Episode 90: Ásta Sveinsdóttir discusses social construction
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What is the overall focus of the episode and who is the guest?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. I just want to say thanks very much for all the iTunes reviews. They've been very helpful and please keep 'em coming. As always you can find us on Twitter at adelucidations pod And you can check out our blog at Lucian, that's L U C I A N Lucian dot usicago dot edu slash blogs slash elucidations. One other thing I wanted to mention is that since August we've been doing our hosting through a new startup called Pippa, which is pretty cool. It's actually founded by some former philosophers. And I have to say I've been very impressed so far. The service is totally free, provides detailed analytics, makes it very easy for you to migrate from your previous host to them.
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Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from San Francisco. I'm Matt Tikeman. And with me is Osta Svenstotter. Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, and she is here to talk to us about social construction. As the Sven stutter? Welcome.
Thank you, Matt. I was very excited when you asked me to do this conversation with you, partly because I'm so excited that philosophers are increasingly interested in social construction. There have been some prominent philosophers who have been working on social construction for quite some time, including Ian Hacking and Sally Haslinger and Ron Mallon, but It hasn't really been part of a mainstream occupation. But I think there's some change there. I mean I would like philosophers to be more engaged with a lot of things that is going on in the academy and outside of the academy and s I see this interest in this topic as part of that. That being said, there's so many things that could be said to be socially constructed.
So I think in order to get a clear on what we're really talking about, we have to make some distinctions. In particular, we have to make a distinction between whether we're talking about our conception of the thing or the idea of the thing and say that It's the idea or the conception or our understanding of the thing that's socially constructed or as a result of social practices or whether we're wanting to say that the thing itself is socially constructed. So as an example, are we saying that Some people have argued that Nature is socially constructed and what they've really brought to bear on that is to say that the way we understand nature, the our concept of nature or conception of nature, or something like that.
That that is influenced by social practices and very historically contingent and things like that.
So what would an example of uh nature being socially constructed? Like a like a deer in the woods? Is a deer in the woods socially constructed in some way?
I don't wanna say that it is, right? So Um what I wanna say is that even if our understanding of nature, our concept of nature, the way we think of nature Із інфуенцбак, з мабієв. determined by social practices in some way. It doesn't show that nature itself is, right? And I'm mostly interested in the kind of social construction where the thing itself is supposed to be social construction. So I don't think nature is a good example of that. I think things like, say, money or institutions, they are good examples of that. But also kinds of people, things like recessions. I think those things are social entities in a sort of way and they're socially constructed. But there are also things that are maybe physical phenomena but could also be said to be socially constructed.
And in order to get a sense in which that can be the case, I think we have to make a distinction between causal construction and constitutive construction. And so this is a distinction that comes from Haslinger and Ron Malone has used it as well.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the overall focus of the episode and who is the guest?
0:00–6:25
2
How does Ásta define social construction and why does it matter?
6:25–12:54
3
What distinction does Ásta draw between causal and constitutive social construction?
12:54–26:35
4
How is disability used as a concrete example of social construction?
26:35–28:54
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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