EDIT: Brief googling couldn’t confirm either of the statements marked by “IIUC”, so take them with a huge grain of salt. Also, “no”, “no-one” etc. in the penultimate paragraph aren’t meant 100% literally—no doubt some people say and do lots of weird stuff.
Assume for the sake of argument that in Northern Ireland certain medically relevant alleles are much more common among Protestants than among Catholics or vice versa (not terribly unlikely, given that IIUC Protestants are mainly of Anglo-Saxon ancestry and Catholics are mainly of Gaelic ancestry). Would that make Protestatism and Catholicism not social constructs?
Or, the fact that people with different ancestries have different genotypes and phenotypes is not a social construct, but that’s just the motte. The fact that you write on the census which of those groups you’re in, they tend to live on different neighbourhoods, not interbreed, have distinctive cultures, have quotas in universities, etc., is the bailey.
(Here in Italy, IIUC the alleles for blond hair mostly originate from Germanic immigrants in the middle ages, and probably correlate with all kinds of other genes; but blonds and brunets freely interbreed, there’s no such thing as a blond church or Germanic-Italian music or a blond school or Germanic-Italian studies departments, no-one is ever accused of acting brunet, no-one refrains from going to a festival because it’s a brunet people thing, there’s no blog titled Stuff Brunet People Like, IIRC we aren’t asked for our hair colour on the census, and it wouldn’t occur to anyone to figure out the percentage of blonds in a university.)
So I’d say we have two correlated but distinct concepts, race2 which is a social construct, and race1 which isn’t except insofar as race2 reduces intermarriages which would otherwise dilute race1 over time to some extent.
If we’re taking about the usage of the word “race” then there are many possible meanings. Generally speaking, the proper usage depends on the context and on the aims of the speaker.
Certainly, some people use the word “race” to refer to social constructs—but that’s not the issue. The issue is whether race is a valid biological construct—and many people say no.
The issue is whether race is a valid biological construct—and many people say no.
It seems to me there’s not just one issue here; the conversation has drifted from one to another in a rather ad hoc way. Whether race is a valid biological construct is different from the issue raised above (“Are you sure doctors (of the medical kind) agree [that race is a social construct]?”), which itself doesn’t, to my eye, address Elund’s original comment (“Race is a social construct anyway”).
Let’s cut to the chase. The issue is whether there are genetically similar populations with some phenotype features which are important and significantly different from other populations. IQ is the classic example. We are talking here in purely biological terms.
The issue is whether there are genetically similar populations with some phenotype features which are important and significantly different from other populations. IQ is the classic example. We are talking here in purely biological terms.
There are certainly populations with higher within-population genetic similarity than between-population genetic similarity, and which differ significantly in IQ and other important phenotypic features. It presumably follows because of reductionism that most of those phenotypic differences, including those in IQ, are mostly biological; big differences in IQ are probably manifestations of differences in brains, and brains are biology. (I’m assuming the referents of “We are talking here in purely biological terms” are differences in IQ and other phenotypic features...?)
(Seems to me this issue too is pretty distant from the remark that kicked things off. It’s hard for me to avoid the impression that “cut to the chase” really means “ride a personal hobby-horse” here.)
Seems to me this issue too is pretty distant from the remark that kicked things off
Well, speaking empirically, the phrase “race is a social construct” is pretty often followed by “therefore all races are the same in all important ways”. “Social construct” implies an arbitrary choice—our society decided to split humanity into races this way, but another society might do it in an entirely different way and all such ways are equally valid, which is to say, there are no underlying “real” differences.
It’s not that it is a personal hobby-horse, it’s just that I have some experience in watching similar conversations develop.
I’m now more sure you’re riding a hobby-horse. I’d better explain why.
Well, speaking empirically, the phrase “race is a social construct” is pretty often followed by “therefore all races are the same in all important ways”. [...]
It’s not that it is a personal hobby-horse, it’s just that I have some experience in watching similar conversations develop.
Me too. Which is probably why I had a hunch that, from the start, you pattern matched Elund to the kind of person who says things like “all races are the same in all important ways” — because you’d observed such people before — in spite of Elund not having said that. That hunch now seems to be confirmed.
That pattern matching would make sense to me if, say, in the context of an argument about race & IQ, Elund had started insisting “race is socially constructed so racial IQ differences can’t exist haha I win!” as a desperate gimmick to shut down the argument. But the context wasn’t a fraught debate like that; Elund’s “Race is a social construct anyway” was an aside to explain why they were content with someone treating “mixed race” or “Hispanic” as racial categories, which doesn’t sound like a mind-killed person invoking “uh uh uh it’s a social construct!” to evade an argument.
So the way you responded to Elund (asking a pointed but not especially relevant question about what doctors think; intimating that Elund was doing an intellectually dishonest post-modernist two-step; asking a question which falsely implied Elund said race wasn’t a useful concept; and dragging IQ (hitherto unmentioned) into the conversation) didn’t seem consistent with a dispassionate correction. It looked a lot more like taking a hobby-horse out for a canter. Reviewing the argument, I’m not sure I could come up with any empirical question about race where the two of you would disagree on the answer!
Mea culpa, though I find pattern matching to be a useful tool. The reason that it’s useful is that it often works—though not always, of course.
The whole argument in this subthread wasn’t particularly focused—one notable diversion was into the meaning of “socially constructed” which Elund seems to understand very widely.
intimating that Elund was doing an intellectually dishonest post-modernist two-step
No, I don’t think I went this far—I didn’t and I don’t believe Elund showed any intellectual dishonesty.
didn’t seem consistent with a dispassionate correction
Oh, but I lay no claim to being a dispassionate corrector :-D I have preferences, tastes, opinions, aesthetics, etc. all of which colour my posts and affect my responses. I am not even above—oh, horrors! -- periodically doing things purely for their amusement value.
Mea culpa, though I find pattern matching to be a useful tool. The reason that it’s useful is that it often works—though not always, of course.
Yeah, had the pattern match been correct I would’ve said nothing.
intimating that Elund was doing an intellectually dishonest post-modernist two-step
No, I don’t think I went this far—I didn’t and I don’t believe Elund showed any intellectual dishonesty.
I’m glad to hear that. (I continue to think your comment would’ve planted the idea in some readers’ heads, regardless of intent, but since I’ve made my view clear and you indicate a lack of intent on your part, I’ll just agree to disagree.)
Oh, but I lay no claim to being a dispassionate corrector :-D
I’ve noticed!
I have preferences, tastes, opinions, aesthetics, etc. all of which colour my posts and affect my responses.
You’re entitled to those. I’m entitled to highlight when they’re fuelling a dubious argument.
“Social construct” implies an arbitrary choice—our society decided to split humanity into races this way, but another society might do it in an entirely different way and all such ways are equally valid, which is to say, there are no underlying “real” differences.
Supposing someone wanted to split humanity into arbitrary races based on actual genetics (which is not how the concept of race originally started because genetics wasn’t known at the time), it would make sense for most races to be African, since Africa has far more human genetic diversity than all the other continents combined do. The reason races are delineated the way they are now is due to social reasons. (It could possibly make sense when you consider the phenotype though, but due to the outgroup homogeneity bias, I have some doubts.)
Still, regardless of where you set the boundaries between races, there will be average biological differences between them (provided you don’t do something biologically ridiculous like classifying whites and Asians as the same race but then classifying their half-white/half-Asian children as a different race).
You’re using a definition of “social construct” under which the word “heaps” is a social construct. Sure, given this definition race is a social construct, too, along with a rather long list of most everything. However I think your interpretation of “social construct” is atypical.
Race2 is not a valid biological construct. Certain people by “race” mean that, and call race1 other words e.g. “ancestry”.
Sure, there also are people who say that race1 is not a valid biological construct. Bu then again, there also are people who say that Elvis is not dead.
Sure, there also are people who say that race1 is not a valid biological construct. Bu then again, there also are people who say that Elvis is not dead.
Unfortunately, the former are more likely to get taken seriously than the latter.
I expect that doctors (of the medical kind) would agree as much or more than the average person. Most of the ‘Doctor’ role is oriented toward enforcing (or following) social norms. They also have relatively little professional incentive to have beliefs about race that match reality (and more than enough compartmentalisation capability to ignore the occasional diagnostic relevance of race). Further, since the medical profession relies on far more arbitrary social constructs than race (for example: Most of the DSM) I’m not sure whether their considering something a social construct should be considered a criticism.
I’d be much more interested what doctors (of the scientific kind, preferably of a relevant field) say.
I expect that doctors (of the medical kind) would agree as much or more than the average person.
I think that would depend on the context and on how the question is phrased. Professionally, doctors know quite well that race matters—e.g. some blood tests have different acceptable ranges depending on your race, the prenatal testing of pregnant women depends on their ancestry, etc.
doctors (of the scientific kind
I think academia is much more politically correct than the medical profession.
There’s a pretty big gap between what doctors tell the public and what they tell each other.
There’s a nation wide, low profile, supposedly secure internet forum in Finland for doctors only. Identities are checked by a reliable system involving official registries. For some reason it’s used mostly by senior doctors, many in higher positions, who happen to know each other, didn’t grow with the internet and seem to have discussions with no regard to public image whatsover. Political mind kill seems to stand strong there, and some opinions regarding culture, nationality, race, religion and so on are interesting to say the least from the perspective of political correctness. Even the N-word and the R-word seem to be used quite liberally. Needless to say the same people are masters of PR at their day job.
Even the N-word and the R-word seem to be used quite liberally.
Note that if it is a site for doctors from Finland then the ‘N-word’ use is still shocking but far less shocking than if it were in the United States. “Bad words” are actually an example of pure social constructs and second-hand arbitrary negative associations can be expected to be weaker than first hand arbitrary negative associations. (And if it were a forum in China it would mean even less.)
Does Finland have a political correctness problem? The Swedish minority is perfectly fine, and the Russians come and (having bought everything in sight) go. Are there a lot of third-world immigrants?
My point is that the human population doesn’t divide neatly into discrete categories called “races”. There are of course genetic differences, but human variation is a continuum. The way people decide boundaries between races is an arbitrary social one.
Heaps can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap. Race is the same way, which is why it is a social construct.
I’m not saying that “heap” and “race” are not useful terms. They do correlate with actual differences, but they are social constructs because they are convenient simplifications to help us describe phenomena.
Also, in case you’re wondering, the reason I didn’t object to “mixed race” being treated as a race wasn’t because I thought mixed-race people are genetically distinct enough to be put in a separate category, but because the phrasing in the survey (asking about what we identify as, not to mention including “Hispanic” as an option) implies that the survey-writers are mainly interested in race as an indicator of self-identity and/or culture rather than genetics. Race is still a social construct even when you use a cultural/identity definition, for reasons that might be more obvious. This was a definition I had in mind (alongside the biological one) when I said “race is a social construct anyway”. By default I do tend to use the biological definition though, simply because this is what most people seem to do, e.g. an Asian girl adopted as a baby and raised by whites in an all-white community is still considered Asian.
Also, “other” isn’t necessarily going to feel like a satisfactory answer for all of us. Including “mixed race” as an option to a race question is like including “atheism” as a result to a religion question. Atheism is not technically a religion, but it’s nice to include an option to account for it anyway. The data wouldn’t be as informative otherwise.
Heaps can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap. Race is the same way, which is why it is a social construct. I’m not saying that “heap” and “race” are not useful terms. They do correlate with actual differences, but they are social constructs because they are convenient simplifications to help us describe phenomena.
If “heap” is a social construct, so is all language, basically, and then everything is a social construct. Sigh.
Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.
Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a great big nuclear furnace. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.
Plus, you might be interested in the wonderfully named Troll’s Truisms:
A Troll’s Truism is an ambiguous statement by which an exciting falsehood may trade on a trivial truth. For example, ‘morality is socially constructed’ sounds like a radical assertion of cultural relativism until we are told that by ‘morality’ the speaker means not morality itself but just our beliefs about right and wrong. Of course, these beliefs are, in some sense, socially constructed, if only because our acquisition of many beliefs is mediated by language and beliefs about right and wrong are certainly among those acquired in that way. Hence in this sense of ‘morality’ the statement is true and trivially so.
If “heap” is a social construct, so is all language, basically, and then everything is a social construct. Sigh.
It is true that all language is socially constructed, but I was trying to draw attention to how “race” is especially subjective. Many linguistic terms are much more precise. A “species” for example refers to related individuals who reproduce among themselves, producing viable offspring. There is still some room for ambiguity, but it is less than what you get with “race”. Besides, what’s wrong with the idea that all language is socially constructed? It is possible to believe that without falling prey to the fallacy of grey.
Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a great big nuclear furnace.
I would personally prefer to use the term “better informed” rather than “more real”. Hypothetically, if both theories turned out to be completely false, and supposing we learned of that but still had no idea what the actual truth was, it wouldn’t be certain which of them is more “real”, but it would be relatively clearer which one had stronger evidence supporting it at the time. To give a different example, if we knew that one of the two theories is 100% true but aren’t told which one it is, it would be reasonable for us to think it is far more likely to be the theory based on scientific evidence (i.e. the theory that actually aligns with the scientific definition of a theory as being a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena:).
Heaps can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap. Race is the same way, which is why it is a social construct.
Right conclusion, wrong reason. (The first sentence strikes me as incorrect all by itself. I could still call certain things heaps even if I had a sharp definition of a heap.) Race is a social construct because genetic data underdetermine racial categories.
Expanding: although knowledge of human population structure rules out (or at least makes implausible) many potential racial classifications, many other classifications are compatible with it. Therefore an analyst has lots of latitude to decide which genetic differences between groups constitute races.
(The continuousness/blurriness of human genetic variation is mostly a red herring, though it does sharpen the under-determination issue and make it more obvious.)
I could still call certain things heaps even if I had a sharp definition of a heap.
Sorry, what I meant was, “Heaps as they are currently defined can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap.” They can also be said to not exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap. However, it is extremely difficult if not impossible for any definition to have absolutely no ambiguity at all, and even if that was possible, language can still be considered a social construct in the sense that linguistic terms are constructed socially. Vague terms have an extra layer of social construction though, because rather than just giving a term to a phenomenon, they also introduce a simplification. This makes the constructed aspect more obvious. I guess I didn’t word my above quote very well, since I didn’t mention that the social construction of all language itself is also enough to make “heaps” a social construct.
Sorry, what I meant was, “Heaps as they are currently defined can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap.” They can also be said to not exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap.
That too sounded confusing/wrong to me on a first reading, but are you saying that because the definition of a heap is vague, there are multiple feasible definitions of a heap, so some people (using one definition) would call a candidate heap a heap and other people (using another definition) would say it isn’t a heap? (Assuming I’ve paraphrased you correctly, I think my formulation is clearer.) I’d agree with that.
Vague terms have an extra layer of social construction though, because rather than just giving a term to a phenomenon, they also introduce a simplification. This makes the constructed aspect more obvious.
Almost all terms introduce a simplification, not just the vague ones. Vagueness does often make social construction more obvious, but for a more mundane reason than simplification: vague terms have a wider array of meanings than non-vague terms, so people are more likely to notice the multiplicity of ways to define a term when it’s vague.
are you saying that because the definition of a heap is vague, there are multiple feasible definitions of a heap, so some people (using one definition) would call a candidate heap a heap and other people (using another definition) would say it isn’t a heap?
Not that they are necessarily using multiple definitions, but the common definitions themselves do not specify an exact range in quantity in which a cluster of things could be considered a heap. Two people could disagree about whether something is a heap despite using the same vague definition of “heap”. They may be comparing the candidate heap relative to things that they have experienced being called heaps in the past. I suppose you could still treat this as being a difference in their personal definitions of “heap”. However, I don’t think that if pressed to define “heap”, that people would be likely to state an explicit quantity range. They would most likely give vague qualitative definitions. The same person may even use inconsistent definitions at different times or forget to include certain aspects that they would consider to be important defining characteristics. People don’t normally think in terms of definitions when classifying things. They usually just classify based on what feels correct, and definitions are after-the-fact attempted explanations of their classifications.
Almost all terms introduce a simplification, not just the vague ones.
Doesn’t the introduction of a simplification itself give a term some vagueness, because then you don’t know the details of the relevant characteristic, just a qualitative judgment? For “heaps”, the simplification is one that keeps the exact quantity obscured while providing a qualitative description instead. Even if you had a different quantity term that, unlike “heap”, didn’t have fuzzy boundaries, it could still be considered vague in a different sense if multiple quantities could fulfill its definition (assuming an exact quantity really did exist in reality). It would certainly at least be considered somewhat ambiguous. For example, the category “integers” has seemingly clear boundaries, but calling an unknown number an integer is still vague if it doesn’t express all the relevant information.
vague terms have a wider array of meanings than non-vague terms
Not that they are necessarily using multiple definitions, but the common definitions themselves do not specify an exact range in quantity in which a cluster of things could be considered a heap. Two people could disagree about whether something is a heap despite using the same vague definition of “heap”. [...]
Ahhh, I think I understand. Yes, that makes sense.
Doesn’t the introduction of a simplification itself give a term some vagueness, because then you don’t know the details of the relevant characteristic, just a qualitative judgment?
Yes, although (as you suggest) that’s a different kind of vagueness: vagueness as a definition’s inclusiveness vs. vagueness as uncertainty about the definition itself.
You’re ignoring the part where I said human variation is a continuum. The fallacy of grey is where people deny the existence of the continuum.
Also, I did mention evidence about people’s varying definitions of the “white race” to illustrate how people do in fact use arbitrary social reasons to decide the boundaries between races.
It depends on how much they’ve thought about it. For instance, consider the “white race”. A neo-Nazi on Stormfront would likely say that “white” refers only to people of 100% European ancestry, excluding Jews. On the other extreme, some people use it interchangeably with “Caucasian”, which, according to its dictionary definition, refers to people of European, North African, Middle Eastern, or Indian ancestry.
Maybe the problem is with terminology. Let’s taboo “race” and talk about “gene pools” or “genetic clusters”. Will you still say that these are not useful concepts?
I never said race wasn’t a useful concept. I specifically said in my earlier post:
.
I’m not saying that “heap” and “race” are not useful terms. They do correlate with actual differences,
I think my initial post that started this discussion may have been a source of misunderstanding. When I called race a social construct, I wasn’t trying to say that race is a useless concept, but instead indicate that it could be useful as a cultural/identity concept. Initially when I talked about “mixed race” and “Hispanic” not technically being races, I was defining race according to the mainstream definition that treats race as a genetically distinct group of people, since that is my default. However, during the part where I talked about how Hispanics are often treated as if they were a race, I was undergoing a shift toward thinking about race as a cultural identity regardless of genetics, which then led me to the statement that race is a social construct. I meant it in a similar way to what people mean when they say that gender is a social construct. When people say that, they’re not implying that gender is a useless concept, but that it is a personal subjective choice of identity. Significantly, I then spent the rest of my post talking about race as a personal choice of identity.
The idea that gender is a social construct is a pretty uncontroversial one, as far as I can tell. People seem to be somewhat less likely to say the same thing about race though, probably because “race” as a cultural term doesn’t have a satisfactory parallel term to refer to biology the way “gender” has “sex”. It didn’t matter for me in practice though. I thought of race as a social construct regardless of whether it was approached from a biological or cultural perspective, which is why I didn’t feel a need to distinguish between the two in my statement. However, subsequent comments drawing attention to its biological validity (e.g. would doctors agree?) pushed me to address my point underlying my passive implication that the biological aspect is also a social construct, which then skews the discussion in a way that buries much of my original meaning. The social construction of race as a biological concept is not itself adequate to explain why I would support including non-genetic race answers to a race question, but the social construction of race as a subjective personal identity is.
Earlier I was wondering why my comments were getting downvoted. What could possibly be so controversial about the idea that human genetic variation is a continuum, or that linguistic terms are socially constructed? Now I can see that if these are interpreted as if they are supposed to be arguments in support of including non-genetic answers to a race question or a lack of average differences between races, they might seem like bad arguments, but I wasn’t intending them to support those premises, and I didn’t think that people would think I was intending them to.
However, during the part where I talked about how Hispanics are often treated as if they were a race, I was undergoing a shift toward thinking about race as a cultural identity regardless of genetics, which then led me to the statement that race is a social construct.
Part of the reason is that if you restrict to the population of the United States they are (more-or-less) a separate genetic cluster. (Yes, that cluster doen’t perfectly correspond to the official definition of Hispanic but a better term doesn’t exist).
The idea that gender is a social construct is a pretty uncontroversial one, as far as I can tell.
Only because anyone who dares to point out the obvious truth that it isn’t gets called a “sexist transphobe” and unfit for polite society.
Part of the reason is that if you restrict to the population of the United States they are (more-or-less) a separate genetic cluster
Well, I wasn’t restricting to the population of the United States. Anyway, race is still a socially constructed identity. This is apparent with mixed-race people who often identify with one race more than another based on how they were raised, how they look, how other people identify them, and whether they act more like a stereotypical member of one of their races than another. The race they identify most with might not be the one that makes up the largest proportion in their ancestry.
Only because anyone who dares to point out the obvious truth that it isn’t gets called a “sexist transphobe” and unfit for polite society.
My understanding is that gender is specifically used to refer to the socially constructed identities. Biological sex differences get lumped under sex rather than gender, which is why people can believe in the social construct of gender while also believing that biology contributes in some degree to stereotypical gender roles. I’m not an expert on gender though, so I should probably leave it to someone else to debate you on this point.
Part of the reason is that if you restrict to the population of the United States they are (more-or-less) a separate genetic cluster
Well, I wasn’t restricting to the population of the United States.
Is the term “Hispanic” even used outside the US and places imitating the US?
My understanding is that gender is specifically used to refer to the socially constructed identities.
That’s the claim made by “gender theorists”. In practice it’s used to refer to any sex differences they can claim to be socially constructed without seeming completely ridiculous. Nearly all of said differences are almost certainly largely biological.
Is the term “Hispanic” even used outside the US and places imitating the US?
It’s used on the Survey (which is how this discussion ever sprang up in the first place) even though non-Americans also take it. (What will Spaniards pick? I’m gonna go check what they did last year… EDIT: three picked “White (non-Hispanic)”, one picked “White (Hispanic)” and one picked “Other”, so they mostly went by the de facto definition rather than the official one.)
(IIRC I once classified myself as “Latin” on some kind of survey because I assumed it referred to anyone with Romance-speaking ancestry.)
Are you sure doctors (of the medical kind) agree?
EDIT: Brief googling couldn’t confirm either of the statements marked by “IIUC”, so take them with a huge grain of salt. Also, “no”, “no-one” etc. in the penultimate paragraph aren’t meant 100% literally—no doubt some people say and do lots of weird stuff.
Assume for the sake of argument that in Northern Ireland certain medically relevant alleles are much more common among Protestants than among Catholics or vice versa (not terribly unlikely, given that IIUC Protestants are mainly of Anglo-Saxon ancestry and Catholics are mainly of Gaelic ancestry). Would that make Protestatism and Catholicism not social constructs?
Or, the fact that people with different ancestries have different genotypes and phenotypes is not a social construct, but that’s just the motte. The fact that you write on the census which of those groups you’re in, they tend to live on different neighbourhoods, not interbreed, have distinctive cultures, have quotas in universities, etc., is the bailey.
(Here in Italy, IIUC the alleles for blond hair mostly originate from Germanic immigrants in the middle ages, and probably correlate with all kinds of other genes; but blonds and brunets freely interbreed, there’s no such thing as a blond church or Germanic-Italian music or a blond school or Germanic-Italian studies departments, no-one is ever accused of acting brunet, no-one refrains from going to a festival because it’s a brunet people thing, there’s no blog titled Stuff Brunet People Like, IIRC we aren’t asked for our hair colour on the census, and it wouldn’t occur to anyone to figure out the percentage of blonds in a university.)
So I’d say we have two correlated but distinct concepts, race2 which is a social construct, and race1 which isn’t except insofar as race2 reduces intermarriages which would otherwise dilute race1 over time to some extent.
If we’re taking about the usage of the word “race” then there are many possible meanings. Generally speaking, the proper usage depends on the context and on the aims of the speaker.
Certainly, some people use the word “race” to refer to social constructs—but that’s not the issue. The issue is whether race is a valid biological construct—and many people say no.
It seems to me there’s not just one issue here; the conversation has drifted from one to another in a rather ad hoc way. Whether race is a valid biological construct is different from the issue raised above (“Are you sure doctors (of the medical kind) agree [that race is a social construct]?”), which itself doesn’t, to my eye, address Elund’s original comment (“Race is a social construct anyway”).
Let’s cut to the chase. The issue is whether there are genetically similar populations with some phenotype features which are important and significantly different from other populations. IQ is the classic example. We are talking here in purely biological terms.
There are certainly populations with higher within-population genetic similarity than between-population genetic similarity, and which differ significantly in IQ and other important phenotypic features. It presumably follows because of reductionism that most of those phenotypic differences, including those in IQ, are mostly biological; big differences in IQ are probably manifestations of differences in brains, and brains are biology. (I’m assuming the referents of “We are talking here in purely biological terms” are differences in IQ and other phenotypic features...?)
(Seems to me this issue too is pretty distant from the remark that kicked things off. It’s hard for me to avoid the impression that “cut to the chase” really means “ride a personal hobby-horse” here.)
Well, speaking empirically, the phrase “race is a social construct” is pretty often followed by “therefore all races are the same in all important ways”. “Social construct” implies an arbitrary choice—our society decided to split humanity into races this way, but another society might do it in an entirely different way and all such ways are equally valid, which is to say, there are no underlying “real” differences.
It’s not that it is a personal hobby-horse, it’s just that I have some experience in watching similar conversations develop.
I’m now more sure you’re riding a hobby-horse. I’d better explain why.
Me too. Which is probably why I had a hunch that, from the start, you pattern matched Elund to the kind of person who says things like “all races are the same in all important ways” — because you’d observed such people before — in spite of Elund not having said that. That hunch now seems to be confirmed.
That pattern matching would make sense to me if, say, in the context of an argument about race & IQ, Elund had started insisting “race is socially constructed so racial IQ differences can’t exist haha I win!” as a desperate gimmick to shut down the argument. But the context wasn’t a fraught debate like that; Elund’s “Race is a social construct anyway” was an aside to explain why they were content with someone treating “mixed race” or “Hispanic” as racial categories, which doesn’t sound like a mind-killed person invoking “uh uh uh it’s a social construct!” to evade an argument.
So the way you responded to Elund (asking a pointed but not especially relevant question about what doctors think; intimating that Elund was doing an intellectually dishonest post-modernist two-step; asking a question which falsely implied Elund said race wasn’t a useful concept; and dragging IQ (hitherto unmentioned) into the conversation) didn’t seem consistent with a dispassionate correction. It looked a lot more like taking a hobby-horse out for a canter. Reviewing the argument, I’m not sure I could come up with any empirical question about race where the two of you would disagree on the answer!
Mea culpa, though I find pattern matching to be a useful tool. The reason that it’s useful is that it often works—though not always, of course.
The whole argument in this subthread wasn’t particularly focused—one notable diversion was into the meaning of “socially constructed” which Elund seems to understand very widely.
No, I don’t think I went this far—I didn’t and I don’t believe Elund showed any intellectual dishonesty.
Oh, but I lay no claim to being a dispassionate corrector :-D I have preferences, tastes, opinions, aesthetics, etc. all of which colour my posts and affect my responses. I am not even above—oh, horrors! -- periodically doing things purely for their amusement value.
Yeah, had the pattern match been correct I would’ve said nothing.
I’m glad to hear that. (I continue to think your comment would’ve planted the idea in some readers’ heads, regardless of intent, but since I’ve made my view clear and you indicate a lack of intent on your part, I’ll just agree to disagree.)
I’ve noticed!
You’re entitled to those. I’m entitled to highlight when they’re fuelling a dubious argument.
Supposing someone wanted to split humanity into arbitrary races based on actual genetics (which is not how the concept of race originally started because genetics wasn’t known at the time), it would make sense for most races to be African, since Africa has far more human genetic diversity than all the other continents combined do. The reason races are delineated the way they are now is due to social reasons. (It could possibly make sense when you consider the phenotype though, but due to the outgroup homogeneity bias, I have some doubts.)
Still, regardless of where you set the boundaries between races, there will be average biological differences between them (provided you don’t do something biologically ridiculous like classifying whites and Asians as the same race but then classifying their half-white/half-Asian children as a different race).
You’re using a definition of “social construct” under which the word “heaps” is a social construct. Sure, given this definition race is a social construct, too, along with a rather long list of most everything. However I think your interpretation of “social construct” is atypical.
I’m just using it to mean things that are constructed socially.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/social+construct
Race2 is not a valid biological construct. Certain people by “race” mean that, and call race1 other words e.g. “ancestry”.
Sure, there also are people who say that race1 is not a valid biological construct. Bu then again, there also are people who say that Elvis is not dead.
Unfortunately, the former are more likely to get taken seriously than the latter.
The former are perfectly capable of getting those of a different opinion into a lot of trouble. The latter aren’t.
I expect that doctors (of the medical kind) would agree as much or more than the average person. Most of the ‘Doctor’ role is oriented toward enforcing (or following) social norms. They also have relatively little professional incentive to have beliefs about race that match reality (and more than enough compartmentalisation capability to ignore the occasional diagnostic relevance of race). Further, since the medical profession relies on far more arbitrary social constructs than race (for example: Most of the DSM) I’m not sure whether their considering something a social construct should be considered a criticism.
I’d be much more interested what doctors (of the scientific kind, preferably of a relevant field) say.
I think that would depend on the context and on how the question is phrased. Professionally, doctors know quite well that race matters—e.g. some blood tests have different acceptable ranges depending on your race, the prenatal testing of pregnant women depends on their ancestry, etc.
I think academia is much more politically correct than the medical profession.
There’s a pretty big gap between what doctors tell the public and what they tell each other.
There’s a nation wide, low profile, supposedly secure internet forum in Finland for doctors only. Identities are checked by a reliable system involving official registries. For some reason it’s used mostly by senior doctors, many in higher positions, who happen to know each other, didn’t grow with the internet and seem to have discussions with no regard to public image whatsover. Political mind kill seems to stand strong there, and some opinions regarding culture, nationality, race, religion and so on are interesting to say the least from the perspective of political correctness. Even the N-word and the R-word seem to be used quite liberally. Needless to say the same people are masters of PR at their day job.
Note that if it is a site for doctors from Finland then the ‘N-word’ use is still shocking but far less shocking than if it were in the United States. “Bad words” are actually an example of pure social constructs and second-hand arbitrary negative associations can be expected to be weaker than first hand arbitrary negative associations. (And if it were a forum in China it would mean even less.)
Does Finland have a political correctness problem? The Swedish minority is perfectly fine, and the Russians come and (having bought everything in sight) go. Are there a lot of third-world immigrants?
Well, Finland is next to Sweden which is notorious for taking political correctness to totalitarian levels.
Sweden has a very strong element of conformism in its national culture.
You could be right. Now I’m more curious.
My point is that the human population doesn’t divide neatly into discrete categories called “races”. There are of course genetic differences, but human variation is a continuum. The way people decide boundaries between races is an arbitrary social one.
Sorites paradox. Heaps exist regardless.
Heaps can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap. Race is the same way, which is why it is a social construct.
I’m not saying that “heap” and “race” are not useful terms. They do correlate with actual differences, but they are social constructs because they are convenient simplifications to help us describe phenomena.
Also, in case you’re wondering, the reason I didn’t object to “mixed race” being treated as a race wasn’t because I thought mixed-race people are genetically distinct enough to be put in a separate category, but because the phrasing in the survey (asking about what we identify as, not to mention including “Hispanic” as an option) implies that the survey-writers are mainly interested in race as an indicator of self-identity and/or culture rather than genetics. Race is still a social construct even when you use a cultural/identity definition, for reasons that might be more obvious. This was a definition I had in mind (alongside the biological one) when I said “race is a social construct anyway”. By default I do tend to use the biological definition though, simply because this is what most people seem to do, e.g. an Asian girl adopted as a baby and raised by whites in an all-white community is still considered Asian.
Also, “other” isn’t necessarily going to feel like a satisfactory answer for all of us. Including “mixed race” as an option to a race question is like including “atheism” as a result to a religion question. Atheism is not technically a religion, but it’s nice to include an option to account for it anyway. The data wouldn’t be as informative otherwise.
If “heap” is a social construct, so is all language, basically, and then everything is a social construct. Sigh.
Maybe this will help—hot off the bit presses:
Plus, you might be interested in the wonderfully named Troll’s Truisms:
It is true that all language is socially constructed, but I was trying to draw attention to how “race” is especially subjective. Many linguistic terms are much more precise. A “species” for example refers to related individuals who reproduce among themselves, producing viable offspring. There is still some room for ambiguity, but it is less than what you get with “race”. Besides, what’s wrong with the idea that all language is socially constructed? It is possible to believe that without falling prey to the fallacy of grey.
I would personally prefer to use the term “better informed” rather than “more real”. Hypothetically, if both theories turned out to be completely false, and supposing we learned of that but still had no idea what the actual truth was, it wouldn’t be certain which of them is more “real”, but it would be relatively clearer which one had stronger evidence supporting it at the time. To give a different example, if we knew that one of the two theories is 100% true but aren’t told which one it is, it would be reasonable for us to think it is far more likely to be the theory based on scientific evidence (i.e. the theory that actually aligns with the scientific definition of a theory as being a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena:).
Right conclusion, wrong reason. (The first sentence strikes me as incorrect all by itself. I could still call certain things heaps even if I had a sharp definition of a heap.) Race is a social construct because genetic data underdetermine racial categories.
Expanding: although knowledge of human population structure rules out (or at least makes implausible) many potential racial classifications, many other classifications are compatible with it. Therefore an analyst has lots of latitude to decide which genetic differences between groups constitute races.
(The continuousness/blurriness of human genetic variation is mostly a red herring, though it does sharpen the under-determination issue and make it more obvious.)
Sorry, what I meant was, “Heaps as they are currently defined can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap.” They can also be said to not exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap. However, it is extremely difficult if not impossible for any definition to have absolutely no ambiguity at all, and even if that was possible, language can still be considered a social construct in the sense that linguistic terms are constructed socially. Vague terms have an extra layer of social construction though, because rather than just giving a term to a phenomenon, they also introduce a simplification. This makes the constructed aspect more obvious. I guess I didn’t word my above quote very well, since I didn’t mention that the social construction of all language itself is also enough to make “heaps” a social construct.
That too sounded confusing/wrong to me on a first reading, but are you saying that because the definition of a heap is vague, there are multiple feasible definitions of a heap, so some people (using one definition) would call a candidate heap a heap and other people (using another definition) would say it isn’t a heap? (Assuming I’ve paraphrased you correctly, I think my formulation is clearer.) I’d agree with that.
Almost all terms introduce a simplification, not just the vague ones. Vagueness does often make social construction more obvious, but for a more mundane reason than simplification: vague terms have a wider array of meanings than non-vague terms, so people are more likely to notice the multiplicity of ways to define a term when it’s vague.
Not that they are necessarily using multiple definitions, but the common definitions themselves do not specify an exact range in quantity in which a cluster of things could be considered a heap. Two people could disagree about whether something is a heap despite using the same vague definition of “heap”. They may be comparing the candidate heap relative to things that they have experienced being called heaps in the past. I suppose you could still treat this as being a difference in their personal definitions of “heap”. However, I don’t think that if pressed to define “heap”, that people would be likely to state an explicit quantity range. They would most likely give vague qualitative definitions. The same person may even use inconsistent definitions at different times or forget to include certain aspects that they would consider to be important defining characteristics. People don’t normally think in terms of definitions when classifying things. They usually just classify based on what feels correct, and definitions are after-the-fact attempted explanations of their classifications.
Doesn’t the introduction of a simplification itself give a term some vagueness, because then you don’t know the details of the relevant characteristic, just a qualitative judgment? For “heaps”, the simplification is one that keeps the exact quantity obscured while providing a qualitative description instead. Even if you had a different quantity term that, unlike “heap”, didn’t have fuzzy boundaries, it could still be considered vague in a different sense if multiple quantities could fulfill its definition (assuming an exact quantity really did exist in reality). It would certainly at least be considered somewhat ambiguous. For example, the category “integers” has seemingly clear boundaries, but calling an unknown number an integer is still vague if it doesn’t express all the relevant information.
Yes, terms can be vague in that way too.
Ahhh, I think I understand. Yes, that makes sense.
Yes, although (as you suggest) that’s a different kind of vagueness: vagueness as a definition’s inclusiveness vs. vagueness as uncertainty about the definition itself.
Beware The Fallacy Of The .
You’re ignoring the part where I said human variation is a continuum. The fallacy of grey is where people deny the existence of the continuum.
Also, I did mention evidence about people’s varying definitions of the “white race” to illustrate how people do in fact use arbitrary social reasons to decide the boundaries between races.
So, let me repeat. Are you sure doctors (of the medical kind) agree?
It depends on how much they’ve thought about it. For instance, consider the “white race”. A neo-Nazi on Stormfront would likely say that “white” refers only to people of 100% European ancestry, excluding Jews. On the other extreme, some people use it interchangeably with “Caucasian”, which, according to its dictionary definition, refers to people of European, North African, Middle Eastern, or Indian ancestry.
Maybe the problem is with terminology. Let’s taboo “race” and talk about “gene pools” or “genetic clusters”. Will you still say that these are not useful concepts?
I never said race wasn’t a useful concept. I specifically said in my earlier post: .
I think my initial post that started this discussion may have been a source of misunderstanding. When I called race a social construct, I wasn’t trying to say that race is a useless concept, but instead indicate that it could be useful as a cultural/identity concept. Initially when I talked about “mixed race” and “Hispanic” not technically being races, I was defining race according to the mainstream definition that treats race as a genetically distinct group of people, since that is my default. However, during the part where I talked about how Hispanics are often treated as if they were a race, I was undergoing a shift toward thinking about race as a cultural identity regardless of genetics, which then led me to the statement that race is a social construct. I meant it in a similar way to what people mean when they say that gender is a social construct. When people say that, they’re not implying that gender is a useless concept, but that it is a personal subjective choice of identity. Significantly, I then spent the rest of my post talking about race as a personal choice of identity.
The idea that gender is a social construct is a pretty uncontroversial one, as far as I can tell. People seem to be somewhat less likely to say the same thing about race though, probably because “race” as a cultural term doesn’t have a satisfactory parallel term to refer to biology the way “gender” has “sex”. It didn’t matter for me in practice though. I thought of race as a social construct regardless of whether it was approached from a biological or cultural perspective, which is why I didn’t feel a need to distinguish between the two in my statement. However, subsequent comments drawing attention to its biological validity (e.g. would doctors agree?) pushed me to address my point underlying my passive implication that the biological aspect is also a social construct, which then skews the discussion in a way that buries much of my original meaning. The social construction of race as a biological concept is not itself adequate to explain why I would support including non-genetic race answers to a race question, but the social construction of race as a subjective personal identity is.
Earlier I was wondering why my comments were getting downvoted. What could possibly be so controversial about the idea that human genetic variation is a continuum, or that linguistic terms are socially constructed? Now I can see that if these are interpreted as if they are supposed to be arguments in support of including non-genetic answers to a race question or a lack of average differences between races, they might seem like bad arguments, but I wasn’t intending them to support those premises, and I didn’t think that people would think I was intending them to.
Part of the reason is that if you restrict to the population of the United States they are (more-or-less) a separate genetic cluster. (Yes, that cluster doen’t perfectly correspond to the official definition of Hispanic but a better term doesn’t exist).
Only because anyone who dares to point out the obvious truth that it isn’t gets called a “sexist transphobe” and unfit for polite society.
Well, I wasn’t restricting to the population of the United States. Anyway, race is still a socially constructed identity. This is apparent with mixed-race people who often identify with one race more than another based on how they were raised, how they look, how other people identify them, and whether they act more like a stereotypical member of one of their races than another. The race they identify most with might not be the one that makes up the largest proportion in their ancestry.
My understanding is that gender is specifically used to refer to the socially constructed identities. Biological sex differences get lumped under sex rather than gender, which is why people can believe in the social construct of gender while also believing that biology contributes in some degree to stereotypical gender roles. I’m not an expert on gender though, so I should probably leave it to someone else to debate you on this point.
Is the term “Hispanic” even used outside the US and places imitating the US?
That’s the claim made by “gender theorists”. In practice it’s used to refer to any sex differences they can claim to be socially constructed without seeming completely ridiculous. Nearly all of said differences are almost certainly largely biological.
It’s used on the Survey (which is how this discussion ever sprang up in the first place) even though non-Americans also take it. (What will Spaniards pick? I’m gonna go check what they did last year… EDIT: three picked “White (non-Hispanic)”, one picked “White (Hispanic)” and one picked “Other”, so they mostly went by the de facto definition rather than the official one.)
(IIRC I once classified myself as “Latin” on some kind of survey because I assumed it referred to anyone with Romance-speaking ancestry.)
Because Yvain is imitating US usage.
I know. But people outside the US also take the survey, so your “if you restrict to the population of the United States” upthread doesn’t apply.