Constructing the Hacking test
[This entry serves two functions. First, it sets the stage for the discussion of Hacking on Thursday, so all students enrolled in the class will have to post a reply to it before class begins. Second, it provides a concrete example of the kinds of postings that I expect from the weekly presenters.]
Hacking offers a rather neat solution to one of the more complex problems bedeviling constructionist analyses: how can one simultaneously maintain that something is socially constructed and that it is in some sense real? We might call this the inverted-commas solution, inasmuch as it involves placing scare-quotes around the specific thing that we want to think of as socially constructed and then arguing that social construction applies to the concept (surrounded by inverted commas) and not to the object. We thus transform child abuse into 'child abuse', and can then without fear of contradiction claim both that child abuse is real and that 'child abuse' is a social construct. Ditto for 'multiple-personality disorder', 'dolomite', and so on.
It's an ingenious solution, one that simultaneously preserves two of our current intuitions about social life:
Take a concrete example: the "Hacking test," proposed by the author as a way of seeing where you fall on the three important dimensions of social construction: nominalism, contingency, and externality sources of stability in knowledge. What exactly does this test "test"? If it is an attempt to rank readers on a scale, is it constructing those readers' proclivities, or merely revealing them? Apply Hacking's own analysis: the notion of being a 'social constructionist' is clearly a social construction, but this doesn't necessarily mean that social constructionists are. So could you be essentially and intrinsically a social constructionist? Could you be so consistently? (Should this matter?)
Compare the Hacking test with, say, this personality-typing system based on the enneagram. Does that change the issue in any way?
Do claims about social construction occupy some kind of middle ground between a thing and the inverted-comma concept of that thing?
[Posted with ecto]
Hacking offers a rather neat solution to one of the more complex problems bedeviling constructionist analyses: how can one simultaneously maintain that something is socially constructed and that it is in some sense real? We might call this the inverted-commas solution, inasmuch as it involves placing scare-quotes around the specific thing that we want to think of as socially constructed and then arguing that social construction applies to the concept (surrounded by inverted commas) and not to the object. We thus transform child abuse into 'child abuse', and can then without fear of contradiction claim both that child abuse is real and that 'child abuse' is a social construct. Ditto for 'multiple-personality disorder', 'dolomite', and so on.
It's an ingenious solution, one that simultaneously preserves two of our current intuitions about social life:
- things in the social world -- things that all of us as social theorists and social scientists are interested in -- are in some sense dependent on contingent human activity to produce and sustain them; and
- things in the social world are not simply a product of wishful thinking or flights of fancy, but seem to point beyond themselves -- 'child abuse' the concept, like 'genocide' the concept, is not simply a figment of our (collective) imaginations, since it refers to something.
Take a concrete example: the "Hacking test," proposed by the author as a way of seeing where you fall on the three important dimensions of social construction: nominalism, contingency, and externality sources of stability in knowledge. What exactly does this test "test"? If it is an attempt to rank readers on a scale, is it constructing those readers' proclivities, or merely revealing them? Apply Hacking's own analysis: the notion of being a 'social constructionist' is clearly a social construction, but this doesn't necessarily mean that social constructionists are. So could you be essentially and intrinsically a social constructionist? Could you be so consistently? (Should this matter?)
Compare the Hacking test with, say, this personality-typing system based on the enneagram. Does that change the issue in any way?
Do claims about social construction occupy some kind of middle ground between a thing and the inverted-comma concept of that thing?
[Posted with ecto]
posted by ProfPTJ at 3:13 PM
3 Comments:
I agree that it's suspiciously neat, but I don't think it begs some kind of infinite-regression problem because 'the notion of child abuse' would be very hard to apply Hacking's condition 0 to - in other words, how could one claim that the idea of the idea of child abuse is essential and fixed?
But, like Arlo Guthrie, I didn't come here to tell you about child abuse. I wanted to ask: given that Hacking takes pains to describe the process of unmasking as more than simple exposure, making references to disintegration as he does so, does constructionism of this form (basically data+analysis->conclusion->results rather than the data+analysis->conclusion of essentialist inquiry) automatically become intellectual activism and what are the ramifications of this with regards the awkward relationship between the activist and the intellectual approaches to falsifiability? Put another way, and taking this back to the initial question, does the single-tier inverted comma rule shield constructionists from having to explain why awareness is a good thing, and, having to defend such a position (at least at Hacking's stage [2])against rigorous attack?
And here's my contribution to the Hacking Test Contender run-offs: http://www.okcupid.com/oktest . My results? http://www.okcupid.com/personality?type=RBLD&g=1&o=1 . And a damn sight more interesting to me than my Hacking scores (or even h@XX0R scores).
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