What is the argument in favor of science being a social construct?

measurements are accurate only to a degree and it varies.
Questionnaires and polls are measurements, as they measure the state of mind of the respondent about the subject of the question. Of course, this type of measurement is not very accurate, but right now it is the only way to do measurements in that field.
Maybe in the future they will be able to directly scan the physical state of the brain, which, as a type of measurement, will be more accurate.

Science is a method of creating knowledge. It relies on making hypotheses about how we think things work and then designing and running experiments to test those hypotheses in order to decide if they are false or not. If the results of the experiment are not as predicted, we say the hypothesis is false. If the experiment comes out as predicted, we say there is evidence to support the hypothesis.

We don’t say the hypothesis is true. There are a lot of reasons for this which I won’t go into here. But remember that even though there may be all kinds of evidence to support a hypothesis, it still may not be true. Similarly, even if we find the evidence contradicts the hypothesis, we might not have falsified it. Our experiment may have been run incorrectly or our logic could be incorrect, and there could be many other reasons why the experiment didn’t work even though our hypothesis actually is true.

Even in hard science, we use social constructs. What is a kilogram? Does a kilometer exist? These are things that exist only because humans made them up. They are social constructs. They do not exist in nature. Humans have imposed them on nature so that we may do our work.

Why kilometers? Why are they the length they are? Who decided this? Why did they decide this? You can look at that up, but the point is that someone invented it and the rest of us agreed to abide by that unit of measurement (except those of us who didn’t).

In order to communicate our idea of how big a kilometer is, we need to find a way to make it so precise that anyone can create a kilometer using the same set of instructions. I’m not sure what it’s based on, but it has to be some universal constant, or else it will introduce error into experiments and measurements very quickly.

In social science, we have the same issues that physicists had back before the days of universal measurement systems. We have to invent measurements systems. This means we have to define phenomena so that people can count them. How do you measure personality traits? This is a big problem and there are many competing tests and questionnaires and some people say the ones we have are perfect, and others say they leave out all kinds of important information we need if we are to predict human behavior.

In many cases, we have ideas about important aspects of personality, but we can’t measure them directly. These are called latent variables. So we develop theories. Let’s take intelligence. Some people will say that intelligence is measured on an SAT. Others will say it is measured on an intelligence test. Still others will say that you also have to look at people’s skills and abilities as measured on a skill inventory. Others want you to put in some concrete measure of success, such as income or wealth, and on and on.

In social science, relationships between traits and experience are expressed statistically, because, at least at the imprecise level of measurement we have, don’t always come out the same even though it looks like the inputs are the same. This is true in hard science, as well, but mainly at the quantum level. I believe all relationships in the universe are probabilistic, but there are many in the physical world that look like they happen the same in every case. I am suspicious of that, although I think the variation is extremely small, so it is worth treating it as a law.

In social science, saying that one factor predicts another 40% of the time is huge! Another way of saying that is that we have an R-squared (prediction value) of .4. This is all based on people coming up with ideas about intelligence and what it is made of and defining ways of measuring it, and then relating that to other aspects of a person’s life. These are social constructs with a lot more wiggle room. And you are right to be suspicious of it. If you are going to understand any social science research, you need to delve into the issue of definitions and measurements very carefully. Our ideas about these things are determined by building a consensus with other researchers. These things are correctly called social constructs. It is also important to understand they have been being built for tens of thousands of years—since humans became conscious.

I don’t say this very often, by @wundayatta‘s answer is more or less spot on, especially the part about predictions in social sciences (this is known as a predictor-criterion relationship).

And, the OP’s comment about the lack of synthesis for some theories being embarrassing just isn’t so. It might be embarrassing for irrational ideologues and religious people – and not all religious people are irrational – to lack certainty, but science should never give you certainty. It should give you reliability, but not unquestioning obedience to its authority. Claims that demand such things are a variety of pseudoscience.

Finally, it’s important to understand what a theory is. It’s not a hunch, like a theory in day-to-day chatter (“I have a theory that Michael is gay”). It’s more like a complex framework that explains phenomena, made up of facts, experimental results, laws, and maybe even other theories. Something like the theory of evolution has to synthesize these things from physics, chemistry, and biology alike to be workable.

This question is similar to the question is science objective? I don’t think it is as it is based on observation and observation relies on our senses. Everything we know about the universe comes from our senses, either first hand or second hand. In the same way everything we hypothesise about our observations comes from our minds which are constructed in a certain way. The way we think about the universe is strongly influenced by the grammar of the language we use to do our thinking, which is a social construct. But then there is mathematics, which does seem to be objective and not a social construct.

Science is objective.. The data are the data. Different scientists may interpret the data differently, but the data stays the same. If I close my eyes, the sun is still shining even though I am not observing it.

Philip K. Dick said it best: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”.

@LostInParadise Interesting question. @wundayatta noted that before one can measure things, one must invent a unit of measurement. The unit (meter or kilogram or whatever) is actually a fiction we invented and agreed upon so we could go on to measure things. But as the early Greeks and Babylonians looked up at the night skies and pondered the nature of what they observed, they had neither a unit of measure or a place to measure from. The first fiction was to imagine a place from which measurements could be made. Once those fundamental fictions are dreamed up and agreed to, we could proceed with measuring. But it was a stunning leap of mental gymnastics to realize we needed a place, and to decide that the Earth and the Sun would be a starting point, and that lunar eclipses measured at different times of the year would begin to map out the motions of things in the sky.

For nearly 2,000 years after that, things proceeded in a linear fashion, with facts and measurements leading to hypotheses which eventually led to theories which led to more observations and new theories. Rene Descartes realized that the human mind is good at solving linear problems and almost impossibly poor at solving non-linear ones like economics, social sciences and biology present. He defined a very rigid approach to thought, forcing all inputs to be standardized so they could flow through his problem solving routine in a pipeline fashion. Seymour Cray used the same approach to develop the first supercomputer. It was fast because linear problems were presented to it in such a way that they could flow in pipeline fashion.

But networked supercompers have led to a whole new way of problem solving, using a rather evolutionary process that can take garbage or random input in and parallel process it trillions of times, slowly evolving a solution that is useful in predicting swings of the stock market, or how a new long-chain organic chemical for a wonder drug will spatially orient its chain of connections.

The closest any human has ever come to thinking in this nonlinear fashion is found in the work of Johannes Kepler. His mentor, the elderly German astronomer Tycho Brahe was an elderly man when Kepler first met him, and he had spent his entire lifetime making astronomical observations and carefully recording his results in notebooks. Brahe had filled a notebook every year. Kepler inherited all these, and added in his own copious observations. And he spent years thinking about them with no particular discipline. He believed in the occult, and in astrology. He mused that the planets might have volition and keep their appointed rounds because they wished to do so. He was as comfortable looking for musical harmony in the planets as he was orderly motion.

And yet he came up with Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. His first law is almost beyond imagination. He figured out how a series of regular polygons inside a containing globe, pictured here, could define the motion of the known planets and the mon. He did this in his head, thinking about millions of data points at once! This solution is no longer used, but his second law, using advanced algebra to describe motions, is.

What Kepler managed to do is almost incomprehensible to most meager humans, but he was dealing with a problem that while very complex, was trivial compared to biological, ecological and social systems. Only through massive parallel processing and trillions of iterations can such problems be approached. We humans can feed in the problem and read out the predictions of the model, but we cannot think like a massively networked series of supercomputers can.

I wrote all that because I find it a fascinating story but also because it now gives us a tool to measure the seemingly immeasurable. We can begin to bend science toward actually understanding and making meaningful predictions about social constructs. And it all came about from the initial fiction of a place from which to start measuring using a fiction about a unit to measure with—which were social constructs.

@LostInParadise That didn’t answer your question, did it?

I provide support to a lot of qualitative researchers. Their job, in my mind, is to define categories that are measurable. It is a job that only humans can do. When you are dividing things into categories, the boundaries are arbitrary, at some level. Now I recently saw a statistical tool that is designed to help with defining category boundaries, but it can only do so given the original data, which is measured according to some standard that a human decided on.

There is no way around this. We can sort things into groups by using standard deviations or by using quintiles or quartiles or jenks algorithm, but the things we are sorting are human created things, like race. Race is something only a human can decide on, because it doesn’t exist in the natural world in any way that is definable in quantifiable terms. Only a human can look at skin tone and language and behavior and food and history and assign a likely race to another person, or to themselves.

Any analysis that relies on race is going to be inherently fuzzy because no two people see race the same way. It is only through years of efforts that we can work to define race more and more carefully and narrowly. But there will always be diminishing returns from increased efforts to pin the notion down, and it changes over time, so it resists being pinned down.

This means that knowledge in the social sciences is a moving target, and what we know today will be nonsense tomorrow. Too bad.

It is true that the particular units of measure are determined by humans, but these units do not determine the form of scientific laws. F = ma, regardless of the associated units.

There are many examples of non-linear thinking by humans, leading to new directions of thinking. Non-Euclidean geometry (at least among mathematicians), evolution, relativity and quantum mechanics are all examples.

What computers allow us to do is to record huge amounts of measurements and do huge amounts of calculations on the data. That is how it is possible to predict the weather a week in advance.

@wundayatta , There is enough Luddite in me that I hope that there are limits to how well we will ever be able to take measurements in the social sciences.

@LostInParadise I don’t think you need to worry. I don’t think we’ll ever get enough precision to allow us to prediction anything with an accuracy we are used to seeing in hard sciences. .4 predictive capability is still going to be very, very good for any one factor.

@LostInParadise & @wundayatta Our efforts at predictive measurement may at least answer the question, “Is there free will?” If there is, then no effort to measure will be predictive in the way measuring the orbit of Uranus led Urbain Le Verrier to conclude that there had to be a nearby, as-then-unseen planet whose gravitational tug was disturbing Uranus’ orbit. Le Verrier was able without ever even looking for Pluto to tell astronomers exactly where and when to point their telescopes to find it. When they tested, they found he was right.

If free will exists, it will make such predictive analysis impossible for any life form possessing, or influenced by beings possessing it. If all is deterministic, eventually, we’ll measure human behavior down to the point we can pre-arrest for crimes you are going to commit. I think we’ll find there is free will. I hope so. I don’t want to go down for a crime I haven’t yet been able to enjoy committing.

You open a whole new area of discussion. My personal opinion is that either there is free will or that human behavior is too complex to be able to predict.

free will

I like the notion of compatiblilism, which skirts the issue of free will. It provides a justification for treating people as being responsible for their actions, free will or not. At any given moment, a person has some sort of independent being, and actions by that person are determined by who he/she is and not by some alien mind-controlling agent, even if that person’s essence is determined by the person’s genes and particular historical experience.

I am going to stick with this view until such time that a device can be implanted that redirects a person’s thoughts. We may be viewed as having arrived at this point in special cases. Suppose a violently schizophrenic person’s behavior can be controlled by medication, but the person refuses to take the medication. Are we justified in administering punishment? If the punishment induces the person to take the medication, then I would say yes, but it is a sticky situation.

We would never be justified in forcing the schizophrenic to take the meds. We would be justified in keeping them incarcerated to keep them from endangering the public. Although I would put a very high standard of evidence to justify incarceration.