The social construction of what?
by Ian Hacking · first published 1999
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2017–2023first – last mentioned
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Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality.
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:P Ive recently been reading Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What? which is a serious yet very entertaining analysis of all those Social Construction of X books and ideas. And probably much more worth reading than any of them.
on “Ask HN: Which are the most damaging books you've read?” ↗Some of the most memorable/useful/wonderful: Fleck - Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact Hacking - The Social Construction of What? Felsner - Geometric Graphs and Arrangements xkcd volume 0 Tommy Wonder - The Books of Wonder Elisabeth Lloyd - Science, Politics and Evolution ..and, it's embarrassing to admit it on here :-) but…
on “Ask HN: What is the best book you read on 2017?” ↗It’s been a long time since I read it, but Social Construction of What? was a great book, philosophy at its best, in my opinion: lending clarity and rigor to concepts that reach into law, psychology, medicine, ethics, and the every day.
on “Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87” ↗…natural kind, which I think would have added some clarity to the article. A related approach that could have added clarity (though I can’t recall whether it deals with natural kinds per se) is Hacking’s Social Construction of What? which lays out a sort of hierarchy for how socially constructed a given phenomenon is. It attempts to add rigor to our intuitions around how objective or subjective a given judgement is.
on “We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned the Bitter Lesson” ↗…no information. You failed to clarify what you meant and only managed to make a vague reference to Berger. There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”. > Dismissing the entire subfield as vapid comes across…
on “The Secret Joke at the Heart of the Harvard Affirmative-Action Case” ↗…the concept of IQ. We can talk about it in terms of constitutiveness, grounding, expert-novice problems, &c. >There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”. You're describing science. Science "allows" people to…
on “The Secret Joke at the Heart of the Harvard Affirmative-Action Case” ↗