What happens when a social scientist enters a laboratory?
If Orton focused on "What the butler saw," we may wonder what the social
scientist _sees_ or observes_ there. As Popper noted, "observe" can be a tricky
verb. He delighted in retelling the story when he told his students "Observe!"
-- They took him to be implicating OTHER than what he was saying ("I never had
an implicature in mind," Popper seems to be implicating -- call this The Popper
Paradox).
Torgeir wrote a little essay on our resident Popperian, one McEvoy (I'm
currently studying the implicatures of 'one' -- as in "one Grice"), on which
(on the essay, I mean) I will comment -- perhaps our resident Popperian will
comment in due turn, as they say in Finnish.
Torgeir rightly writes in his "Trivium; or, McEvoy['s Adventures] in
Wonderland":
"Charles Dodgson held the view that to the four recognised algebraic
operations -- addition, subtraction, multiplication and division -- two
more should be added, uglification and derision."
He was of course a mathematician. A student in maths. It's odd, but you cannot
be a "fellow" of Christ Church, Oxford -- only a student, and Dodgson was on
top a 'reader' of maths.
Torgeir goes on:
"McEvoy's latest attempt falls within the purview of Dodgson's extended
definition. His argumentative loitering -- seeking to extract from one's
opponent falsifiable information with the purpose of being able to say "I was
right and you were WRONG!" -- testifies to a girlish attitude we are more prone
to find in the wishful thinking of Alice of Wonderland fame. It should be below
a serious and astute participant who argues in good faith."
I'm not so sure about 'girlish'. I never understood the etymology of 'girl'.
They don't have them in Italy!
The first attested record of something like an English girl is from circa 1300,
when one (if you're into MSS and stuff), "gyrle," thus spelt, to mean something
like "child, young person" (of either sex but most frequently of females)."
"Girl" is known, as it were, to be of unknown origin.
One guess, by the OED, none the less, but cfr. Bosworth/Toller, "Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary", leans toward an unrecorded Old English *gyrele, from
Proto-Germanic *gurwilon-, diminutive of *gurwjoz, apparently also represented
by Low German "gære" "boy, girl," Norwegian dialectal "gorre," Swedish
dialectal "gurre", "small child," though the exact relationship, if any,
between all these is obscure).
It would be from proto-Indo-Germanic *ghwrgh-, also found in Greek parthenos
"virgin."
But this involves some objectionable philology. As Liberman has noted, "girl"
does not seem to go back to any Old English or Old Germanic form. It is part of
a large group of Germanic words whose root begins with a "g" (or a "k") and
ends, if this helps, with an "r." The final consonant in "girl;" the "l," that
is, is a mere diminutive suffix.
The g-r words denote young animals, children, and all kinds of creatures
considered immature.
A more 'convoluted' candidate is Old English gierela "garment" (for possible
sense evolution in this theory, compare "brat").
A former folk-etymology derivation from Latin "garrulous," "chattering,
talkative" is now discarded -- since Cicero never used it anyway.
Like "boy", "lass," and "lad," "girl" is of more or less obscure origin.
Probably most of these lexical items arose as jocular transferred uses of words
that had originally different meaning, but not sense ("Do not multiply senses
beyond necessity" -- Grice's modified Occam Razor).
The specific meaning of "female child" is only late 14c.
Applied to "any young unmarried woman" since mid-15c.
Meaning "sweetheart" is from 1640s.
---- end of interlude on "Alice".
Torgeir goes on:
"If McEvoy earnestly and truthfully would like to know the number of times
social scientists have penetrated into the laboratories, the answer to this is
likely to be found in what is usually referred to as a meta-study. For those
who consider themselves rightly to be non-specialist in this area, there is a
long history of social constructivist scholarship, dating back at least to the
1950s (The Social Construction of Reality). Making use of any of the widely
available search engines in the Internet is likely to provide McEvoy
with a long and educational reading list."
"The Social Construction of Reality" is now a paperback. I think Searle, the
Oxonian philosopher, once defended it!
Torgeir goes on:
"To those who take a sceptical view to the fraudulent and deceptive approach to
scholarship documented by Sokal in his self-aggrandising volume, it is worth
one's while to also take into account the position of those who published his
initial -- and fake -- article. Stanley Fish, then editor of Social Text,
responded to what became a cover story in
the New York Times with an op-ed, giving the editorial team's view on the
matter. These were events that took place in the mid 1990s, when so-called
social constructivism had already been around for about 40 years."
Indeed. It may be worthwhile to examine (or try to verify) if what McEvoy might
find through the looking glass is "The social construction of reality".
For the record, the index goes:
Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise
in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Note the use of 'treatise,' a Wittgensteinian word, in the subtitle. Note the
repetition of 'socio-' in "social" and "sociology". And note that while Berger
has two initials, Luckmann only has one. In "Anchor books," "anchor" is used
_figuratively_.
What _is_ a social construction?
Let us consider the Griceian implicatures in terms of conceptual analysis.
As Grice would note, while constructionist claims often take the passive form
of a declaration that
i. Y is socially constructed.
it is more useful to think of social constructionist claims as having the form
of a two-part relation:
ii. X socially constructs Y.
We can then think of different accounts of social construction as differing in
their accounts either of the relation itself, or of one or both relata. But the
Griceian bibliography that has been socially constructed is indeed immense, and
below.
Cheers,
Speranza
Andreassen, R. O., 1998. “A New Perspective on the Race Debate,” British
Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 49: 199–225.
Appiah, K. A., 1996. “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in
Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, K. A. Appiah and A. Guttmann
(eds.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 30–105.
Armon-Jones, C., 1986. “The Thesis of Constructionism,” in The Social
Construction of Emotion, R. Harrè (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 32–55.
Atran, S., 1998. “Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive
Universals and Cultural Particulars,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21:
547–609.
Averill, J., 1980a. “A constructivist view of emotion,” in Emotion: Theory,
Research and Experience (Vol. 1: Theories of Emotion), R. Plutchik and H.
Kellerman (eds.), New York: Academic Press. pp. 305–339.
–––, 1980b. “Emotion and Anxiety: sociocultural, biological, and psychological
determinants”, in Explaining Emotions, A. Rorty (ed.), Berkeley: University of
California Press. pp. 37–72.
Bach, T., 2012. “Gender Is a Natural Kind with a Historical Essence,” Ethics,
122(2): 231–272.
Barnes, B., D. Bloor, et al., 1996. Scientific knowledge: a sociological
analysis, London: Athlone.
Boghossian, P., 2006. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Boyd, R., 1992. “Constructivism, Realism, and Philosophical Method,” Inference,
Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science, J.
Earman, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 131–198.
Boyd, R. and P. J. Richerson, 1985. Culture and the evolutionary process,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
–––, 2005. The origin and evolution of cultures, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Boyer, P., 1994. The naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of
religion, Berkeley: University of California Press.
–––, 2001. Religion explained: the human instincts that fashion gods, spirits
and ancestors, London: Heinemann.
Bruner, J., L. Postman, et al., 1951. “Expectation and the Perception of
Color,” American Journal of Psychology, LXIV: 216–227.
Butler, J., 1990. Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge.
Campbell, D. T., 1960. “Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative
Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes,” Psychological Review, 67: 380–400.
Carruthers, P., 2006. The architecture of the mind: massive modularity and the
flexibility of thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. and M. W. Feldman, 1981. Cultural transmission and
evolution: a quantitative approach, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Chalmers, D. J., 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Churchland, P., 1988. “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality: A
Reply to Jerry Fodor,” Philosophy of Science, 55(2): 167–187.
Cochran, G., J. Hardy, et al., 2006. “Natural History of Ashkenazi
Intelligence,” Journal of Biosocial Science, 38: 659–693.
Dawkins, R., 1976. The selfish gene, New York: Oxford University Press.
Feldman, M. and L. Cavalli-Sforza, 1989. “On the theory of evolution under
genetic and cultural transmission with application to the lactose absorption
problem,” in Mathematical Evolutionary Theory, ed. M. Feldman. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press. pp. 145–173.
Fine, A., 1996. “Science Made Up: Constructivist Sociology of Scientific
Knowledge,” in The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. P.
Galison and D. Stump. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 231–54.
Fodor, J., 1984. “Observation Reconsidered,” Philosophy of Science, 51: 23–43.
–––, 1988. “A Reply to Churchland's ‘Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical
Neutrality’,” Philosophy of Science, 55(2): 188–198.
–––, 1983. The Modularity of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A Bradford Book.
Foucault, M., 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, New
York: Pantheon.
Franks, B., 2011. Culture and cognition : evolutionary perspectives,
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Godfrey-Smith, P., 1996. Complexity and the function of mind in nature, New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Grice, H. P. The conception of value, the Carus Lectures. Oxford: Clarendon.
Griffiths, P. E., 1997. What Emotions Really Are, Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Hacking, I., 1986. “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism:
Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, T. C. Heller, M.
Sosna and D. E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 222–236.
–––, 1991. “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,” Critical Inquiry, 17:
253–288.
–––, 1992. “Multiple personality disorder and its hosts,” History of the Human
Sciences, 5(2): 3–31.
–––, 1992. “World Making by Kind Making: Child-Abuse for Example,” in How
Classification Works: Nelson Goodman among the Social Sciences, ed. M. Douglas
and D. Hull. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 180–238.
–––, 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
–––, 1995. “The looping effects of human kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A
Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. J. Premack, New
York: Clarendon Press: 351–394.
–––, 1998. Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental
Illnesses, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.
–––, 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Halperin, D. M., 1990. One hundred years of homosexuality: and other essays on
Greek love, New York: Routledge.
Harré, R., 1986. “An outline of the social constructionist viewpoint,” in The
Social Construction of Emotions, R. Harré, New York: Basil Blackwell: 2–14.
–––, 1986. “Emotion talk across times: Accidie and melancholy in the
psychological context,” in The Social Construction of Emotions, R. Harré. New
York: Basil Blackwell: 220– 227.
Haslanger, S., 1995. “Ontology and Social Construction,” Philosophical Topics,
23(2): 95–125.
–––, 2003. “Social Construction: The ‘Debunking’ Project,” in Socializing
Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality, F. Schmitt. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield: 301–325.
–––, 2005. “What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social
Kinds,” Hypatia, 20(4): 10–26.
–––, 2012. Resisting reality : social construction and social critique, New
York: Oxford University Press.
Hirschfeld, L. A., 1996. Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the
Child's Construction of Human Kinds, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Holden, C. and R. Mace, 1997. “Phylogenetic analysis of the evolution of
lactose digestion in adults,” Human Biology, 5: 605–628.
Hull, D. L., 1988. Science as a process: an evolutionary account of the social
and conceptual development of science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kelly, D., E. Machery, et al., 2010. “Race and Racial Cognition,” The Oxford
Handbook of Moral Psychology, J. M. Doris and T. M. P. R. Group (eds.), Oxford:
Oxford University Press: 433–471.
Kitcher, P., 1993. The advancement of science: science without legend,
objectivity without illusions, New York: Oxford University Press.
–––, 1999. “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in Racism, ed. L. Harris, New
York: Humanity Books: 87–120.
–––, 2001. Science, truth, and democracy, Oxford, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Kripke, S. A., 1980. Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Kuhn, T. S., 1962/1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kukla, A., 2000. Social constructivism and the philosophy of science, London:
Routledge.
Kunda, Z., 1999. Social Cognition: Making Sense of People, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Laqueur, T. W., 1990. Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Laudan, L., 1981. “The pseudo-science of science?” Philosophy of the Social
Sciences, 11: 173–98.
Machery, E. and L. Faucher, 2005. “Social Construction and the Concept of
Race,” Philosophy of Science, 72: 1208–1219.
Mallon, R., 2003. “Social Construction, Social Roles and Stability,” in
Socializing Metaphysics, ed. F. Schmitt, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield:
327–353.
–––, 2004. “Passing, Traveling, and Reality: Social Construction and the
Metaphysics of Race,” Noûs 38(4): 644–673.
–––, 2006. “‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” Ethics, 116(3):
525–551.
–––, 2007a. “A Field Guide to Social Construction,” Philosophy Compass, 2(1):
93–108.
–––, 2007b. “Arguments from Reference and the Worry About Dependence,” Midwest
Studies in Philosophy, XXXI: 160–183.
–––, 2007c. “Human Categories Beyond Non-Essentialism,” Journal of Political
Philosophy, 15(2): 146–168.
Mallon, R., E. Machery, S. Nichols, and S. P. Stich, 2009. “Against Arguments
from Reference” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, VOLUME: PAGES.
Mallon, R. and S. P. Stich, 2000. “The Odd Couple: The Compatibility of Social
Construction and Evolutionary Psychology,” Philosophy of Science, 67: 133–154.
Mannheim, K., 1936. Ideology and utopia; an introduction to the sociology of
knowledge, New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Mills, C., 1998. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Murphy, D., 2006. Psychiatry in the scientific image, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nelson, A., 1994. “How Could Scientific Facts be Socially Constructed?” Studies
in the History and Philosophy of Science, 25(4): 535–547.
Nichols, S., 2002. “On the Genealogy of Norms: A Case for the Role of Emotion
in Cultural Evolution,” Philosophy of Science, 69: 234–255.
–––, 2007. “The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History
of Philosophy,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXI: 260–270.
Nisbett, R. E. and L. Ross, 1980. Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings
of social judgment, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Odling-Smee, F. J., K. N. Laland, et al., 2003. Niche construction: the
neglected process in evolution, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Outlaw, L., 1990. “Toward a Critical Theory of ‘Race’,” in Anatomy of Racism,
ed. D. T. Goldberg, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 58–82.
Outlaw, L., 1995. “On W.E.B. Du Bois's ‘The Conservation of Races’,” in
Overcoming Racism and Sexism, L. A. Bell and D. Blumenfeld (eds.), Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield: 79–102.
Pickering, A., 1984. Constructing quarks: a sociological history of particle
physics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Pinker, S., 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, New York:
Viking.
Popper, Why I'm not a social constructivist -- nor I want to be! [This is an
implicature on Russell, "Why I'm not a Christian," known by heart by the
protagonist of "Indignation," a film based on Roth's novel, now playing]
Prinz, J. J., 2007. The emotional construction of morals, Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Putnam, H., 1975. “The meaning of ‘meaning’,” Mind, Language and Reality:
Philosophical Papers, New York: Cambridge University Press. 2: 215–271.
Quine, W. V. O., 1953. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of
View, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 20–46.
Root, M., 2000. “How We Divide the World,” Philosophy of Science, 67
(Proceedings): 628–639.
Rosen, G., 1994. “Objectivity and Modern Idealism: What is the Question?” in
Philosophy in Mind: The Place of Philosophy in the Study of Mind, ed. M.
Michael and J. O'Leary-Hawthorne, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 277–319.
Scheff, T., 1984. Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory, New York: Aldine
Publishing Co.
Searle, J., 1995. The Construction of Social Reality, New York: The Free
Press.[a pun on the essay mentioned by Torgeir above]
Showalter, E., 1996. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Sripada, C., 2006. “Punishment and the strategic structure of moral systems,”
Biology and Philosophy, 20: 767–789.
Steele, C., 2010. Whistling Vivaldi : and other clues to how stereotypes affect
us, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Stein, E., 1990. “Conclusion: The Essentials of Constructionism and the
Construction of Essentialism,” in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the
Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. E. Stein, New York: Routledge: 325–353.
–––, 1999. The mismeasure of desire: the science, theory and ethics of sexual
orientation, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Stein, E. (ed.), 1990. Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social
Constructionist Controversy, New York: Routledge.
Sterelny, K., 2003. Thought in a hostile world: the evolution of human
cognition, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Sundstrom, R., 2002. “Race as a Human Kind,” Philosophy and Social Criticism,
28(1): 91–115.
Taylor, P. C., 2004. Race: a philosophical introduction, Malden, MA: Polity
Press.
Thomasson, A., 2003. “Realism and Human Kinds,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 67(3): 580–609.
Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman, 1974. “Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and
biases,” Science, 185: 1124–1131.
Wilson, D. S., 2005. “Evolutionary Social Constructivism”, in The literary
animal: Evolution and the nature of narrative, J. Gottschall and D. S. Wilson
(eds.), Evanston: Northwestern University Press: 20–37.
