The social construction of what?

What Hacker News says

1. lukeasrodgersJul 2023
   Very briefly, the idea of a natural kind term is that of a term that “carves nature at its joints” (Plato’s metaphor), ie is not just a convenient way of splitting the world up into entities but one that reflects the true structure of reality.

   Philosophers have debated various criteria for determining what constitutes a natural kind, which I think would have added some clarity to the article.

   A related approach that could have added clarity (though I can’t recall whether it deals with natural kinds per se) is Hacking’s Social Construction of What? which lays out a sort of hierarchy for how socially constructed a given phenomenon is. It attempts to add rigor to our intuitions around how objective or subjective a given judgement is.

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2. lukeasrodgersMay 2023
   It’s been a long time since I read it, but Social Construction of What? was a great book, philosophy at its best, in my opinion: lending clarity and rigor to concepts that reach into law, psychology, medicine, ethics, and the every day.
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3. yesenadamFeb 2018
   :P Ive recently been reading Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What? which is a serious yet very entertaining analysis of all those Social Construction of X books and ideas. And probably much more worth reading than any of them.
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4. yesenadamDec 2017
   Some of the most memorable/useful/wonderful:

   Fleck - Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact

   Hacking - The Social Construction of What?

   Felsner - Geometric Graphs and Arrangements

   xkcd volume 0

   Tommy Wonder - The Books of Wonder

   Elisabeth Lloyd - Science, Politics and Evolution

   ..and, it's embarrassing to admit it on here :-) but I didn't read Refactoring or Clean Code or Kent Beck until 2017. Better late than never.

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5. LudwigNagasenaMar 2023
   > Right, and even withing social ontology/constructivism there are multitudes.

   There are multitudes; and that’s exactly why such statements are vapid and contain no information. You failed to clarify what you meant and only managed to make a vague reference to Berger.

   There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”.

   > Dismissing the entire subfield as vapid comes across as intellectually immature.

   Would dismissing astrology be intellectually immature? I don’t think so.

   > "constructivism bad because Marxism bad," is about as thought-limiting cliché as one can get

   Indeed. Good that it is not what I’ve said.

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6. kelseyfrogMar 2023
   It sounds like you've read a critique of social construction without actually reading much about social construction itself.

   Social construction is an lens of interpretation in the toolkit of critical thinking. I like to frame it as an epistemological question that simply asks, "How do you know that?" It's extremely powerful when used against topics where people make claims that are "obvious", "reality", "truth", or even "science".

   Science itself is an epistomological framework and subject to interpretation from other (meta-)epistomological frameworks eg: scientific examination of social construction is just as valid a pursuit as the social construction of science. In fact that latter, the social construction of science, is the umbrella from which we can examine the concept of IQ. We can talk about it in terms of constitutiveness, grounding, expert-novice problems, &c.

   >There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”.

   You're describing science. Science "allows" people to say "it's something I am an authority on." This is because it's an epistomological framework independent of the validity of the subject. That's what epistomological frameworks do.

   > Would dismissing astrology be intellectually immature? I don’t think so.

   We can absolutely talk about the social construction of astrology independent of the truth claims of astrology. I'm sure you can agree with me that there is a profound difference between the two.

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