The Concept of Social Construction

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Ys: I want to make clear how weak or strong the notion of social construction is. Mean, everyone will agree that your body is socially influenced by the exact facts that you mentioned. But think of it this way, a statue isn't made from scratch either. A statue comes into existence. It's shaped in a certain way and becomes a statue. And similarly, my body has a potentiality to be moulded by me in response to the social context. So i'm kind of thinking about, just as, you know, you knock the statue off the table and it falls to the floor, not by virtue of its aesthetic properties.

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it’s because those ways provide elegant predictive descriptions or because they serve a more subtle political purpose. To get at the true nature of reality, therefore, it’s important to think about which aspects of it are socially constructed, and why. I talk with Sally Haslanger about these issues, and the techniques we can use to understand the world and make it a better place.

Update (22 March): Our discussion here could have (and did) leave some listeners with the wrong impression of how Sally and I feel about trans rights -- we are entirely for them! My fault for not making things more clear during the conversation. So I have added a brief note during the podcast intro to make our position perfectly explicit. Thanks to everyone who commented.

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Sally Haslanger received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Ford Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among her awards are the Carus Lectureship, the Distinguished Woman Philosopher award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of several books, including Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique.

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