Social Construct

What isn’t a social construct?
even numbers may be social constructs.
MEST (matter, energy, space and time) may be infinitely divisible, it may not be made up of units.

And units of measure, such as inches and feet, are definitely social constructs.
Not only that, but no two meter sticks have ever shared the exact same length.
If you looked at the ends of any two meter sticks under a microscope, you’d find one is a little longer than the other.
So our units of measure are always changing.

But what constitutes a little, or slight deviation, is relative to the collective/individual minds of the species apprehending it.
eventually, after 1000s or 1000000s of years, meter sticks may evolve into something a lot longer or shorter than the meter sticks of today.

Same with words, no people or person has ever uttered the same word the exact same way twice.
each time you say the word: change, it’ll sound a bit different.
This difference may or may not be perceptible to you and other listeners, but it’s there.

And furthermore, you’ve never meant the exact same thing by a word either.
Your idea of a dog is always changing.
When you think about what a dog is, different thoughts, feelings, images and sounds spring to mind/the same thoughts, feelings, images and sounds spring to mind differently.

So language, both in sound and in meaning is continuously mutating.
This is how language evolves into different languages after centuries or millennia.
An accumulation of imperceptible changes in sound and meaning over short periods of time, giving way to perceptible changes over long periods of time.

The English of 3019 would probably be largely incomprehensible to the English of 2019, just as the English of 1019 is largely incomprehensible to the English of 2019, unless we use computers to keep track of sounds and meaning, but even then, computers are always changing, their recording of sounds are imperfect, and they can’t really record meaning, they can record definitions, but the meanings of definitions are entirely in our heads, so using computers to keep track of language will only slow the process of linguistic change down, delay the inevitable, not stop it.

There are no specific colors, sounds, smells, tastes…or things.
There are no apples or oranges, cats or dogs out there in a strict sense, nor in here, in our heads.
What can be said about an apple, that it’s a thing, as opposed to many things or nothing? But to a thing more thingy than us, it may seem like nothing.
Where does an apple begin/end?
Is an apple a whole or part of the world?
Is an apple a thing or millions of things?
Is an apple separate from its environment?
Where do we draw the line?
Any apple is continuously exchanging an innumerable amount of MEST with its surroundings and the other things within them.
Is it red, is it round, is it hard, is it moist?
Again, all inter and intra-dependent, no two reds are the same, nothing is perfectly round, hard is contingent, moist conditional.
People can’t agree on red.
ever said to someone, that’s red, expecting congruence, but they object: that’s not red, it’s orange, or pink?
How round does a thing have to be, in order to be round?
A thing could always be infinitely rounder, or squarer.
Look at it carefully, and you will see there are relatively straight lines.
And my current criteria for determining round, won’t be exactly the same a moment from now.

How many changes can a chair undergo, before it’s no longer a chair?
If I remove one of its four legs, is it still a chair?
If I remove all of its legs?
How much does a chair have to rot, before it’s no longer a chair?

So can anything be said about, anything, absolutely?
Or is everything both continuously changing, and dependent on everything else for definition?
If anything can be said absolutely, it is this: things are what they are, stuff is what it is, things can’t be anything more or less than what they are at the moment.
Other than that, everything is socially constructed.

However, the origin of the chair seems to exist even when the form is empirically destroyed. Since, making more chairs is a possibility for human beings. Is making things “social”? It is as much “natural”, is it not? Something happens, just as when a comet hits a remote piece of metal in the most dark part of space that ever existed.

What does “social” mean hear? Involving a group of humans? Or, do you contrast it with the abiotic or non-human in some way?

Do you mean only humans are involved in this group discussion, and all discussion, ergo, the “social” is all?

I wasn’t making an empirical, inductive criticism of man’s senses, I was making a rational, deductive criticism of man’s interpretation of his senses, his cognition and language.
All cognition/language is a personal/social construct.
Nothing is absolutely a comet, there’re only relative comets, some stuff that matches the comet category we made up in our heads more than other categories also made up in our heads, a category which, like the stuff it intends to parse, is fluid, in flux.

How are we to separate “cognition” from the “empirical”? I see a chair. How do you “know” = “cognition”. I know because I see it, seeing, “empirical”. The two are seemingly inseparable.

One could continue, Are you sure it’s a chair?, and go on to touch it, sit in it, etc… Ergo, any chair one comes across, is always, a chair as such.

That being said, I don’t know what is “socially constructed” in the cognition of essences. They simple are so.

Let me put it to you this way: how spherical does a thing have to be in order to be deemed a sphere?
As sphereical as a thing is, it could always be infinitely or at least unquantifiably more or less spherical, and so from a purely objective standpoint, it’s arbitrary, when a thing is deemed a sphere, or any other category for that matter, it’s only from an (inter)subjective standpoint that deeming something a sphere becomes meaningful.

When we say something is a sphere, it is already a sphere by the standard of obviousness (or, a priori). Only when we have this daily obvious sphere, a ping ball for instance, can we bring in the artificial question of exactness (which, by the way, is a flat misreading of Plato’s seventh letter).

If “objective” means physically exact according to measurement it is impossible without starting from the institutional knowledge of the kind of thing we call a sphere. That knowledge is the standard for the “objective”, where we mean, measurable in physical terms, standard.

The absence of the question about what you mean by “subjective” and “objective” here is the origin of this confused “problem”.

Our comprehension of sphericity is dynamic and imperfect (altho sphericity apart form our comprehension mayn’t be), let alone stuff (like apples, planets, tennis balls out there in the world) the label is applied to.

It’s not necessarily an artificial question, these kinds of questions come up, particularly when dealing with relatively ambiguous shapes, other properties and things.

Right, institutional, or a social construct.

There is no problem, labels are relative.

A perfect sphere is an issue of perceptual acuity. It is self evident if we’re not to close or too far away. The social construct then, is the imperfect sphere, that we CAN be too close or too far away and it is no longer a sphere.

That’s a perceptual construct.

There are no perfect spheres, there might not even be approximate spheres, but only relative spheres.