Demarcating the Social World with Hume

Abstract

Where lies the boundary between the natural and social worlds? For the local constructionist, who wants to say that whilst global constructionism is false, nonetheless there remains a domain of socially constructed phenomena, there is going to be a demarcation question. In this paper I explore two initially plausible accounts of the boundary, based on mind-dependence and constructive mechanisms, and show that each is bound to fail. After further rejecting an explanatory account drawn from the work of Ásta, I look at Hume’s account of the artificial to develop a distinctly Humean account of the boundary, improving it with a necessity condition to deal with potentially pernicious counter-examples, and suggesting that it provides our best answer to the local constructionist’s demarcation question.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sally Haslanger, Esa Díaz-León, Jennifer Saul, Robert Stern, Rosa Vince, Kayleigh Doherty, Alana Wilde, James Lewis, Robbie Morgan, Rory Wilson, and an anonymous reviewer at Philosophical Papers, along with audiences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Sheffield for their helpful comments and questions on this piece.

Notes

1 I will not argue for local constructionism here, but rather assume it for the purposes of exploring this problem. Nonetheless I maintain that it is the most plausible picture of our world.

2 Note here that I am talking about kinds rather than categories—that is, I am not interested in whether our ideas about what makes something money or a tiger are socially constructed, but rather whether money and tigers are themselves socially constructed. See Hacking (1999, 9–16) and Haslanger (2012, Ch. 3) for more on why we should distinguish the construction of our classificatory tools from those kinds that we are attempting to classify.

3 I have a fairly inclusive view on the kind of dependence at stake here. Whatever kind of dependence is in question, whether constitutive dependence (as grounding or as anchoring), or causal dependence (see Haslanger 2003, 317–18 and Epstein 2015, Ch. 6), in what follows I will assume that any of these sorts of dependence will do for something to count as dependent on something else.

4 For a rich and important discussion of these sorts of issues in a somewhat different context, see Rosen 1994.

5 One might, if one has an austere notion of natural kinds that does not allow for breeds of dog to be natural kinds, complain that the poodle is not robust enough a grouping to count as a kind proper. However, it is enough that my reader thinks that on the local constructionist picture it would be odd to count the poodle as a part of the social world, whether one thinks it is a mere grouping or a kind proper. If one is still unsatisfied, note that the species canis lupus familiaris, or the domestic dog, itself provides a problematic kind. Canis lupus familiaris only exists thanks to human mindedness, in the form of domestication. But we should be extremely unwilling to count this species as a social kind—species seem to be paradigmatic natural kinds.

6 Thank you to an anonymous reviewer at Philosophical Papers for pushing me on this point.

7 A small point of clarification: at least in the case of poodles, the continued existence of any given poodle is not dependent on (human) mindedness. However, all actual (and past) poodles would not exist had there not been an intentionally guided breeding programme in the past. It is in this sense that their existence is mind-dependent.

8 What about Alzheimer’s? Here the naïve mind-dependence theorist might respond to the putatively problematic example by saying that we can distinguish Alzheimer’s as a cognitive condition from Alzheimer’s as a neurological condition. One might think, for instance, that Alzheimer’s as a cognitive condition is mind-dependent (and therefore social) whereas Alzheimer’s as a neurological condition is dependent only on the human nervous system (and therefore not social). However, I worry that this commits the naïve mind-dependence theorist to a form of mind-body dualism: after all, on any materialist picture of the world, the human mind is (at least partially) constituted by the central nervous system, and as such Alzheimers as a neurological condition is dependent on a part of the human mind. If this fails to convince, the opponent of the naïve mind-dependence theorist might simply swap in depression as an example—a disease that is defined purely in terms of its cognitive symptoms and likely does not have a common underlying neurological basis (see, for instance, the depressive disorders in detailed American Psychiatric Association 2013).

9 Esa Díaz-León has suggested to me an alternate attempt to restrict the mind-dependence account that would exclude non-constitutive mind-dependence. So, we might suggest a version of the account along these lines that runs as follows: a kind X is social iff X is constitutively mind-dependent, and natural otherwise. This seems to get us the right answer in poodle and super heavy element cases, as they are not constitutively, but merely causally mind-dependent and therefore come out as natural kinds. However, it still looks as if psychological kinds are going to be a problem for this type of account, as it looks as if many, if not all, psychological kinds are going to be constitutively dependent on minds. Moreover, we might also worry that such an account is also too exclusive, ruling out features of our social world that are merely causally mind-dependent, but also social. One might, for instance, think that desire paths are a social kind, but that nonetheless, desire paths are not constitutively mind-dependent.

10 See, e.g., Gilbert 1989, Butler 1990, Searle 1995, and Ásta 2018.

11 I suspect that something like this pluralist view is in the background for Díaz-León (2019). Of course, both there and in her 2015 paper she argues that certain kinds of social construction are more apt for particular (debunking) projects, but this is different from a claim that only (say) constitutive social constructions are social constructions, and only they count for the purposes of demarcating the social world.

12 One might suggest a reading of Ásta which suggests that X is social property iff X is conferred, and use this claim to somehow demarcate the social world. Note however, that being a recession was a social property prior to the recognition of recessions by economists, and therefore was a social property but not conferred, thus the above biconditional cannot hold. Moreover, causal social construction seems to be hard to fit into this sort of picture. Plausibly, conferral is sufficient but not necessary for sociality. For more on conferring and conferralism see Ásta 2018.

13 There may be social phenomena that are causal dead-ends, for instance, that don’t serve to help in the explanation of any further facts.

14 I admit that it is possible that, whilst I run together natural as opposed to unusual (as in the Enquiries) and natural as opposed to the arbitrary (as in the Treatise) in the category natural₃ in what follows, it may be that Hume developed four senses of nature. In any case, for the purposes of this paper, it is largely besides the point.

15 That Carly Rae Jepsen posters are not natural₂ is a point of some contention among those who are great fans of her album Emotion. However, I take it that their sense of what is obvious and necessary to humankind has been somewhat misled by the catchiness of ‘Call Me Maybe’, which despite their protestations, is in fact natural₃.

16 I freely admit that this may not what Hume had in mind, but I am (for the most part) only really interested in getting the best account of the boundary between the natural and the social, and not in being particularly faithful to Hume.

17 It might be objected that there may be instances of psychological kinds that are or were dependent on human thought or reflection. Dementia, in addition to being caused by (among other things) genetic factors, can be caused by excessive alcohol consumption (and is therefore dependent on thought and reflection given how alcohol is distributed in our society). It thus seems to, on the Humean account, be social, rather than natural. However, thankfully, the move to a modified Humean account featuring a necessity condition (see below) rules out such potential counterexamples, as all such examples could have not been dependent on human thought and reflection: not only could the dementia have arisen as a result of say, genetic, causes, we can imagine a case where excessive alcohol is imbibed without thought and reflection being required.

18 The absence of ‘human’ in the definition is a further friendly amendment to the Humean account—we should hardly like to rule out non-human thought and reflection as possibly giving rise to social phenomena.

19 Recessions and other social phenomena that do not require recognition on the part of minds for their existence demonstrate that utilizing John Searle’s account of the boundary between the social and the natural will not do. If Searle’s account is simply that x is a social kind iff our attitudes towards that x are partly consitutive of x, then it looks like, given the absence of such attitudes, recessions are wrongly counted as not social (Searle 1995, 33). See Thomasson 2003 and Khalidi 2015 for more on this.

20 Here is another potential counterexample: swamp piano. Suppose lightning strikes a swamp of primordial ooze, and instantaneously creates what appears to be a working (and perfectly tuned) piano. As such, one might suggest that pianos are not necessarily dependent on thought or reflection, given that one could be dependent on merely lightning and ooze, and that therefore the modified Humean account wrongly treats pianos as a natural, rather than a social kind. However, I don’t think that this description quite captures exactly what is going on in this case. Take, by way of explanation, the flat-topped rock that sits in the woods behind my house, whose shape was created by erosion. What is odd is that it is an exact physical match of a rock that sits in my back garden and serves as the table where I take tea and eat barbecue in the summer. I suggest that the rock in my back garden is a table, whilst the rock in the woods is not. There is a sense in which we could call the rock in the woods a table—certainly, I could take tea on either the rock in my garden or on the one in the woods. However, I suggest that it is only the investment by minded creatures of the rock with the status of a table that makes the rock a table in either case. That is, tables are dependent on thought and reflection because (in Searle’s terms) a status function is required to make a flat, elevated surface into a table. The modified Humean account therefore correctly treats tables as a social kind, along with other such artifactual kinds. What does this mean for the swamp piano case? Well, I suggest that what is created in the lightning strike is not a piano. Just as a flat-topped rock created by lightning strike is not a table until given an appropriate status by minded creatures, so too the lightning-made ivories and hammers in a wooden case is not a piano proper until endowed with an appropriate status via thought or reflection by minded creatures.

21 A coven is a gathering of witches who meet to perform certain rituals and rites.