Science is NOT a social construct

Science is NOT a social construct.

When dealing with the Woke—that is, devotees of the ideology outlined in Critical Social JusticeTheory—one assumption (among many) that is an almost sure bet to make about their claims is that some trick of language is being played. What’s needed to expose the vacuity of the Wokeposition, then, is not necessarily the ability to bring facts to bear on the matter or even to argue better than they can (as they’ll deconstruct your position and leave you looking foolish to anyone slightly sympathetic to their cause). The best thing to do is expose the trick.

Most often, these language games—as Wittgenstein named them, the postmodern theorists then exploited, and the Woke have appropriated—take one of a rather small number of forms. In nearly all cases, it’s some form of a “strategic equivocation,” in which two ideas are being forwarded simultaneously, allowing the Theorist to play both sides of the argument to his own advantage in any given situation.

One example of these sorts of language games is the “motte and bailey” rhetorical structure, in which a radical position (the “bailey” position) is maintained by defending only a highly defensible (but disingenuous) variation (the “motte”). When the pressure is on, the claim being made is justsome perfectly reasonable thing (the motte), like that Critical Race Theory is just an analytical tool that fosters racial sensitivity. When it comes off, the radical position (the bailey)—racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society and thus society requires a revolution to reorder it according to the Critical Race Theory view of the world by empowering Critical Race Theorists—comes back out to play. An extreme example of this style of strategic equivocation are “Troll’s Truisms,” as Nicholas Shackel had it (“deepities,” as named by Dan Dennett). Troll’s Truisms occur when something is trivially true in a banal sense with no real implications and false in a profound sense with serious implications (Dennett gives the example of “love is just a word”).

Frequently, these sorts of equivocations are facilitated by another strategic equivocation common to the Woke: meaning something different by everyday words. Among many possible examples of this disingenuousness—racism, anti-racism, Social Justice, diversity, inclusion, critical, tolerance, and antifascist all spring to mind—its subtlest form occurs when the word being used is very much so technically correct but contains at least one assumption hidden from view by the Woke Theorist. Arguably, diversity works this way in that the hidden assumption is that unless a person has a critical consciousness (i.e., is Woke), they have a false consciousnessand therefore do not truly represent their views authentically, which in practice ensures basically no diversity of thought. Far more subtle and effective than this, however, is the idea of “social constructions.”

The Woke are social constructivists, or, more accurately, critical constructivists. A critical constructivist is someone who holds to a strong or strict social constructivism view that is then meant to be analyzed by Critical Theory. Social constructivism is the view that the various features of human experience and our interaction with reality are the products of social interactions, and thus to discuss those features in terms of some underlying reality misses the point of talking about the social processes that has made them what they are.

The most prominent example of this way of thinking is the belief that gender is a social construct, which social constructivists would maintain means that the most or only relevant way to think about gender is in terms of the social processes that define it. In its extreme forms, gender social constructivism holds that male and female biology have nothing to do with one’s gender—or, in queer Theory, even one’s sex—and that it is all a product of “socialization,” which is society brainwashing people to believe their gender is as society believes it should be. More important than something like gender in social constructivism, however, is the belief that knowledge is socially constructed.