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Scientific Constructivism
271 words, ~1 minute read.
Scientific constructivism is the philosophical idea that science is a Social Construct , in this case one created socially by scientists.
In her video on Social Constructs, Philosophy Tube discusses taxonomy as an example social construct. We observe animals' natural properties and form categories along arbitrary lines, and just deal with weird edge cases like the platypus that don't neatly fit into our prescribed lines. Some criticized this argument, because modern taxonomy typically looks at lineage and nearest shared ancestors, which avoids those edge cases and is therefore seen as a more "objective" measure. But us choosing to taxonomize using that metric versus any other is still inherently arbitrary and thus a construct.
This lovely response to Richard Dawkins claiming science is not a social construct is a great read. It argues, amongst other points, that science is to natural properties as a map is to the physical landscape. That is, science and maps are social constructs because they are our attempts to define and understand the underlying properties. Science is a process, not objective truth. (This same argument could be applied to mathematics, where there is some underlying property we don't have a name for, but mathematics - the axioms, theorems, proofs, etc. - as a collective body is a social construct above that underlying property). Philosophy Tube describes how height, one such natural property, might be used at different layers of social constructs. We have a concept of "tallness", which is a social construct based on the underlying property "height". However there could be a society that goes an extra layer of abstraction up and has a concept of "bigs", which are the elites of this society, as determined by their exceptional tallness. We might think its silly of such a society to structure themselves in this way, and question their reasoning for having a concept of "bigs" in the first place. But so to could a society that's one layer below ours question us for having a concept of "tallness", arguing that its fine to measure height but that its silly to describe people as being tall or not. They might argue that they, by merely measuring a natural property of height, do not have a social construct. However a layer below even them might question them for choosing to measure height in the first place. Does that not inherently imbue meaning (and therefore a social definition) upon the measured number? And by that logic, any measured property, by us choosing to measure it in the first place, is some level of social construct.
Science will often be affected by our own biases and come to incorrect conclusions. A classic example of this is phrenology, a racist "science" that used its supposed " Objectivity" to argue for racial differences that didn't exist. You may argue that science has already built in affordances for previous research being determined incorrect, however. We have (flawed) peer reviews and regularly (ish) replicate experiments and further verify various historical theories. However even the process of peer reviews, the scientific method, and conducting science at all are social constructs. Academia similarly has arbitrary restrictions, like defining statistical significance at 5% difference, that arbitrarily determine what is science and what is not (and often leads to data dredging).
While looking online to see people who agree and disagree with science as a social construct, I found some interesting pages that didn't really fit in elsewhere. I found this paper, Questioning science: how knowledge is socially constructed , which has a cool sounding abstract but I haven't found the article itself, and considering how little its been cited it seems far from seminal. I also found this entertaining forum thread discussing social constructs and science, which became a good example of how many people believe something being a construct means its not "real", and that therefore anything real/observable must therefore not be a construct. Fortunately, there are some voices in there attempting to clarify the nature of social constructs, and the back and forth was just enjoyable to read.