I *despise* the category of "social construction." "Race is a social construct." "Gender is a social construct."
It confusingly conflates these three:
- Socially Constituted: Something that only exists because we say it does.
- Socially Chunked: Something that exists as a spectrum in the real world that we—with some arbitrariness—chunk into discrete categories.
- Socially Charged: Something that exists in the real world that we decide to assign social importance to.
Examples:
Socially Constituted: *country borders* (They only exist because we believe in th...
Same. It's especially true because if a knight saw a T-Rex he wouldn't hesitate to call it a dragon. He wouldn't be like, "What this is is ambiguous."
I just say, "parable of the purple creatures" when I talk to friends, who I have talked about this with before and understand the concept.
It came up yesterday for me when I was talking to a friend and he was like, "If God made some rules that he would punish us for not following, but the rules weren't intrinsically motivating, should we call that moral realism?" And I was like parable of the purple creatures bro.
Parable of the Purple Creatures
Some Medieval townsfolk thought witches were poisoning their wells. Witches, of course, are people—often ugly—who are in league with Satan, can do magic, and have an affinity for broomsticks. These villagers wanted to catch the witches so they could punish them. Everyone in the town felt that witches should be punished. So they set up a commission to investigate the matter.
Well, it turned out little purple alien creatures were poisoning their wells.
They *weren’t* human.
They *couldn’t* do magic.
They *weren’t*...
Some people think the Bible or Quran was written by the infinitely intelligent creator of the universe. I think this is a failure of imagination.
What do I mean?
Like really, you don't think such a being would write a *better* book?
Imagine a book that you could read both forwards and backwards. As in, the letters in all the words just so happen to be arranged such that the book could be meaningfully read both ways with different messages. That alone would be insane. But then also the chapter titles formed an acrostic and the whole book rhymed.&nb... (read more)