An Excerpt: "Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction" from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

If there is any core idea of social constructionism, it is that some object or objects are caused or controlled by social or cultural factors rather than natural factors, and if there is any core motivation of such research, it is the aim of showing that such objects are or were under our control: they could be, or might have been, otherwise.

Social constructionist themes can be and have been picked up by naturalists who accommodate and appropriate the interesting and important cultural phenomena documented by constructionist authors while sidestepping more radical anti-scientific and anti-realist theses widely associated with social constructionism.

1. What is Social Construction?

Y is socially constructed.

X socially constructs Y.

1.1 What Constructs?

Many of the agents in social constructionist claims can be neatly divided into two groups: those that view the agents as primarily impersonal agents, and those that view the agents as personal agents (i.e., persons or groups).

Work in the first group emphasizes a causal role for impersonal causes like cultures, conventions, or institutions in producing some phenomenon.

A second group of constructionist claims emphasizes personal social agents that construct through their choices… Other constructionists—those we might call critical constructionists—emphasize personal choices not just to establish the contingency of the acceptance of some representation as to emphasize the role of an agent’s interests or power relations in determining the content of an accepted representation.

1.2 What is constructed?

Most uses of “construction”-talk… are directed at three very different sorts of entities: representations (e.g. ideas, theories, concepts, accounts, taxonomies, and so forth), (non-representational) facts quite generally, and a special sort of non-representational fact: facts about human traits.

It is useful to first distinguish global constructionist claims that hold that every fact is a social construction, from local constructionist claims that hold that only particular facts are.

1.3 What is it to Construct?

We can distinguish two importantly different sorts of relationship: causal or constitutive.

The first, and more straightforward idea is causal construction: X causally constructs Y if and only if X causes Y to exist or to persist or X controls the kind-typical properties of Y.

More obscure is the idea that X’s construction of Y is some sort of constitutive relationship. X constitutively constructs Y if and only if X’s conceptual or social activity regarding an individual y is metaphysically necessary for y to be a Y.

There is a different model of necessity for the constructionist, however, which is to hold that the necessity in question is revealed a posteriori by our investigations of the phenomenon in question.

Of course, there may well be other models of necessity available. For example, it is sometimes suggested that a neo-Kantian interpretation of social constructionism is possible, an interpretation on which our socio-linguistic activities could provide a transcendental basis for any knowledge of the world.

2. Naturalism and Social Construction

Above, we identified naturalism with a certain attitude towards science, and for present purpose, we develop this idea by identifying three naturalistic attitudes toward science that have been picked up by naturalists addressing social constructionist themes.

Epistemological Fundamentalism
Metaphysical Fundamentalism
Human Naturalism

These features characterize substantial threads of contemporary naturalist though—threads that arise repeatedly in discussions of constructionism.

3. Naturalizing Social Construction

3.1. The Social Construction of Representations

A number of commentators have noted that many provocative constructionist claims are, in the first instance, claims that some sort of representation is constructed…. Where we limit the objects of constructionist claims to representations (such as theories), the claims cease to be particularly metaphysically provocative though detailed constructionist accounts of how certain representations came to be selected may still teach us much about science.

Still some constructionists endorse a stronger claim as well—that in constructing the theories, the facts described by those theories are thereby made to be… The distinctive feature of social constructionist explanations of representation is that they explain how we came to have those representations not by reference to the facts in the world they represent (as in realism), nor by reference to associations among our sensations (as in some forms of empiricism), nor by reference to innate knowledge or concepts (as in rationalism), nor by reference to the conditions of our thought or experience (as in transcendental arguments) but rather by reference to social and cultural background facts.

In contrast to naturalistic response to the threat of scientific anti-realism, naturalistic responses to constructionist claims about representations (including beliefs) understood as human traits have been far more sympathetic to constructionist approaches… In contemporary naturalistic philosophy of science and psychology, the naturalistic explanation of culturally produced cognition is picked up by at least three distinct strands of work taking up constructionist themes of culture. The first is centered on the idea that culture can be understood by analogy with population genetics, and that cultural items might be understood to be more or less successful based upon their success in spreading in a population.

The second, overlapping strand of naturalistic inquiry also views culture as a system of representations upon which selection acts, but attempts to integrate this idea with the idea, common in evolutionary cognitive psychology, that the mind is comprised of a great many domain-specific mental mechanisms, and uses these as the selective mechanisms that act as a primary mechanism of selection.

A third, philosophically undeveloped strand naturalizes crucial elements of critical constructionist approaches by suggesting the influence of sometimes implicit evaluations on judgments and theoretical activities.

3.2 Construction, Human Kinds and Human Traits

Since the constructionist strategy explains a trait by appeal to highly contingent factors (including culture), partisans of these debates often come inquire whether a trait or cluster of traits is culturally specific, or can be found across cultures.

3.2.1 The Conceptual Project

This conceptual project is a philosophical project par excellence, and it has contributed a great deal to clarifying just what conceptual and empirical issues are at stake in constructionist work.

3.2.2 The Social Role Project

Such a causal model of the way in which social roles might shape behavior is at least arguably naturalistic in all of the above senses.

Insofar as these and similar processes prove to be important and pervasive, they may provide an account of underlying psychological mechanisms in virtue of which constructionist claims about human kinds might be true.

4. New Directions for Social Construction

4.1 Constructionist Explanation and Integrative Models

It is now common, especially among those sympathetic to evolutionary and nativist approaches to human psychology, to call for very general, integrative approaches that combine acknowledgement of a role for evolutionary forces in shaping human nature with a complimentary respect for the role of social constructionist mechanisms in producing human traits and their products.

4.2 Social Construction as Ultimate Explanation

The canonical way to understand social constructionism about human traits is as suggesting that human traits emerge from experience of the world and as emphasizing the role of culture in structuring the world so experienced. Such constructionism thus contrasts with nativist accounts of those traits.

Recent work suggests the possibility that culture might provide relatively more ultimate explanations of some evolved traits.

In a different vein, recent work on niche construction—the process by which organisms successfully modify their environments in ways that benefit themselves and their offspring—has also suggests a role for culture in altering natural selection… the niches may also be more or less structured by our cultural conceptions, including our conceptions of different kinds of person.

Such a hypothesis combines Kitcher’s suggestion of the biological significance of intracultural reproductive isolation that socially constructed racial classification may produce with the niche selectionist idea that culture may produce selective pressures resulting in biological adaptation.

5. Conclusion

Philosophical naturalists as well as working scientists have begun to take up this opportunity in ways that use the methods of philosophy and science to both state and evaluate social constructionist hypotheses (though not always under that label). Because of the powerful and central role culture plays in shaping human social environments, behaviors, identities and development, there is ample room for continuing and even expanding the pursuit of social constructionist themes within a naturalistic framework.