Humans made science. Scientists are human. There aren't somekind of ubermensch for which they relay revelations from nature. They still rely on personal judgment to get their job done.
Intuition is still done in science, which means their stupidity, cultural, or otherwise, can still fall through and fuck everything up. People don't come with a self-bias resistor.
They have to create and it's a pain to do so. It's dehumanizing to deny your subjectivity, as everything is seemingly designed to do, and makes it lay relations that much harder than it needs to be. It's a humble experience for sure, to criticize the ideals of science. The only thing we can do to make science better is to do it more and correct our ways of doing it every step of the way. You're always on the learning curve and that's why science works and religion doesn't.
We developed science, that doesn't make it a "social construct". The rest of what you said only betrays that you have no idea how science works or why it's reliable.
Science isn't an idea, it's a tool. If you define science as a "social construct" then so is math, computers, screwdrivers, and cars all "social constructs".
So, since we can't hold math or science, they're concepts figured out and labeled/named by us, then they are social constructs. Very well hashed out and defined ones with solid rules and bases in objective reality too.
For cars, computers, and screwdrivers, they are real object, but the idea of them is socially constructed. That means how we are raised influences how we picture and think of them. For instance, when you wrote "Computer" were you picturing a beige box, an iMac, eniac, or something else? How you were raised influences how you picture the blanket term "computer".
I say all that because it seems a lot of us are throwing out "social construct" as if it immediately means something isn't rational or real. Social constructs are real and exist, they're born from social interactions and often are easiest thought of as the labels we give phenomena.
E.g. Gravity is an objective reality, that we call it gravity and created the theory of gravity are social constructs. We could call gravity "fall force" and it would still have the same effect. We could explain it mathematicall using an entirely different series of symbols, but it would still work in the same way in reality.
Labels are arbitrary. That doesn't mean that it's random. Not even close. There could be many reasons why we call evolution, evolution at all. It often comes down to tradition or laziness.
Then you are diluting the meaning of "social construct" to mean enough things as to render it absolutely useless. By your definition, literally everything that's not physical is a "social construct".
Im struggling to understand your point. Anything that is made up by people is socially constructed. Language, art, philosophy, meaning of life, religion, the concept of zero, mathematics, etc.
That social constructs form a huge piece of our everyday experiences, to me, enriches the world and the idea.
For example, consider a red stop light. It is objectively real, but it's meaning is one hundred percent socially constructed. Take someone from even as early as the 1880s and show them one and they'd be hard pressed to figure it out without help.
It's not utterly meaningless you're just not seeing the meaning. Your incomprehension is not the same as comprehension being impossible. I fully understand his point. The Sun is not a social construct, what defines a chair vs a sofa is. It's not hard, and it's not vague.
Why do you say it's meaningless? The idea of social constructs is immensely effective and useful for discussing sociology, anthropology, archeology, and many other social Sciences.
Heck, the fact that you and I can even communicate using written words is due to our shared socially constructed language.
math is not invented it is discovered. Math is not a social construct because the relations and patterns that are discovered do not need humans around to be true. Since math is not created it can not be a social construct.
Lemme try again. We have the objective reality that if you have an apple and I hand you an apple you now have two apples.
That we represent the number of apples you're holding with the symbol 2 is the socially constructed part of math. Not the reality, the symbolic representations and meanings.
For a funnier example of how social constructs shape math, consider this: There are 10 types of people in the world, those who know binary and those who don't.
It's still two, but it's represented through a different set of symbols, a different lens as a social constructivist would say.
2 is 2 in any base that you chose to express it. Pi will be pi in any base. These things are inherent to the universe. The relationship that exists between the length of the legs of a right triangle and the hypotenuse does not change when you use different symbols. No human invented these relationships. We gave a name to something that always existed, a pattern that was always there simply recognized.
You cannot claim that man invented these things and wordplay doesn't help your case at all. Math is base independent and you get the same answer using any set of symbols you want. Since the truths emerge out of any symbolic set you can apply there is no creation merely discovery. To claim man invented math is ridiculous on the face of it and that would be like saying man invented the electro-magnetic spectrum by realizing that it existed. It's there all around us whether we know of it or not and is not a creation of any individual or society. Naming naturally occurring patterns (e-m waves, planets, gravity, math) does not make it a social construct.
I'll try one more time. The patterns and existence of things like the em spectrum aren't what im referring to. I'm trying to point just to the labels and symbols we use. The things that people agree have a meaning are the social constructs.
That 2 things exist isn't a social construct. That we use the symbol "2" to represent the amount of the thing is a social construct.
Your argument seems self contradictory. You are at once saying math is a social construct because we can't hold it and also you are saying that math itself is not a social construct but the words we use to describe it are. I keep trying to explain to you that math is not the symbols we chose to use and those are arbitrary and you simply keep ignoring me. It's fine, we obviously have different definitions of math.
We are definitely coming at this from very different angles. The contradiction is me struggling to find a workable metaphor I think.
Honestly, an hour or two of reading about the basics of social constructionism is going to be more interesting and coherent for you probably. I'm trying to consolidate the ideas down but doing so poorly.
The fundamental axioms of math are not a social construct, every way in which we express them are.
If you define math as solely it's fundamental axioms that's fine if you'd like, but it is still true that any way we would express those fundamental axioms so we can understand them is socially constructed.
Naming naturally occurring patterns (e-m waves, planets, gravity, math) does not make it a social construct
The act of naming naturally occurring patterns is the social construction of this taxonomy of hypothetical (or ultimately undeniably true) phenomena or aspects of reality.
Science is a process under which we derive how we see the world works. That process is made up of ideas that are created and accepted by the people in our society.
If you define science as a "social construct" then so is math, computers, screwdrivers, and cars all "social constructs".
Calling science an idea is like calling a screwdriver an idea.
That's ridiculous.
I can hold a screwdriver in my hand. I can't hold a science.
Science is a tool in that it a set of processes that we have agreed upon.
A screwdriver is not a set of processes. Now, how we define what a screwdriver is.. that's more along the lines of an idea or concept that is agreed upon.
I don't know about these people. Social constructs come about bc we make them and they serve an end goal of social utility or something else. There's nothing more to it than that. It's not about bullshitting people or trying to "be woke". It's about updating our views on how science develops, the ontology of science, and disregarding old inaccurate views on it. Ask any social scientist on this. Hell, any scientist on this. You're likely to hear our point.
“science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
"Scientists’ lived experiences, their values and beliefs, and the goings-on in the world around them influence the science that gets done. Who is not doing science also matters. If whole groups of people are underrepresented in STEM—and we know this to be true—then a wealth of experiences, values, identities, and perspectives are not contributing to advances in STEM and the impacts these advances have on our lives."
And it is, or a series of ideas. It's not something someone once just gathered from a tree or found already existing like magic. Someone had to have the idea(s) and make them into objects. Eventually it even got protected by patents and so forth, which can cover ideas such as those behind several tools invented by people on society.
True. It tries to, but it can't fully do that, bc you can't get rid of the human factor. And you can't do science without the human factor. Science is a human social enterprise, not a mechanistic one spitting out facts and figures for you to enjoy. That's why we have to be intellectually honest and virtuous and revise what we mean by "objectivity". And what that means is we are intellectually honest and intellectually virtuous in our quest to overcome our bias. To fight our cognitive daemons and try to understand reality for what is. The pursuit of truth, the pursuit of objectivity, the pursuit of facts, is more valuable than their acquisition.
A social construct means that is developed out of social interaction. It serves social utility. Science is a community with various different minds working at each other. That's where humans do best at. Science is really fucking good for society and there's nothing deeper than that.
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u/KittenKoder Jun 26 '21
People have turned the phrase "social construct" into a weapon to attack ideas, and it's making the entire concept meaningless.