. I'm inclined to say that a sewing machine or a pumpkin patch is not a social construct as I mean it, precisely because it is a physical presence. Whereas the notion of property 'that it is my sewing machine or my pumpkin patch' very much is. — unenlightened
And in this regard, the postmodern is more humble and realistic in not assuming that the separation can ever be complete. — unenlightened
↪unenlightened
Gravity is found; human rights are fabricated. Both are quite real. When you make something, it's real, isn't it? The difference between gravity and human rights isn't that one is real; it's that we don't have the ability to change or abolish gravity, which we do with human rights.
↪unenlightened
I would add: there's a difference between, say, fiction and human institutions. Telling a story doesn't make the story true. What is made, and what has effect in the world, is not the content of the story, but the story itself and the telling of it. With institutions, the content becomes real. If you christen a ship, it now has the name you gave it.
And what if we stop using the term "gravity" in our theories?
What is 'generally accepted' imposes itself on me as real, as a physical constraint. I'd better not take pumpkins from someone else's pumpkin patch, or there will be consequences. — unenlightened
There are three human-constructed races: Mongolid, Negroid, and Caucasoid. There are no genetic differences/separators between these races. There are many ethnic groups within each race; they do have genetic differences between them. — Thanatos Sand
If all you required was that I replace the word "race" with "ethnicity", I don't understand why you bothered to object in the first place. As soon as I clarified that my conception of race goes beyond white black and asian, you should have assented to my position. I guess we're also encountering one of the driving forces behind this post-modern angle: a lack of understanding.
The American Anthropological Association had to release a statement focusing on race as socially constructed because they operate in a political world where anything more nuanced would allow ideologues who misunderstand the science to use it as nesting material. But while they (and you) state that "race" was invented to give perpetual low status to certain individuals, they both abandon the original topic of "race" and move purely into a world of political pandering and poor speculation.
Slavery has existed for thousands of years, and generally, but not always, groups tended to enslave people who had different physical characteristics than themselves. They never needed the concept of different races to begin doing it, and even without slavery the concept of different races can be invented even by a child who experiences them.
Maybe another way to say this is that the behavior of people is of course quite real, and some of their behavior can be described as participating in the convention of property, or maybe as "practices constitutive of" the convention of property. — Srap Tasmaner
The American Anthropological Association had to release a statement focusing on race as socially constructed because they operate in a political world where anything more nuanced would allow ideologues who misunderstand the science to use it as nesting material... — VagabondSpectre
I'm glad that you do now agree with me though, that different ethnic groups do have statistically significant genetic differences which is what leads to the consistency of characteristics between more closely related individuals (same family, same ethnic group), and deviation in characteristics the more distant the relation (different family, different ethnic group). — VagabondSpectre
↪Thanatos Sand I don't see how we can continue the discussion if every time I use a certain word even if just to reference it, even after clarifying my usage, you regress back to "that word is problematic".
If you want to move past this you can roughly do so by assuming I mean "ethnicity" whenever I say "race" and then see if you still protest...
That's a lie. I never did that. You were using the word "race" incorrectly and I pointed that out. I don't see how we can continue the discussion when you're dishonest. — Thanatos Sand
How do you know the meaning I intended when I used the word race? (how do you ignore my intended use after I've clarified twice?)
↪Thanatos Sand
I think that racial categories are much more complex than just "black/white/asian/etc...". For instance, the Pygmy people are ethnically different from the Bantu people and the results of those genetic differences are stark and undeniable. Do you deny that there is an observable difference between the average characteristics of the Pygmy and Bantu people which stems from differences in their average genetic makeup?
Because of the way you incorrectly used it. I already made that clear. — Thanatos Sand
And in the above quote is where you misused it when you said "racial categories" when you were discussing two different ethnic, not racial, groups.
So, use the word correctly or I'm moving on. I have no time for people who refuse to use words correctly. — Thanatos Sand
Sometimes you'll here economists talk about credit, and the economy at large, this way: that it is sustained by faith or trust, and if something undermines that trust, the world could come tumbling down. — Srap Tasmaner
Because of the way you incorrectly used it. I already made that clear.
— Thanatos Sand
How do you know I used it incorrectly though? It seems like anytime i've typed "race" you've just said "Aha! incorrect!"
If the way I use "race" is in line with your conception of what "ethnicity means" then I haven't used it incorrectly at all. You can at least try to acknowledge the intended meaning of my statements rather than to doggedly tell me I'm a problematic child...
Do have we made any progress on your question? — Srap Tasmaner
Of course it is the analytic science based view - that we can get at the world unmediated by our constructions- that has a use for the notion of a 'social' construct as distinguished from a 'real' or 'physical' one. Whereas the postmodern has no use for this distinction. Not that this is an easy distinction to make or obvious in every case, but it is the scientist, particularly the social scientist who even thinks it worth trying to disentangle the two.
So to come back to BC's quote at the top, one must surely want to say that there are facts of human nature if only that they are social constructers that are not, or not entirely social constructs. And at the same time, one has to accept that whether a Jew or a Negro is fully human is a matter of constructive dogma. Have the postmoderns won, or is there still a use for the scientific view? Is it worth trying to disentangle the construct from the concrete? — unenlightened
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.
we cannot distinguish the real from the conditioned. — unenlightened
No, neither Derrida nor any other prominent Postmodern/Poststructuralist philosopher says this. — Thanatos Sand
we can never fully distinguish the real from the conditioned — Thanatos Sand
Ideas impose order on the realm of sensation
I stand corrected. :D
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