Alex WellersteinVerified account

Sometimes the "thing" being held together has no value/truth outside of those social practices, but gains power/value through them.

Money is the easy example of this. Currency gains or loses its value through social practices (wipe away society, and it is just paper).

Some social practices can also be used to discover underlying truths about nature.

The question of how much of this truth is "nature," and how much is "social," often bogs people down, and is the wrong question.

But let us give a simple example. You mentioned nuclear weapons. This is my specialty. Is nuclear physics a social construct?

In the sense meant by actual social theorists, yes. Nuclear physics was created by societies & social practices.

We can (and historians have) articulate which societies and practices created it. They're pretty interesting (interwar Europe, largely).

But the question you are asking is, do those theories have an underlying truth to them, separate from the circumstances of their creation?

No social theorist I know would say "no." These ideas are not arbitrary, even if they are created by (and for!) social entities (people).

So the basic assumption that social construct cannot equal some kind of truth is just not right.

You might wonder why I say "some kind of truth" and not "truth." The answer is because there is always some kind of mediation there.

Some translation from the "truth of nature" into a language of humans (of which mathematics is one). That's not avoidable.

And indeed, with quantum physics in particular, its pioneers were VERY aware of this. N. Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation based on this.

Are there "errors in translation"? Sure — all the time. Science is largely the process of figuring those out, where our understanding lacks.

What this means is that our understanding of these truths is always tentative. In other words, always partial, always human.

This is where talking about social constructs is more useful than talking about "discovering truths."

It reminds us that if we want to understand why some communities find truths that seem to endure, and others don't, there is a reason.

It reminds us that to create, convince, maintain truths requires an entire social apparatus. What we call "the scientific community."

What it does not do is say, "scientific facts are arbitrary." That is not what social construction means.

It is unfortunate that many people think it means that. I suspect most have not read the works they claim to criticize.

Which is ironically not very scientific! /thread

One last little thing: here's another way to think about it. Are nuclear weapons themselves social constructs?

In the sense meant by social construction, yes. They are created by society, by social practices. They certainly don't just grow on trees.

They are made to satisfy certain social goals, of certain societies. Over time, those goals have shifted a bit—hence the weapons have, too.

Their creation, deployment, and use are all dictated by social practices. And indeed, the weapons themselves may dictate some practices—

for example, they tend to require secrecy in the organizations that create them.

Does that make the weapons not real? Of course not. They're real. Society making something doesn't make it non-real.

Money is a social construct — but you still have to pay the bills.

Race is a social construct — a fact that won't help you if you're an African-American in a dodgy traffic stop.