## 1. What is Social Construction?



While constructionist claims often take the passive form of a
declaration that "*Y* is socially constructed," it
is more useful to think of social constructionist claims as having the
form of a two-part relation:



> 
> *X* socially constructs *Y*.
> 



We can then think of different accounts of social construction as
differing in their accounts either of the relation itself, or of one
or both relata.


### 1.1 What Constructs?



While philosophers have carefully engaged various constructionist
claims over the last several decades, much of the attention has been
paid to various objects of construction (e.g., ideas? knowledge?
facts? human nature?). In contrast, comparatively little attention has
been paid to distinguishing different sorts of agents of construction.
Many of the agents in social constructionist claims can be neatly
divided into two groups: those that view the agents as primarily
*impersonal* agents, and those that view the agents as
*personal* agents (i.e., persons or groups).



Work in the first group emphasizes a causal role for impersonal causes
like cultures, conventions, or institutions in producing some
phenomenon. For example, the claim that what we perceive is determined
by our background theories emphasizes an impersonal causal
agent--culture--in determining some phenomena. Perhaps the
most influential version of this claim came in Thomas Kuhn's
suggestion that, "what a man sees depends both upon what he
looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience
has taught him to see" (1962/1970, 113), a suggestion with some
foundation in "New Look " psychology (e.g. Briner,
Postman, and Rodrigues 1951). This view was subsequently taken up by a
range of other authors across disciplines. For example, the historian
Thomas Laqueur writes that, "powerful prior notions of
difference or sameness determine what one sees and reports about the
body" (1990,
 21).[1]
 Provocative claims like Kuhn's and Laqueur's suggest that
perception is so dependent upon the background theories that the
observational data becomes compromised as an independent constraint on
empirical inquiry. Impersonal cultural accounts of construction are
also found in explanations of nonrepresentational phenomena, for
example, of sex-differentiated behavior. Here a core claim might admit
that there is sex difference, but claim that the cause of difference
is rooted in different conceptions of sex (and the practices caused by
those conceptions) rather than biological facts (see
 Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender).



A second group of constructionist claims emphasizes *personal*
social agents that construct through their choices. For example,
Andrew Pickering's (1984) influential work *Constructing
Quarks* emphasizes the role of scientists' judgments in a
variety of roles in scientific process including, e.g., theory
selection, experiment evaluation, assessments of research fecundity,
and so forth, and such an emphasis on apparently highly contingent
choices by researchers and scientific institutions is a mainstay of
the social studies of knowledge literature. In emphasizing personal
choices, some constructionist work (including some of
Pickering's) seems primarily aimed at emphasizing the
contingency of the scientific theory that we come to accept (cf.
Hacking
 1999).[2]
 Other constructionists--those we might call *critical*
constructionists--emphasize personal choices not just to
establish the contingency of the acceptance of some representation as
to emphasize the role of an agent's interests or power relations
in determining the content of an accepted representation. For example,
Charles Mills suggests that the borders of American racial categories
were determined in such a way as to "establish and maintain the
privileges of different groups. So, for example, the motivation for
using the one-drop rule to determine black racial membership is to
maintain the subordination of the products of
'miscegenation'" (1998, 48). And a range of
constructionist research, especially research on human classifications
like "race" and "gender," documents shifts in
human classification in response to shifts of interests or power.


### 1.2 What is Constructed?



Social constructionist claims are made about so many different objects
that it is perhaps not surprising to find that such claims have
different implications depending upon the different objects at which
they are directed. Most uses of "construction"-talk (and
related talk to the effect that that objects are, surprisingly,
"invented" or "made up") are directed at three
very different sorts of entities: representations (e.g. ideas,
theories, concepts, accounts, taxonomies, and so forth),
(non-representational) facts quite generally, and a special sort of
non-representational fact: facts about human traits.



Most philosophical discussion of social constructionism has been
concerned with the so-called "science wars" which means
that they have been concerned with evaluating the inference from the
numerous and complex social influences operating in the production of
scientific theories to the social construction of the facts those
theories purport to represent, or to the failure of accounts of
scientific rationality, or scientific realism, or scientific process
(e.g. Laudan 1981, Nelson 1994, Fine 1996, Kukla 2000).



But "construction" talk has a more or less independent,
but equally contentious life in the "human nature wars"
where it labels the position that human traits (for example the
emotions) or human kinds (which we can think of categories whose
members share traits or clusters of traits, including, especially,
dispositions to think and behave) are produced by culture rather than
by biology or nature. 



This *kind* constructionist view contrasts with the view that
human kinds or traits are to be explained in terms of non-cultural
mechanisms - especially internal, biological or natural states of the
organism. The most pronounced disputes are prima facie concerned with
whether the clustering of traits in, for example, sex difference,
emotional behavior, or mental illness, are caused by a cultural
practice of differentiating persons or are instead caused by natural
processes operating in relative independence from culture.



But this kind constructionist view has also (especially in the
philosophy of race) come to contrast with the skeptical view that a
kind does not exist. In the context of race, constructionism amounts
to the positive assertion that race is real even though it is not
constituted by, or grounded in, biological facts such as genetic
difference. (See, e.g., Haslanger 2012, Taylor 2013, Sundstrom 2002,
Outlaw 1995, and the section "Race: Do Races Exist? Contemporary
Philosophical Debates" in the entry on
 race.)



We consider naturalistic approaches to the construction of
representations and human traits in more detail below, but it is
useful to first distinguish *global* constructionist claims
that hold that *every* fact is a social construction, from
*local* constructionist claims that hold that only particular
facts
 are.[3]
 Because of their provocative nature, many philosophers associate the
term "social construction" with a global thesis, and a
standard argument against global constructionism concerns whether such
a program is sustainable in the face of the regress such a global
thesis engenders regarding the thesis of constructionism itself (e.g.
Boghossian 2006, Kukla 2000). Philosophers may have focused on these
more radical claims in part because of the recognition that, relying
on something like the general idea of construction sketched above,
claims that are relatively global in scope are quite provocative and
surprising while claims that would count as locally socially
constructionist are quite familiar in many areas of philosophy,
perhaps most importantly in meta-ethics, aesthetics, and social
ontology. The domain of social ontology is especially interesting
because here many facts are widely recognized as social constructions:
for example, facts about *being a U.S. Senator* or a
*licensed dog* are social
 constructions.[4]
 Call such constructions *overt*
 constructions.[5]



But even local constructionist claims can be interesting to the extent
that they try to show some object may be produced by unacknowledged
social practices--when they are *covert* constructions.
This is the role that they play in the philosophy of psychiatry
(Hacking 1995a, Scheff 1984, Showalter 1996, cf. Murphy 2006), the
philosophy of the emotions (Averill 1980a, 1980b, Armon-Jones 1986,
Harre 1986, cf. Griffiths 1997), the philosophy of race (e.g.
Outlaw 1990, 1995; Mills 1998; Taylor 2013), and the philosophy of
gender (see
 Feminist Theories of Sex and Gender: Gender as Socially Constructed).
 Here the local claim that some kind (for example *mental
illness*, *emotion*, *race*, or *gender*) is
explained by received culture or practice retains its interest because
it offers a metaphysical alternative to other explanations
(biological, religious, etc.) of the differential features of the kind
members as well as an alternative to skepticism about the reality of
the
 kind.[6]


### 1.3 What is it to Construct?



We have already suggested that the core idea of constructionism is
that some social agent produces or controls some object. Of course,
"construction" talk is meant to evoke a variety of
connotations that attend more paradigmatic construction: intentional
activity, engaged in step-by step fashion, producing a designed,
artifactual product. While different objects lead constructionist talk
to be interpreted in different ways, we can distinguish two different
sorts of relationship: *causal* or
 *constitutive*.[7]
 On the first, *X* constructs *Y* if *Y* is
*caused* to come to exist, to continue to exist, or to have the
properties that it does by *X*. On the second, *Y* is
constructed if it is *constituted* by *X*'s
conceptual or social activity (perhaps even independently of
*X*'s *causal* influence on *Y*).



The first, and more straightforward idea is *causal
construction*:



> 
> *X* *causally constructs* *Y* if and only if
> *X* causes *Y* to exist or to persist or *X*
> controls the kind-typical properties of
>  *Y*.[8]
> 



There is no special problem posed by the claim that human social and
linguistic activities cause certain things to exist or persist, or
cause certain facts to be. More obscure is the idea that
*X*'s construction of *Y* is some sort of
*constitutive* relationship. Many constructionist claims seem
to involve the idea that the world is itself "made up" by
social and cultural activities in ways that suggest our
socio-linguistic behaviors are at least necessary to the object in
question. This suggests a relationship such as:



> 
> *X* *constitutively constructs* *Y* if and only
> if *X*'s conceptual or social activity regarding an
> individual *y* is metaphysically necessary for *y* to be
> a *Y*.
> 



Consider the ways in which causal and constitutive claims might pull
apart in a case of a socially produced artifact. Representations
expressing the concept *watch* are normally causally necessary
for some materials to come to have the intrinsic features of a watch,
but they are not metaphysically necessary. It is metaphysically
possible, however unlikely, that we could walk across a heath and find
(something with the intrinsic features of) a watch that had
"always been there."



In contrast, the best candidates for constitutive construction are
social facts:



> 
> For social facts, the attitude that we take toward the phenomenon is
> partly constitutive of the phenomenon ... Part of being a
> cocktail party is being thought to be a cocktail party; part of being
> a war is being thought to be a war. This is a remarkable feature of
> social facts; it has no analogue among physical facts. (Searle 1995,
> 33-34)
> 



On Searle's view, a particular gathering of persons can be a
cocktail party only with the conceptual and social recognition of
those gathered. A similar idea has been influential in constructionist
discussions. For example, the provocative claims that there were no
homosexuals before the concept *homosexual* came to be
expressed in Western culture in the nineteenth century (e.g. Foucault
1978, Halperin 1990) or that race is a modern invention (e.g Taylor
2004) seem to make sense if we see sexual or racial kinds as in part
constituted by our concepts of them.



But Searle is right that there is something remarkable here, at least
in the case of social facts: somehow our conceptual scheme or practice
are necessary to make it true that some event instantiates
*cocktail party* or *war*. What is wanted is, at a
minimum, a model of this production--a model of exactly how the
conceptual practice constitutes the fact. Perhaps the most obvious
model to explain such constitutive claims is to hold that the relevant
necessity is *analytic*, it holds in virtue of the meaning of
the relevant term or concept. It is a fact about the meaning of
"cocktail party" and perhaps "homosexual" and
"race") that it does not apply to a thing unless it is
recognized to do so.



Whether *any* such meaning claims can be accommodated has been
a contentious question since Quine (1953), but it is a question we can
put aside for now (see
 The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction).
 Instead, we should ask whether such model of constitutivity as
analyticity is plausible for objects of social construction.



On the one hand, if Searle's general account of social facts is
correct, there may be many terms that operate like "cocktail
party" in that the participants produce them only when they
share certain intentional states about what they are doing. On the
other hand, this does not seem plausible for the objects of many
social constructionist claims. Remember, it is a mainstay of
constructionist research to claim that social influence is exercised
in surprising and provocative ways, especially on objects that we take
to be produced naturally. But just this feature suggests that it
cannot be part of our ordinary concepts of covertly constructed kinds
that instances require our social-conceptual imprimatur to be members
of these kinds (Machery 2014, Mallon 2017). This point is highlighted
in a more general way by Paul Boghossian's query:



> 
> isn't it part of the very *concept* of an electron, or of
> a mountain, that these things were *not* constructed by us?
> Take electrons, for example. Is it not part of the very purpose of
> having such a concept that it is to designate things that are
> independent of us? (2006, 39)
> 



If this is right, constructionists who view construction as a
constitutive relation need another account of the necessity of our
conceptual practice: it is implausible and inconsistent to claim that
the necessity arises out of concept or word meanings in cases of
covert construction.



There is a different model of necessity for the constructionist,
however, which is to hold that the necessity in question is revealed
*a posteriori* by our investigations of the phenomenon in
question. Saul Kripke (1980), Hilary Putnam (1975) and others defended
a causal theory of reference on which some terms (notably natural kind
terms) referred to some sort of stuff or essence underlying the
central uses of the term (see
 Reference: Causal Theories).
 Crucially, however, because the reference relation is external,
competent users of a term can be radically mistaken about what the
term refers to and still successfully refer. In the case of water, for
example, Putnam suggests that "water" picks out the sort
of stuff that bears the appropriate causal-historical relation to
paradigmatic instances in our own causal history (viz.
H2O), and this was true even when we did not know what sort
of stuff that was (i.e. before we knew the chemical structure).
Kripke, Putnam, and others emphasized that claims such as
"water=H2O" express necessary though *a
posteriori* truths.



While the causal theory of reference (and its correct interpretation)
remains controversial, in many quarters of philosophy it has become
accepted wisdom. It is thus an option for interpreters of social
constructionism to claim that certain terms--for example,
"race"--actually refer to a kind that is produced by
our socio-linguistic behavior, even if that fact is revealed only
*a
 posteriori*.[9]
 Such a constitutive constructionist could grant, then, that it is
part of our ordinary conception of the concept (e.g. of race) that -
like electron - it refers to an independent, natural fact about the
world, but such a constructionist would insist that further
exploration of the world reveals that conventional features of our
practice produce the object of our study. As with the case of
"water" before modern chemistry, the conception widely
associated with "race" (viz. that it is a biological kind)
is wrong, but the term successfully refers all the same. Ideally, for
such an approach to work, the constitutive constructionist would like
an independent characterization of the sorts of social objects that
investigation reveals to be identical with the kinds in question (e.g.
Asta 2016; Bach 2012; Mallon 2003, 2016), but they also need to
fend off critics of applying the causal theory of reference in the
context of reference to socially produced objects (e.g. Thomasson
2003) as well as more general critiques of employing theories of
reference as premises in arguments with philosophically significant
conclusions (Mallon et al. 2009, Mallon 2007b). Still, if it can be
made to work, this strategy would make sense of constitutive
constructionist claims while respecting Boghossian's idea (one
that is also central to constructionism) that these kinds are
ordinarily believed to be natural and independent of us. For this
reason, this strategy has been suggested in the case of race, gender,
and other human kinds (Haslanger 2003, 2005; Mallon 2003, 2016), and
more generally for scientific facts (Boyd 1992). 



Of course, there may well be other models of necessity available. For
example, it is sometimes suggested that a neo-Kantian interpretation
of social constructionism is possible, an interpretation on which our
socio-linguistic activities could provide a transcendental basis for
any knowledge of the world. Such an interpretation might allow certain
apparently radical constitutive claims, but the challenge would remain
to reconcile the view with a naturalistic conception of ourselves,
something such a proposal may fail to do (e.g. Boyd 1992, Rosen
1994).


## 2. Naturalism and Social Construction



Any discussion of naturalistic approaches to social construction is
complicated by the fact that "naturalism" itself has no
very widespread and uniform understanding (see
 Naturalism).
 Still, the prospect seems provocative, in part, because social
construction has come to be associated with a critical anti-realist
attitude towards science.



Above, we identified naturalism with a certain attitude towards
science, and for present purposes, we develop this idea by identifying
three naturalistic attitudes toward science that have been picked up
by naturalists addressing social constructionist themes.


1. Epistemological Fundamentalism
	1. Accommodating Science: Most contemporary naturalists take science
	to be an enormously successful enterprise, and so other knowledge
	claims must either cohere with the findings of our best science or
	explain those findings away.
	2. Empiricism: Knowledge comes from careful study of the world, not a
	priori theorizing.
	3. Causal Modeling: The world is a set of entities related by natural
	laws. In attempting to understand it, we produce causal models that
	idealize these relationships to varying degrees.
2. Metaphysical Fundamentalism
	1. Supervenience: There are more and less fundamental entities, and
	the less fundamental depend on the more fundamental. Naturalists
	understand (at least) these fundamental entities to be natural (as
	opposed to supernatural). Naturalists typically hold these fundamental
	entities to be physical entities.
	2. Reduction: The regularities in which less fundamental entities
	participate are explained by natural laws governing the more
	fundamental entities upon which they supervene.
3. Human Naturalism:
	1. Nonanomalism: Human beings and their products (e.g. culture or
	society) are natural things within the world that science explains.
	They are not metaphysically anomalous.
	2. Methodological Naturalism: In studying human nature, human
	culture, and social life, the methods of the natural sciences are to
	be employed.



These features characterize substantial threads of contemporary
naturalist thought--threads that arise repeatedly in discussions
of constructionism. Still, it is worth noting that something may be
naturalistic in one sense but not another, and that the various
threads we have characterized may sometimes be at odds. For example,
rational choice explanations in economics might count as naturalist in
that they attempt to reduce complex macro-level phenomena to simple,
micro-level phenomena at the level of individuals (exhibiting some
variety of metaphysical fundamentalism), and in the sense that they
employ idealized causal modeling to do so (as in 1c). But they seem
nonnaturalist insofar as they offer a highly idealized account of
human behavior, one that seems frequently contradicted by the
psychological facts about human reasoning (see, e.g., Nisbett and Ross
1980, Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) (against, perhaps, 1a and b, and
3).



We now review various naturalistic approaches to social construction,
considering different sorts of entities in turn.


## 3. Naturalizing Social Construction



As we noted above, the production of facts by social agents poses no
special problem for the naturalist where that production is understood
causally, though naturalists of many stripes may want to produce
causal models to show how the macro-level social phenomena of interest
to many social theorists and social scientists are causally realized
given what we know about, e.g. human nature or the causal structure of
the universe. In contrast, constitutive claims of construction seem
difficult to make sense of (except on an account of construction on
which social activity involving a representation comes to produce and
causally sustain an object that is referred to by that
representation).



In recognition of this state of affairs, many naturalist approaches to
constructed phenomena have involved attempts to causally model matters
of interest to constructionists in ways that engage more or less
completely with existing scientific knowledge. By way of illustrating
such naturalistic approaches, I'll discuss the social
construction of representations and of human nature in more
detail.


### 3.1 The Social Construction of Representations



In talking about the construction of representations, we address the
range of mental states, group beliefs, scientific theories, and other
representations that express concepts or propositions. Such
representations are, among other things, the vehicles of our thought
as well as the means by which we store, organize, and further our
knowledge of the world, and we do this in virtue of their role as
bearers of meaning. A number of commentators have noted that many
provocative constructionist claims are, in the first instance, claims
that some sort of representation is constructed (e.g. Andreasen 1998,
Hacking 1999, Haslanger 2012, Mallon 2004). Specifically, these are
claims that social causes produce or control the selection of some
representations with some meanings rather than others: for example,
when Pickering (1984) writes of the construction of quarks or Laqueur
(1990) suggests that sex is "made up," they seem to be
most directly addressing the process by which the *theories* of
the quark or *theories* of sex are produced, viz. they are
showing how a theory with one meaning was selected or endorsed rather
than another theory or no theory at all. Where we limit the objects of
constructionist claims to representations (such as theories), the
claims cease to be particularly metaphysically provocative though
detailed constructionist accounts of how certain representations came
to be selected may still teach us much about science (e.g. Latour and
Woolgar 1979l Collins and Pinch 2012).



In light of this, philosophers may be wont to diagnose some
constructionist talk as a careless (or even an intentionally
provocative) error of talking about the object of construction
*using* a representation when one should be *mentioning*
it (thereby expressing a view about the referent of the representation
rather than the representation itself). When Claudius Ptolemy offered
a geo-centric theory of the universe in the second century CE, he
thereby contributed to the social construction of something: namely,
*a geocentric theory of the universe*. We can talk about how
and when that theory arose, and how it changed over time, but in doing
so we are simply talking about a representation (or perhaps a lineage
of related representations). It would be a mistake simply to slip from
those claims into saying that in constructing this theory he thereby
constructed *a geocentric universe*. Hence, charity in
interpretation alone may suggest attributing only the weaker claim to
a constructionist
 author.[10]



Still some constructionists endorse a stronger claim as
well--that in constructing the theories, the facts described by
those theories are thereby made to be. But if we leave at least the
global versions of these additional claims aside as impossible to
reconcile with naturalism, the distinctive feature of social
constructionist explanations of representations is that they explain
how we came to have those representations not by reference to the
facts in the world they represent (as in realism), nor by reference to
associations among our sensations (as in some forms of empiricism),
nor by reference to innate knowledge or concepts (as in rationalism),
nor by reference to the conditions of our thought or experience (as in
transcendental arguments) but rather by reference to social and
cultural background facts.



Naturalist work on constructionist approaches to representations can
be grouped according to the debate the naturalist is addressing.
Naturalists addressing the challenge posed by social construction to
the authority of science have attempted to respond to this challenge
in a variety of ways that pit various versions of realism and
empiricism against constructionism (e.g. Boyd 1992; see
 Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge).
 Because naturalists are typically committed to science as a central,
if fallible, avenue of knowledge about the world (i.e. some variety of
epistemic fundamentalism), naturalists will want to explain how this
can be if, as social constructionists about scientific representations
note, empirical observation is theory-laden and scientific theories
are themselves subject to massive social influences.



For example, Jerry Fodor's account of the modularity of
perception (e.g. 1983, 1984, 1988) is, in part, a response to the
implication that perception is so theory-laden that it lacks the
independence required to constrain belief (see above for this
implication in such diverse thinkers as Kuhn 1962/1970 and Laqueur
1990). Fodor suggests that sensory perception is modular by which he
means (in part) "mandatory" and "informationally
encapsulated" in its operations--i.e., it operates
independently of our will and of our background theories and
expectations. Fodor illustrates this effect by pointing to cases of
optical illusions like the Muller-Lyer illusion (Fodor 1984). Here,
two parallel line segments continue to appear to be different lengths
even when one knows them be the same length, suggesting the
independence of the process that produces sensory phenomena from
one's background theoretical beliefs. And while some
philosophers (e.g. Churchland 1988, cf. Fodor 1988) have resisted this
conclusion, some social scientists of knowledge have attempted to
restate a constructionist view in ways that allow that Fodor may be
correct. Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry, for example, shift
from emphasis on the determination of perceptual experience by culture
to an emphasis on the underdetermination of belief by perceptual
experience (a view which leaves room for cultural determination of
belief) (1996, Ch. 1). More generally, epistemologists and
philosophers of science have taken up the project of accommodating
social influence in the production of knowledge, and this project is
well underway in contemporary social epistemology and philosophy of
science (e.g. Boyd 1992; Kitcher 1993, 2001). These issues are taken
up elsewhere
 (Social Epistemology)
 so we address them no further here. Instead, I focus on attempts by
naturalists to accommodate the cultural and personal processes at the
heart of constructionist phenomena in naturalistic terms.



In contrast to naturalistic responses to the threat of scientific
anti-realism, naturalistic responses to constructionist claims about
representations (including beliefs) understood as human traits have
been far more sympathetic to constructionist approaches. Indeed, an
emphasis on the cultural and social causes of belief is quite amenable
to range of naturalists, and naturalistic approaches to these causes
are well represented in constructionist precursors, including such
luminaries as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche (see the section on the
critique of the descriptive component of MPS in
 Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy),
 and Karl Mannheim (1936). In contemporary naturalistic philosophy of
science and psychology, the naturalistic explanation of culturally
produced cognition is picked up by at least three distinct strands of
work taking up constructionist themes of culture. The first is
centered on the idea that culture can be understood by analogy with
population genetics, and that cultural items might be understood to be
more or less successful based upon their success in spreading in a
population. Various versions of this sentiment find expression in such
diverse thinkers as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (1985, 2005a,
2005b), D.T. Campbell (1960), Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman
(1981), David Hull (1988), Jesse Prinz (2007, Ch. 6), Daniel Sperber
(1996), and one version of it has a substantial popular following
(Richard Dawkins's (1976) widely read discussion of
"memes"). While only some of these thinkers link the
project to the understanding of constructionist research themes, the
project in every case is to formally model cultural processes,
understanding these complex processes as depending on simpler ones
(See also
 Cultural Evolution.)
 



The second, overlapping strand of naturalistic inquiry also views
culture as a system of representations upon which selection acts, but
attempts to integrate this idea with the idea, common in evolutionary
cognitive psychology, that the mind is comprised of a great many
domain-specific mental mechanisms, and uses these as the selective
mechanisms that act as a primary mechanism of selection (so called
"massive modularity"; see
 Evolutionary Psychology: Massive Modularity;
 cf. Carruthers 2006), and it is most firmly represented among
cognitive anthropologists and psychologists like Scott Atran (1998),
Pascal Boyer (1994, 2001), Laurence Hirschfeld (1996), and Daniel
Sperber (1996). Such an approach represents naturalism in most (or
perhaps all) of the above senses, and it is finding its way into the
work of naturalist philosophers of science and psychology (Machery and
Faucher 2005, Mallon 2013, Nichols 2002, Prinz 2007, Sripada 2006,
Sterelny 2003).



A third, philosophically underdeveloped strand naturalizes crucial
elements of *critical constructionist* approaches by suggesting
the influence of sometimes implicit evaluations on judgments and
theoretical activities. For example, a growing body of empirical
evidence on so-called "motivated cognition" (cf. Kunda
1999) suggests mechanisms for (and some empirical validation of) the
critical social constructionist tradition of explaining the content of
accepted theories in part by appeal to the interests of the theorists.



### 3.2 Construction, Human Kinds and Human Traits



Any sort of human trait could be an object of social construction, but
many of the most interesting and contested cases are ones in which
clusters of traits--traits that comprise human kinds--are
purported to co-occur and to correlate with mental states, including
dispositions to think and behave in particular
 ways.[11]




Because discussion of kinds of persons with dispositions to think and
behave quickly gives rise to other questions about freedom of the will
and social regulation, debates over constructionism about kinds are
central to social and political debates regarding human
categorization, including debates over sex and gender, race, emotions,
hetero- and homo-sexuality, mental illness, and disability. Since the
constructionist strategy explains a trait by appeal to highly
contingent factors (including culture), partisans of these debates
often come inquire whether a trait or cluster of traits is culturally
specific, or can be found across cultures.


#### 3.2.1 The Conceptual Project



These issues can quickly come to generate more heat than light, and so
one role that philosophers in general, and naturalists in particular,
have played is to carefully analyze constructionist positions and
their alternatives. For example, in reflecting on debates over
cultural specificity or universality, a number of commentators have
noted that constructionist claims of cultural specificity often hinge
not on genuine empirical disagreement about what is or is not found
through history and across cultures, but also on a strategy of
*individuating* the phenomena in question in ways that do or do
not involve contextual features that vary across cultures (Mallon and
Stich 2000; Boghossian 2006, 28; Pinker 2003, 38).



Philosophers have also distinguished claims of social construction
from the possibility of cultural control (Mallon 2007a, Stein 1999),
disentangled claims of social construction from claims of
voluntariness and nonessentialism (Stein 1999), set out alternate
forms of constructionism or anti-constructionism (Griffiths 1997,
Mallon 2007c, Andreasen 1998), disentangled questions regarding the
neural basis of a human kind from the innate/constructed dichotomy
(Murphy 2006, Ch. 7) and so forth.



This *conceptual project* is a philosophical project *par
excellence*, and it has contributed a great deal to clarifying
just what conceptual and empirical issues are at stake in
constructionist work.


#### 3.2.2 Explaining the Development and Distribution of Human Traits



Naturalist interpretations of constructionism have also taken up the
distinct, open-ended, empirical project of defending substantive
claims regarding the development and distribution of human traits via
the suggestions that human socio-linguistic behaviors shape human
traits (including behavior) via different avenues, both developmental
and situational.



One "social role" family of theories emphasizes the way
that our socio-linguistic practices produce social roles that
structure and shape human life and behavior. Perhaps the most
influential philosophical project in this area has been Ian
Hacking's work on "making up people" (1986, 1992,
1995a, 1995b, 1998). In a series of papers and books, Hacking argues
that the creation and promulgation of bureaucratic, technical, and
medical classifications like "child abuse,"
"multiple personality disorder," and "fugue"
create "new ways to be a person" (1995b, p. 239). The idea
is that the conception of a certain kind of person shapes both a
widespread social response (e.g. one that exculpates and perhaps
encourages kind-typical behaviors), while at the same time, the
conception shapes individual "performances" of the
behavior in question (by suggesting highly specific avenues of
behavior). On Hacking's model, one he calls "the looping
effect of human kinds," the conception of the behavior may be
part of an epistemic project of understanding a human kind that in
turn gives rise to the clusters of traits that the theory represents
(thereby providing epistemic support for the
 conception).[12]
 Much of Hacking's own recent work has been aimed at providing
detailed historical and cultural evidence that suggests that looping
effects really are a feature of (at least modern) human social life,
e.g. for the American epidemic of multiple personality disorder that
started in the 1980s (Hacking 1995) or the European epidemic of fugue
in the late nineteenth century (Hacking 1998). Hacking makes further
claims about the "looping effect," for example, that
looping effects mark "a cardinal difference between the
traditional natural and social sciences" because "the
targets of the natural sciences are stationary" while "the
targets of the social sciences are on the move" (1999, 108)
),claims that themselves have spurred lively discussions over the
nature of looping effects (e.g. Cooper 2004, Laimann forthcoming) and of their
mechanisms in human groups (e.g. Mallon 2016, Kuorikoski and
Poyhonen 2012).



Others have drawn on Hacking's account to offer similar accounts
of constructed kinds of person, including K. Anthony Appiah (1996) on
racial identities, and Paul Griffiths (1997) on performed emotional
syndromes. Together with Hacking's work, these accounts provide
partial, causal interpretation of even quite radical claims about
kinds of person. For example, Judith Butler has provocatively claimed
that the sex-differentiated behavior is a performance, writing,
"That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no
ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its
reality. ... In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and
enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing
gender core..." (1990, 136). Following on the work of
Hacking, Appiah, Griffiths, and others, we can naturalistically
(re)interpret Butler's claim as one that explains gender
differences in actions, gestures, desires, and so on by reference to
the social role that a person occupies. Such a causal model of the way
in which social roles might shape behavior is at least arguably
naturalistic in all of the above senses.



This "social role project" amounts to only one way of
developing constructionist ideas in the service of explaining the
development of human kinds, traits, or behaviors. For example,
constructionist ideas find diverse manifestations in the theory of
emotions (e.g. Armon-Jones 1986, Barrett 2017, Harre 1986, cf.
Griffiths 1997 and Prinz 2004 for discussion). Because social
constructionism offers a general set of explanatory approaches,
constructionist approaches can be expected to reemerge in a variety of
ways in the attempt to explain a wide range of human phenomena. 


#### 3.2.3 Formal Approaches to the Social Construction of Kinds



Still a different way of developing naturalistic constructionist
accounts of kinds involves using various formal methods to model such
kinds. Among recent work in social ontology, Francesco Guala has
distinguished "rules-based" approaches to social
institutions from "equilibrium-based" approaches (2016,
xxv). The former attempts to understand social structure as emerging
from the collective adoption of rules, while the latter sees it as
emerging along with various solutions to coordination and cooperation
problems. As an example of the former, Searle (1995) influentially
argues that we can understand social institutions as brought into
being by collective endorsement of rules of the form:



> 
> *X* counts as *Y* in *C*.
> 



Here, "*X*" is a specification of the individual or
type to which the status "*Y*" applies. And
"*C*" specifies the context in which this imposition
occurs. For instance, it might specify that tokens of a certain type
produced by the U.S. mint count as money in the United States. Such
statuses obtain in virtue of collective acceptance of one or more
status functions. (See the entry on
 social ontology.)
 



In contrast, the latter family of approaches attempts to understand
social structure by using the tools of economic and evolutionary game
theory to understand culture (e.g. Bicchieri 2006, 2016; Guala 2016;
O'Connor 2017). Here, norms, behaviors, and social regularities
are seen as produced and stabilized by the preferences of individual
actors making decisions in a social context of other actors. For
example, Richard McElreath, Robert Boyd, and Peter Richerson (2003)
have argued that ethnic-group based "markers" (e.g. things
like styles of dress or other indicators of membership in an ethnic
group) culturally evolved because they allowed actors to
differentially interact with those who shared common norms, thus
reaping the benefits of coordination and cooperation with greater
efficiency.



While rules-based approaches have been much discussed across a range
of philosophical fields (including metaphysics, social philosophy,
empirically-informed philosophy of mind), equilibrium-based approaches
have so far received comparatively little philosophical attention.


#### 3.2.4 Human Kinds and Normativity



Many constructionist projects concerning human kinds are, or are
pursued as part of, normative projects. Thinkers interested in gender,
race, mental illness and disability, are often motivated not only by
concern with the metaphysics of these categories, but with questions
of social morality and justice that connect with them. For instance,
Sally Haslanger's work on the construction of gender and race
(Haslanger 2012), or Elizabeth Barnes's (2016) constructionist
account of disability seem to essentially incorporate normative
concepts. This connection, in turn, raises a number of further
questions about why they are connected, and how we ought to understand
their relationship.



One answer to these questions is simply that, once we understand the
constructed nature of some category or phenomena, different normative
conclusions will follow. For instance, some have emphasized that
because constructionist explanations highlight the role of agents in
the production or the sustenance of phenomena, they make those agents
subject to moral evaluation (Kukla 2000; Mallon 2016,
forthcoming).



A different approach might be that normative considerations ought to
drive us towards certain metaphysical explanations. For instance, Esa
Diaz-Leon (2015) has argued that constitutive constructionist
explanations are politically better than causal constructionist ones,
on the grounds that constitutive constructions are more tightly
connected to our socio-conceptual practices:



> 
> revealing the constitutive connections between instantiating a certain
> category and standing in a certain relation to certain social
> practices, opens a clear path for social change: just change those
> social practices, and social change will automatically follow. (2015,
> 1145)
> 



In contrast, Theresa Marques (2017) has argued that a focus on causal
social construction is more relevant to projects of social justice.
But if we see constructionism as a kind of explanation, then this
debate can seem to put the cart before the horse. The correctness of
an explanation is given by some facts in the world. Deciding what we
would like those facts to be, given our aims, seems to fail to
appreciate the reality of our socio-conceptual practices and their
consequences.



More generally, while normative constructionist projects can be deeply
engaged with our best scientific understanding, many naturalists will
be tempted to attempt to distinguish descriptive and normative
elements in order to engage them separately.



At the same time, ongoing naturalist work on human cooperation and
coordination suggests the future possibility of more thoroughgoing
naturalist approaches to construction that integrate naturalistic
approaches to norms and normativity (e.g., Bicchieri 2016, Sripada
2006, and the entry on
 social norms)
 with accounts of the human kinds that our socio-conceptual behaviors
structure and shape.


## 4. Conclusion



The metaphor of "social construction" has proven
remarkably supple in labeling and prompting a range of research across
the social sciences and humanities, and the themes of personal and
cultural causation taken up in this research are themselves of central
concern. While most philosophical effort has gone towards the
interpretation and refutation of provocative accounts of social
construction arising especially out of studies in the history and
sociology of science, social constructionist themes emerge across a
host of other contexts, offering philosophical naturalists a range of
alternate ways of engaging constructionist themes. Philosophical
naturalists as well as working scientists have begun to take up this
opportunity in ways that use the methods of philosophy and science to
both state and evaluate social constructionist hypotheses (though not
always under that label). Because of the powerful and central role
culture plays in shaping human social environments, behaviors,
identities and development, there is ample room for continuing and
even expanding the pursuit of social constructionist themes within a
naturalistic framework.