"Metafyzický" sociální konstruktivismus
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | In the philosophy of science, there is a widespread belief that social constructivists conflate metaphysical questions with epistemic ones: while few would doubt that our knowledge of reality (concepts, ideas, theories, representations) is shaped by social attitudes, claiming that reality itself (facts, particulars, states of affairs) is constituted in this way is considered a mistake. In response to this challenge, some social constructivists concerned with social categories (race, gender, disability, religion, etc.) have argued that, according to their theories, society constructs not only our knowledge of these categories but the categories themselves. Accordingly, they refer to their approaches as metaphysical social constructivism. Proponents of this version of constructivism repeatedly defend the claim that, although social constructs are undoubtedly products of society and constitutively dependent on human attitudes and beliefs, they are nonetheless real. In this talk, I will focus on the question of what the predicate “to be real” means in this debate. I will consider a range of interpretations, two of which are particularly important: (a) “the social construct k is real” means that k has causal effects (in the case of social categories such as race, this is understood primarily as the claim that they have serious consequences for the life of an individual classified as belonging to that category); (b) “the social construct k is real” means that k would continue to exist even if the social attitudes that constituted k were to change (for example, racism would continue to exist even if people ceased to believe in racial categories). I will argue that (a) can be explained equally well from the standpoint of mere epistemic constructivism, since serious consequences for an individual’s life can result simply from being socially categorized on the basis of a completely fictitious concept (e.g. witch). I will further argue that the standard examples purportedly supporting (b) can be explained by the mere persistence of social practices, which, however, would gradually disappear if social attitudes genuinely changed. The paper will thus show that so-called metaphysical social constructivism is not a justified theory. |
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