"It's a social construct!"

Suppose I point at an object. A normal, everyday object, like a door. I ask you, "Is that an elephant?"
You ask me, "Are you drunk? Are you high? Are you insane?"
"I'm not crazy," I assure you, "This is philosophy."
You sigh in resignation.
"No," you say, "That's not an elephant."
When you say, "That's not an elephant," that is all you mean: that's not an elephant, you lunatic. You don't mean, "That's not something that we attach the arbitrary linguistic sign 'elephant' to as a consequence of the use of that sign in a language game," or any other such piece of philosophical analysis. You just mean that it's not an elephant.

But there's a problem. If I ask that fatal question, "What do you mean by that?" then we can get caught up in all manner of irrelevancies. You might respond, "It's not a creature with a trunk and four legs and gray skin." And I might decide to be a smartass and say, "So if I cut off an elephant's trunk, it's no longer an elephant?" This can go on and on. I'm not saying that we shouldn't get into such semantic tangles because they're annoying. Such debates are important! The abortion debate is, for many people, a semantic question about the meaning of the word, "baby." But that's not what I want to focus on here.

The first concept I want you to grasp, here, is a little meta to the whole discussion about whether or not something is a baby or an elephant or whatever. The first concept is this: we can argue over whether my car is still a car when it's disassembled and in pieces in my garage. But we know that an oak tree is not a car. More importantly, when we say that the car I'm leaning against isn't an oak tree, we're not talking about words. Most importantly, some things are definitely cars, and some things are definitely not cars. I want you to digest that. Now, for the hard step: I want you to combine those two ideas. First, that there are some things that are definitely oak trees and some that are definitely not, and second, that when we say that, we're not talking about words. What happens when you combine those two ideas?

What happens is this: you realize that, just because something is vague, doesn't mean that it's not real. Yeah, there are borderline cases, like the dis-assembled car, where something is kind of a car and kind of not a car. But that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as a car. It doesn't mean that cars aren't real things or that cars, to use a somewhat abused turn of phrase, are socially constructed. It means that there are cars, and things that aren't cars, and things that are kind of cars.

There's a problem, though. Remember a few paragraphs ago, when I said that the best way to end up in an endless semantic tangle was to ask, "What do you mean by that?" Them we end up debating about words. Now, there's nothing wrong with debating about words. The fact that we do that isn't a problem. The problem is this: we can abuse reasoning about words to say absurd things. Philosophers get accused of doing this a lot, but really, philosophers spend most of their time trying to escape this problem, not create it. If I ask you what you mean by "That's not an elephant," and you respond by listing the attributes of "elephant" as "Creature with four legs and a long nose," I can be a smartass and ask if an anteater is an elephant. The fatal step, the real problem, is this: I can then use that line of reasoning to decide that there's no such thing as an elephant, and if you insist that there is, I'll demand that you nail it down precisely. And no matter how precise your definition is, I can keep on finding counterexamples and tangling you up until you give up, and possibly throttle me out of frustration. It takes a lot of verbal acumen for someone to stop me in my tracks by saying, "You've gotten the cart before the horse. Just because we understand something through language doesn't mean that that thing is as arbitrary as language, any more than seeing you with my eyes means that you exist only inside of my eyes."

I want to stress, again, that there is nothing wrong with asking for a precise definition. While this essay wouldn't cut it in an academic journal, I am, all the same, being somewhat more careful with my words here than is needed for ordinary conversation. I am doing so because it is useful for the purposes of this essay. And sometimes, you really do need to nail things down to a high degree of precision. But that step in reasoning at the end, where I claim that there's no such thing as an elephant, is still wrong. It's a fallacy. A mistake in reasoning. If my thinking leads me to reject the existence of elephants, then I've screwed up somewhere, full stop, even if I try to weasel out of it with some hair-splitting about how I really do believe that there are elephants, even though I don't. And, to the credit of those pesky philosophers everyone hates for doing this, they do, in fact, have a name for this mistake: "The Sorites Fallacy," for the Sorites Paradox that outlines this very problem. It's a very old idea. That people still make this mistake is a painful indicator that we moderns are perhaps not as clever as we'd like to think. We're still making the classic philosophical mistake of identifying the way we know about something with that very thing. More than twenty centuries later, all of the dreadfully clever and enlightened moderns laugh at the ignorance of the past while making shadow puppets in Plato's cave.

The reason that the phrase "socially constructed" gets so much hate is because, when people argue that such-and-such is socially constructed, they often abuse this line of reasoning and commit the fallacy above. Somewhere along the line, a few French philosophers and their followers rediscovered this problem and, while pointing out some of the legitimate challenges it raises, still committed the classic postmodernist error of getting far too excited about a relatively minor problem. This French school of philosophy became enormously influential, and, at the time of this writing, the humanities departments of most universities in the Western world are saturated by this kind of thinking, without even knowing it. Liberal arts students, or, as N+1 Magazine likes to call them, "The Theory Generation," are indoctrinated into a particular worldview based upon this very narrow era of philosopy. As the indoctrination progresses, they are told that they are learning "critical thinking" from well-meaning professors. Your average university students thinks that their outlook is just what how enlightened people think. They're convinced that, if you confront your deeply-held assumptions about how things are, you will think the way they do. "If you'd just think for yourself, you'd agree with me!" They don't realize they've accepted a particular worldview, because they were told that they've transcended worldviews. They don't think they've been indoctrinated, because they were told that they were learning how to avoid being indoctrinated. They don't think, because all matters of thought have been settled for them. And if you point this out to them, if you suggest the idea that perhaps they're doing the very thing they accuse everyone else of doing, they'll give you an ironic smile and very patiently say, "Well, you haven't really thought it through."