No it's not James, it's not just a semantic issue, it's a real issue that has practical consequences. Introducing distinctions isn't just a philosophical parlour game. Otherwise we could say the diff between a conservative and a Nazi is just semantic.
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Can we agree on something like 'the phenomena of interest would behave similarly if we analyzed it in 1000000 different possible realizations of language and culture' Mars has ice on it. It would with no humans. It would regardless of what we called 'ice.' But...
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How about "Men are taller than women on average." It is factual but the strong soc cons might say it emerged that way through maybe food distribution, or iterated culture-driven mate preferences of shorter women/taller men e.g.,https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-01979-6_7 …
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This is a hypothesis. And we have to agree on a level of testability for it to be useful imo (e.g, we might see the same behavior across all cultures, primates, etc)- one could then say all of those animals have distinct 'cultures' too, and in some 'deconstructed culture'...
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...food distribution, mate preferences, etc. would be different such that the reverse would be true, i.e., women taller on average. This, for me, mostly becomes a separate truth claim of a new "is...then" type. But there needs to be a minimum level of testability and usefulness.
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Beyond the low-hanging fruit of e.g., orbital mechanics, it is difficult to do much with things like "hierarchies are socially constructed." It's true by definition, but it also emerges at every level of analysis across species, time, and space, and is expressed in many traits.
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e.g., athleticism, musical skill, etc. We can break those down socially or a Derrida-esque critique of terms? How do we view who is athletic? Why are poker pros not considered athletes? But now we're in semantics, not phenomena.
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At least this is how I interpret soc const mainstream thought, leaving the "X type of people have unique ways of knowing" in the minority. Of course, it's not all wrong.
End of conversation
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