For instance, you can’t change the speed of light, but you can revalue your currency
Note that I personally can’t actually revalue the US dollar (the currency that I mostly use), except the small revaluation that would happen were I to tear up a $20 note. If I were to personally decide to use a different ‘money’ concept, I imagine I’d get a bunch of predictions wrong or fail to obtain food or something. Perhaps I could convince all my compatriates to use FilanBucks instead, but I’d expect that most relative prices would stay the same, indicating that there are some facts of the matter that this ‘money’ thing is reflecting that aren’t just about our shared opinions about ‘money’.
I also think that this doesn’t really divide ‘social constructs’ and ‘scientific subjects’. For instance, my mass is probably a scientific subject, and yet I can change it, and yet I still want to use basically the same epistemology to understand my mass as I do to understand other physical traits of things.
Note that I personally can’t actually revalue the US dollar (the currency that I mostly use), except the small revaluation that would happen were I to tear up a $20 note. If I were to personally decide to use a different ‘money’ concept, I imagine I’d get a bunch of predictions wrong or fail to obtain food or something. Perhaps I could convince all my compatriates to use FilanBucks instead, but I’d expect that most relative prices would stay the same, indicating that there are some facts of the matter that this ‘money’ thing is reflecting that aren’t just about our shared opinions about ‘money’.
I also think that this doesn’t really divide ‘social constructs’ and ‘scientific subjects’. For instance, my mass is probably a scientific subject, and yet I can change it, and yet I still want to use basically the same epistemology to understand my mass as I do to understand other physical traits of things.