What is a social construct? A comment on “Categories We Live By”
As a music theorist, a good deal of what I do is categorize things. Pieces of music into styles, composers into periods, chords into functions, sounds into pitches and so on. I would bet that many theorists of art could say the same. We rarely inquire however, at least in music, what categories are in the first place.
To be fair, there are good reasons for us not to ask that question. Categories are one of those tools we can intuitively operate with fluency, without having the trouble to dissect their inner workings. That is mostly fine for our day-to-day lives, but I when it comes to research taking a better look at fundamental concepts in our toolboxes can sometimes prove immensely profitable. There is always the risk of becoming the tools of our own tools if we do not understand them.
In that spirit, I sometimes read about the ontology of categories. by Ásta, a professor of philosophy at Duke University falls into that category (no pun intended). I learned about this book on on social constructs by PhilosopherTube, a YouTuber that never fails to amaze me with its virtuosistic blend of philosophy, politics, acting and videomaking. The book does not deal with categories in general, but focuses on particular (albeit broad) kind of category that is often called a “social construct”. The groundwork layed by the book is something I didn’t realize how bad I needed until it was handed to me, as often happens with good inventions, conceptual or not.
I find Asta’s central idea very elegant. Social constructs are a kind of category, one whose members possess a certain property that is conferred by others. Hence, Ásta’s proposal might be called the conferralist framework. Conferral is done by institutions or people in an attempt to distinguish things that have a certain base property. Conferring a social property is an attempt to track a certain base properties, but an important part of the model is the explicit recognition that the conferrer may be mistaken about whether the base property holds or not. As an example, think of the property of being a pianist. Whoever attributes that to someone believes that person is able to play the piano to some extent. It might be the case, however, that the conferrer came to that judgment by asking the person in question, who, for whatever reason, lied about it. As long as the conferrer(s) believe that the person has the base property, the related social property is still conferred.
With that, the conferralist framework is able to make justice to the various degrees of dependence of social constructs on other, potentially non-social properties, and to phenomena were there is a mismatch between the conferred property and “reality”. And why is it useful to conceive of a social property as still holding even in the case of where the base property is absent? Isn’t tracking the base property the whole point? Not really. When dealing with properties that pertain to people, the most important consequence of their presence is that they entail restrictions to and enablements on their holders. If someone is believed to be a pianist, her opinion on music will perhaps be valued more highly, or she may be perceived as more attractive or more intelligent. On the other hand, people might, for instance, avoid talking about certain kinds of music with her out of fear of being judged, depriving her of more relaxed and sincere social interactions. Those restrictions and enablements hold whether Janine is in fact a pianist or not, instead, they depend on whether the relevant people believe her to be so, that is, on whether they confer upon her the social property of being a pianist.
Social properties can be either institutional or communal, depending on who does the attribution. Institutional properties are conferred by the institutions of various kinds that have legal power over a certain matter. A federal government, for instance, may confer the property of being a citizen of a certain country. Communal properties, on the other hand, are conferred by those individuals that have standing to do so in a particular context. As an example, art critics may have standing to confer the property of being art, or of being a masterwork to works of art.
Social properties are also contextual, which is not surprising, given the fact that there must be a person or institution doing the conferring. A person that has played the guitar as a teenager might get conferred the communal property “being a musician” by its childhood friends at their gatherings, but might be conferred the opposite property “being a non-musician” when attending to a jam session in the local jazz bar. Context dependency also holds for institutional properties, as a person that is legally married in a country might not be considered so in another, for instance, if that country does not recognize polygamous or homosexual marriages.
Apart from proposing and describing such a framework, Ásta is deeply interested in how well it can be applied to human properties of political importance, such as gender, sex and race. Perhaps most, of the book is dedicated to analyzing those and other concepts through the lens of the conferralist framework. The results seemed to me very convincing, and I recommend a look into the chapters devoted to those specific applications just as much as the rest of the book.
One thing that made Categories We Live By such a memorable and pleasurable read for me was the fact that the author is able to acknowledge the social aspect of categories while also accounting for what is naturally given in them. That virtue is most evident when Ásta analyses the categories of sex and gender through the conferralist framework. The book contrasts the conferralist take with the view on the sex/gender distinction of two other proeminent feminist thinkers, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. Roughly, the Beauvoirean take is that “gender is the social meaning of sex”. That is, there is a biologically given fact about people, their sex, and gender is what having that biological property entails in a particular society. The Butlerian view goes further and argues that even sex is not exempt from social determination. There are good reasons on why this should be the case. As Ásta emphasizes, drawing on the research of Anne Fausto-Sterling and others, there are at least three main ways to categorize people into sexes — by hormone levels, by the presence of functioning genitalia and by chromosomal types — and they do not do not segment the population into male and female in the same way. Someone that has genitalia of one sex might have the hormonal levels of another, for instance. At least to the extent that we have to make a decision as to which of those criteria to use in order to determine sex, it is not merely a biological fact.
A conferralist account of the categories of gender and sex can comfortably acknowledge both the natural and the social aspects. In Ásta’s analysis, sex is an “conferred property where the aim is to track certain physical features, but where the resulting property is an institutional property”. The base property being tracked is actually a cluster of sex stereotypical characteristics, such as the aforementioned presence of functioning genitalia and hormone levels and the conferred property itself is the recording of sex in official documents. Doctors and other authorities, then, are attempting to track that cluster of biological properties, but in cases where they point to different sexes (such as in intersex people) there is no biological fact as to which sex to confer and society-specific factors must come into play. Likewise, gender is a social property, but a radically context-dependent one, where biological factors play no significant role. Without going into the details, I think the following anecdote by Ásta sums it up quite nicely:
Consider this scenario: you work as a coder in San Francisco. You go into your office where you are one of the guys. After work, you tag along with some friends at work to a bar. It is a very heteronormative space, and you are neither a guy nor a gal. You are an other. You walk up the street to another bar where you are a butch and expected to buy drinks for the femmes. Then you head home to your grandmother’s eightieth birthday party, where you help out in the kitchen with the other women while the men smoke cigars.
It is clear for me that the conferralist framework can be profitably applied to concepts with sociological and political import. But is it relevant to research about music? Let’s try to apply it to the property of “being a good composer”. It is easy to think of it as a social construct. It certainly is the case that it puts enablements to and constraints on whoever it is bestowed upon. People regarded as good composers will, for instance, have their music more likely to be performed, get commission for new pieces more often, and have more prospective students. A constraint might be that people will tend to compare any new piece from the composer to their previous work, perhaps demanding that they do not significantly change in style or that they are equally good. What would be the base property that underlies the conferred property “being a good composer”? One might say that it is that of “being able to compose good music”. The obvious follow-up is: what is good music? What are the properties that a piece of music must have to be considered good?
We might try to continue using the framework and ask if the category of “good music” itself is a social construct. Do we need to refer to social factors when defining what “good music” is? That depends on the underlying philosophy of music (or of art) that we are working with. In particular, it depends on whether it considers that quality is an intrinsic property of a piece of music or whether its value depends on its relation to a social context. For the sake of the argument, let's consider only one aspect of what is commonly taken to be relevant to a composition’s quality and define a good piece of music as one that has an optimal degree of innovation. Music with little innovation is banal and therefore bad, but music with too much innovation is incomprehensible and therefore also bad. Good music must be fairly innovative, while remaining comprehensible. In this contrived scenario, the value of music depends only on the music itself and on its novelty in relation to preexisting pieces. If all the factors that contribute to its value could be similarly defined without relying on social factors, then it would not to be the case that “being good music” would be a social property.
But even here, the conferralist account might be useful, as we might think that the degree of innovation is the base property that is imperfectly tracked for the conferral of the social property “being innovative”. After all, it is not a given that people with standing or institutional power will perceive the degree of innovation correctly. A certain audience might wrongly judge a piece to be innovative if they are not aware of earlier, lesser known pieces that employ similar musical devices. That is often the case in art: a great innovator is not recognized as such if she also does not make their innovations widely known. That kind of mistake can be very relevant, for instance, in the context of a government deciding on which art projects to direct public resources to, a context in which “being good music” is a relevant institutional property.
Applying the conferralist framework on the property “being a good composer”, which relies on the property of “being good music”, makes it clear that it must be coupled with it domain-specific knowledge to produce meaningful analyses. What is valuable about music must depend on an underlying theory of value, general or otherwise. That is to be expected, as an ontology is an account of what categories in general must be, not of whatt specific categories are. I think the conferralist framework is a very sober and useful ontology, and that it can spare us of much confusion about what is social in specific categories in politics, music or any domain.