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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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In that sense claim that race is socially constructed may mean that certain social aspects of race and its impact on daily lives of people is socially shaped even though it is obviously real in a sense that there are people with white skin and people with black skin.

That's the motte.

The bailey is that because race is socially constructed and not scientifically real, we can therefore assume any policy with disparate impact ("class starts at 10AM so show up before 10AM", "math questions have objective answers" or "don't beat up other children") is racist.

I think you have it backwards. The motte is the defensible part

Fixed, thank you.

That, or it may be genuine discussion of what should be considered racism and racist. To go for more benign example take claim like "psychology is science". It is at the same time a claim about what is psychology but also a claim of what properties science should have. Somebody saying "psychology is not science" can disagree with you about properties of psychology and/or properties of science.

And of course as said previously, this can be used as sophistry. You can use word games to become parasitic on some pre-existing meaning or valence of certain word (e.g. racism is bad) in order to either make the new thing (like disparate impact) seem a little bit like the original category (racism), or to change the meaning of the word (racism) a bit - or both at the same time.

While I'm aware of the redefinition of "racism", the bailey I describe isn't that. Lets roll with your psychology example:

  1. Psychological studies have little predictive value and people in the field don't seem very worried about replication or correctness.

  2. Psychology is a science, and science tells us that if you don't do gender affirming care/body positivity/etc, people will do suicides and such.

Now, (1) is just an empirical claim. Point (2) may have some embedded prescriptive linguistics about what "science" should means (I guess not predictions that tend toward accuracy, or correction of errors based on empirics coming out the wrong way).

However, if you noticed, (2) actually has an embedded implicit assumption: namely that science makes predictions which are generally true, unlike critical theory or english literature. And in the psychology case, people don't bring out (2) when folks complain about (1).

We can similarly decompose discussions of racism and HBD:

  1. The reason black people are underrepresented in technology is because black people for biological reasons lack the ability to write code, not race-influenced choices by people in technology.

  2. It is racism to require the ability to code in order to hire someone as a programmer because of the disparate impact.

(1) is an empirical claim, (2) may be a claim about the prescriptive linguistics of "racism". But unlike the psychology case, people do bring out the prescriptive linguistics as if it somehow is relevant to (and refutes) the empirical claim (1). That's the bailey.

Do people really trot (2) out to refute (1) in the racism example? I would expect many people to refute (1) by just saying, "that is racist" and not really even talk about disparate impact or business hiring practices.

No, they trot out "socially constructed" to refute (1). It's crazy to suggest a socially constructed identity would have biological effects, after all.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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