News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thin... by 6gvONxR4sf7o on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @11:56AM (#26079742)
Are these examples like saying "this movie sucks" or “specific person X is tall?” In that “tall” is fuzzy and social, but if we agreed on a precise definition (“any person at least Y height is defined as tall“), we could give it truth in the photon sense, but as it’s collectively used today, it’s too imprecise a word to assign true or false?
Re:Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thin... by maze-le on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @04:56PM (#26082887)
Not every fuzzy proposition is necessarily a social construct. Your example of a tall object is as good as your definition of "tall" is, but once that is defined any object can be measured objectively.

A good way of determining if something is a social construct is to ask yourself if the proposition would still hold if one were to remove all social lifeforms from the universe. A "tall" object would still be tall (to the degree that we can define tall) and it could still be measured somehow. In my example talking about a currency or an exchange rate wouldn't even make sense if we don't have a society that exchanges money or goods.