What is Good Science: Why ask What?
From BluWiki
"Why ask What?" (1999) is a chapter by I. Hacking, published in The Social Construction of of What? (ISBN 0674004124).
Summary
‘Social construction and its effect on human being’
Social construction is likely to impose a so-called looping effect on human kinds, meaning a conscious change of the individual’s behaviour, as constructivism invents classifications to which people actively react either by adopting or from which they distance themselves consciously.
- warning of relativism, which might entail that any kind of religious fundamentalism is as good as any kind of science
- relativism and decline are real worries
- great deal (or all) of our lived experience and of the world we inhabit, is to be conceived of as socially constructed
- aim to raise consciousness
- people want to eradicate status quo (x)
Gender
- gender to be understood as social category which definition makes reference to a broad network of social relations, not a matter of anatomical differences
- people become gendered by what they do (performance)
Woman Refugees
- from states perspective: socially constructed is not the individual people, but the classification:
- species like the whale
- individual women and their experiences of themselves are changed by being so classified (idea of matrix)
- the idea of the woman refugee is constructed
A Precondition
- no one doubts that contracts and institutions are the result of historical events and social processes
=> hence no one urges that they are socially constructed
The Self
- Existentialism: self that constructs itself by free acts of will accepting agonizing responsibility for that which it has constructed
- interplay of history, social conditioning, and the chosen behaviour of the individual person can hardly be called construction at all
Essentialism, About Race, For Example
- race is not inevitable only in present state of affairs
- essentialism often is a crutch for racism, but need not be
- unqualified constructionism about race clouds our view
- essentialism is merely the strongest version of inevitability
Emotions
- social concept model:
- emotions are inherently cognitive and conceptual , and are the concepts peculiar to a social group, formed by the culture of that group
- social role model:
- an emotion is a transitory social role
- social construction more code than description
- insights of social constructivism are perfectly compatible with what is known about the evolutionary basis of emotion
Grades of Commitment
- six grades of constructivism:
- Historical
- Ironic
- Reformist / Unmasking
- Rebellious
- Revolutionary
- perhaps he only ay you can begin to be a constructionist about the idea of the economy is to pass at once from irony to evolution
Objects, Ideas, and Elevator Words
- three distinguishable types of things said to be socially constructed: ideas, objects, elevator words (truth, facts, reality)
- thesis about construction of fact is different in character from a thesis about the construction of the child viewer of TV , for it is not about the construction of either an object or an idea
Universal Constructivism
- claim: everything is socially constructed all the way down (not author’s opinion)
- our experience of reality, our sense of reality as other result of processes and activities which they thought might aptly be called social construction
The Child Viewer of Television
- no definite class of children until child viewer of TV becomes thought of as social problem
- since children are such self-aware creatures, they may become not only children who watch TV, but, in their own self-consciousness, child reviewers
Why What? First Sinner, Myself
- there need be no clash between construction and reality
- concepts, practices and people interact with each other
- such interaction is often the very point of talk of social construction
Why What? Second Sinner, Stanley Fish
- baseball social construction: real as well as constructed
- all ideas have histories, as does any idea, and they have different types of history, including social histories
Interactions
- all our acts are under descriptions and the acts that are open to us depend, in a purely formal way, on the descriptions available to us
- in social sciences are conscious interactions between kind and person
Two Question Areas
- successful science did not have to develop in the way it did, but could have had different successes evolving in other ways that do not converge on the route that was in fact taken
- question for
- contingency
- metaphysics
- stability
- choices have consequences for the very group, for the kind of people that is invoked
- people of a kind may become false because people of that kind have changed in virtue of what they believe about themselves -> looping effect of human kinds
- social construction of genius or anorexia, they are likely talking about the idea, individuals falling under the idea, the interaction between the idea and the people and the manifold of social practices and institutions that these interactions involve: the matrix in short
