BOOKS
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you use it favorably, you deem yourself rather radical.
If
you trash
the phrase, you declare that you are rational, reasonable, and
respectable.
Given the vitriol on both sides of the science wars, Hacking serves a
valuable function by explaining, in language as clear as it is smart, what
noncombatants in the science wars need to know. Here, for example, is
what he has to say about socially constructed anorexia:
Unfortunately, social construction analyses do not always liberate.
Take anorexia, the disorder of adolescent girls and young women
who seem to value being thin above all else. They simply will not
eat. Although anorexia has been known in the past, and even the
name is a couple of hundred years old, it surfaced in the modern
world in the early 1960s. The young women who are seriously
affected [their exact numbers are currently a subject of hot debate]
resist treatment. Any number of fashionable and often horrible
cures have been tried, and none works reliably. In any intuitive
understanding of "social construction," anorexia must in part be
some sort of social construction.
It
is at any rate a transient mental
illness, flourishing only in some places at some times. But that does
not help the girls and young women who are suffering. Social con–
struction theses are liberating chiefly for those who are on the way
to being liberated-mothers whose consciousness has already been
raised, for example.
Since Peter
L.
Berger and Thomas Luckman published the first study
to use "social construction" in its title
(The Social Construction of Real–
ity,
1966), we have been awash with imitators. Most of them concen–
trate on the "how it is" that our consciousness has been changed, and
always, we are told, for the good. By contrast, the
what
that so interests
Hacking hardly matters. Even fundamental physics is not immune in an
age when some argue that scientific results, like everything else, are
social constructs rather than discoveries about our world that hold inde–
pendently of society.
We think of this fundamental debate separating social constructivists
from objectively grounded scientists as yet another aggravating feature
of postmodernism, but in fact it is quite old. In 1898, long before the
term "social construction" was coined, Edwin
J.
Goodwin, an Indiana
legislator, proposed a bill that would make
:n:
=
3.2-and furthermore,
that people using his "New Mathematical Truth" be required to cough
up royalties. The scheme, part of other misguided efforts at the time to
