I’m generally glad your exploring this topic and posting about it, but I think you get the details wrong here in this opening paragraph (in a way that doesn’t impede what follows but that still matters):
For logical positivists, deeming something a “social construct” is like signing its death-warrant. But really all it means is that the Litany of Tarski doesn’t apply. If there is no underlying reality to the thing, we are allowed to decide what we want it to do for us, and with our thoughts make it so.
I’m not 100% sure I could pass the ITT for a logical positivist, but I think the “death warrant” framing gets their position wrong. Social fact that bottom out in observable behavior are fine for positivists because they can be verified same as other observations. So I think they’d happily accept much of social reality because it can be observed, and only throw up their hands at inferences that can’t be verified (and only for so long as they can’t be verified, assuming this is an information availability issue and not a fundamental issue).
I also don’t think it follows that the Litany of Tarski doesn’t apply. I could see that making sense if you buy into something like realism and consider social reality outside of what is so, but we can read the Litany as being just about what’s so as experienced (since experience is the only source of signal about what is that we have), in which case it very much still applies to something we might construe to be a social contract, though obvious any notion of a contract is conceptualization applied to what is experienced.
That’s fair; I’m trying to gesture at a certain cluster of rhetoric I sometimes come across, and I may be caricaturing or strawmanning by calling it “logical positivism”:
Treating “X is a social construct” as the end, not the beginning, of the conversation, as if nothing else meaningful can then be said about X
Or, asserting that social-construct-statements are simply false (example, though not to pick on that article too much; that’s just one I remember from recently)
A sentence like “The Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives” is not “false”, but it’s not “truth-apt” either. It also wouldn’t really make sense to apply the Litany of Tarski: “If the Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives, then I desire to believe that the Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives...”. Maybe I think Congress should consist of one house, or three, or should be abolished, but this is unrelated to any belief about an underlying “reality” that this statement somehow fails to correspond to.
You can cash out “The Congress… does consist of...” into empirical observations, but I think people speaking imprecisely may confuse this with the “shall” version.
To give the analytic tradition its due, the concept of illocutionary acts was later developed to cover statements like this, but it would be hard to fit it into the framework of “classic” logical positivism (i.e. that everything is either an empirical fact, or a tautological relation of ideas, or else meaningless).
Yeah I agree it the idea of social constructs very much goes against the vibe of logical positivism, which is often what matters when talking with people who have it as their worldview. Logical positivism has long been shown unworkable, but many still cling to naive, intuitive versions of it, so I very much understand the impulse to push back on it (I’ve done the same myself many times!).
I wish we had a good name for the kind of strawman rationality that includes naive logical positivism that wasn’t “strawman rationality” or “straw rationality” because it’s not a fake position designed to be knocked down, but a real set of beliefs people hold that have to be argued against (especially among many people who are part of the rationalist scene).
We can go to Washington DC and observe Congress and see whether it does meet in two houses, and whether people do reliably call those houses the Senate and the House of Representatives. If we see that’s actually what happens, then in what sense is the Constitutional provision not truth-apt? By learning what that provision says, we gain a correct prediction of what those people in DC actually do.
Occasionally, a law does become non-predictive. One example of this is selective enforcement, for instance the (real or purported) phenomenon of driving while black. The law says that anyone breaking the traffic laws gets a penalty. If the actual practice were that black drivers get penalties and white drivers don’t, then the law would not predict the practice. This is why the courts have the ability to rule that a law may be constitutional as written but unconstitutional as applied.
I’m generally glad your exploring this topic and posting about it, but I think you get the details wrong here in this opening paragraph (in a way that doesn’t impede what follows but that still matters):
I’m not 100% sure I could pass the ITT for a logical positivist, but I think the “death warrant” framing gets their position wrong. Social fact that bottom out in observable behavior are fine for positivists because they can be verified same as other observations. So I think they’d happily accept much of social reality because it can be observed, and only throw up their hands at inferences that can’t be verified (and only for so long as they can’t be verified, assuming this is an information availability issue and not a fundamental issue).
I also don’t think it follows that the Litany of Tarski doesn’t apply. I could see that making sense if you buy into something like realism and consider social reality outside of what is so, but we can read the Litany as being just about what’s so as experienced (since experience is the only source of signal about what is that we have), in which case it very much still applies to something we might construe to be a social contract, though obvious any notion of a contract is conceptualization applied to what is experienced.
That’s fair; I’m trying to gesture at a certain cluster of rhetoric I sometimes come across, and I may be caricaturing or strawmanning by calling it “logical positivism”:
Treating “X is a social construct” as the end, not the beginning, of the conversation, as if nothing else meaningful can then be said about X
Or, asserting that social-construct-statements are simply false (example, though not to pick on that article too much; that’s just one I remember from recently)
A sentence like “The Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives” is not “false”, but it’s not “truth-apt” either. It also wouldn’t really make sense to apply the Litany of Tarski: “If the Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives, then I desire to believe that the Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives...”. Maybe I think Congress should consist of one house, or three, or should be abolished, but this is unrelated to any belief about an underlying “reality” that this statement somehow fails to correspond to.
You can cash out “The Congress… does consist of...” into empirical observations, but I think people speaking imprecisely may confuse this with the “shall” version.
To give the analytic tradition its due, the concept of illocutionary acts was later developed to cover statements like this, but it would be hard to fit it into the framework of “classic” logical positivism (i.e. that everything is either an empirical fact, or a tautological relation of ideas, or else meaningless).
Yeah I agree it the idea of social constructs very much goes against the vibe of logical positivism, which is often what matters when talking with people who have it as their worldview. Logical positivism has long been shown unworkable, but many still cling to naive, intuitive versions of it, so I very much understand the impulse to push back on it (I’ve done the same myself many times!).
I wish we had a good name for the kind of strawman rationality that includes naive logical positivism that wasn’t “strawman rationality” or “straw rationality” because it’s not a fake position designed to be knocked down, but a real set of beliefs people hold that have to be argued against (especially among many people who are part of the rationalist scene).
We can go to Washington DC and observe Congress and see whether it does meet in two houses, and whether people do reliably call those houses the Senate and the House of Representatives. If we see that’s actually what happens, then in what sense is the Constitutional provision not truth-apt? By learning what that provision says, we gain a correct prediction of what those people in DC actually do.
Occasionally, a law does become non-predictive. One example of this is selective enforcement, for instance the (real or purported) phenomenon of driving while black. The law says that anyone breaking the traffic laws gets a penalty. If the actual practice were that black drivers get penalties and white drivers don’t, then the law would not predict the practice. This is why the courts have the ability to rule that a law may be constitutional as written but unconstitutional as applied.