Imagine a caveman living
all on his lonesome. Imagine he discovers fire, say as a result of a
lightning strike. Imagine that he fiddles around with it, puts his hand in
it and discovers that it is hot and can burn flesh. Furthermore as the
lightning recedes and it starts to rain he discovers that water puts fire
out. He now has "knowledge" about fire. According to Tobin "knowledge"
"must" be a social construct but notice that the caveman is all on his
lonesome, he lives in no society but alas he has "knowledge". Tobin's thesis
is invalid. If by "social construct" we mean that science has
journals, email communications and so on and members of this "society"
discover knowledge of course this is true but completely
trivial.
Now I have three comments on this:
(Does anyone know how to get rid of the damn blue line on the
left?)
1. A caveman like this never existed
and never could exist. He's like Robinson Crusoe, a figment of liberal
imagination. (I'm not calling you a liberal. I'm just saying that liberalism
is based on the myth of the autonomous
individual).
2. Some philosophers would say that
unless the caveman communicates this knowledge to others it's not really
knowledge. We also still have the question of how the caveman thinks about
fire without words, symbols, or other socially created
things.
3. Isn't this still a trivial story?
Even if we reject #1 and #2, and say this hypothetical caveman actually had
knowledge, isn't it true that the overwhelming bulk of the stuff we call
knowledge is produced in a social context and communicated through social
media? Suppose we were to say, "while it's conceivable that some knowledge
may not be socially constructed, the overwhelming majority of knowledge is."
Would that change your
objection?
For me the issue here is this. I want
to be able to preserve a critique of some forms of knowledge as being
gendered, classed, raced, and otherwise socially colored and constructed
without denying the truth value of such knowledge or slipping into cultural
relativism. This is not to say that such knowledge cannot be improved upon
by removing its gender, race, etc. biases. It is to say, however, that
neither I nor anyone else who advances such a position should believe that
their position is itself above reproach and free of social construction. In
other words, we should not think we can do the "God
trick."
Furthermore, none of this is to say
that social construction implies cultural relativism or irrealism. A mosque
and a church are both social constructions, but this does not make them any
less constructed out of bricks. If they do not somehow "jive" with reality,
they'll fall down, yet they can take on diverse and contradictory
forms.
Let me put the matter another way. In
a famous passage from the Introduction to the Critique of
Political Economy, Marx refers metaphorically to the mode of production
as giving off a light that colors everything else in society (the
superstructure). It seems to me that this implies the mode of production, if
nothing else, slants knowledge a certain way, and in that sense all
knowledge is socially constructed (or socially colored, if you prefer). Now,
do you reject this principle of Marxism? If so, why and why would you jump
to the opposite conclusion that scientific knowledge is free from any and
all such coloration (i.e., not only from the mode of production, but also
from anything else that's social and outside knowledge other than its
object)? If not, then how can you deny that knowledge generally has at least
an important component of social construction in
it?