Beyond Economics

Essay on the Sociology of Knowledge

Below is some work I have recently done on the sociological aspects of knowledge. The central idea of the paper is that the social nature of information is reflected in the architecture of our brains. To understand the factual basis of “social constructions” we must know how memory works, and what the nature of belief, desire, motivation, and so forth consists in.

This document points in the direction of the truth, I think, but must be treated only as a preliminary investigation. N.A.

Remarks on Social Construction in Science

N.R. Anecone

Understanding the sociology of knowledge is a vital problem. In social science, knowledge has often been interpreted as being at least fractionally “socially constructed”. The notion comes from the humanities. The idea is that man is a fundamentally productive creature, he builds and creates and it is his nature to conjure cultural artifacts. If this premise is true, why would knowledge be anything different? Knowledge is clearly a human phenomenon, as no one could fairly attribute knowledge, as in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to worms, dogs, or even the occasionally clever chimpanzee.

Knowledge, so the sociologists maintain, —validly—is something produced. It is not a bodily effluvium, like sweat or urine. It is more like a product made through manufacture. We make knowledge, it comes from certain locations, production centers—us. Knowledge is stored, in books, in diagrams, in scholars. Or it is passed through folklore, from parent to child, from the mouth of the shaman, witchdoctor, or scientist—depending on the society.  Chances are most of our knowledge, residing in our craniums right now, was minted elsewhere.  Arabic medieval physicians read the medical texts of the Greeks and expanded on their work. Renaissance doctors and anatomists read the works of the Arabs. Knowledge transfers, resides in an individual for a while, is thought over, altered, interpreted and passed on.

Many regard science as the principal knowledge factory. Science is kind of like a knowledge fountain, which all are free to drink from. But, many sociologists maintain, the fountain is at risk of being poisoned, and the knowledge spouting from it is never perfectly filtered.  Research is always in risk of being tainted by social influences. Sadly, for idealists at least, scientists are not shining paragons of truth and enlightenment but fallible agents grounded in a network of associates and rivals and faced with burdens to publish and attract funding. Scientists are fallible and sullied with motivations which lie outside the domain of objective data and clean, unideological theories. Many cases can be cited where scientists in possession of new data were silenced or ostracized because the prevailing belief was in contradiction with their findings. In the darkest days of Stalinist Russia, science was often used as a font for the propagation of Marxist ideology, was frequently censored to be reflective of Marxist doctrines. In modern capitalist societies, scientific knowledge is frequently corporatized and commoditized, especially in the realms of medical, chemical, energy, and weapons applications. In the 1800s, a movement labeled “scientific racism” became quite popular among European intelligentsia and was used to lend credence to the colonial subjugation of nonwhites.

The notion that science is never invulnerable to ideological contamination is legitimate. However, some tinkering is needed if the idea of social construction in science is to have effective play as a concept. –For, in the end, our interest should be in the enhancement and preservation of accurate, resourceful human knowledge. The object of this set of remarks is to sketch out the preliminaries to such an investigation, but not to directly solve these problems out of hand.

The first order of business is to identify the root metaphor governing the idea that things can be socially constructed. What constructs, and what is constructed? What could you point at, and say, with definitive confidence, “this is the construction.” And “this is the constructor.”?  The answer as to “what constructs” must lie somewhere, almost certainly behind the boundary of our skins. The answer must lie in thought processes; because, if you eliminate thinking patterns all capacity to deal with knowledge is also eliminated.

First, it is wrongheaded to think human psychology is constructed, that is without biological processing systems. A scholar in the humanities is likely to suppose what we call “personal identity” to be something overtly and almost totally influenced by historical place, cultural orientation, role modeling, etc. In the widest of strokes these humanistic ideas exhibit much that is valid. Such ideas lose their coherence, however, upon examination of the psychological details.

A person thinks using cognitive interfaces which are themselves less than human. For example, the occipital complex at the posterior of the cerebrum where vision is for the most part processed is not considerable as an independent entity to be human. It is just a very interesting galaxy of neural tissue. Many of our thought processes are the sum of many rudimentary pattern detection subsystems which are not themselves “intelligent”. Human intelligence emerges from the cooperation of these simpler subsystems, as they circuitously bound and rebound information. Logic points out here that these subsystems are what ultimately do the “constructing”. We must recognize the modular composition of intelligence if we are to fully understand the notion of social construction.

One of the keys to this investigation lies in psycholinguistics. Most sociologists will agree that language is the primary medium for the communication of ideas.  If anything is socially constructed, it is whatever mental epiphenomenon trails alongside the communication of words. Somehow, in a manner which cannot be explored here, uttering words influences the internal cognition of both the speaker and interlocutor, and in ways highly essential to the day to day operation of social systems. Just try to imagine what life would be like if nobody in the world could talk! Almost surely, civilization would suffer a direct blow in terms of productivity and progress.

The centers where language is produced in the brain have been consistently identified to be in the perisylvian fissure of the left cortical hemisphere. (The area about an inch behind the left temple.) In ways that are still dimly understood, these centers connect with whatever regions of the brain (very likely the frontal cortex) that are self aware and able to mediate behavior. If we want to know how language leads ultimately to a social construction (keeping the term vague for the moment,) we’d profit from knowing how the linguistic centers interrelate with the parts of the cortex responsible for motivation, planning, and most importantly, concept formation. For in the end, what sociologists and humanists suspect a social construction to be is a concept or belief.

Before asking what a concept or belief is, it is relevant to clear up what parts of science have little or no social influence. For nobody can legitimately maintain the proposition that science is wholly a product of social interactions. The reason why such a proposition is untenable is that science derives its substance from aspects which have no social component, e.g., Mendel’s experiments on the heredity of peas. (Was Mendel talking to the peas?) Science works because it derives input from physical objects which have no social existence and which therefore cannot be named social constructions, such as the phases of matter, neutron stars, trilobite fossils, cell division cycles, etc. It is when the scientists working with these items depart from their studies to report observations that the information becomes vulnerable to social forces.

Reportage, instruction, diagrams, models, theories, conspiracy, experimental procedures, and related things are what can most legitimately be called social constructions. Even so, these things rely on non-social aspects to a large degree. The overwhelming fraction of them require tools that are unthinking, unbiased automatons.

Returning to the question: what constructs? If social interaction is posited as the mainspring of idea flow and belief formation, then what’s particular about social interaction that gives it this special quality?  Social interaction must have a kind of anatomy, a regular form, a typology. There must be identifiable processes happening every time a social interaction occurs. If the thesis that beliefs are socially constructed is true, it must identify what goes on during socialization that generates a belief. For this to be a valid thesis there must be sufficient evidence to lead us to suspect the absence of non-social propensities to believe certain things. (This is to say, social constructionism must seal out from its thesis any notion that the limits and workings of neurophysiology influence what kinds of beliefs humans form.)

Many of us believe speech instructs thought, or that the exhibition of the body in kinds of clothing (a soldier’s uniform, a geisha’s dress, a tribesman’s body paint, a businessman’s suit, etc) biases how we perceive and treat the dressed person, or that certain social categories are determined by the way  we fall into relationships with other people. But where is this “instructing,” “perceiving,” “biasing” and “categorizing” happening? Where is the common point at which all these phenomena intercept?  The answer is of course psychology.

The questions humanistic styles of thinking need to answer are “where do ideas come from?” and “How are ideas made, and what makes them?” The argument which tries to answer these questions is that ideas originate from unconscious mechanisms (processes, activities, patterns) of thought which are themselves unthinking and impersonal. Many little widgets inside our heads assemble ideas, scan, accept and reject incoming ideas, and remember bits and pieces of ideas. Because in our natural state we are blind to these unconscious processes, but are in converse aware of the gestalts we call “people” or “persons”, we make the false contrivance that people and persons are responsible entirely for the ideas which brew in their brains. The alternative to this proposition ends by positing a homunculus, a little person living in our heads who builds handcrafted ideas, and who we call “him” or “her” or by positing an immaterial soul which operates metaphysically on ideas.

Moving on to the question: what is constructed? Above we have been using the vague terms “ideas” “concept” and “belief” but have not given them a sound meaning consistent with the most powerful neuropsychological theories available. Sociologists frequently talk about belief being socially constructed while being unaware that they are using “folk psychology”: our innate intuitions that humans work in certain ways. We often speak in terms of belief as though belief was some kind of abstract object which sits within the container of a person’s mind, as when we say “he has the belief that dogs are superior to cats.” Here, belief is interpreted as a stable mental object that is persistent in time. Here, belief is well-rounded, circumspect, defined, and attributed to an agent. Such thinking though, is founded on metaphors and the imperfect mechanisms of human thought which evolved for us to think about what other people are thinking about. To think in the following way: “A believes P” is to think using these imperfect mechanisms.

It is a very plausible proposition that what we call concepts and ideas and beliefs coincide exactly with memory. In order for a belief to exist, for example, there must be memory of the elements of the belief. Which is to say, there are neural assembles, collections of synaptic connections, whose computational architecture corresponds to the belief. In fact, the linguistic prop, the word “belief”, at this point becomes nothing but a grammatical placeholder. There is nothing else to a belief except these synaptic hosts.

If beliefs are socially constructed, it must mean kinds of stimuli reach the sense organs. This is to say, the social interaction, depending on its properties, ultimately sends signals through parts of the cortex corresponding to a given belief. If I believe, for instance, evolutionary theory, my belief is very likely to be reinforced if I go to a conference, or read a book on evolutionary theory. What does it mean, reinforced? It means the neural assemblies coding for my belief in evolutionary theory will get a lot of play by hearing positive statements about evolution. The parts of my brain holding information on that idea will have signals run smoothly through it, without lock ups or confusion. It is as if I’d say to myself “ah, that’s right, that’s what’s normal.” I would be saying this only because the preexisting memory structures in my cortex prior to the event are stimulated by the sense inputs of the event.

The point of emphasis is that social constructions must interface with learning mechanisms and memory.  The social construction is in reality a very vast and orchestral episode of Hebbian learning, the neurophysiological process by which synapses between neurons are reinforced through mutual stimulation. (i.e. If cell 1 fires, and is connected to cell 2, then cell 1 and 2 will fire together. This is a vast simplification, however.) When people are agreeing to a certain idea, it must mean they share a similar memory structure corresponding to the idea, and their communications are reverberating the association networks connected to that memory structure.

(This is why two professionals communicating using jargon terms, e.g., the terminology of mathematics, may sound like “gibberish” to listeners not affiliated with those terminology. The jargon does not correspond to any established association network in the cortex of the listener.)

If the above reasoning is true, then we see nothing metaphysical is happening when beliefs are socially constructed. Of course, some social theorists will maintain that the very chain of reasoning just used is itself a social construction— and therefore it says nothing as into what the nature of social constructions are (it is circular). Such arguments are manifestly absurd, since they are self-refuting. (Since the claim that all statements are social constructions, and therefore all statements have no legitimate truth-values, is itself a social construction. So the proposition self-annihilates.)

Beliefs are memory structures, and memory structures are aggregate synaptic connections, and aggregate synaptic connections are formed through stimulation via Hebbian learning. If true, this encapsulates the physiological basis of social constructions.  When two or more people share the same ideas, or belief system, they share similarly structured association networks. That is the claim. There may be ways to verify it experimentally, but for the time being we can only speculate.

To illustrate this idea through an example: a religious community tends to attract people who believe in the same ideas, i.e. who have similarly structured association networks.  Muslims believe Islam because they have structured their cortexes around the information contained in the Koran, etc.

Even if this physiological basis holds for all cases of social interaction leading to the construction of a belief, its application is as wide as the depths of history. Humans can believe seemingly infinite things. Sociology is primarily concerned with beliefs that pertain to other humans, to the distribution of power, to notions of class, race, gender, profession, and so forth; all of which are lively social realities in our modern civilization. Of particular interest here is the social aspects connected with the production of scientific knowledge. Already expounded is the fact that all beliefs and all knowledge are correlations between masses of synapses in the cortex. We have simplified the nature of belief, but even if this is perfectly accurate, in application it is humanly impossible to track the rapid dances of information between brains involved in societal phenomena. Instead, we must rely on our interpersonal modules, which allow us to think about other people intuitively.

At this point all attempts to extend neurological theories into the domain of political activities breaks down. The reason why is not that the neurological theories are false outright, but because we reach a horizon in our ability to make connections in the scale of nature. Political activities exhibit all the neurological complexity mentioned here, but with an additional interpersonal field of complexity. Our ideas begin to loop back on themselves, expressing their inherent limitations.

A human being is essentially a recursive memory loop. These memory loops communicate information to other memory loops, altering the structure of the other loops. Some loops relate to each other, forming what we call interest groups, political parties, army platoons, baseball teams, religious congregations, and laboratory associates. These loops talk to each other, reinforcing their memory structures, and meanwhile our mammalian nature limits the degree of cooperation between and within each group of loops. Conflict of interest seems inevitable and part of the system as a cybernetic whole.

Sociologists build their theories around notions of wants, intents, interests, — psychological notions that we must admit are not easily identifiable. Whenever we attribute a desire to someone, we must realize that the person is a conflicted center of very complex neural activities which we do not intuitively understand. We can only glimpse the complexity of our minds through the use of intellectual abstractions, abstractions which often seem stilted, jarred, or disjointed from our everyday interactions with people. Political activities, logically, are composed out of everyday interactions with people, though special types of interactions, such as international diplomacy, are more advanced than the usual badgering (tax collections, for example) which produce the outputs of social systems.

The political applications of scientific knowledge, the things most usually named social constructions, fall within the limits of our ability to track the high level abstractions humans are capable of spinning. No one can identify a social construction, as we can identify apples, by pointing. That is because a social construction is ultimately a very delicate net of neurons distributed chaotically throughout the brain. It is true that there are actual physical objects which result from these neural distributions, such as the paper you are now reading. This paper, and all other papers, is dissymmetrical to the brain that produced it. Products of mental activity are not equivalent to the mental activity. If knowledge is identified to reside not in our brains alone but also in external objects, libraries, the internet, research stations, etc,then we have identified a dissymmetry. However it is demonstrable that these external objects are convertible back into brain structure—a fact proven if you read this paper and can understand and remember a word of it.

In closing, the sociology of knowledge tries to track intangibles which are distributed in brains and in external objects. If social constructionism is to have any validity as an empirical proposition, it must reach into the psychological details which are the prime movers of intersocial behaviors. Social constructionists use intuitive psychology, thinking in terms of wants, desires, intents, ambitions, etc, when they analyze the sociology of knowledge. They must be aware that using such thinking is itself an imperfect representative of neuropsychological facts. Social constructionists who believe every proposition to be a social construction are levitating the idea of social construction within the realm of their intuitive psychology, and are not distributing the fullness of reality. In fact what they claim is self refuting and is not a respectable proposition. In order to think successfully about these problems, we must be aware of several scales of complexity, and be able to relate them into one another.