
The fact is that something can both be physically real and socially constructed, much in the same way that one can point out that the value we assign to our different forms of currency is arbitrary and not reflective of any inherent difference in value, but only a fool would argue that means there's no difference between trying to pay for $50 worth of groceries with a $10 bill vs $100
There is no reason money should represent the value it holds, except that we assign that value to money. However, the value behind it is real. Things that you would exchange for money hold real value, even though the money’s value is assigned. The money is just a stand-in for this real-world value.
So too, I would argue, the concepts that words represent are also real. For example, we have socially assigned the meaning to the word “rationality”, but rationality is a real concept which exists, if not physically, in essence. Rationality is a real thing which someone, or something, can possess, and not simply the summation of our ideas of rationality.
Rationality is a real thing which someone, or something, can possess, and not simply the summation of our ideas of rationality.
And who decides if someone is rational? The Nazis considered their hatred of Jews to be completely rational, based on race-science. Nowadays we would paint them as irrationally angry. So if rationality is a real thing, how were they able to loose it afterwards?
In the same vein, the Rights likes to paint their denialism of human-made climate change as rational and the scientists are actually irrationally blinded by ideology. So depending in which group your are, the question of who possess rationality doesn't seem to be a real thing.
Right. But then it should be clear that to understand how money has value, studying just what they're physically made out of and the arrangement of their materials would lead you to conclude that there is no inherent difference. You have to include the sociological factors if you're going to study the value of money.
So it is with anything you study with a sociological component, like the role gender plays or how gender is perceived in society. Acknowledging the sociological factors as important doesn't make it flawed science, it makes it more complicated than you want it to be.
If you believe that scientific theories are free from social influences then I would argue that you are actually a shitty scientist since you are ignoring possible ways a theory is biased. The way scientific theories are biased by social influences is based on empiricism itself, you are basically rejecting theories yourself because of your ideology, thus prooving the entire thing.
Science itself has no problems functioning along with social constructionism, because real scientists understand that a scientific model is merely a representation of a thing and not the thing itself. And things being arbitrarily chosen doesn't mean that it is not real. Just as something being the result social constructionism doesn't mean that it is imaginary or unreal.
Modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and general relativity were seen as irrational by a lot of scientists at the beginning of the 20th century. This too doesn't bode well for rationality as an objective quality.
How can we trust science, if every scientific theory is biased by social influences? That would mean there are no absolutely true scientific theories. Every theory would be subjective, based on the biases of the researchers.
So again, I ask, how can you defend social constructionism?
This study only seeks to show that its participants believe that men are more rational, and that women are more emotional, but that is obvious. Everything else is taken within the radical feminist framework, which says that men and women are the same, that we are totally socially constructed by a system which oppresses women, and that acknowledging any difference between the sexes is itself sexist.
This study can neither be feminist, nor scientific.
Not feminist because it does not promote a scientific understanding of women, and not scientific, because it works within an easily disprovable feminist framework, taking as a baseline that which it assumes to be true.
Please read the rest of my post for my full analysis of this study.
So the study did not set out to prove the thing you wanted it to prove, and therefore did not have anything to say on that topic, so you decided that made it bad science? You can't just pick up a random piece of literature and say, well, this wasn't what I wanted to read today, therefore it has no merit.
Gotta love when the OP accidentally makes a post about regular science, but disagrees with it for vapid reasons, thereby accidentally making something that could be posted here unironically
Had to check that the bad science was not intended to be the other reddit post, rather than the linked study, haha.
What do you think about the circular reasoning used within the study, with regards to social constructionism?
What circular reasoning?
The fact that social constructionism was both the initial assumption, and one of the final conclusions of the paper.
The paper is not proving that social constructions exist in general. That has already been proven by previous work. It is showing the existence and extent of one particular aspect of one particular (previously established) social construction.
Can you share other studies which have proven social constructions exist? I would be interested to read that.
Why does this paper need to establish social constructionism at all, if that isn’t one of the key points? If this one particular social construction (I’m assuming you mean the stereotype that men are rational) has already been established, why does this paper need to investigate it?
There are lots of sources to get you started here.
The relevant social construct is gender. Like most social constructs, it's a very complex phenomenon, so there are a lot of different papers written about different aspects of it. This is sort of like asking why we need to keep writing more papers about monkeys, when we've already established that monkeys exist.
“the foundation of this theoretical framework suggests various facets of social reality—such as concepts, beliefs, norms, and values—are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members, rather than empirical observation of physical reality.”
So.. empirical observation of physical reality, or what we call science, is false, and we should take up the mantle of social constructionism instead? I’m simply asking because this is a science-based subreddit, yet your link to Wikipedia seems to be discounting science. Social constructionism is diametrically opposed to science, and that is obvious from the above sentence.
No, it's not opposed to science at all. In fact, social constructs, social norms, culture, and language are all subjects of scientific study in various fields, despite the fact that they are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members rather than, say, natural forces. It doesn't really matter very much how something comes into existence - if it exists, it can be studied scientifically.
Let’s take your example of gender, then. Your theory states that gender is socially constructed, doesn’t exist outside of that, and is wholly subject to the culture in which it exists. A bio-essentialist theory would state that gender is inherently tied to sex, and in reality, doesn’t differ much at all from the biological sex. How can you conduct any study on gender, then, without choosing one framework or the other? Would you be able to conduct a study which determines whether gender is socially constructed or biological? Has such a study ever been done? Even if you want to believe that gender is a biological reality, social constructionists will argue that our understanding of that reality is itself tied to the culture and system in which our understanding resides. Therefore, according to social constructionists, we cannot know, or study, whether gender is reality or not. Our own understanding of it gets in the way.
I brought up this point within my original critique. I pointed out that authors of this study suggested it would be impossible to conduct any study determining whether men are more rational or women are more emotional, because we cannot know what it means to be “rational” or “emotional”. This is an extremely post-modern argument to make, where they are so concerned with the words’ usage, that it seems we cannot know what the words mean. Only a social constructionist would make this argument. Because it flows down from the constructionist viewpoint: since words are themselves socially constructed their true meanings do not exist outside of their social understanding. This is why the authors suggest we cannot study the concepts behind the words. (Studying those concepts would constitute an empirical observation of physical reality, or science, as we tend to call it.)
Holy schizoposting.
Can you refute my arguments?
Skill issue.
All those things that you say were "assumed" are in fact well known facts established by previous research. You should read about social constructs, like, in general. We don't start every paper restating well known facts, we don't start by saying a²+b²=c² in mathematics, we don't start by saying "concrete really works for construction, guys" in civil engineering.
You have some serious catching up to do. Go read a book.
What books do you recommend?
A good start (even if not a full book) is this:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-construction-naturalistic/#WhaSocCon
Then you might want to go deeper on Social Construction overall, just start by the wiki, there is a list of authors at the end of Origins section.
If you wanna go deeper on gender specific, start with Judth Butler, any book. If you want to go chronologically start with Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988).
If at ANY POINT you feel like you're not getting, or that they're talking non-sense that means you reach a wall of previous knowledge. They're not talking non-sense they're just in another league. So you have to go even further back to find your league. Maybe get a Sociology 101 or a Philosophy 101 text book in this case.
I read the link you sent. I found it quite interesting. While reading, I came across this sentence:
“Most philosophical discussion of social constructionism has been concerned with the so-called “science wars” which means that they have been concerned with evaluating the inference from the numerous and complex social influences operating in the production of scientific theories to the social construction of the facts those theories purport to represent, or to the failure of accounts of scientific rationality, or scientific realism, or scientific process (e.g. Laudan 1981, Nelson 1994, Fine 1996, Kukla 2000).”
Doesn’t this mean that social constructionism is primarily concerned with dismantling science as we know it?
I read further, and found this sentence to support my claim:
“Because naturalists are typically committed to science as a central, if fallible, avenue of knowledge about the world (i.e. some variety of epistemic fundamentalism), naturalists will want to explain how this can be if, as social constructionists about scientific representations note, empirical observation is theory-laden and scientific theories are themselves subject to massive social influences.”
So, how can you defend social constructionism on a science-based subreddit, given this? If, apparently, all science is flawed unless we know the social influences which gave us those scientific conclusions, then science no longer exists, only social constructions.
No. That just means it is part of scientific process, it has been fully incorporated in Sociology for instance. I don't think there is a single sociologist that on analysing something they won't pay attention to the social constructs involved.
You're reading "The Social Construction of Representations" and the text tells you that the naturalists have issues with constructivism in that regard. But just is 2 paragraphs below it shows that
Then it lists three main ways naturalists agree with constructivists on "human traits".
So the answer for "So, how can you defend social constructionism on a science-based subreddit, given this?" is because scientists, even naturalists, who study those things do too.
Now your conclusion is absurdly illogical. Words are social constructs, do you think words exist? Marriage, countries, system of government, law. All social constructs and all exist.
You should understand what a social construct is first, then go back to that article.
Perhaps you can explain to me what a social construct is, in more depth? Since I read the entire article and don’t seem to understand your point.
Words exist, yes, but the meaning behind those words is socially constructed. Therefore the question is not whether words exist, but whether the concepts behind the words truly exist. Because those concepts — the meanings of the words — may reflect an actual reality, or they may simply represent the idea which society has constructed, and then represented with a word.
Do you think money exists? As it currently stands, we use little bits of paper and plastic as stand ins for economic productivity that we use for obtaining goods and services. Is there a particular reason why a $10 bill and a $100 dollar bill should be valued differently for non-social reasons? I mean, they're both made of the same stuff, in the same basic arrangement.
The fact is that something can both be physically real and socially constructed, much in the same way that one can point out that the value we assign to our different forms of currency is arbitrary and not reflective of any inherent difference in value, but only a fool would argue that means there's no difference between trying to pay for $50 worth of groceries with a $10 bill vs $100
There is no reason money should represent the value it holds, except that we assign that value to money. However, the value behind it is real. Things that you would exchange for money hold real value, even though the money’s value is assigned. The money is just a stand-in for this real-world value.
So too, I would argue, the concepts that words represent are also real. For example, we have socially assigned the meaning to the word “rationality”, but rationality is a real concept which exists, if not physically, in essence. Rationality is a real thing which someone, or something, can possess, and not simply the summation of our ideas of rationality.
And who decides if someone is rational? The Nazis considered their hatred of Jews to be completely rational, based on race-science. Nowadays we would paint them as irrationally angry. So if rationality is a real thing, how were they able to loose it afterwards?
In the same vein, the Rights likes to paint their denialism of human-made climate change as rational and the scientists are actually irrationally blinded by ideology. So depending in which group your are, the question of who possess rationality doesn't seem to be a real thing.
Just because we can debate what is or isn’t rational, does not mean that rationality is a fake concept.
Rationality can exist, and we, as humans, can have a limited and subjective view of what rationality is.
Right. But then it should be clear that to understand how money has value, studying just what they're physically made out of and the arrangement of their materials would lead you to conclude that there is no inherent difference. You have to include the sociological factors if you're going to study the value of money.
So it is with anything you study with a sociological component, like the role gender plays or how gender is perceived in society. Acknowledging the sociological factors as important doesn't make it flawed science, it makes it more complicated than you want it to be.
If you agree with me, then you should also admit that there is a biological component to gender.
If you admit that, then you are not really a social constructionist, are you?
If you believe that scientific theories are free from social influences then I would argue that you are actually a shitty scientist since you are ignoring possible ways a theory is biased. The way scientific theories are biased by social influences is based on empiricism itself, you are basically rejecting theories yourself because of your ideology, thus prooving the entire thing.
Science itself has no problems functioning along with social constructionism, because real scientists understand that a scientific model is merely a representation of a thing and not the thing itself. And things being arbitrarily chosen doesn't mean that it is not real. Just as something being the result social constructionism doesn't mean that it is imaginary or unreal.
Modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and general relativity were seen as irrational by a lot of scientists at the beginning of the 20th century. This too doesn't bode well for rationality as an objective quality.
How can we trust science, if every scientific theory is biased by social influences? That would mean there are no absolutely true scientific theories. Every theory would be subjective, based on the biases of the researchers.
So again, I ask, how can you defend social constructionism?
This study only seeks to show that its participants believe that men are more rational, and that women are more emotional, but that is obvious. Everything else is taken within the radical feminist framework, which says that men and women are the same, that we are totally socially constructed by a system which oppresses women, and that acknowledging any difference between the sexes is itself sexist.
This study can neither be feminist, nor scientific.
Not feminist because it does not promote a scientific understanding of women, and not scientific, because it works within an easily disprovable feminist framework, taking as a baseline that which it assumes to be true.
Please read the rest of my post for my full analysis of this study.
The post that reads like it crawled from a Jordan Peterson podcast?