(December 22, 2022 at 1:04 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(December 21, 2022 at 12:20 pm)paulpablo Wrote: So what comprises a mountain exists it doesn't matter what we want to call it, but it's a mountain because people agreed that hills over a certain height are mountains and everyone mostly agreed.

If everyone changed their minds it would change what mountains and hills are.

I wonder if it would make sense to differentiate two different types of thing here.

First, social construct as definition of existing thing. So whether the mound is a hill or a mountain, whether Pluto is a planet or something else, depends on definition. The object would exist even if humans were completely unaware of them.

Second, another kind of social construct would be something that only exists because people believe in it. Such things have no physical existence you can point to. They are relationships among people, agreements to act in certain ways, etc. I'm thinking this category could include marriage, other contracts involving promises, etc. Perhaps government. The fact that these things are recorded on paper, or have buildings built to house them, doesn't mean they are concrete objects. The marriage record in city hall is not the marriage, the capitol building is not the government. 

In the case of this second type, if the social construct changed, the agreed-upon thing would cease to exist -- unlike the case of a mountain.

I've been reading through some threads on reddit in my spare time at work. At least I'm not the only one crazy enough to have had the thought everything might be a social construct because there's threads on there about it.

Even some seemingly knowledgeable people on there were taking the question seriously.
I don't know much about them but the concept is interesting.

I'm definitely not saying things physically disappear when humans don't define them.
It's more that it seems most things, even officially defined things, are defined just well enough to be socially agreed upon rather than having an objective reality.

(December 22, 2022 at 1:23 am)paulpablo Wrote: I've been reading through some threads on reddit in my spare time at work. At least I'm not the only one crazy enough to have had the thought everything might be a social construct because there's threads on there about it.

Oh, man, if you're doing philosophy on reddit you're a braver man than I am. It can get wild over there. 

Quote:Even some seemingly knowledgeable people on there were taking the question seriously. 
I don't know much about them but the concept is interesting.

Absolutely, I think it's a fascinating and important topic. 

Even if we agree that not everything (mountains, Pluto) is a social construct, I think it's true to say that how we perceive things is always filtered through our social construction of them. No one sees the world "raw," so to speak. Our socially-constructed images are always put in play to interpret and filter our perceptions. 

There's a saying in art school: "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing you see." Because the ideal, for some artists, is to draw what's there as directly as possible, without accepting influence from our social interpretations, our selfish desires for one thing over another, etc. Nearly all beginning artists, for example, draw the faces much bigger in proportion to the body than they really are, just because the faces are more interesting to us. (And if the model is a woman, the guys draw the boobs too big.) This is maybe not exactly what "social construct" means, but it certainly parallels the idea that what we perceive of the world is strongly adjusted by our ideas about it.

Recently among people who study aesthetics the big topic has been "The Aesthetics of Nature." The thinking behind this is that we have been trained to look at the world as if it were a work of art. If we look at the view from a train window and say, "Oh, that's beautiful," usually what we mean is "Oh, that looks like a painting." So these modern guys want to dissociate our judgement of beauty and interest in nature from our judgement of beauty and interest in art. Art being very much a social construct, they want to discard that as a criteria for judging non-art things. I'm not sure it's quite possible, or what will come of it. But it's evidence that, as you say, teasing out the social constructs that we inevitably use in perceiving the world is a worthwhile thing to do.

(December 22, 2022 at 1:23 am)paulpablo Wrote: I'm definitely not saying things physically disappear when humans don't define them.
It's more that it seems most things, even officially defined things, are defined just well enough to be socially agreed upon rather than having an objective reality.

Some do.  Social constructs, for example.  I think what you're missing is that a thing is not a social construct just because society agrees.  A society might agree on x because x is true. A thing is a social construct when it's existence is dependent -only- on that agreement.

The physical organism exists or does not exist as the case may be, irrespective of any social construct.   But that we bucket that thing with “tree” is mostly a social construct born out cognative framework and the need to share such framework.   The bucketing in a cognitive framework may reflect physical distinction deep or shallow, or distinctions that is without a difference to a only very slightly altered cognative framework,      But even if the bucketing reflects fundamental physical distinctions, it is still no less a social construct.      If our perceptual cognative framework is different, we can conceivably have no conception of that prickly woody thing that stands before us is anything other than an gross unevenness in the ground, despite deep differences in organization and molecular make up. here the ground is smoother, there it repletes with highly complex fractal-ish prickly topology

I think there is a tendency to connect “social construct” with made up, which is the case, but what is made up is the construct, not the thing to which it applies.    The social construct allows us to communicate better and model our world better in our minds.    It is the social construct we menipulate in our brains, that construct can be an close analogy, a partial analogy or lose analogy or entirely without parallel to parts of the physical reality we can observe and menipulate.

(December 20, 2022 at 10:56 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Dogs are fully domesticated, cats are not.  That's why stray cats are a bigger issue than stray dogs.  Cats, if left to their own devices, would not change their behaviors very much and have no trouble surviving and reproducing.  Our dogs (and our cattle, and our sheep, etc), on the other hand, don't last very long in a post human world.