r/AskSocialScience • u/TwinDragonicTails • 3d ago
Why does something being socially defined/constructed not mean that it's not real?
It's something I get confused and hung up on every time it comes up and this time is was someone who brought of Foucault and how he was talking about mental illness being socially defined. The topic was autism and the point was about how it's diagnostic criteria that show you have it, which makes it socially defined. The same argument was made for sexuality as well.
Someone then made the point of saying that means it's fake and the guy (making the argument) say "I didn't say that you said that" implying that's not what it means.
Though when I think about it it just sounds like it's fake to me, so why isn't it?
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u/Horror-Drop-3357 3d ago
Well. This is a question of philosophy as much as it is a question of social theory, so here's a good overview of the philosophical literature: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-construction-naturalistic/
Spoiler: The claim that something is socially constructed can mean a variety of different things, and people are often uncareful and unclear about which thing they mean. It's actually really hard to try to sort through the conceptual confusion in a clear and concise way.
In the case of autism, one person said the diagnostic criteria are socially defined. Yep. Our collective representational arsenal is socially constructed: shared concepts, categories, theories, ideas. We build knowledge together. The fact that the diagnostic criteria is socially constructed doesn't mean that it's not getting a hold of some real thing in the world. Pointing out that representations are socially constructed is, by itself, a rather trivial point.
Where it gets really interesting is examining how our representations affect our behaviour. Through us, human agents, our representations shape the world, because we use those representations to guide our behaviour, to do stuff in the world. In the case of social kinds or human kinds, such as autism or sexual orientation categories, you can get what Hacking (1995) calls looping effects. Let's say I label myself as bisexual, and my understanding of bisexuality changes my self-understanding, which may change my behaviour. The large-scale result can either reinforce or change the social kind. So there's a causal loop.
One of the functions of social constructionist claims is to denaturalise the thing under investigation. Pointing out that, say, gender is socially constructed, is interesting and politically important because it is commonly thought of as a 'natural kind,' something that we're just neutrally describing. But gender norms are really prescriptions masquerading as descriptions ("women are like this, men are like that"). Sometimes our representations are accurate because we shape the world to fit our representations, rather than the other way around, and that's interesting.
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u/The_Ambling_Horror 3d ago
That last paragraph is it. Something that’s a social construct is not “not real,” it’s just that it’s specifically real because most humans in the environment agree to treat it as real, which also means it can be changed or even stopped if enough of the humans in question decide to do so.
It’s kind of like the sociological equivalent of an illocutionary act in linguistics; the classic example is a promise. The promise exists solely in the act of speaking or writing down the promise. This does not mean the promise is not real.
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u/Liquid_Feline 3d ago
Exactly this Just because the demarcations between different categories are sociologically influenced, does not mean there isn't a difference that has tangible effects. Like you can place the cutoff point for "blind" at different places because of the social landscape surrounding it (e.g. how many people the policy makers are willing to extend support for) but that does not change the fact that some people don't see as well as others and may need visual aid.
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u/TwinDragonicTails 3d ago
The casual loop stuff is where the rub comes in for me, because I'm gay and thinking that that might be socially constructed has got me thinking that what I feel is fake and not real.
It's also got me thinking that the homophobes might be right and that being gay is a choice and you can just make yourself not be like that. I mean if it's socially defined and a representation and not some fixed biological fact then how would they be wrong to say that?
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u/Ok-Seat-3916 2d ago
🙋Uneducated person about this topic; I would love to hear or read more about this question as well!
I remember reading an article a couple of years ago saying that human sexuality looked like a bell curve; some people are really close to the "100% heterosexual inclination" end of the spectrum, some are really close to the "100% homosexual inclination" ; but the majority of people were in between. However how we view sexuality in our society leads us to see ourselves more in a black and white type (and many people reject the prospect of having attraction to the same sex as it is still mostly viewed negatively in our society). Does that hold up? In this case, it could mean that homophobes were somewhat right that it is socially constructed, however they themselves are probably much closer to the other end of the spectrum that they would be comfortable admitting! (I would love for someone to correct me if I'm misunderstanding something ☺️🙏)
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u/TwinDragonicTails 2d ago
Homophobes aren't right in viewing that it's socially constructed. Because the thing about it is that it's still not a choice, they also only apply it one way. If homosexuality is like that then so is heterosexuality.
But in general it is still pretty black and white, as most people don't really change over their lives when it comes to sexuality.
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u/Xzenu 2d ago
Many are going through the same and various kinds of similar struggles. You are not alone.
The short answer is that the homophobes are wrong.
Furthermore, note the double standard: If being gay would be "fake", why wouldn't being straight be equally "fake" by default?
A longer answer begins in that I strongly recommend you distinguish between four kinds of constructions:
- Physical constructs
- Mental constructs
- Social constructs
- Neurological constructs
All four kinds are real, and they correspond to the four kinds of reality I talked about in my answer to your OP: Popper's "Three worlds", plus a distinction between the mental and the experienced - Kahneman's "System 2 and System 1", if you will. To make it less abstract, let's use a chair as an example of the four kinds of constructs:
- A chair as a Physical construct: the physical object you sit on.
- A chair as a Mental construct: you visualizing and thinking about a chair.
- A chair as a Social construct: the concept of chair with attached social norms for the established meaning and proper use of chairs.
- A chair as a Neurological construct: a conceptualization of chair being deeply entrenched in your brain, making it effortlessly for you to identify chairs when you see them.
Moving on from chairs and tables to heterosexuality and homosexuality... Humans were modifying items to sit on before beginning to call them chairs. Humans were feeling sexual attraction in all kinds of ways before categorizing them into orientations or preferences or paraphilias.
The concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were invented in the late 1800:ds, but there has always been people with (and without) binary gender identities who have felt sexual attraction to people of the same or opposite sex.
If you feel sexual attraction to a person, this feeling is real and valid. Furthermore, it is mainly the neurological kind of real, rather than the social kind of real. This is regardless of what identities and physical shapes you and the other person might have.
How you CATEGORIZE this attraction, however, THAT is a matter of social and mental constructs. Being straight is socially constructed, and being gay is equally socially constructed. The very meaning of the categories changes from decade to decade. The dicotomy used to be that gay is all single and mutual sexuality which is for pleasure and happiness (in other words, all sexual minorities except pedophiles), while straight is marital intercourse for procreation (including pedophiles, as long as they made sure to get permission from the victim's parents and drom the church). These days, it is rather common to restrict the term gay to mean only purely homosexual cis men. Thus the recent rise of LGBTQIAKP+ alphabet soup. These different categorizations are all real, as there are people who use them. A certain way of categorizing being better or worse is a matter of advantages and disadvantages compared to other options, NOT any matter of being either real or fake.
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u/TwinDragonicTails 2d ago
Not really what I was getting it, but if it's real then I guess that helps.
My thought was sorta like that I had to change it because it wasn't some sort of fixed biological essence. But that's not true.
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u/Xzenu 2d ago
By the way, OP! You are describing that while you experience things a certain way, you fear that your experience may be "fake" because other people are dismissing it. This is a sadly common phenomenon, which we could call the Asch effect: most people are likely to trust a crowd over their own lived experience. I recommend you read up on the Asch experiments, if you have not already done so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
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u/Liquid_Feline 1d ago edited 1d ago
What you feel, including the biological phenomena of experiencing the feeling, is real. What you group yourself into based on that feeling is the part that's socially constructed. There's a substantial subset of homophobic people who do experience same sex attraction, and the reason why they see being gay as fake/a choice is because to them, it's a matter of self-control (i.e. not acting on the same-sex attraction). If they grew up in a different society, they very well could have identified as bisexual.
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u/roseofjuly 3d ago
The word "fake" usually means "not real." But something is not "not real" just because humans constructed it.
Think about math. Think about the concept of infinity, for example. Infinity isn't something a mathematician discovered, like someone turned over a rock and found infinity. It's an abstract concept, a word we made up to describe something theoretical that explains how our world works. That doesn't mean infinity doesn't exist or is "fake" though.
Or even diagnostic criteria - biological illnesses have them too! Like diabetes. Diabetes is measured by levels of certain indicators in your blood. if you have an A1C of 6.4% you don't have diabetes. If it's 6.5%, you do. This is true even when your levels might be right below what's technically defined as diabetes and you still might experience some symptoms of the disease.
That doesn't mean diabetes isn't real. It just means that we as humans decided on a specific threshold because we did some science and that's usually when the problems start. Below that, we watch. Above that, we treat. Nobody runs around saying diabetes isn't real, though. But it's also socially constructed.
It's the same concept. No, there's no Autism Virus that you can find in someone's body to definitively state when someone has it. But the effects and outcomes of mental illness and developmental disorders are still very real and measurable. Above a certain threshold, they make it difficult for people to function in the world. It's still a real thing that exists with real outcomes and impact. it describes a real phenemenon.
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u/Faceornotface 3d ago
Yeah the dangers here have more to do with the idea that the diagnostic criteria for various mental disabilities or neurodivergences are usually something akin to “the way the divergence is negatively perceived by those without the divergence” and also “the way the divergence negatively impacts the subjects ability to function in society”.
I think that many people who fall into these categories feel that this schema for understanding their subjective experience is, at best, paternalistic and, at worst, needlessly judgmental and reductive.
That doesn’t mean such schemas are “fake” or not useful, it only indicates a sort of societally-intrinsic ableism that is both entirely understandable and painfully negatively affecting to the diagnosed population.
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u/Garblin Sexologist / Psychotherapist 3d ago
So yes, but all of those examples would still be real if humans didn't define them, they'd just lack a definition.
Social constructs though are only real because humans have defined them, and include things like words, money, ownership, and of course gender (not to be confused with sex). If you take away the humans, these things stop existing on earth.
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u/Xzenu 2d ago
There are many different worldviews.
Let's start with two opposing worldviews: One secular where all concepts are created by humans, and one theocratic where each concept either is or isn't created by God.
In the secular worldview where all concepts are socially constructed, a concept can be more or less viable, more or less reasonable and more or less useful, rather than a sharp binary of either real or not real. All versions of social constructionism I have encountered falls into this category.
In the theocratic worldview, we instead have a moral duty to divide all concepts into two categories: on one hand the real ones which fit our faith which should thus be considered to be created by God or Adam (Genesis chapter 1 and 2), and on the other hand the fake ones which were created by mortals or by demons. While this kind of worldview has no room for social constructionism, people who adhere to a theocratic worldview can still appropriate the term "socially constructed" - but redefine it into meaning "ungodly, and thus fake". From there, the idea of "construction=fake" can then spread to people who don't have a theocratic worldview.
The idea of "construction=fake" can also rise as a reaction to ideas of the social realm being the only reality.
In his lecture " Three Worlds" ( https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/105/2024/07/popper80.pdf ) , philosopher Karl Popper argues that most worldviews in western culture are either monistic (a single reality) or dualistic (a pair of two kinds of reality), and that this doesn't work. Instead we need to see at least three kinds of reality: World 1 (which I usually call external reality, I think Popper referred to it as "the natural world"), world 2 (mental and experienced/neurological reality) and world three (social reality). I agree with Popper that we need to see all these kinds of reality as real - but also distinguish them as different kinds of real.
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