User:Patrick0Moran/Race discussion

my understanding of social construction is that it is primarily a counterfactual claim. to say that X is socially constructed means that X would have been otherwise if society had been otherwise. thus, to extrapolate a biological construct is one that would have been otherwise if biology had been otherwise. in my opinion some definitions of race are mostly social construction, and some definitions of race are mostly biological construction -- in the context of that phrase. note: i would dislike a definition of construction under which electrons could be said to be constructed. --Rikurzhen 09:25, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

§ Giving this a second look it seems a bit odd even after I disattend to "conterfactual". Let me try to paraphrase and elucidate, just to see whether I am really tracking on what you are saying. (Forgive me if I commit the sin of doing my own thinking.) To me, a social construct is an accont of something, e.g., why the sun gets up in the morning, that has one foot in the world of empirical observation (i.e., pertains to "facts") and one foot in the world of mythology, old wives tales, "what everybody knows", etc. What non-ideologues are aiming at is an account of the world that is objective, an account that is not distorted by somebody telling us what we ought to believe or what we ought to conclude from the facts so that our account would jibe with what some canonical text or other authority source says. To try to talk about things the way you are talking about them is possible, I guess, but maybe not very helpful to the beginner. It amounts to saying that there are accounts of (theories about) the world that contain some non-empirical content (e.g., content that answers the question, "What is worth investigating?"), but whose main content is determined not by those "social" factors but by what the facts turn out to be. P0M 02:55, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

§ "Counterfactual" is a heavy word in the world of logic and philosophy. Leaving that aside, I think we are basically on the same wavelength. You may not like "a definition... under which electrons could be said to be constructed." But take a look at one of the fundamental paradoxes of modern physics: Light is best described as a wave when it is studied in certain modalities (by certain experiments), and it is best described as a particle when other ways of investigating it are chosen. Some wag decided that the way around the problem was to call it a "wavicle", but everybody knew he was joking. P0M

§ The really important thing to see is that we never see light. (Sorry, I didn't mean for that sentence to turn out that way, like a snake eating itself.) We never really see electrons either. It turns out, by the way, that electrons have wave characteristics and seemingly a single electron can go through two slits at the same time. (I'm eliding lots of details, assuming you are familiar with the physics.) We get in trouble when we use what we know of the macroscopic the things we encounter in everyday life on a human scale to try to understand things that are on the scale of atoms or that are on the scale of light years and near C velocities. The world just doesn't work the way everyday experience makes us expect that it should.P0M

§ Lets look at limit cases first. I find that approach enormously fruitful as long as you don't just get stuck out there on the fringes. Having looked at the limits at least you know where the ballpark is, so to speak. P0M

§ One extreme is where somebody talks about something that has no referrent. I would call a supposed theory about the reasons why the population of Martians never exceeds one hundred and fifty million a fantasy, not a construction. If it deserves the status as a "social construct" (or any other kind of construct), I guess it would be because there is at least a planet Mars out there that might have denizens. To really make a complete fantasy I guess we would have to find some story that didn't draw its characters by transforming something that everybody has experienced. (Chinese had stories about weretigers sometime before the year 400 A.D., so the idea has been around a long time. It was probably original to those people who created the stories, but it was based on the existence of tigers. So we would want something even more alien than The Alien for it to be a "complete fantasy.") P0M

§ Another extreme is where somebody talks about something that is really there and uses only empirical reports. Even to attempt to outline how somebody would do that looks dauntingly tedious. Trying to follow Edmund Husserl as he works out how one experience is grounded in another experience is a bit like trying to follow the giant turtles that stand on giant turtles to support the world. "Don't you try to trip me up, young man! It's turtles all the way down!" Generally speaking, people start with the account of the world that is given to them, e.g., Newtonian Physics, and then fuss with that account when they find that it gets them into trouble. But Newtonian Physics gives us a whole set of ideas about space, time, mass, energy, etc. that we generally tkae for granted. We investigate bees as social animals because we already "know" that they are discrete entities, that they live together in another discrete entity called a hive, that the hive is located in a field, etc., etc. -- all of which designation we generally accept as defining the field and the entities in the field of our investigation. Trying to figure out how we learn to perceive these [things] and how we grant them [existence] turned into several long books for Husserl, and they are not easy books to follow. So there is allegedly a subjective component in our supposedly objective investigations of the world because we decide for our own reasons what is important and we may likewise decide other foundational questions on the grounds of subjective axiological factors. P0M

§ A phenomenologist's world and a fantasy world begin to look about the same if you cross your eyes. In between them is the world in which scientists try to do their work. They try to make it clear to themselves what they actually observe and what they add to the observations in the way of a "useful fiction" to make a well-grounded theory. Having a "social construct" is, in itself, neither good nor bad. It's just the way things are with human intelligence. We are not able to free ourselves of our dependence on empirical observations, and we also cannot make order out of our empirical observations unless we do some "data clustering" of one kind or another on our observations. We have to decide on a non-objective basis what we intend to be highly objective about. P0M

§ To say that X San's view of [race] is a social construct implies, I suppose, that some extra information is brought in and added to the facts. Here I have an individual with such-and-such outward physical characteristics... and before we've even looked at the individual's dentition, blood type(s) (there are lots of groupings besides just the utilitarian A, O, B..., as you know), etc., somebody is ready to predict the individual's tolerance for alcohol, likelihood to be a good dancer, crafty and guileful nature, etc., etc. That part of the fiction comes as boiler plate from mom and dad and the individual's surrounding community and maybe the books published by a certain press in Illinois (or was it Iowa). P0M

§ This last kind of construct is pertinent to racism, but maybe not so pertinent to serious attempts to categorize humans in some meaningful way.P0M

§ That brings me to your use of the word "valid." You used it without definition. I looked it up in my philosophical dictionary and decided that it carries so much baggage as a technical term that I'd rather avoid it for something more mundane and down to earth. That being said, I'm not sure what you meant, what you were trying to get at:P0M

• I have suggested above that the validity question has to be aimed at a particular definition, and perhaps even to a particular population (e.g. all the people of the US; or all the people of the world). Let me also suggest that the question of validity may or may not need to be disambiguated from the question of utility. Races may be informative (valid) but only for meaningless distinctions (no utility). Races may not be valid at a global level, but have utility for US doctors. Races may be social constructs that are highly useful. And so on. --Rikurzhen 14:08, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

§ Does "valid" mean (to you) something like: "does not create a grossly distorted picture of what is really out there, a picture that would lead us astray, cause us to interact inappropriately with our environment, etc."?P0M 02:55, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

§ Let me take a stab at paraphrasing the central ideas in the above paragraph. There can be a way of defining a set of categories, which will get called [races], and that defining will either be appropriate to the world that we discover by empirical research, or it will not be appropriate. I know how to judge the truth of statements about the existence of people, the occurrence of events, etc. At least ideally it is possible to go to wherever the thing is supposed to be and confirm that it is there. If it isn't there, then we mark the sentence false. But it should be noted that these processes may be circular. I go to London and confirm for myself by certain tests that there is an individual called Prince Charles. I come back to the U.S. and proclaim the existence of Prince Charles. You go to English, see the same man, employ the same identity tests that we've agreed on, and come back and tell me I was right. There is no problem with that. That's the way we work language.

§ Now suppose that I say that there are several aggregate populations in some region that I choose to call "Race A," "Race B," and "Race C." I examine all of the individuals in that region according to the rules for categorization, and (mentally at least) attach a label to each one of them. Now you come along, take up my system of categorization, and apply it as I did, Presumably we will come out at about the same place, with the same list of individuals belonging to A, B, and C. How could we have expected otherwise? Only if one or the other of us has applied the rules differently or has observed the world with different biases that somehow affect our judgments would we expect to find discrepancies. So we will, if all goes well, find just what we expected to find. P0M

§ There may, however, be a problem because our system of categorization depicts the population as consisting of three discrete groups. In an artificial situation, or under the influence of major historical events, we may find that reality approximates that situation more than it would in a region where the heredity of individuals had already reached equilibrium. If Atlantis emerges from the sea and we populate it with one million people from darkest Africa, one million people from Iceland, and one million people from northern China, and if we are careful about the defining characteristics we choose to look at, then we may have what we could call discrete sub-populations. Again, we created the situation, and now we find it mirrored in our statistics. (That's very much like the situation in which people who believe in the natural existence of a certain number of [races] wanting to look only at the centers of the territories of certain populations. Indeed, you will find few blends among the people of Iceland.)P0M

§ So I'm thinking that your idea of validity of racial groupings may come down to the belief that there are ways that the inhabitants of at least some areas come ready-divided into discrete groups. The problem that I see with this idea is that the process of hybridization will begin almost the minute you put these three groups down on the island, and your discreet groups will be inversely proportional to the amount of indiscrete behavior that has occurred. ;-) P0M

§ Did you get the point of what Cavalli-Sforza says in (I think it was) the third quotation that I grouped together on the Race/discussion page? He says in 10 lines what I can't say in 10 pages.P0M

§ The other criterion you bring up for discussion is utility. The issue would be whether, if one can construct a system of categorization that finds a "natural" place for all or almost all people in a population, that grouping of people on the basis of X number of easily determined characteristics enables you to predict characteristics that would be uneconomical or even impossible to determine on the basis of an examination of the individual at this point in time. (I'm thinking that there might be no test that would show that a certain individual will develop diabetes in 25 years and could benefit by weight reduction at this point in life that might otherwise be thought unnecessary, but that certain marker characteristics might tell doctors that s/he would be making a good bet by losing enough weight to be considered "track ready" and keeping the weight off for the rest of his/her life.)

• On the global scale many suggest that human genetic variation is clinal, but no one seriously suggests that genetic variation among the disparate non-random immigrant groups that comprise the US population are clinal -- opening the possibility that race is valid for populations like the US, but not for those like Brazil or the entire globe.

§ I think you could make this point clearer. I didn't see what you were getting at the first time around. Even though your idea looks interesting, your statement is fudged because it makes it appear that the non-clinal groups are distinct populations when the fact is, in the U.S. at least, that the population is in genetic disequilibrium and mother nature is doing her best to get it into equilibrium. The result is that there are not anywhere near as pure anythings as external appearances would make one presume. To me it looks like predictions regarding individuals might be dicier in the U.S. than at the "broad band of hybridization" between, e.g., Asians and Europeans. If you give up your preconceptions about this city or that region being the true site of race X, and accept that in a clinal situation which has reached some close approximation to equilibrium, any point on the map that you want to take as your sample point for "race D" will probably be as good as any other point that isn't a big crossroads for genetic experimentation. As long as you know what the measured characteristics of a population in any region may be, you can make statistically valid predictions. And, by the way, the smaller the regions and the more intensive the sampling, the better your predictions are going to be.

§ Saying that "race is valid... for the U.S." would mean what? That there are discrete genetic groups, no?

• Re:: I also think that race (as was definied by human biologists in the 20th century) and population is not the same thing. In human biology, race was definied as subspecies. .... Clines or populations are not exclusive or discrete and therefore are valid concepts for describing human biological diversity. What genomic tests have proved about human beings is that our biodiversity is patterned and not expressed by discrete types. [14] (http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1455.html) -- Orionix 14:45, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

§ I removed one sentence that kind of messed up his flow of argument, but I think his point is very well taken. P0M

• I wasn't going to suggest this, but it seems like it might be needed after all... We probably need to make it crystal clear that the debate isn't about whether human races "exist" (in the loosest sense) but whether races are in some biological way valid. Even if they are not biologically valid categories, I don't know of anyone who says they aren't cultural important categories; for example in the context of racism. --Rikurzhen 21:33, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

§ Doing things this way hypostatizes [races], whether you want it to or not. P0M 02:55, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

§ It is dicey enough to talk about "existence" of an individual, but at least I believe that most of us know what the accepted tests for, e.g., "the existence of Jackie Tarr" are. Somebody says Jackie Tarr exists, and that he lives in KotaBaru in Malaysia. We go there and everybody among the expatriot British population laughs at us because he is a fictional character from the pen of John Le Carre. But I don't know what it would mean for a [race] to exist. I organize people into a football team and then I say that the football team exists. O.k., it "exists", but only because I put it together. As for the "validity" of human races, isn't that really asking whether we've put our football teams together in some way that is useful to us? I think the implication, in the case of [races], is that in our categorization we are mirroring something that is already present in nature. The trouble there is that by the very act of categorization we wite-out out lots of connecting lines that we choose not to see. Again, I would stand with Cavalli-Sforza's remarks on which level of clustering is the real level of clustering. We can have as many or as few [races] as we choose to have, but we have to realize that they are our clusterings. And I may cluster data one way to facilitate predicting one thing, while you would cluster it another way to facilitate predicting another kind of thing.

• I don't think there is any doubt about the existence of the concept of races; rather, the debate surrounding human races is whether races are valid biological categories for the human species or whether they are socially constructed. --Rikurzhen 21:43, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

§ Who has ever expressed doubt that the concept of race exists? The trouble is that there are so many concepts of race, and they may give us the word "race" for which no referrent exists. Your basic question is correct. I would paraphrase it as follows: "Can humans be categorized in ways that reflect little if anything more than the actual genetic and/or other connections among human beings and how those connects "hang together," and in such a way that useful predictions of a statistical nature can be made about individuals selected from the general population under investigation?" P0M 02:55, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

§ Philosophical baggage aside, the term "valid" means "strong." Making a "construction" is just what we do whenever we impose order and simplicity on nature, which can be rather untidy and much more complex than we sometimes wish it were. Speaking of a "social construction" seems to me to describe going well beyond actively seeing the facets of reality we choose to pay attention to and actively ordering them in the ways that we want. In "social construction" we "put a construction on" the facts, and that construction derives from prejudices, preconceptions, old wives tales, what our high school biology teacher told us... Who knows what all might be included, but it doesn't spring from our data. Instead, it distorts and falsifies our data. P0M 07:23, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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Most of what you are discussing seems to rest ultimately on the "problem of material constitution", and so you and I will probably not get very far by going down that path. I think that the definition of social construction that Slr offered is probably what the term originally meant; although for what it's worth I think my definition is a more helpful distinction, because it would seem that saying something is socially constructed doesn't distinguish it from anything else. However, many statements about race looks like this: "Conventional wisdom holds that race is socially constructed and not based on genetic differences. Cutting-edge genetic research threatens this view and hence also endangers the pursuit of racial equality and useful public health research." [1] (http://www.jacquelinestevens.org/SymbolicMatterST.pdf) Many times, the "and" turns into a "and thus", and then I get really confused. Rikurzhen

Which "and"? I think the problem you are looking at is real, and that what is going on is that some people are ideologically motivated to attack the idea of [race]. Somebody who knows what "social construction" was intended to mean (it's not a well-chosen term, by the way) says that "race is a social construct", and the second person interprets that to mean that "race is nothing but a social construction", i.e., that "race is nothing but some idea that takes no guidance from objective factors." The result of the work of several groups of people who have looked at the "intending" functions of mind have been remarkably consistent., whether starting from value judgments and making a bold leap to all conceptualizations (as did Zhuang Zi at around -350) or starting from an attempt to use science to understand the functioning of the human mind and discovering that in the process what had previously been thought to be the secure grounding of science had been sapped (which is essentially Kant's most important contribution), they have realized that the world does not come somehow "preconceptualized" for us. Instead, we use the active powers of the human mind to wrest order from the Universe. We try to diminish the subjective biases that we introduce, but in the end we either find that nature has eluded us (How can Mother Nature do that!? It's against the laws of science!), or we don't find a discrepancy but know that the next corner we turn may make a mockery of our previous certainty. The field of history of advance in the field of objective knowledge is littered with the corpses of theories that were the past champions of their days. P0M 08:36, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

You mentioned this quotation from Cavalli-Sforza: "By means of painstaking multivariate analysis, we can identify 'clusters' of populations and order them in a hierarchy that we believe represents the history of fissions in the expansion of the whole world of anatomically modern humans. At no level can clusters be identified with races, since every level of clustering would determine a different partition and there is no biological reason to prefer a particular one. The successive levels of clustering follow each other in a regular sequence, and there is no discontinuity that might tempt us to consider a certain level as a reasonable, though arbitrary, threshold for race distinction."

I actually find this to be rather disingenuous of Luca. I think there can be a good reason to choose a certain level of partitioning over another: each partition not only breaks people into groups but assigns a distance between the groups. My memory of the data is that the partitioning of people into 4-6 clusters accounts for a large amount of the total genetic distance, and further division gives diminishing returns of distance and accuracy. Sorry I don't have a ref for that, it's just my memory of looking at trees. Rikurzhen

Even so, the "good reason" is your good reason or my good reason, and they may not be the same -- even from time to time, or from task to task, for the same person. P0M

In the end, I think that our confidence in a notion like race is not a binary decision, but a continuous (perhaps Baysian probabilistic) one. Rikurzhen

I agree, but I would add that the confidence (or, rather, the dependability) with which one can use an idea like "race" depends on the degree to which the user really understands what 'e is talking about. As an example of this kind of dependability, ocnsider how unreliable the use of "Einstein's theory of relativity" by people who claim that "everything is relative so it doesn't matter whether you cheat your own mother". (Well, maybe nobody actually makes that egregious a use of relativity.) I was noticing how large a percentage of biologists in the poll quoted in the Race article are happy to use "race" in discussing biology. At first it seemed odd, and then it occurred to me that some biologists seem equally happy to talk about the races of honeybees at the same time they are explaining that there is a rather broad hybridization zone between most of the supposed races, i.e., at the same time they are characterizing the differences between Italians, Carniolians, and Caucasians with words that seem to me to fit the definition of clinal.

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