Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique

by Sally Haslanger

Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. In these previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory to explore and develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice.

Although the central essays of the book focus on a critical social realism about gender and race, these accounts function as case studies for a broader critical social realism. To develop this broader approach, several essays offer reworked notions of ideology, practice, and social structure, drawing on recent research in sociology and social psychology. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural.

Additional essays in the book situate this approach to social phenomena in relation to philosophical methodology, and to specific debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The book as a whole explores the interface between analytic philosophy and critical theory.

Genres: Philosophy, Feminism, Nonfiction, Sociology, Race, Gender, Politics

512 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2012

About the author

Sally Haslanger is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Reviews

[Emily Jayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book thoroughly unpacks an overused concept, social construction, especially as it pertains to gender and race. I would say it is a necessary read if you want to be confident in your use of the term in an academic context. It is, however, a collection of separately published papers on similar themes. So if you read it front to back like I did, you might find it repetitive at times.

[Thomas Wright · Rating 1 out of 5]

Caveat that I only read in depth Haslanger's essay "Feminism in metaphysics: Negotiating the
natural".

The reason being that it is truly an awful piece of scholarship. Her criticism of Butler for one is a non-starter (and I would love a good criticism of Butler's philosophy) that can be easily refuted by anyone who reads the first thirty (even ten) pages of Bodies That Matter charitably, something that was clearly beyond Haslanger's intellect. I mean can anyone explain to me her demarcation between "things" and "individuals" that it is actually substantive?

Even in that distinction a concept of "reference" is still invoked so I have no idea really what Haslanger's criticism of Butler is. It appears to be it is that Butler confuses the act of referring with the object itself but then Haslanger still has to invoke the act of referring to explain how we refer to the object at all. It is this mediation which allows for objectvity that her critique rests but how such mediation actually allows for this glossed over in a few examples both conrete and abstract. Concrete examples (the telephone gives you the voice directly) are good and all but they are just that, concrete examples; it does not explain what mediation of itself consists and why it would allow us to grasp something unproblematically objectively. The abtract examples of coherentism, evidential support are also just proffered without any analysis and as if analytic epistemology was not a complete dead-end. Coherentism has never escaped skepticism and no one has never provided an adequate concept of evidence that would allow for types of evidence to emerge in the development of sciences (or even for the ones we have now).

Secondly her proposed model of objective types (at least in this essay) or, in other words, scientific sets is so half-baked that it is typical of the deference analytic philosophy has for what it thinks science is, i.e. the explainer of everything, as if physics disproved John Keats. But too many philosophers are convinced they know what a "set" actually is (or scienence for that matter) because they encounter so often. For my part, like the concept of number, I have no clue what a set is (nor science).

The arguments in this essay, in the end, really only end up appealing to authorities and are not at all convinving.

Again though, my (intense) dislike was mainly for that essay so take my (salty) limited perspective with some salt.

[FluffyNyctea]

Please stop please analytic philosophers I beg you, stop yapping!!! Y’all can turn the most interesting issues into the most horrifying arguments…

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really really enjoyed reading someone who takes critical theory seriously and writes with analytic rigor, Haslanger is truly one of the goats.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

manchmal scheint es so zu sein, als hätten sie in der analytischen Philosophie gestern Abend fix angefangen, ein bisschen zu lesen