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What Is Social Construction? bs_bs_banner DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12033 What Is Social Construction? E. Diaz-Leon Abstract: In this paper I discuss the question of what it means to say that a property is socially constructed. I focus on an influential project that many social constructivists are engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and I examine several recent characterizations of social construction, with the aim of assessing which one is more suited to the task. 1. Introduction It is common place in the humanities and the social sciences to claim that certain human features, such as someone’s gender, race, or sexual orientation, are socially constructed. This view about the nature of these human categories (known as Social Constructionism) is supposed to be in contrast with two rival views, namely, Biological Realism (that is, the view that a certain category is a biologically real kind), and Anti-Realism (that is, the view that a certain category is empty: nothing belongs to it, the corresponding expression does not refer to anything). Social constructionism is taken to be a realist account of the nature of a certain category: it is claimed that the category is a real feature of human beings, but it is determined by social, rather than natural or biological properties. In this paper, I will focus on the question of what it means to say that a category is socially constructed. As we will see, it does not make much sense to look for the notion of social construction, because the label can be, and has been, used in different ways. Rather, a better strategy seems to be to focus on some specific projects and aims that social constructionists may have in mind, and ask, with respect to each project, which notion of social construction is most useful. In particular, in this paper I will focus on a very influential project that social constructionists are typically engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and we will discuss which notion of social construction is most useful in this case. More in particular, we will examine some recent characterizations of social construction, and we will ask, for each of them, whether it would entail that a certain human feature is not inevitable in the required sense. In addition, we will explore the related questions of whether the notions of social construc- tion discussed here entail that a property is not intrinsic, or not biological. In short, we are interested in clarifying the notion of social construction because we are interested, first, in clarifying what follows from the claim that a certain category is socially constructed, and second, in clarifying what kind of evidence could be used in order to establish that a certain human feature is socially constructed. European Journal of Philosophy 23:4 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 1137–1152 © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1138 E. Diaz-Leon 2. Social Construction, Contingency, and Inevitability Ian Hacking (1999) has done more than anyone else in trying to clarify what is going on in different social constructionist projects and what notion of social construction is at issue. He claims that many social constructionists about different categories are interested in the following project: Social constructionists about X tend to hold that: (1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is as present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable. Very often they go further, and urge that: (2) X is quite bad as it is. (3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed. (Hacking 1999: 6) This is what I call the project of arguing against the inevitability of a trait. The project is especially appealing when (2) and (3) are held about a certain category: in those cases, claim (1) opens a path for change and transformation regarding what is seen as a harmful state of affairs. But what does (1) mean exactly? Or more precisely: how should (1) be understood, so that claims to that effect really open a path for change and transformation? A preliminary clarification is in order: (1) cannot just be saying that X is contingent. If the point of social constructionism were just to say that a certain feature X is contingent (that is, that it might not have obtained) and is in some sense ‘not inevitable’, then many properties that are presently instantiated in the world, and indeed, most biological properties, would be contingent in that sense.1 If social constructionism were to be understood along these lines, that is, in terms of the contingency of the instantiation or the current distribution of a certain property, then social constructionism about X would not be incompatible with biological realism about X. But as we said at the beginning, this is one of the desiderata for a notion of social construction: social constructionism and biological realism about X seem to be competing views, at least in principle. In addition, and more relevantly for our purposes: if we understand (1) merely in terms of what is metaphysically possible (that is, in terms of what is the case in some metaphysically possible world), then this claim doesn’t really open the way for a feasible strategy to achieve social change and social justice. If the instantiation or distribution of X in the world is not inevitable merely in the sense that, if the laws of nature were different, X would not have existed, or would have been different from the way it actually is, then there isn’t much we can do about the current instantiation or distribution of feature X, assuming that changing the laws of nature is not really in our hands anyway. Therefore, the point of (1) is rather to claim that the instantiation or distri- bution of X is contingent upon certain social events and social arrangements: if those social events and arrangements were different, then facts about X could be © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd What Is Social Construction? 1139 different. As Hacking puts it, the point of (1) is to claim that ‘X was brought into existence or shaped by social events, forces, history, all of which could well have been different’ (Hacking 1999: 7). In this way, when (1), (2) and (3) are all endorsed, with respect to a certain feature X, (1) provides a method for getting rid of X, to wit: by changing the social arrangements that give rise to X.2 The question I want to examine in this paper is this: which notion of social construction is more adequate for the project of arguing against the inevitability of a trait? In order to explore this question, I will focus on several characteri- zations of social construction in the recent literature, and I will ask whether they entail (1) or not. The aim of this inquiry is not just to come up with an artificial notion of social construction that will give us the results that we want; rather, what we are looking for is a method for assessing claims and arguments of the following form: a certain human category, say, race, or gender, or sexual orientation, has such and such features, and therefore it is socially constructed, and therefore it is not inevitable, and therefore facts about the instantiation and distribution of this category (which are taken to be unjust) can be transformed by means of social action. My main aim is to examine arguments of this form, which are obviously important for social and political reasons, so as to tell apart those versions of the argument that work from those that don’t work. 3. The Construction of Ideas In the recent literature, several notions of social construction have been intro- duced, and some important distinctions have been made. The first crucial distinction we have to address concerns the objects of the construction: what is constructed? Hacking (1999) distinguishes two notions of social construction along these lines: the social construction of ideas (or concepts, or theories, that is, mental representations), and the social construction of objects (or individuals, properties, kinds, facts, that is, entities in the world, as opposed to our mental representations of them).3 We will focus on the construction of ideas first. Idea-constructionism about a certain category X, then, amounts to the claim that our ideas, concepts and theories about X are the result of contingent social factors. As Sally Haslanger (2003) argues, this is not a very controversial claim, and on some formulations, it might be trivially true: it is obvious that the theories and concepts we actually have about any domain are to a certain extent the result of contingent historical and social events. For instance, we need individuals with certain psychological traits in order to produce the concepts and theories that we have; furthermore, technological developments, historical events, and even social and political factors (such as what kind of research gets funded) all have an input into what kind of theories and concepts are used today and the level of understanding we have in the different areas of human knowledge, but this does not entail that our theories and concepts, nor the entities they are about, are socially constructed,in any interesting or controversial sense. Of course, this (partial) dependence upon © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1140 E. Diaz-Leon social factors will also hold with respect to theories in the natural sciences, and in particular in the biological sciences, so then the claim of idea-constructionism about X won’t really be incompatible with biological realism about X either.
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