On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Brian Siano wrote:
> In this case-- and given the responses I've gotten so far, I'm loath to
> ask it again-- the question was "What does 'socially constructed' mean?"
Miles: Well, I'll give it a try....
-clip-
^^^^^^^ CB: I'll try too.
I think this socially constructed is best understood in a contrast between humans and other animals.
Take dogs. A dog's behavior and life activities are, to take Justin's approach, the expression of genetic potentials in the environment in which they have grown up. Some of its actions are almost completely instinctive; some are based more on what it has learned from its individual experience. Swallowing is instinctive. They don't have to learn how to do it. Chasing small animals is instinctive. They don't have to learn it almost at all. Knowing( and acting accordingly) that in the specific area in which they live prey tend to live in one part and predators tend to dwell in another is learned, not instinct. Some of their learned experience is while in groups of dogs, and might be in some sense socially constructed in that dogs imitate each other or give some kind of elementary signals to each other.
The main difference between dogs and humans is in the quantity and quality of conduct that is socially learned, i.e. learned from other people and other people's experience. To take the above example, most humans would learn that prey tend to be in one part of their home area and predators in another from other humans, including "tales" from ancestors or the like. Much more of human conduct is based on custom or culture, i.e. socially constructed. Even instinctive conduct is "clothed" or costumed in culture. Because of language and custom, a human individual receives and learns from many,many more messages from many, many more other humans than a dog does from other dogs. So , a human life is much more socially constructed than a dog's. Humans receive maybe most of their messages originally from dead generations of humans (custom, culture, history). Dogs receive almost no messages from dead generations of dogs. This expands the human socially(historical) constructed life qualitatively and quantitatively compared to a dog.
This does not mean that there is no expression of instinct or "nature" in human conduct, but it is saturated with socially constructed aspects as compared with animal instinctual conduct.
So Aristotle called "man" the _social_ animal or being .
So, Marx and the rest of us are _social_ists. :>)
( In some ways, dogs are a bad example, because tamed dogs get more "messages" from humans than they do from other dogs. Many dogs' lives are highly human-socially constructed today, but just make the example some wild animal)