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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26859 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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This is the game played when calling it socially constructed. Of course there are messy edge cases where the lines get blurry and arbitrary socially constructed rules throw people into one bucket or another. You could play the same game with most other categories like species or colors or flavors and so on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

I haven't encountered the notion that Indians are an edge case before.

that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

Neither is calling it socially constructed. Colors are a great example - the set of colors in English is totally arbitrary. Some languages have more, some less, some as few as two. There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

Yeah, but that's irrelevant. Again ask people to sort colors by similarity, and they'll reach pretty much the same result, regardless of their language and culture.

Are you sure? The phrase that comes to mind is "wine-dark sea". I've seen academics suggest that the notion of blue is a surprisingly modern invention.

I was going to make an argument about Homer, but in fact after searching to back it up I'll just link this.

Two points he doesn't mention:

  • The Greeks always drank their wine heavily mixed with water (this is a key point of the Centaur Wedding myth that distinguishes what it is to be Greek from what it is to be barbarian). Watered down wine looks much bluer, and can even turn fully blue if the wine is poorly made.
  • There's a reason from modern times not to read Homer literally. Troy was not very far from a sea we now call the Black Sea. I wouldn't use the name of the Black Sea as an argument that some seas are in fact black instead of blue...

But yeah, it's just one of those things some academics are completely wrong about, but that Science! Journalists repeat because it's catchy and counterintuitive.

If I’m remembering correctly, there was a radiolab / NPR something podcast on this very topic

Yes, I'm sure. I even know which exact video you got this from. It also had an example of an African tribe that supposedly can easily tell very similar shades of green apart, because they have more words for it in their language.

The phrase you quote does not imply an inability to perceive blue - the sea is pretty damn dark during a dark storm, and wine is also often dark enough that you can't tell it's color - and the African tribe thing was outright made up for the clicks (or views, I guess) by the BBC and a corrupt academic they were filming.

Nobody is saying that the similarity of colors to each other is socially constructed (or at least I've never heard this claim).

Ok, well I'm pretty sure that if ask people to pair up objects of the same color, they'll also do that regardless of their language or culture.

If you're going to say that no one claimed that the sameness of colors is not socially constructed, then I don't know what content is the sentence "color is socially constructed" even carrying.

Ok, well I'm pretty sure that if ask people to pair up objects of the same color, they'll also do that regardless of their language or culture.

Except for the Chinese combining 青 with 青, or the Russians separating синий from голубой....

You're talking about language, I'm talking "sort these according to how hard they are to separate with your eyes".

what content is the sentence "color is socially constructed" even carrying.

That the assortment of bands of the electromagnetic spectrum into color words is socially constructed.

Maybe I'm pedantic, but I'd call that "language is a social construct".

If you read Foucault and his descendants, all "scientific knowledge" is socially constructed. Think of Power as an OSI layer between "reality" and "our understanding of reality", with the actual existence of immutable reality left deliberately ambiguous.

It's not that some things are "socially constructed" and others are "real", even if it's used that way tactically ("Science Is Real! No, your science is a socially constructed artifact of the cisheteropatriarchy"). It's that all our methods of understanding go through a filter of social power/biopower/whatever.

It's a very clever definitional superweapon.

Okay, I guess I should have known that there are people making that claim. However, I'm not trying to steelman it because I think it's dumb.

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