scholarly journals The Relevance of Causal Social Construction

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Marques
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Stereotype Threat ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Social Kinds ◽  
Performance Effects ◽  
Social Causes

AbstractSocial constructionist claims are surprising and interesting when they entail that presumably natural kinds are in fact socially constructed. The claims are interesting because of their theoretical and political importance. Authors like Díaz-León argue that constitutive social construction is more relevant for achieving social justice than causal social construction. This paper challenges this claim. Assuming there are socially salient groups that are discriminated against, the paper presents a dilemma: if there were no constitutively constructed social kinds, the causes of the discrimination of existing social groups would have to be addressed, and understanding causal social construction would be relevant to achieve social justice. On the other hand, not all possible constitutively socially constructed kinds are actual social kinds. If an existing social group is constitutively constructed as a social kind K, the fact that it actually exists as a K has social causes. Again, causal social construction is relevant. The paper argues that (i) for any actual social kind X, if X is constitutively socially constructed as K, then it is also causally socially constructed; and (ii) causal social construction is at least as relevant as constitutive social construction for concerns of social justice. For illustration, I draw upon two phenomena that are presumed to contribute towards the discrimination of women: (i) the poor performance effects of stereotype threat, and (ii) the silencing effects of gendered language use.

The Social Construction of Human Kinds

Hypatia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 716-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Metaphysical Claim ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
Response Dependence ◽  
Human Kind

Social construction theorists face a certain challenge to the effect that they confuse the epistemic and the metaphysical: surely our conceptions of something are influenced by social practices, but that doesn't show that the nature of the thing in question is so influenced. In this paper I take up this challenge and offer a general framework to support the claim that a human kind is socially constructed, when this is understood as a metaphysical claim and as a part of a social constructionist debunking project. I give reasons for thinking that a conferralist framework is better equipped to capture the social constructionist intuition than rival accounts of social properties, such as a constitution account and a response‐dependence account, and that this framework helps to diagnose what is at stake in the debate between the social constructionists and their opponents. The conferralist framework offered here should be welcomed by social constructionists looking for firm foundations for their claims, and for anyone else interested in the debate over the social construction of human kinds.

What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 10-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Haslanger
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Semantic Externalism ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Methods Of Analysis ◽  
Social Kinds ◽  
And Gender

Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all. The question arises: what do we mean by the terms? It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are definitive. However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credibility to social constructionist projects.

The truth in social construction

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-108
Author(s):  
Neil Levy
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Biological Psychiatry ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
Diagnostic And Statistical Manual ◽  
Social Explanation ◽  
Neural Dysfunctions ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Research Domain

Central strands of biological psychiatry, such as the Research Domain Criteria championed by Thomas Insel, aim to identify mental illnesses with genetic and/or neural dysfunctions. Such approaches are justified by the mismatch between psychopathologies picked out by descriptive criteria (such as those used by the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and neural correlates: patients presenting with the same symptoms may share little at the neural level, while those who share dysfunction at the neural level may exhibit quite different symptoms. Biological psychiatry is typically understood as opposed to social constructionist approaches to mental illness. This chapter argues that because symptomatology and disorders of neural circuits fail to match, biological psychiatry needs to embrace social construction, broadly understood. The differences at the level of symptomatology will often be explicable by differences in patients’ individual histories and social and cultural settings. The notion that social construction and biological psychiatry are mutually exclusive arises from an inchoate and incoherent feeling on both sides that only the second offers a physicalist explanation of mind and behaviour; in fact, a social explanation can ultimately be cashed out in physicalist terms. Nevertheless, systematicity of the kind sciences seek will need to be sought at the level of representations, as well as at the level of the brain, since cultural and social factors are unlikely to be able to be cashed out in terms of physical natural kinds.

Race as a Social Construction

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 115-133
Author(s):  
J. L. A. Garcia ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Ian Hacking ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Linguistic History ◽  
Linda Alcoff

This paper raises serious problems for the commonly held claim that races are socially constructed. The first section sketches out an approach to our construction of institutional phenomena that, taking Searle’s general approach, restricts social construction proper to cases where we adopt rules that bind relevant parties to treat things of a type in certain ways, thus constituting important roles in, and parts of, our social lives. I argue this conception, construction-by-rules, helps distinguish genuine construction from other activities and relations and also solves a problem raised against simplistic conceptions. The second shows why and how Sally Haslanger, Linda Alcoff, and Glenn Loury have explained race as a social construct. The next points out problems for their and other accounts, including circularity, difficulties arising from conceptual and linguistic history, and non sequiturs. After returning to Haslanger in more detail, I proceed critically to engage work by Ian Hacking, Lawrence Blum, Luc Faucher and Edouard Machery, and Charles Mills. The following sections move from specific accounts in the literature to offer general arguments that viewing races as products of social construction threatens to mislead in numerous ways. At the end, I discuss the significance of the issue and challenge whether social constructionist accounts are genuinely liberating.

scholarly journals Causal Social Construction

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-99
Author(s):  
Riin Kõiv
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Biological Factors ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social

AbstractIn the social constructionist literature, little has been said about what it means for social factors to cause X in such a way that X would count as causally socially constructed. In this paper, I argue that being caused by social factors – and thus being causally socially constructed – is best defined in terms of a contrastive counterfactual notion of causation. Unlike some plausible alternatives, this definition captures what is at stake in actual social constructionist debates. It makes transparent which factors the truth of a causal constructionist claim may depend on. By doing so, it sheds light on what the disagreements over whether X is causally socially constructed may turn on. It also helps us to see under which condition the claim that X is socially causally constructed is compatible with the claim that X is caused by biological factors.

scholarly journals Natural kinds of mental disorder

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sander Werkhoven
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Health Problems ◽  
Abnormal Behaviour ◽  
Diagnostic Categories ◽  
Socially Constructed

AbstractAre mental disorders (autism, ADHD, schizophrenia) natural kinds or socially constructed categories? What is at stake if either of these views prove to be true? This paper offers a qualified defence for the view that there may be natural kinds of mental disorder, but also that the implications of this claim are generally overestimated. Especially concerns about over-inclusiveness of diagnostic categories and medicalisation of abnormal behaviour are not addressed by the debate. To arrive at these conclusions the paper opens with a discussion of kind formation in science, followed by an analysis of natural kinds. Seven principled and empirically informed objections to the possibility of natural kinds of mental disorder are considered and rejected. The paper ends with a reflection on diagnostics of mental health problems that don’t fall into natural kinds. Despite the defence of the possibility of natural kinds of mental disorder, this is likely to be the majority of cases.

A Conceptualization Framework of Allyship: Bidirectional Allyship Between Black Heterosexual Women and White Gay Males

2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862110353
Author(s):  
Peter Scaramuzzo ◽  
Michael Bartone ◽  
Jemimah L. Young
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Black Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
Gay Males ◽  
Social Justice Movements ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Heterosexual Women ◽  
Complex Dimensions ◽  
Justice Movements

Allyship is a complicated idea laden with multiple, layered assumptions. One should not presume that allyship conceptually permeates all social justice movements. One should not presume that allyships develop to combat or dismantle a predefined socially constructed ism. A critical interrogation of allyship and allyship constructions necessitates recognition of broader, universal tenets of allyships anywhere. This must go further to embrace the nuanced, situated, dynamic, critically problematic, and complex dimensions rooted in individual lived experiences intersecting multiple marginalizations which contribute as praxis toward an actualizing of individual allyships. Although we will blur constructed distinctions as we progress, here, we endeavor to surface and deliberate upon the derivations and functions and shapes of allyships between two demographic categories, made arbitrarily distinct here for the purposes of engaging in discursive analysis: cisgender heterosexual Black women and cisgender gay White men. In short, we are proposing a way to view this allyship as bidirectional allyships, grounded in social justice frames of existing: a way to see each respective group as traveling within their own lane down a collectively traveled highway. Each traverses the space along their own course, traveling down “their own road.”

Service innovation as a social construction: The role of boundary objects

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Mele ◽  
Roberta Sebastiani ◽  
Daniela Corsaro
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Service Innovation ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Boundary Objects ◽  
Resource Integration ◽  
Shared Meanings ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Outcome Perspective

This article advances a conceptualization of service innovation as socially constructed through resource integration and sensemaking. By developing this view, the current study goes beyond an outcome perspective, to include the collective nature of service innovation and the role of the social context in affecting the service innovation process. Actors enact and perform service innovation through two approaches, one that is more concerted and another that emerges in some way. Each approach is characterized by distinct resource integration processes, in which the boundary objects (artifacts, discourses, and places) play specific roles. They act as bridge-makers that connect actors, thereby fostering resource integration and shared meanings.

Sex Offender Registration: Implications and Difficulties for Ireland

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie McAlinden
Keyword(s):  
Sex Offenders ◽  
Sexual Offenders ◽  
Sex Offender ◽  
Sexual Offending ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Sex Offender Registration ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Justice Process ◽  
Criminal Justice Process ◽  
The Media

This paper explores the implications and difficulties of a system of sex offender registration for the two jurisdictions of Ireland. From the orthodox perspective, registration appears justified. Sexual offending has increase and this is used by the media to generate a ‘moral panic’. However, in terms of Blumer's (1971) developmental perspective, sexual offenders in the community have been socially constructed in Ireland, as a problem requiring specific action. This perspective most adequately explains the formulation of legislation. Arguments expounded in favour of registration include the supposedly high recidivism among sex offenders, the inadequacy of supervision provisions and the resulting need to ‘track’ the offender for public protection. Yet a plethora of obstacles which were not considered at the time the legislation was being formulated, such as cost and inadequate policing resources, may impede its effectiveness in aiding law enforcement and reduce it to symbolic significance only. Given these difficulties, I argue that registration is not an appropriate response to the problem of released sexual offenders in Ireland. Rather, from the social constructionist perspective, I suggest that it is better to ‘treat’ the sex offender through less formal and stringent means in the community, away from the criminal justice process.

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