It's sufficient to answer that with "That's how the word is commonly used." — Mongrel

There are few things more entirely worthless than relying on 'how words are commonly used' in order to aim at conceptual specificity. That 'construction' is commonly used in relation to, well, what is it? - life, humans, or intention? - tells us nothing about construction and everything about the socio-linguistic quirks of a particular community in a particular period of time. And in this case not even a community - so far two people have used three different distinctions in this thread alone. The only possible response that a Descartes might have to the objection that he's using the word 'cogito' in a way not commonly mandated would be 'who gives a flying fuck?'.

If you want to stipulate a special definition, you can invite people to accept it. You'd probably want to build an attractive (or at least intriguing) thesis around that jargon. So it would start something like: "I posit that mountains are constructions." You wait for the audience to register their surprise and then you go to about explaining how that could be. — Mongrel

Yep, that's how all discussions take place. With explanation. 'Common meaning' is merely petrified jargon.

-

It's incredible that one has to justify the ground zero of rational discussion - the giving and asking for reasons - with these ridiculous convolutions.

To bring you back to your own words, you said only that we make certain distinctions 'because we can' and 'because it allows us to produce more categories of things' - as if the sheer qualitative increase of categories would in and of itself lead to conceptual 'enrichment' (which might be true only in the very narrow sense that a qualitative increase sand granules would 'enrich' the grey heap to which they belong); you made no qualification that said distinctions ought to be 'sensible and valid'. And of course, a 'sensible and valid' distinction would presumably be one for which both its sensibility and validity could be demonstrated - which is all I'm asking for.

And again - and this is the last time I repeat myself on this point - I'm not arguing that we simply drop the distinction between the natural and the human (or life and not-life, or the intentional or the not-intentional - again note how fluid and entirely unrigorous and unprincipled the use of these terms are). Only that, if we want to employ it in order to illuminate 'constructions' - in that very narrow context - then we should specify how it does.

There is no reason to believe that multiplying categories for the sake of it would be any more conceptually enriching than it might be conceptually debilitating. Only concrete analysis of actual reasons and arguments advanced for particular cases would provide any measure for thinking such either way. In any case, even if one were to concede your point about 'enrichment', such a goal would simply not be relevant to the double condition I outlined above. Which is fine on its own terms of course.

I'm not saying that one shouldn't or can't draw a distinction between what might be called 'formations' and 'constructions'. I'm saying that, if - note the conditional - one wants to shed light on what it means for something to be a 'construct', and if one thinks it is important to distinguish between constructs and formations in order to do so, then one ought explain why invoking intentionality or life (note how both you an Un seem to differ on how to index construction and formation) contributes to that project. If you don't care for this double condition, then by all means, make whatever other distinction(s) you like for whatever purpose(s) you like.

Hmm, I think there's a confusion about what is meant by 'value' here. To say that a distinction is motivated by a value is simply to say that a distinction is meant to draw our attention to one kind of thing over another kind of thing. And note: kind of thing, not 'thing'. The 'value' in question is 'epistemic', or rather methodological, and not normative: it doesn't refer to what I 'like' or 'desire' or 'want'. Levi Bryant has a nice discussion of what this means, and he draws a useful distinction between 'distinction' and 'indication' which I think might help clear things up:

"In order to indicate anything we must first draw a distinction ... Distinction is the condition under which indication is possible. Indication, of course, can be anything. It can be what we refer to in the world, how we sort things, what we choose to investigate, etc. In order to indicate or refer to any of these things, I must first draw a distinction. As a consequence, the distinction is prior to whatever happens to be indicated. For example, if I wish to investigate the pathological, I must cleave a space (conceptual or otherwise) that brings the pathological into the marked space of the distinction. It is only on the basis of this distinction that I will be able to indicate the pathological. The pathological never innocently indicates the pathological, but rather presupposes an unmarked space of the “normal” that structures and organizes the pathological. In other words, the conditions under which any observations are possible are those of a prior distinction."

Vox's guide to Obamacare is pretty excellent reading:

https://www.vox.com/cards/obamacare

I also found their explanation-via-cartoon also wonderfully enlightening:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/17/13652466/trump-obamacare-preexisting-cartoon

But notice how in your scenario, the very bounds of what it means to 'pick something up' are more or less taken for granted. What is being squabbled over are the exact things to be picked up. But say you tell the kids to pick up all the stuff on the floor, at which point they begin throwing throwing objects around the room. Notice how that what is now in question is what it means to 'pick something up' - the level of analysis has been moved 'one level up', as it were. No longer 'what' to be picked up, but the significance of 'picking up' is now in question: its bounds, its meaning, its relation to other actions. This shift in analytic level is, in analogue, the 'certain level of abstraction' which I want to get to, and which, moreover any analysis of concepts must rely upon.

To explore a concept - in this case 'construction' - is to carry out a similar manoeuvre. A distinction must be made that is not simply 'internal' to the concept of 'construction' - such that one cleaves it in two according to constructions of 'life' and 'non-life', and relabelling the 'non-life' side of it. This literally tells us nothing interesting about what a construction is or is not. It's taxonomy, not philosophy. It's as if, were I to ask you what a computer is, you were to tell me that some are black, and some are white, and yet others still are purple (and that purple computers happen to be called purputers and not computers). You may not be wrong, but - much worse - irrelevant.

As far as the the 'values' that motivate a distinction are concerned then, it is important to note that these values may inform distinctions that do not simply differ by degree, but also by kind. The kind of distinction you have in mind when speaking to your kids (between floor and thing) is of a different kind than that which is comes into play when the 'very idea' of what it means to pick something up comes into question. The latter kind of distinction - that which bears upon the very limits and relations that our concepts partake in, is the only kind that matters here.

what does it mean to say a distinction is "purpose-relative"? How does that work? — Srap Tasmaner

The most basic way to understand this I guess is as a rather simple linguistic or logical point: any distinction without a difference is… not a distinction. So any distinction worthy of the name always carries on into a second order: a difference, and then the difference that difference makes. It follows that the value of any first-order distinction is only ever given by, or derived from, the second-order difference which it carries along in tow. So this is one way to understand the ‘purpose-relativity’ of any distinction: to ask the purpose of a distinction, is simply to ask what difference a difference makes, without which, it would not be a difference.

(Another way to understand this is that any distinction always involves three elements: the two terms distinguished, and that which relates or articulates [from the Latin articulus, 'joint'] them; this third element is something that Un so far has not countenanced).

This in turn can be taken or understood in a few different ways. Here is how I think it ought to be understood: that humans are not the only things that make distinctions. Or rather, that the human power to distinguish is continuous with "nature's" powers to distinguish. One may consider here natural selection, or, to use Delanda's example, that of rivers which act as sorting mechanisms for rock layer formation. If this is the case, then the best 'theories' are those whose distinctions track those in 'nature' in order to show how those distinctions make a difference. Things get complicated here and we're already off track from the OP, so I'll refer you to a post a while back I made on similar issues in the context of causality and evolution.

So getting back to the question of 'construction', the question is whether or not limiting construction to 'life' is a distinction that tracks anything more than a kind of conversational convenience. If so, then at best it provides a kind of sociological observation (regarding the socio-historical quirks of how humans in a certain time period understand 'life'), and is, as far as philosophy is concerned, simply not very useful. Or to put it differently: does limiting 'construction' to life tell us anything interesting about the concept of construction, or does it simply tell us something middling about 'us'? Insofar as it's precisely the concept of 'construction' that is under discussion, the latter is, more or less, a useless path to take. Hence the poverty of Un's reply, which basically trades philosophy for sociology, and even then, a purely descriptive sociology that explains nothing ('that's just the way things are'... can one imagine a worse banality?).

Bergson once wrote that "a philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said"; and I think this is basically right. If anything, I think one should be suspicious of those who don't have some kind of basic, even if unconscious framework in place in order to approach issues; else thought becomes like Kant's dove, thinking it can fly all the better without the resistance of air which enables its flight.

Very briefly, because it's late and I want to reply better tomorrow: the level of abstraction I'm interested in is, to be a little enigmatic, ontological. One can, of course, make all sorts of distinctions for all kinds of purposes: but do these distinctions illuminate, as it were, the nature of terms involved? One distinguishes between children and adults for the purposes of voting; but does one distinguish between children and adults along the axes of being-human? If so, why or why not?

Similarly, there's no issue with distinguishing between what is and is not in our power, and having our vocabulary follow those lines for those purposes. But is this good philosophy? Is 'our power' the measure of things? Anyway, more to say tomorrow, hopefully that conveys the gist of it.

Look, to olive branch a bit - the justifications for where we draw our elementary distinctions are of profound, profound importance. Our very ability to think - and in turn, to do philosophy - is grounded in the distinctions that we begin with. To posit a distinction between 'construction' and 'formation' indexed upon a further distinction between life and not-life (or 'forms of life' and 'not-forms-of-life') is to imply both that the constructions of life differ in kind from the formations of non-life and that both life and non-life irreducibly differ along the dimension of their respective 'productions'. It's a case of 'baking in' conceptual differences right at the level of terminology, and it irrevocably alters the way which we treat these concepts*. There is nothing innocent, in other words, about the way we articulate the relations between our concepts; those initial articulations foreclose certain ways of thinking about things, even as they open up other paths.

So as a general rule every distinction made ought to be a motivated one; there ought to be a reason for making it, and those reasons in turn will frame the very ways in which one will understand the terms involved. Now perhaps it is precisely the case that one wants to delineate a rigorous distinction between life and not-life, in order to illuminate something conceptually distinct about each, or else to illuminate something conceptually distinct about 'construction' or 'formation'. There is, as it were, two polarized axes of freedom along which we can manipulate relations between terms that shed light on each (life - not-life/ construction - formation). But the motivations behind these distinctions ought to be spelled out. The difference a difference makes needs to be made explicit, least the terms become lodged as reified oppositions: which is the danger par excellence when it comes to talking about 'social constructions' (which almost always becomes 'opposed' to, well, practically everything else; it also feeds into a constellation of other, just as conceptually impoverished 'oppositions' like that between 'nature and culture', or 'appearance and reality')

So it's not unfair to ask, in order to fix our terms and the relations between them: why this distinction? What motivates it? What is it meant to say about 'life', 'not-life', 'construction' and 'formation'? Perhaps it's just a semantic convenience, and you don't mean to say anything at all. And that's OK. But that too needs to be spelled out.

*Spencer-Brown: "There can be no distinction without motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value."

To which a perfectly intelligible reply would be, "The university relocated to Inverness during the war, and never came back", or even, "the university is on vacation at the moment." — unenlightened

But the category mistake lies in considering the university a member of the class of which library belongs. Your reply does not make this assumption, and so is not relevant as a counter-example.

It's not enough simply to declare that I am wrong, you need to present some argument or explanation. — unenlightened

I've only declared you wrong on the specific issue of category mistakes, which are, at any rate, incidental to this thread. Otherwise I've only asked you to justify why you think a 'limit' ought to be placed on the use of 'construction'. Which you seem to have taken great exception to.

Oh, to maximise agreement, principle of charity, because meaning is use. What a fucking idiotic question. — unenlightened

Oh I'm sorry I thought that maybe you had a philosophically substantive and non-arbitrary reason; that it would be a difference that made a conceptual difference with respect to illuminating what we were to understand of the concept of 'construction'. I thought you were more than a kind of vocabulary police. My unreserved apologies for this apparently misplaced faith.

I think that simply is how it is generally used, and yes, we ought to use it that way too. — unenlightened

Why ought we?

It is you that wants to suggest that it ought to mean sedimentary rocks as well as things we make with them.

In the absence of a reason or motivation to make a distinction that seems otherwise unnecessary, yes.

And therefore Ryle's exemplar of a category error turns out not to be one, and the distinction between the inanimate construction of the university buildings and the social construct of the university itself is a valid one. — unenlightened

But your examples are not at all clear. One can, for example, conjoin house and home, but whether or not the conjunction is a category error will depend on the use to which conjunction is put. To be shown around a house and to ask 'but where is the home?' is to commit a category error. To speak of 'house and home' in some poetic flourish is not. Category errors are context dependent. Ryle's 'use' of the university and it's buildings is very much a category error, and you are wrong about it not being one.

I don't understand what you're talking about. I was under the impression that we were discussing the scope of what it means for something to be a 'construction'. You seem to want to argue that this concept ought to be employed ('limited') only in reference to living things. I asked why. I can make no sense of your reply.

Yes, I think it is reasonable to deny non-life a centre, where a centre is a point of view. The distinction between life and non-life I would say is indispensable to almost any kind of sensible talk about the world. — unenlightened

I don't understand what a 'center' or a 'point of view' has to do with constructs or formations, and why either would be important to the latter in any principled way. Indeed, it is perfectly sensible to talk about living and non-living formations in the same breath. And note that I'm not denying that arbitrary distinctions are important for sensible talk, but I would hope there is more than arbitrariness involved when we make distinctions that are supposed to have some kind of philosophical import.

One does, however conjunct the anthill and the ant colony, or the university and it's facilities, or more generally, house and home. — unenlightened

Yes, and?

I think it is reasonable to limit 'construct' to the productions of life-forms. Thus a mountain is a formation, but an ant-hill is a construct. — unenlightened

Is this reasonable though? Surely this simply widens the circle of exceptionalism to a kind of 'life-exceptionalism' - from anthropocentrism to biocentrism. At the very least one would have to ask about the philosophical utility of such a limitation: what - if such a limitation is indeed reasonable - are the reasons for it? What kind of distinction is the one between 'formations' and 'constructs? What motivates it? Or is the limitation merely nominal, for the sake of conversational convenience?

From the point of view of individuation, it is not at all clear that one can make an in-principle distinction between the kinds of processes involved in either the construction of mountains or molehills. For someone like Manuel Delanda, for example, the processes at work in the formation of both mountains and societies, are, at a certain level of abstraction, exactly the same: "Sedimentary rocks, species and social classes (and other institutionalized hierarchies) are all historical constructions, the product of definite structure-generating processes" ... which Delanda describes, but I'll omit for reasons of space. In any case, the conclusion being that "this conception of very specific abstract machines governing a variety of structure-generating processes not only blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also that between the living and the inert." (Delanda, The Geology of Morals).

As far as Ryle's example is concerned, there's nothing that stops it from being applied to non-human, or non-living things: one simply has to imagine showing someone a ridge, a plateau, a peak, a spur, and having them ask 'but where is the mountain?'. Indeed, Ryle's own criteria for what constitutes a category is entirely 'neutral' with respect to the 'kinds' of things that can or cannot fall under it (here is his rather dry formulation: "when two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them" i.e. one does not 'conjunct' 'the peak, the ridge and the mountain').

I'm still going to want to distinguish between construction processes dependent upon organisms acting within an environment and constructions processes that require only natural forces. — Srap Tasmaner

I guess the immediate deconstructive response to this ought to be suspicion regarding the very terms of the question: why are organisms acting within an envionment not considered to belong to the class of forces deemed 'natural'?

Regarding agency and responsibility, I'm not clear, on the basis of your post, what the exact issue raised is. I think you have a worry about what happens to those terms if the organism is too tightly(?) embedded in the environment, but I can't be sure if thats what you meant.

But then we still have the question of how to distinguish what is (real and) constructed from what is (real and) not constructed. — Srap Tasmaner

See I'm not even sure about this either: I think that if taken to the limit, deconstruction entails that there are, as it were, constructions other than those of the social. That is, the word 'social' in 'social construction' ought to be understood as something that qualifies scope. There are asocial constructions, constructions of biology, of geology, of celestial dynamics, and then there are constructions that pertain to 'the social', each of these with it's own specific mechanisms and modes of functioning. I understand 'social construction' in an entirely naturalist way, as it were. And I think, moreover, this is how it should be understood.

By contrast, I think many people take 'social construction' to qualify not scope, but 'ontological status', as it were. As if 'social constructs' are somehow unreal, or lacking in substantiveness. But I think this is an anthropomorphism: there is nothing special about humanity that somehow locates them outside the sphere of 'reality': as if there is reality on one side, and the social on the other. It's this view that makes Un think that 'social construction' entails a kind of 'imprisonment', I think. But this is only the case if one remains caught in a kind of human exceptionalism in which only humans 'construct'. But once you see that the social is continuous with nature (along a very specific dimension, at any rate), the problem dissipates.

This is similar to what Willow is saying in the post above, I think.

This is the deconstruction as I understand it, that we are conditioned by our social constructs to the extent that we cannot distinguish the real from the conditioned. And to pretend that we can - which is all of our discussion - is hubristic overreach. — unenlightened

This is not quite it; the point would rather be to question the cogency of the very distinction between 'the real' and 'the conditioned' to begin with; that is, it's not a question of epistemic limits: it's not a matter of us being unable to make a distinction that could, in principle, be made, if only we were not conditioned, etc. This is why I keep trying to locate the real on the side of the constructed: if the social is real, if it belongs on the side of the real, then the distinction to be made is no longer oppositional; one cannot neatly parse the social and the real not because of some limitation on our 'finite', human selves - the attempt to go beyond which would be "hubris" - but because the concepts themselves no longer lend themselves to any such neat parsing. It's not a matter of 'from which position' we attempt to make the distinction.

What would you like me to clarify?

I don't know, maybe I'm too stupid. But the only way I can reconcile them is to conclude that everything is a fabrication and we are forever lost in the funhouse with no possibility of escape. At which point further discussion is reduced to a pleasant or unpleasant pastime with no other value. — unenlightened

Why?

Sorry for being pedantic, but what reasons lie behind these conclusions? And further, why is the inescapability of fabrication an imprisonment?

Why?

Are they? Human nature is claimed as a construct, but it is one founded on something real that is elaborated. Human rights might have the same foundation. I'm not sure that fabrications are ever 'total'. — unenlightened

Perhaps, but I don't see any distinction between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated.

But the real effects of total bullshit are not at all in dispute. Still it would be nice if we could stop lynching people for bullshit reasons, and so it would be handy if we could separate to some extent the stuff we make up from the stuff we don't. — unenlightened

I think it might be handy, but it also might not be - depending on the situation. Human rights, for example, are a total fabrication, but I think an incredibly important and useful fabrication. One whose reality has shaped the trajectory of humanity for the better. Bullshit reasons can be awfully useful ones.

Someone needs to do a Foucault on medicine — unenlightened

Foucault did a Foucault on medicine - see here. Or else Canguilhem.

Ok buddy.

Establishing a binary does not entail establishing a gradation. Between apples and not-apples, it is not necessary that there are degrees of apples between the two. In any case, your 'objection' simply relies on a different use of words. A triviality.

If you don't know what it means for anything to have more or less reality than anything else, than you should probably stop using the words "real" or "reality" since you have no definition for them and you refuse the standard ones: — Thanatos Sand

As far as I can see, the very standard definition you've cited contrasts the real with the artificial or the illusory, and at no point does it invoke a scale or gradation of realness. To argue for the reality of the social, is just to argue for the fact that the social is neither 'illusory, artificial, or fraudulent'. Or at least, no more or less so than gravity. Finally, if you don't know what the terms 'constructed' and 'found' refer to, I suggest you consult the OP, where they are used.

I'm not sure what it means for anything to have 'more' - or 'less' - reality than anything else. Nor do I have any idea what kind of distinction that between reality and the real is. I simply mean to complicate the distinction in the OP between that which is 'found' and that which is 'constructed'. To put it in it's terms, that which is 'constructed' may well also be 'found'; even if found as constructed. Finally, by 'felt reality', I simply mean that if you're about to be lynched by mob because you're black, it will do little good to plead that 'race is a social construct'.

Some concepts are constructed - 'property' for example - and others are... what? Found, I suppose. 'Gravity' kind of imposes itself on us as inescapable, whether one has the concept or not. — unenlightened

But surely 'property' also imposes itself upon us as inescapable; one can't willy nilly ignore that things belong by law to certain entities, without suffering from the consequences (if caught).

The point being that anything 'socially constructed' has no less reality than anything not. That race is 'socially constructed' does not mean, for example, that the institutional or cultural reality of race is any less felt than the force of gravity. Reality is on the side of the social, not set against or beside it.

This is sounding very 'Vienna School'. If by 'sensibly' you mean something like 'in terms of the senses' then there's your category error right there; theologists, mystics and religionists purport to be talking about something suprasensible. What kinds of "answers' to questions concerning the suprasensible would you expect. — John

I've spent the entire thread explaining what I mean by 'sensibly'. If at this point it is still unclear to you, I can only conclude that you have not read much, or anything I've written. From where I stand, you seem to be confusing a point about semantics - how words, questions, and langauge more generally works - with... I dont know what. I'm beginning to suspect that you think I'm talking about the 'meaning' in the phrase 'the meaning of life', whereas I'm talking about the 'meaning' of phrase itself. That is, I'm talking about the rather pedestrian subject of semantics. You seem to be quite literally talking about something else entirely. Perhaps this is my fault. I should not have used such an awful example as 'the meaning of life'. It has always thrown people into fits of intellectual hystetics on account of it's utter vacuity.

Sure, but John - or at least the John of that statement - would say either (1) they are talking nonsense, or (2) they mean something different than he does when each respectively speaks about the meaning of life. Both paths remain open. This is how the inferential game is played. Saying certain things either rules out of contention other, certain things, or recognizes that someone else, using the same words, is simply talking about something else altogether.

The question about the meaning of life ('meaning', that is, taken in an overarching sense) is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" who intended it to have such a meaning, and the question is incoherent otherwise. — John

My bolding.

Oh look it took you three lines and a single post to do what John has been dancing around for three pages now. Although John of course might disagree with you on that last bit, given that he affirmed, in his initial post, that the question is incoherent without such an 'author'. And what this in turn shows is that both of you are articulating your terms differently. For you, life is the kind of thing that could have purpose, with or without a God. For John, life is not even in principle the kind of thing that could have 'meaning' without such an author (that way is closed on pain of incoherence). Both of you are attributing different senses to your terms. But one can only find this out, of course, by getting you - or whoever - to undertake such articulation. A third person might articulate the terms of the question differently yet again, ad infinitum.

So well done on attributing some kind of minimal sense to the question, without which, it would remain an incoherent one. That said, it is still unclear why life is treated by both of you differently. Neither of you have articulated why life can (in your case), or can't (in John's case) be attributed meaning in the absence of an author. This would crystallize the sense of the question further... - and in turn clarify what kind of a solution would correspond with it. And so philosophy happens.

Melinda Cooper - Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
Ivan Ascher - Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction

Speaking solely of women, Hannah Arendt is among my favourite political philosophers and I’d recommend her work unreservedly.

Wendy Brown probably places a close second, and her recent Undoing the Demos is perhaps one of the most prescient diagnoses of our contemporary situations that I know.

Melinda Cooper’s recent Family Values is also a monumental work of political anthropology/history and well worth reading.

Angela McRobbie’s work on consumer culture, feminism, and postmodernism might be something right up your alley as well - a mix of cultural studies and anthropology - and although it’s hard to pick a single work, the ever popular The Aftermath of Feminism is always a good place.

Saskia Sassen’s work on the sociology of globalisation might be of interest as well.

Doreen Massey’s works on cultural geography ranks among my favourite writing as well - see her Space, Place, and Gender, or her For Space.

As far as classic anthropology, there's always Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa), and Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture).

Otherwise, authors like Linda Zerilli, Susan Moller Okin, Iris Marion Young, and Nancy Fraser, are among the best philosophical philosophers, living or dead.

What are your interests, in particular? As in, subject areas (sub-disciplinary)?

Overarching meaning that is understood to be given by a transcendent reality. Surely you knew this already? Are you that unfamiliar with religions and theologies?

It's true that the idea might be wrong. There might be no such reality. How are you going to demonstrate that, though? I think the problem is that you simply have no feel for and thus do not understand the experiences, presumptions and mindsets of people who affirm such things. — John

I really think you're talking past me entirely here. The question 'what is the meaning of life?', like any other question, either is, or is not meaningful. Either one can discuss this question sensibly, or one cannot. If the question is meaningful, one can specify the kind of answers which would be appropriate for it, and if it is not, this can't be done. This is a simple point about sense and language, and applies to all questions, theological or not, and in fact, philosophical and not. In light of this, I don't understand the relevance of this invocation of 'transcendent meaning'. Are you trying to suggest that the question has meaning in a way that, er, no mortal can understand or some such thing?

What in the world - or not in the world? - is 'transcendent meaning'?

I've been wondering if maybe instead of talking as if you choose from preexisting domains, the domain is something you construct with the question. Theoretical entities are in an obvious sense constructed, and maybe these are the members of the domain you construct. Asking a question would be the first step in building, rather than finding, an answer. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, exactly this! This is what I've been trying to get at with the idea that solutions are coeval with the explication of questions. Hence the citation of Deleuze's quote in the OP: "every problem always has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated... and of the means and terms at our disposal for stating it." What I wanted to suggest is that category errors, or rather, our ability to divine them, serve as guides through this process of construction. The construction of 'theoretical entities' - I just want to say philosophy - is never a purely 'free', subjective' act as it were; we are constrained by a certain logic of sense - of the need to avoid category errors, of making sure we do not run together terms that belong to different categories; much in the same way that a chess player - who can technically make any number of creative, interesting, and unforeseen moves - is constrained by certain rules; the difference or disanalogy being that in philosophy, or in language more generally, the 'rules' evolve along with the moves, as it were.

This is why, in a certain sense, unelaborated philosophical questions are not questions at all; they are, as it were, words strung together in certain grammatically correct forms that, sans articulation, lack sense. They provide no impetus, no orientation, with respect to what 'category' it's corresponding 'solution' is meant to fall in.

So your favoured principle is "Guilty until proven innocent"? — John

Yes. This is about the third time I've affirmed this in this thread. And this was the entire point of the OP so short of you not having read it, I don't understand why you find this so surprising. The idea, to explain for about the fifth time, is that the questions attain their sense only to the degree that the very terms of the question are articulated, that until someone explicates, in concreto, the stakes and scope of a question - 'what kind of answer' would be appropriate - there is no reason - and I mean this quite literally, as in, there is no way a chain of inferences can be formed in order to construct a line of reason - to assume that any philosophical question makes sense. Your response to this has been, seemingly, to say that one ought to take it on compelete faith that, because some people say certain questions make sense, that they do in fact make sense. It's kind of mind-boggling.