What Is A Social Construct?

Accusations that the claim of one's opponent is a social construct are not infrequent enough to be unusual, in my experience.  Sometimes the charge is correct ("Gender stereotypes are social constructs"), and sometimes it is not ("Theism is a social construct").  It is important to know exactly what a social construct is so that inaccurate accusations of this type can be avoided.  In short, a social construct is a belief or claim that a society embraces which does not conform to objective reality, hence the fact that society merely constructed the idea.

Things that are social constructs include:


Any widely accepted moral claim that isn't true.

Any popular belief about race or gender that isn't true.

Any widespread belief about God's nature that isn't true.


A social construct is a truth claim, whether about morality, gender, theology, beauty, or anything else, that does not conform to objective reality.  A belief is a social construct if it is the false byproduct of irrational thinking and not the correct result of a calculated discovery of the way things really are.  Whenever a society, whether a small community or an enormous empire, agrees that something is true, reality does not change.  At best a society can discover truth, but it cannot make things a way that they are not.

Truth, logic, consciousness--these are examples of things that some people might call constructs that are not, that cannot be.  Society can't invent truth and logic because they both exist necessarily apart from the existence of all minds.  Society can't invent consciousness because people would have to be conscious to do so, meaning they didn't create consciousness at all, and then there is the inescapable fact that something cannot bring itself into existence.  These things are not and cannot be social constructs, regardless of what some error-riddled minds might prefer or think.

It remains true, though, that a great majority of what people seem to believe amounts to nothing more than fallacy-filled falsities that were inherited from others, whether from family members or from society at large.  Any person who has not systematically tested truth claims has no knowledge of which of his or her beliefs are true and which are fictions represented as true by some culture.  The only way to distinguish the two is by holding these beliefs up to the light of reason and to note which ones the light can see right through and expose as lies.  Just because arguments for a certain conclusion are bad, however, doesn't mean that the conclusion itself is false, so care must be used in sorting between truth and constructs, lest a seeker of truth arrive at errors of his or her own in the process.