Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Why is that? I don't see the Motte and Bailey here. Both are socially constructed, neither of which confers a moral value on the construction. Indeed, in the case of both gender and math, it invites criticism that long held beliefs that are held to be may not be true

Math and gender are frameworks on entirely different layers. Even "sex" isn't near the layer where ground truths in math reside, bc despite being highly bimodal, phenotype + genotype do not consistently cut cleanly. If you think logic behaves similarly, I do think you're confused

Mathematics has become vastly more rigorous over the past century, but perhaps this is where your "not being a mathematician" weakness is showing? What form of logic are you talking about? Which topos? Which set of axioms do you adopt?

Possibly, I really can't claim a lot of content knowledge re: maths. But I don't think that a field becoming more rigorous over time indicates that the content it has always concerned itself with is itself socially constructed (if that's what you're suggesting)

I don't think that's what Matt was saying, but you'd have to ask him. I think the field of math, and the definitions it uses and the consensus of say, using ZFC are all social constructions.

I think this is roughly pointing to what I'm calling the layer for "useful maths conventions," and I agree that they're socially constructed, but don't find that a helpful lens to understand them much like I don't find that helpful for understanding e.g. typing or data structures

When we discuss gender, we have layers for things like culture-informed self-identification & the interpersonal norms that cause us to assume something that correlates w/ sex with very limited information about genotype + phenotype. "Social construct" seems a very diff term there

Like I said, I think there are not-necessarily-wrong ways to understand virtually everything as "socially constructed." But I think we need to either maintain careful conversational hygiene or use new terms if we're going to be talking about cultural stuff in the same breath