What is the ‘social construction of nature’? A typology and sympathetic critique

Abstract

This paper seeks to clarify what is meant by the ‘social construction of nature’, which has become a crude but common term used to describe very different understandings of nature, knowledge and the world. I distinguish two broad varieties of construction talk in the social sciences: construction-as-refutation and construction-as-philosophical-critique. The first uses the construction metaphor to refute false beliefs about the world and is consistent with orthodox philosophical stances, such as positivism and realism. By contrast, I identify four other, more radical sorts of construction-as-philosophical-critique that use the construction metaphor to question the culture/nature, subject/object and representation/reality dualisms that provide the conventional philosophical foundation for distinguishing true conceptions of nature from false ones. Another source of confusion has been the question of precisely what is meant by the term ‘nature’. Making distinctions among different senses of that term can provide some badly needed clarity in debates about the social construction of nature. It also highlights a broad difference between those for whom the social construction of nature refers to the construction of our concepts of nature and those for whom the construction of nature refers to the process of constructing nature in the physical and material sense. That distinction, in turn, suggests two major, if also somewhat related, points of theoretical contention: first, the epistemological significance of understanding concepts of nature as constructed; second, the philosophical and political implications of arguing that nature is a socially constructed and contingent phenomenon. These are difficult philosophical and political questions, and the variety of constructionisms suggests that it is possible to answer them in a number of different ways.