I wish I could be more help, you don't sound to be in a good place. All I can say is that if you do nothing, nothing much will happen. Look for any way to improve your environment, with particular emphasis on the people around you. Have you seen 'What about Bob'? My all time favourite film - seriously funny and funnily, serious. Walk in nature - trees are very good therapists, and exercise helps. Life is made of small things; clean sheets, drawing or painting, coffee with a friend. When you're down in a hole, life looks very big and far away and hard to get to, but is really quite close, and what looks impossible isn't that hard if you start from where you are and aim for a better place. Try to be a good friend to yourself, which means accepting what you are and trying to be better.

So, according to what you're saying, depression is a coping mechanism, and to get rid of depression one has to understand the reason why there is such a coping mechanism in place. Is that right? — Question

Yes, I think so.

If so, then how is it that depression is such a 'bad' coping mechanism that leads to thoughts about suicide? Or are suicide and depression two separate things? And who gets to decide what feeling they want to feel in the first place, as if depression is a defense mechanism, like a faulty thermostat? — Question

It's bad, but not as bad as what it's coping with, kind of like heroin. And suicide is a great cure for depression as it is for heroin addiction, or any problem that cannot be faced. When you ask who decides, you expose the division between one who feels and cannot cope, and one who copes but cannot feel. to talk about a defence mechanism is to separate oneself from 'it' the mechanism. The end of the depression is the end of the division - I cannot cope and I cannot feel, and yet I feel and cope. There is no other, no illness or syndrome or mechanism or illness or depression, or unconscious trauma,
it is all me.

I mean, it's a sad state to live in where most people who are depressed don't get better. What do you attribute that fact to? — Question

It hurts to get better; it is a fate worse than death. You need a friend, and friends are hard to come by, and even harder to recognise.

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. — StreetlightX

I don't agree - surprise! I might au contraire suggest that the only significant difference between a cliff and a retaining wall is how it got there. A stony verticality whatever. There are details of course by which we can tell the difference.

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

Shit. When you quote Spencer-Brown, I have to sit up and take notice. Yes, there is a difference in value, and it relates to property value and labour value. A bird's nest is a bird's labour and property and ought to be respected in a way that a wind -blown pile of leaves does not merit. And the bird's activity merits respect in some proportion to the value it itself puts upon it's labour, which is to say that motives and values are already afforded to living things but not to inanimate ones. I don't know why that is, biocentrism if you like, but it seems like it was the struggle of the ancients to de-animate in the imagination at least, the forces of nature. It certainly makes it easier to manipulate the environment.

Then, are you advocating complacency? Because it is quite a burden to live with depression as you must know all too well based off of experience with the ill. I've already posted around here about accepting depression and learning to live with it; but, I feel that is a hard task to do. — Question

I don't think accepting or rejecting makes much difference, and certainly not complacency. It's not like a rucksack you can take off. But understanding transforms.

I can't be an internet therapist, but there is indeed a hard task involved in understanding oneself without making that separation of 'me' understanding 'depression'. Depression has to understand and 'see through' itself. Normally, feelings are like the British weather - every five minutes it's different. When a feeling persists and is not obviously caused by a repetitive provocation, it is likely to be the result of a trauma. Trauma produces 'unbearable' feelings ( I use scare quotes because no feeling can be beyond the limits of sensitivity, so strictly it should be 'unacceptable'). One response to such feelings is to press them down from conscious to unconscious and this is depression.

All of which is of little help to anyone who is depressed, except to imply the nature of the hard task, which is to find the feeling behind the feeling. Depression in this understanding is a remedy for a feeling that is worse than feeling depressed, so the cure is to rip the depressive bandage off the unhealed wound. Don't be alone when you do it.

Well I'm not going to try and argue you back there. Congratulations, then. :)

When I saw, 'frames', I immediately thought of the things that attach to my nose and ears that hold the rose-tinted lenses in place.

Amen to that.

In spite of collective belief that blacks are equal to whites in America, blacks are -- by the stats -- treated worse than whites.

One could take this as evidence that people really believe that blacks are inferior. I'd just say that in spite of widespread intentional beliefs of racial equality, we continue to see white supremacy operate in the world. Not unanimous widespread belief, mind, but widespread.

Also, on the back-end of the civil rights movement, in spite of widespread belief that blacks were inferior, a minority political movement was able to enact and enforce (to a limited extent) laws that bettered their position.

Belief is only a small part of the overall social world, and is often times not even relevant to its functioning and operations. — Moliere

Well the belief is that blacks should be equal to whites, because the difference is no more than skin deep. But the fact is that it is better to be white; that is the social construction, that one can no more disbelieve than that money has value. In the same way an anarchist does not 'believe in' government, but this does not mean they deny the existence of governments.

constructions and constructs, by the English definition, are not limited to the productions of life forms. — Thanatos Sand

Really?

construct
verb
kənˈstrʌkt/Submit
1.
build or make (something, typically a building, road, or machine).
"a company that constructs oil rigs"
synonyms: build, erect, put up, set up, raise, establish, assemble, manufacture, fabricate, form, fashion, contrive, create, make
"the government has plans to construct a hydroelectric dam there"
noun
noun: construct; plural noun: constructs
ˈkɒnstrʌkt/Submit
1.
an idea or theory containing various conceptual elements, typically one considered to be subjective and not based on empirical evidence.
"history is largely an ideological construct" — google

I'm not seeing any reference to sedimentary rocks or anything else produced by other than lifeforms.Where do you get your definition?

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

Why ought we? — StreetlightX

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

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. — StreetlightX

I am happy to provide a supporting reference, the first example Ryle gives in The Concept of Mind to explain his newly coined term "category-mistake": a visitor being shown around Oxford and told about all the buildings, finally asks his guide, "But where is the University?" — Srap Tasmaner

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."

It's not enough simply to declare that I am wrong, you need to present some argument or explanation. I think I have done enough work here to provide explanations myself to warrant more than your dismissive one line 'so whats' and 'you are wrongs' and 'why ought wes'. I have laid out a fairly coherent analysis of the concept of social construct in terms that are about as uncontroversial as terms get, and all your response seems to amount to in the end is a vacuous all-is-one-ism.

if we want any kind of debate to take place then we need some kind of "rating system"; namely we have to rate a sentence "true" or "false". — Meta

Well I don't have any problem with that, because a sentence's feelings are not hurt by being called false. And in the same way, I don't have any problem with rating your maths homework answers as right or wrong. It's the same thing.

So the unnecessary pain is produced not by the grading of work alone, but by the identification of the student and their work. So I say, " your ideas are a bit wrong" but you hear, "You are wrong".

If your ideas are wrong, then that discovery is identical with changing your ideas. But if you are wrong, then how can you ever be right?

So let us proclaim as loudly as possible, that getting things wrong, and finding out that they are wrong, is the whole process of education that leads to getting things right. If you have to get it right from the beginning, then you can never get started on anything new. Therefore rejoice when the sheep or maths problem that was lost is found more than the sheep that never strayed or the maths problem that is no problem. And then one will not be hurt.

One does, however conjunct the university and it's facilities.
— unenlightened

Yes, and? — StreetlightX

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

You seem to want to argue that this concept ought to be employed only in reference to living things. — StreetlightX

I think that simply is how it is generally used, and yes, we ought to use it that way too. It is you that wants to suggest that it ought to mean sedimentary rocks as well as things we make with them.

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. — StreetlightX

You said I was biocentric. As if there were another place to be; another viewpoint to take. I must surely be on the right lines here, as I just had the same argument with Banno, that there is no third person point of view, ending here.

There is a kettle.
There is a third person mode of speech.
There is no third person, and no third person point of view.
If you think there is a third person, be so kind as to introduce them to me. — unenlightened

As if Delanda were not a lifeform. It is surely a fundamental principle of the forum that if SreetlightX and Banno agree about something it must be wrong.

Is this reasonable though? Surely this simply widens the circle of exceptionalism to a kind of 'life-exceptionalism' - from anthropocentrism to biocentrism. — StreetlightX

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.

one does not 'conjunct' 'the peak, the ridge and the mountain'). — StreetlightX

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

One can't make a delicious cake out of shit. — Question

If peace of mind were an achievement, it would have to be the achievement of an unpeaceful, striving mind. But it is not an achievement at all, but simply what happens when one stops trying to make a delicious cake out of shit.

Are you not simply employing your superior grading and reward system of 'moral and immoral'?

Some interesting comments there. I'm going to have a go at reformulating in a way that avoids some of the objections about human exceptionalism, and avoiding therefore 'nature' and 'reality'.

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. I can then use the same notion of life-forms to make the further distinction between a construct made of formations the ant-hill again, and a construct made of life forms, an ant colony.

I think such a formulation allows a new look at this:

I am happy to provide a supporting reference, the first example Ryle gives in The Concept of Mind to explain his newly coined term "category-mistake": a visitor being shown around Oxford and told about all the buildings, finally asks his guide, "But where is the University?"

His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if 'the University' stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.

I don't think you'll find category mistakes limited to definite descriptions though. — Srap Tasmaner

It might have been that he was expecting another building called the university, or, he might have (correctly, I would say) surmised that a university is a social construct, consisting of students and professors and so on, and not the bunch of buildings that they occupy. To see that it is so, simply imagine that all the students and professors have departed; what remains is a tourist attraction, not a university.

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

I stand corrected. :D

Do have we made any progress on your question? — Srap Tasmaner

Well yes and no.

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

I think I have reached a bit more clarity for my own part on the nature of the distinction between social constructs and - well I still don't have a neat label for the negative space. Which is fine for us analytic scientific types. But I haven't made much progress with the postmodern wing, which I think is also important.

So we are, as it were, embedded in imbued with, and, God help us, constructed by (educated by and into) this constructed social world, and from that position we attempt or purport to make this distinction. 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.

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

Absolutely! They like to call it 'confidence'. Paper money at least is nothing more or less than a promissory note.

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

Yes, that's a useful clarification. So the Declaration of Human rights is a fiction, or a pious hope, until it is practiced, and only to the extent that it is lived out socially does it constitute a social construct.

I'm starting feel like I almost know what I'm talking about at last.

Yes, I've no argument with that, really. I'm fumbling for the right language a bit. But then there's this:

So I'd begin with a list -- what are the social constructs? I'd include things like...


Money, laws, institutions, marriage, war, the state, businesses, unions, guilds, non-profit organizations

. . . as obvious, non-controversial sorts of things. But I'd also include things like...


houses, knives, sewing machines, boats, electrical power. . .

and other sorts of goods and services which, under capitalism, are commodities. — Moliere

I find this a bit too broad. What would it mean to abolish sewing machines? It's not what I had in mind, though there is clearly some connection. 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.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes indeed, it is not open to me to abolish property, or to abolish race, just because these are social constructs. I can oppose them, at my own risk - of being treated as a pariah. 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. But all it takes is a revolution, or an authoritative declaration that the pumpkin patch is now common land, and everything is changed. All it takes is the abolition of slavery for slavery to be ended - well sort of.

Never mind, then.

No, it's your turn to clarify a bit.

THe thread on social construction might be the best place to continue this part of the discussion. — Banno

Thanks a lot, dude. :(

Why? — StreetlightX

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. I'm kinda hoping there is some other interpretation.

Human rights, for example, are a total fabrication — StreetlightX

I don't see any distinction between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated. — StreetlightX

I'm having difficulty putting these together in a way that makes sense.

Human rights, for example, are a total fabrication, — StreetlightX

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'.

I thought it might be interesting to see how things play out in a particular case, and I have chosen one where it might be possible to see social constructs in a positive light.

One might say that education is the process of construction of human nature. For example, there is a particular education and training that entitles one to call oneself an MD. And we hope, at least, that when one goes to the doctor, s/he will have the expertise to give good advice, and that the domain of medicine is socially regulated so as to minimise the bullshit. It is and should be a contested ground; a recently overturned dogma is that one should always finish the prescription of antibiotics.

But the construct of 'doctor' is built from real, if incomplete and provisional knowledge of the workings of the human body. This does not prevent all sorts of folks from making competing claims to knowledge, and medicine does not seem too averse to adopting stuff that started as 'alternative', when the results look promising - e.g. mindfulness, or the new buzz about gut bacteria, or the ongoing research into indigenous plant remedies.

Yet for all its scientific aspirations and protective regulation, medicine is by no means immune from the distortions of unfounded social constructs; there has been a recent suggestion that ADHD might be one such, and there is widespread concern that the science base is being systematically distorted by the influence of drug companies.

Someone needs to do a Foucault on medicine - Prescribe and Cure. I'm not going to attempt it here. But perhaps there is enough already to suggest that there is a place for construction and for deconstruction: that while there is no disentangling the real from the constructed, yet there is a need to be vigilant and also fairly humble in attempting to do so as far as possible, and also to question whether the constructs we inherit are ones that we want to solidify or to undermine.

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'. — StreetlightX

Yes, it is not simple, and 'found' is simply a placeholder for 'not-constructed', that you are very welcome to replace if there is a better term. There is an aspect of this that harks back to the traditional triple of Man, God, and Nature. I can't remember where I stole this from, but my thesis is that without God to hold the ring, the distinction between man and nature collapses. And the distinction between constructed and natural inherits this instability.

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.

The point being that anything 'socially constructed' has no less reality than anything not. . — StreetlightX

That's why I put property as the example of a social construct. It's universal and unquestionable, and gets treated as 'natural'.

Is it worth trying to disentangle the construct from the concrete?
— unenlightened

It must be, or we're back where this all started: staring at amorphous shadows projected on cave walls.

When it comes to the "post-modern" rejection of scientific truth, I believe it is mostly born from a layman's understanding of what science actually is, how and why it works, and hence the nature and value of scientific truth. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, I agree it must be, (as a moral imperative). But you cannot blame everything on the poor old layman. It was the high priesthood of science that went looking for a cure for homosexuality. Indeed the high priesthood of science spent a deal of time and effort justifying racialised politics. At the least, it must be conceded to the postmodern that science does not have any methodological immunity from conflating the constructed with the concrete; indeed my understanding is that 'deconstruction' at least purports to offer a method for teasing out the hidden constructs in the monolithic scientific view.

And in this regard, the postmodern is more humble and realistic in not assuming that the separation can ever be complete.

There is reification here, to be sure. What is being reified are cups, tables, and kettles. The stuff that our language talks about.

If you could find that objectionable... well, it takes all sorts. — Banno

When I say things like:

The kettle is boiling.
The cup is in the cupboard,
There is no third person point of view.

I am using the third person form. I have no problem using it to talk about the world as it is, abstracted from how it is experienced, I do it all the time. What I object to is smuggling a fictional experience back in in the form of a third person who experiences it. I do not object to reifying kettles, but to reifying grammar.
There is a kettle.
There is a third person mode of speech.
There is no third person, and no third person point of view.
If you think there is a third person, be so kind as to introduce them to me.

And that's me done with this.

A popular argument — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Where is that popular argument made? I have referenced some arguments that have been made that relate somewhat to what you propose. But it is time to stop setting up staw-men and knocking them down again - it's boring.

Suppose that an object that is not being observed by a mind is simply in a quantum state and looks like this. — Rich

Is it reasonable to suppose that something not being looked at looks like something?

Perspective is removed in the third person account. — Banno

So it ain't a point of view, but an abstraction. I'm not arguing for idealism here, merely against the reification of grammar, I agree shit can be true if nobody sees it, but if nobody sees shit there is no point of view. It's an account sans point of view; there is no third person in the cupboard.

Not my POV, and not yours. If the cup is in the cupboard, then it is true that the cup is in the cupboard, but only God sees it. Is God the third person? It is seen that the cup is in the cupboard, by whom?

It has been called the view from nowhere. "Right there" is an appeal to me to see something, but I don't see it, and if I did see it it would be a first person view. It's not right there; it's not anywhere. The cup is in the cupboard and not on view.

The crux of the issue is that I do not feel that there is any reason to conform to the notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with a patient and that he or she should not continue living with whatever condition they are 'afflicted' with. It seems unethical to make that conclusion on any grounds. — Question

There is no problem as long as you stick firmly to the old-fashioned medical notion of a complaint, rather than disease. Very often, it is a parent or teacher who has a complaint about a child. Little Johnny is hearing voices, or being disruptive, or frightening the horses. Sometimes Johnny has a complaint on his own behalf. As long as you treat the person with the complaint and leave alone the person without one, you do not have to stand in judgement about what is wrong on some spurious objective ground.

I'm fine with the grammar, but what is a third person point of view?