Summary: Joseph Rouse on social constructivism
Rouse, Joseph. „Vampires: Social Constructivism, Realism, and Other Philosophical Undead“. History and Theory 41, Nr. 1 (1. Februar 2002): 60–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2303.00191.
This 2002 review essay concerns two books on social constructivism: A Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science by Andre Kukla (Routledge 2000), B The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking (Harvard Univ. Press 1999). According to Rouse both books fail to take into account the state of the art, in particular new developments that he characterizes as “post-constructivist science studies” (references A. Pickering, M. Biagioli, E. Fox Keller, H. Longino, L.Hankinson Nelson, J. Nelson, D.Harraway, P. Edwards, J. Bono, H.-J. Rheinberger, P. Galison, L.Daston and K. Park and others). The image of the undead is taken from Harraway and Biagioli. It means constructivist and realist assumptions are undead and haunt current discussions despite not being live anymore, or/and the vampires as a necessary transgressers of contrived boundaries (see later about the bounderies).
A Kukla sees the debate between social constructivists and realists as a live debate. For him social constructivists maintain the metaphysical claim that nature, reality and “facts” are socially constructed.
Kukla claims that their arguments support something weaker than that metaphysical claim. He acknowledges that science studies has shown that in laboratory phenomena scientific objects are produced rather than found, but he insists that “at some point, every material-reconstructive recipe calls for a scoop of unreconstructed nature”. So for him these claims of social construction are of limited scope and they do not support the metaphysical claim that reality is socially constructed.
He also acknowledges that there are socially constructed facts in the sense of conventions-as-shared beliefs: the (fact of the) convention that cars stop at red lights is constituted by everyone’s believing that there is a social convention about stopping at red lights. But the scope is limited to social phenomena involving human action.
Kukla agrees that a category of human, for example woman, is socially constructed. The behaviour of humans who are categorized as “woman” (by use of the human produce : the concept “woman”) is partially shaped by the shared beliefs of them and others about women. According to Kukla social constructivists interpret scientific reality as achievements of consensus, just as in the case of social reality (women, stopping at traffic lights) the consensus constructs a reality. Social life is then identified with participation in a consensus community. But according to Kukla once we leave the domain of what is under the collective control of social agents (this would be concepts, beliefs, actions), we encounter quarks and so on outside that control and therefore in a domain that is not socially constructed.
Rouse reconstructs Kukla’s conception of social constructivism as a kind of collective idealism, analoguous to mind/nature idealism. Society and nature are relatively autonomous components of the world. Then there are two specific “interfaces” between the two: human artifacts and shared (scientific) beliefs. Social constructivists, like idealists in the case of the mind/nature division, would then claim that there is nothing beyond the interface. According to Rouse this does not take into account that recent [in 2002] post-constructivist science studies deny that nature, society, culture are relatively self-contained components of the world that interact at well defined localizable interfaces. So, despite inheriting from the social constructivist tradition, these views do not claim that there is nothing beyond the social realm, but that the realms cannot be clearly separated in the first place: language, for example, is not conceived as an interface between thoughts and things, but as a pervasive aspect of the world in which things and thoughts acquire meaning. So, skills, equipment and language are at the same time pervasive constituents of our surroundings, but also embody our practical-discursive grasp of the world. Language, for example, is not to be thought of as entirely under collective human control, but equally under the control of non-human aspects of the surrounding.
B Hacking claims that the constructivism-realism debate as metaphysical debate is dead. One should not read the social constructivist in a metaphysical manner, but as making a political claim. These are performative statements, statements where the question what is being done by stating them is more interesting than the question what is being said. The performative function of these claims is to challenge familiar and widely accepted concepts and practices.
Rouse objects to Hacking as another “interactionist”, someone who views nature and human society as relatively autonomous domains, with clearly localizable interfaces. For example, Hacking makes a distinction between the professed content of science (verbal representation of the world, what the theoretical commitments, the meanings of sentences and diagrams, equations etc. say) and external elements which would include the practical skills, equipment, visual images, material surroundings, institutional networks and discursive patterns. (Hacking uses this distinction to ask whether the best explanation of the stability of much scientific understanding involves external factors (to the professed content) or not. If yes, something is right about social constructivism as a metaphysical claim.) But according to Rouse radical post-constructivists claim that the only coherent notion of content incorporates the social, material and discursive setting of a science, not content of science as a representation of the world, but content of science as “the reconfiguration of the world through practical engagements with things, people and prior patterns of talk”.
[At this point, I really need to know more about these two interpretations of the content of science. Is content as representation really dispensable? What is the theory of meaning that can do that? Presumably some inferential role theory enhanced with practical aspects… But then there would probably some error-theory have to come into play, about the “illusion” of content as representation. Hm. Matters to think about…for real philosophers.]