Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 182 | Sally Haslanger on Social Construction and Critical Theory

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it's because those ways provide elegant predictive descriptions or because they serve a more subtle political purpose. To get at the true nature of reality, therefore, it's important to think about which aspects of it are socially constructed, and why. I talk with Sally Haslanger about these issues, and the techniques we can use to understand the world and make it a better place. Update (22 March): Our discussion here could have (and did) leave some listeners with the wrong impression of how Sally and I feel about trans rights -- we are entirely for them! My fault for not making things more clear during the conversation. So I have added a brief note during the podcast intro to make our position perfectly explicit. Thanks to everyone who commented. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Sally Haslanger received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Ford Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among her awards are the Carus Lectureship, the Distinguished Woman Philosopher award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of several books, including Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Web site MIT faculty page PhilPeople profile Google Scholar publications Amazon author page Wikipedia

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This do-it-all formula also contours, corrects, and highlights, all while staying lightweight, crease-resistant, and smooth. It may be the world's greatest eraser. Find your shade of instant eraser concealer at your local retailer. Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And here at Mindscape, we are members of what back in my day was referred to as the reality-based community. We believe that there is a reality out there, there's a real world, you don't get to pick reality, at the fundamental level, at least. But of course, we all know that when we examine reality, when we talk about it, when we carve it up, when we turn it into useful little person-sized chunks, there's a lot of human-sized chunks, there's a lot of human, choice that goes into how we describe reality. Sometimes this is a very trivial thing, right? You can describe reality at the level of particles and fields, where you can describe the reality at the level of atoms and molecules, all the way up to organisms and societies and what have you. I would argue,

I know I'm an extremist on this, not everyone agrees. I think that even at the level of particles and fields, we human beings are making choices to talk about reality in a certain way. The real way of talking about reality is as a single wave function in Hilbert's space. But anyway, that's an extremist point of view, like I said. In physics, in science more generally, these ways that we carve up reality to talk about them are more or less fixed by the data, by our desire to fit our experience into some framework, which we call a theory of physics or something like that, a theory of some other kind of science. But as you go up and up and up toward the human level, as you become more and more, more macroscopic, we end up making more and more choices about how to describe reality.

Once you get to the level of people in societies and countries and governments, then you're making things up right and left. We make up things like rights and privileges and laws, right? Even when we describe the people around us, we make up categories, categories of race or gender or class, which is fine. We need these categories. They help us analyze the world. There's no choice about it. The problem is that two problems actually. One problem is sometimes we begin to think that the ways that we have chosen to conveniently divide up the world are just as fixed by the facts as electrons and protons are fixed by the facts. We under-emphasize or downgrade the extent to which we are making choices that didn't need to be that way. And the second problem is, is that sometimes not only do we think that our categories are kind of immutable, but we give them a kind of normative advantage. We say they're the right way to be. It's not just as the only way to be or the descriptively correct way to be, but it's good to be that way. These are natural things to fall into, but there are also things to resist a little bit if we want to be as accurate and as

careful as we can in thinking about reality. So the way that we analyze this idea that we human beings make choices in carving up reality is known as the social construction of reality, or the social construction of different categories or different ideas or different concepts that we use to think about reality. And so part of this social construction idea is that the ideas we make up to construct our picture of reality aren't arbitrary, right? Just because you say an idea is socially constructed doesn't mean it has no relationship to the real world of immutable scientific stuff. But that relationship, but that relationship is, relationship deserves examination. Parts of it might be fixed, parts of it might be up for grabs,

maybe we can even improve some parts of it. So today's guest is Sally Hasslinger, who is a well-known philosophy professor at MIT, who is an expert on exactly this idea of the social construction of reality. You know, she's a professor at MIT. She jokes in the podcast. She cares about technology, science, things like that, not saying that it's all up for grabs, but really interrogating the way that we human beings have made choices about how to describe different kinds, different aspects of reality. We'll get into the obvious ones, race and sex, or two of the very, very obvious ones, or gender, I should say. And then there's the question that immediately arises, what should our attitudes be toward thinking about this? Like, how can we prevent ourselves from falling into the

trap of taking the categories that we invent as given to us objectively by nature? And that gets into the area known as critical theory. Critical theory in the context of critical race theory has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons, and we're not really going to talk about that. But the more general picture of critical theory is just examining the presuppositions that we inevitably have when we examine culture and society, looking for the hidden assumptions that lead us maybe down the wrong path in trying to make the world a better place. That's the role of critical theory. And so I think this is a very fair discussion. I don't always agree with everything. I never do. But I think this is going to be a good introduction to these kinds of ideas, especially if you're instantly skeptical, okay? I think that Sally does

a very good job of laying the groundwork as to why you would think in this particular kind of way, whether or not you end up thinking it's the best way of going. I'd like to jump in here now with a later add-on and edit slash clarification to this podcast episode, because we were not clear about certain things, and that has led to misunderstandings. In the episode, we talk about the social construction of reality as a philosophical concept, but an obvious example to consider, which we did, is the social constructor of gender and sexuality. This is, of course, not merely a matter of academic discourse.

It's a topic of contemporary interest that has a real impact on people's lives. So to be absolutely clear, both Sally and I believe that trans women are women, and they deserve all the rights that women have. Full stop. The confusion arose because Sally wrote an influential paper over 20 years ago about the social construction of gender. And she considered the question of what feminism means if female is a socially constructed term, right? Her suggestion was that feminism should advocate for the rights of people whose bodies are socially interpreted as female, regardless of their underlying biology. That would, of course, include many trans women. So this

is an advance at the time. But the problem is it doesn't include. It doesn't, include all trans women. There are trans women who are non-passing in the sense that they identify as women, but they still present themselves to the world in traditionally masculine ways. So that original analysis had an oversight, a mistake, a lacuna. And it's one that both she and others have acknowledged since then in work to correct and subsequent work. Problem is that here in the podcast, we didn't get that far. So the listener is left with an incomplete and outdated picture. And honestly, this is largely my fault as the podcast host because I'm someone who is not as knowledgeable as I could be about this area. I just didn't think to push on that distinction and

allow Sally to elaborate further on her current thinking. So my apologies to her for that. And more especially, apologies to anyone who is concerned that we're advocating for anything other than full rights for trans women. I'm learning. And conversations like this are part of the learning process. So I'm very grateful to everyone who commented. Sally Hasslinger, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. You know, we've been, without much planning on my part, I've been having a few episodes where we talk about reality, what is real in different ways, in very different ways.

The very first podcast of the years with Jodi Azuni, who talks about whether mathematical objects are real. The second podcast was David Reich, the geneticist from Harvard, who, when I asked him, you know, are species real? at least like, ah, it's a philosophical question. I don't want to talk about that. But so I think maybe we're somewhere in between here today, but the angle is the social construction of reality. And as someone who is a physicist myself, you know, somewhat sympathetic to the idea, but there's clearly a whole bunch of questions that come up when you just say that phrase. So I figured we should just start by getting some ideas on the table. I mean, when you say the social construction of reality, in some sense, just what do you have in mind? But in particular, is that to say,

how close is that to a we can construct whatever we want, anything goes kind of thing? Or are you constrained by the reality as we scientists know it, for example? That's a great set of questions. So I like to distinguish two senses of social construction. One sense of social construction is just causal construction. So there are lots of artifacts in the world. They're made by people. There are sometimes made by an individual, but they're sometimes made by groups of individuals or societies or such. So a highway, right? You might want to say, well, that was produced by, you know, there was a legislator, legislature that earmarked money to make the highway, and then there were people who were contracted to build it and whatever, and a highway is a social construction.

Now, that's not the standard way of using social construction, but social construction does have a causal component. And one way of thinking about it is that, or some one form of social construction has a causal component. So if you think about how my body is shaped, it is shaped in part because of the way that the chromosomes have informed different parts of matter to sort of build a body that's of a human shape, but it's also shaped by what I do, what I eat, how much I work out, and those sorts of things.

And those sorts of things, how much of that I do, is affected in part by gender norms, norms about appropriate appearances for women, about my moral beliefs about not eating meat or animal products. And so there's a way, and we could say that my body is, at least partly, socially constructed in the sense that those social norms and beliefs have played a causal role in shaping my body. Okay. So I'm inclined to think of my body as both a biological phenomenon.

It's a biological entity. But it's also kind of a social entity as well because it has been shaped very much by choices that I have made in response to my social. context. So there's a kind of causal conception of social construction there. But I also think that there's a different, that's non-causal sense of construction. But it looked like you had a question about the causal sense. Well, yeah, because I don't want to be too, have too much, I mean, maybe I should or should not say what I want, but I want to make clear how weak or strong the notion of social construction is. I mean, everyone will agree that your body.

is socially influenced by the exact factors that you mentioned, that's a little bit weaker maybe than constructed. And so what is the difference there? Yes. Yes. Well, I do think that there's a use of the term social construction where it just means influenced, that there's a significant social influence on the body or on the world in a way that sort of goes through our social norms.

practices. And it doesn't say that it makes it from scratch, right? Nobody is saying that it makes it from scratch. But think of it this way. A statue isn't made from scratch either. A statue comes into existence. It's made of clay. It is shaped in a certain way and becomes a statue. And similarly, you know, my body, you might think of, there's the clay and that it was shaped in various ways. And it came to be something more statue-like in the sense that it is composed of. the biological entity, the animal, but it is not just that biological entity. It is something more than that. Like the statue is more than just the clay. And so I think that that sense of composition is important in some of the senses of social construction that you come to. You're not

going to say, oh, the statue came to be from nothing, you know, because, you know, it came to be from the effects of an artist who was also influenced by a social context on a material substrate. And so my body, there's a material substrate there, a material substrate like the clay or the marble, has causal, you know, potentialities that are not up to me, but among the potentialities that it has is to respond to what other people say or think or demand or the kinds of punishments that they may impose on me if I don't conform to certain things. And so those potentialities, just like the clay has a potentiality to take to molding in a certain way by not just its environment, but by the artist. So my body has a potentiality to be molded by me in response to the social

context. And so I'm kind of thinking about just as, you know, you knock the statue off the table and it falls to the floor by virtue of its physical properties, not by virtue of its aesthetic properties. When someone comes in and sees it, they respond to it as something beautiful by virtue of its aesthetic properties that are over and above its mere physical properties. So it sounds like in this sense of social construction, various aspects of a body or a person or whatever are the ones that are socially constructed, and for obvious reasons that seems very important. But I know there are people out there who will tell me that quarks and leptons

and atoms and particles are socially constructed. And that doesn't seem to follow up for what you just said. No, no. And I'm not, I would like to say that not everything is socially constructed. Okay. That there are plenty of things in the world that aren't socially constructed and drawing, you know, some kind of distinction between those that are and those that aren't is tricky and difficult and controversial, but I think it falls somewhere out there. Now, there is another, so Ian Hacking used to talk about the social construction of quirks and things like that, but he wanted to distinguish the social construction of things from the social construction of concepts. Right. So concepts, all concepts are socially constructed. They come to us through language. They come to

us through our interactions with other people. You know, you're a baby. You grow up. You learn the concepts. You learn because those are the ones that are made available to you in your social milieu. Now, I'm chomskyen enough to think that we're pre-wired to pick up certain concepts and not others. But it's, I'm inclined to think that, you know, the concept, the thing, the mental entity, if there is one, is a social construct. But the thing it corresponds to and the world isn't necessarily a social construct. Okay.

But there are, just to not only mention your views, but those of others, there's sort of a spectrum of strength of this idea of social construction where some people is going to put it all in the mind, right? But you're very happy to say there are things out there in the world, and we're talking about the powers and impacts they have on the world as a feature of being in part socially constructed. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, I mean, so some people even in philosophy will say that there isn't a new thing, the statue. there's just the lump of clay that is statue shaped. And so some people will want to say there's not a new thing, the social body over and above the biological body. But some people want to say, no, there's the biological body,

and then there's the kind of social body, just like the statue and the clay. And I think that's a matter of some controversy and philosophy, but I don't think it matters for the ordinary person. Okay, good. And I think I did interrupt you with the question there, but you were maybe going on to other versions of social construction beyond the causal. Yes, great.

Yes, and always interrupt me. I love it. So in addition to causal construction, I think there is something that I call constitutive construction. And so constitutive construction is when you have a category that is defined in part by reference to social phenomena. So take the category of a spouse. Now, I am a spouse, and to be a spouse is to stand in a relationship to another person and the state, right, because we are legally married. It's a legal category, yeah. And that is a social category.

It is not a natural category. It's a social category. So sometimes what philosophers will say is that the category of wife is socially constructed, meaning it's not a category in nature. so to speak. It's a category in our social world, but that doesn't mean it's not real. So this comes back to that issue. So I'm a realist about almost everything. And so to say that a category is socially constructed, some people will say is to say it's an illusion. I say, no, it's not necessarily, you know, spouses aren't an illusion. Spouses are real. We have powers by virtue of being spouses, Right. We have social powers and legal powers, et cetera, by virtue. But it's not as if we want to say, well, yeah, I am a spouse because of some, well, I am a spouse because of some causal process of going to the justice of the peace and being married and something like that. But it's different to say that what it is to be a spouse is to stand in these social relations.

And that's constitutive construction as opposed to causal construction. When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptitide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience. And all shift directly to your door in discrete packaging. Do your research.

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BZ reflects decades of experience, reimagined for what's next. The BZ isn't just electric. It's Toyota Electric. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. Okay, I mean, they're clearly closely related to each other, right? I mean, they're going to bounce back and forth. And actually, this is very sympathetic to stuff that I talked about in my book, The Big Picture, where I talk about different layers of reality

and attaching reality to all of the different stories that we can tell accurately about the world. And so the social world is where it gets tricky, right? Like, I always like to say I'm a physicist because it's easy. is fairly simple to pinpoint what happens and what doesn't, whereas the social world very messy. And so what then is the power of mentioning or pointing out or highlighting the social construction of these things, as opposed to just choosing a theoretical vocabulary to talk about certain parts of the world? Yeah. Well, I do think that the choice of theoretical vocabulary is important, but one of the reasons why people have

put a lot of energy into saying something like gender or race, et cetera, is socially constructed, is that it is a strategy for certain social formations to make it seem as though gender or race or certain other categories are determined by nature and are thereby immutable, immutable, inevitable, et cetera, et cetera. And so those people who are interested in saying that they're socially constructed is to say, no, we played at least a major role in creating the things that fall in those categories. I like the statue, like that we created them, like we create a statue, but also that some of the categories themselves are social categories.

They're not natural categories. Okay. So some people would say this is controversial, but sex might be a natural category, but gender is not a natural category. And so people assume that given your sex, you will have a certain gender because it's biologically determined that if you have that sex, you will have that gender. But other people want to say, no, no, no, no, no. that that assumption of biological determination is false. Good. So if I can try to rephrase that, you can tell me if I'm on the right track.

There's a usefulness in highlighting the social constructedness of things because it helps us divide that which is just given to us by nature from that which we have consciously or unconsciously assigned as properties to these categories. Yeah, that's it. No, I do think that it's a mistake to assume that because something is social, it's easily changeable or more easily changeable than the natural world. I mean, I'm at a technology. I'm at MIT, so I'm all about technology. I believe in technology. Technology is a wonderful way to change the world and change the natural facts of the world. And the social is much harder to change, actually, I think. So although there are feminists who disagree with me, I think that one of the greatest

advances for women's liberation is the birth control pill. It's a piece of technology. Technology. And it meant that women could make their own choices about their reproductive possibilities out of the moment in the privacy of their own private. lives, something like that, without having to negotiate with anybody about what was happening. And I think that was a huge advance. But it was something that just changed our reproductive biology, so to speak. Let me just, this may or may not be a useful analogy or comparison, but in physics,

we certainly have situations where the same exact physical phenomena can be described in different theoretical vocabularies, right? Different formulations of classical mechanics or quantum mechanics or whatever. So there's both what happens in some purportedly objective sense and how we talk about what happens, which is obviously a choice that we make. Is that close to the relationship we have between, let's say, sex and gender? So I don't think so because I think we're not talking about the same thing when we're talking about sex and gender. Okay, that's right. And so it's not just a matter of different vocabulary.

So maybe let me go back a little bit to one of the early introductions of the notion of gender in the academy. So feminist historians were interested in thinking about the different ways over time and across culture that people of a particular sex, sex live their lives, right? So females, they don't always, you know, live the same sort of life depending on what culture you're in. There are many different norms. There are many different senses of themselves and identities. There are many different expectations. And so they wanted a way to think about not just the underlying sex, but the set of assumptions that shaped women's lives and that women then conform to. And this, so the slogan was, well, gender is the social meaning of sex, allowing that the same sex across time and place could have very different

social meanings. And so the social meaning of a woman in the 21st century United States is very different than the social meaning of woman in, you know, China in the third century, something like that. And so that was the idea of trying to pick up the notion of gender. And it was important to this kind of disruptive attempt because in every case you find across history and across culture that the background cultural assumption is that this is the way women are naturally. This is the way women ought to be. This is the way that whatever. But historians were saying, well, how could that be? You know, if it varies so tremendously across place and time, it's certainly not natural that women, you know, do this or that or the other thing. So that's how the notion of gender emerged as the

social meaning of sex, allowing this tremendous variation. And also the fact that our bodies and our ways of life and our self-identities and all of that are being influenced by the history and the culture that we're part of. I mean, you said a lot of that in the past tense. Is that because it's been accomplished or do you still agree with it now? So I think, so the distinction between sex and gender is controversial. Many people don't like to draw it because they think that it presupposes that there is this given of sex, you know, the sex binary. And, and so I think that it, think that there's a different sense in which we might want to say that the binary, the sex binary is not given in the sense that there's a large spectrum from people with female body

parts and people with male body parts. And we can draw different, you know, lines along that spectrum. There's intersex people. There's people who, in different. cultures don't count as either one or the other, not because they're intersexed, but because of other factors about their lives. And how you define sex is also socially variable. So that's something that makes the sex gender distinction a little bit more controversial, because if you're just saying, well, sex is given and then gender is the social meaning of that, it gets more complicated than that very quickly because you want to say, well, sex is sort of, you know, socially categorized too. And then there's gender on top of that.

But I think that there's still a distinction worth making between the divisions of people based on their body parts and the divisions of people based on the meaning of those body parts. Yeah. And that I think gender is the distinctions between people based on. the perceived or imagined body parts that they have and what they mean in a particular culture. That does make perfect sense to me. There is something biological, and we are allowed to talk about that and classify it, and it would be overly simplistic to make it a binary, but there are still facts of the matter about what your chromosomes are, what your anatomy is, and that there's a separate set of questions about social roles and expectations and how we dress and behave

in those things, right? Is that roughly the sex gender? That's roughly the idea. And I mean, I maybe on a certain end of a spectrum because I believe that actually not paying attention to different reproductive functions would be a potential source of injustice because I do think that females play a substantially different role in reproduction, that fertile females in particular. and that should be taken into account by a society. That there is a social meaning of pregnancy. Pregnancy produces, in the good cases, the next generation. This is something that's socially, incredibly important. And rape and sexual violence happened to both men and women, but it has different consequences for males and females, potentially.

And so I think that these biological differences can't be just ignored if we're going to achieve justice. Well, so I think that, yeah, this is certainly bringing up exactly where the rubber hits the road in terms of these questions because we, basically, if I have the picture right, in a non-reflective way, we created these social categories. and they were closely related but not the same as sort of scientific categories. And now we're being a little bit more reflective about it. And for good reasons, as we'll get to later, there are sort of social justice reasons to try to do this. We want to make the world a better place. But it's hard because the vocabulary isn't there and the expectations are a little weird.

And, you know, so, I mean, you're using words like male and female, et cetera. What do these words mean? How should we go about this project? We need to invent completely new words. I mean, I know in discourse about trans people, there is a discussion of the extent to which we should just say trans women are women, full stop, right? Yes, yes. And I see the attraction of that in terms of giving them the rights and expectations that women have. There are obviously biological differences or whatever.

And so how do you even talk about that? Like, what is the way in which this separation of the socially constructed parts versus the natural or scientific? parts, I'm not quite sure what to call the other parts. Totally. No, this is what we're struggling with. I mean, both theoretically and culturally, I think we're struggling with. So since, you know, for the past 30 years or so, since this introduction in the academy of a notion of gender as the social meaning of sex, people have sort of regimented the

language to suggest that we use male and female for sex and man and woman for gender. Oh, okay. Now, that's a, it doesn't always work. I mean, I myself even talked about men and women, what I was really talking about, males and females, because in ordinary discourse, and I'm trying to speak non-theoretically. So in ordinary discourse, you know, we use men and women more than male and female. So it's, it is very tricky to communicate. And there are, and when you use male and female, there's this temptation to reinforce the binary. because what's the other sexes?

Like, what do we want to call? We haven't even in, you know, sort of culturally theoretically decided how many sexes we want there to be or think that there are. And so some people are resistant to, you know, male and female as the sexes because that already reifies the binary. And then when you're starting to talk about genders, you don't want to assume that genders are just the social meanings of male and gender. female because there might be the social meanings of all different other kinds of categories. So you, I mean, to take it, so Unix are an example, an interesting example, right? That they, they have a different body type, not naturally, but by virtue of surgical intervention. And there's a different social meaning associated with them. And so sometimes people have thought,

well, what we need to do is look historically at these different, formations and social formations that offer us examples of different bodies and different meanings of those different kinds of bodies. And so some people have looked to the two-spirit tradition in Native American cultures and suggested that there are different genders there and sort of left it a bit open about how we want to categorize sex in contexts like that. And, you know, there's a kind of openness and sort of ongoing exploration and political contestation over that.

I mean, I guess that makes sense. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And maybe the answer to my next question was implicit in the sentence you just said, but I was going to say, okay, now that we have this improved understanding of these distinctions, what do we do with it? I mean, and maybe what we do with it is just talk about it in a slightly more clear, rigorous way than we used to when we were just taking things for granted. Yes, I do think that clarity and rigor is a good thing, but there's also politics because... I've noticed, yes.

Because there are some people who do not want to allow that trans women are women because our social facilities such as bathrooms or our laws around marriage, etc., are organized around men and women. And because of that, the rights and privileges that individuals have by virtue of being men or women are connected historically to body type. Yeah. And so when you start saying, well, a woman is just a gender and it's not necessarily connected to a body type, that suddenly changes a set of rights and privileges and obligations that people have by virtue of, well, by virtue of what? I mean, is it by virtue of their identity? Is it by virtue of their bodies? Is it by virtue of what? And that becomes immediately. quite political. When Toyota builds an electric vehicle, we don't start with a blank slate. We start with everything we know.

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But then I think that I noticed that you came up with the same analogy, which is to money. You know, money is a social construction. We invented it. But there's a whole bunch of people out there who have a, you know, a strong feeling that money should be more tangible than it really is. And they want to, you know, go on the gold standard. They want to feel secure that they could hand in some dollars and get something tangible back. whereas in the actual current system, it is just entirely socially constructed. It's just what we agree to do when you give us money.

And is that sort of search or desire for certainty and foundationalism part of the thing you're up against when you emphasize the social construction of things? I mean, that's an interesting analogy, and I think that there's a lot to it. But given what we were talking about before, that there are different. bodies that have different potentialities, it isn't just like money, right? Because you can't make it the case that someone can get pregnant just by saying so or categorizing them as of a certain kind, you know, by how we think, you know, that there are, that there are all vulnerabilities that individual bodies have that we should be respectful of and attentive to. But how to do that is part of what's at issue in the political, in the political landscape.

How do we want to be attentive to, and also to history, that there are spaces where women have felt safe from sexual predation, where females have felt safe from sexual predation. And what does it mean now to make those spaces open to males, where being a male brings with it certain physical potentialities that are already sort of have a meaning in our society. And so that becomes highly problematic. So there's women wanting safe spaces, but, and so they associate threat with a certain body type, but it may not be that that body type brings with it a threat, but that has, it already has its social meaning in place over time, over history, and people can feel threat even if there isn't a threat. And so, and they want a safe place from feeling threatened.

Yeah, yeah. So I think that you've done the, you know, perfect philosopher thing in stating the problem in wonderful clarity and comprehensiveness. So what's the answer? Is there, I mean, how, even if we can't just give the answer in simple terms, how do we address a question like that? Once you've said, you know, okay, who gets to go into which restroom is entirely socially constructed? I mean, which doesn't, as you've correctly said, which doesn't mean it's divorced from physical facts, but it is nevertheless a constructed fact. Okay. What are our? our guidelines, what are the principles that we use to make better decisions about those questions? It's not easy, right? It's not easy. No, I love to tell an anecdote of a, I am a

subscriber to a local theater, Central Square Theater. And before the pandemic, they converted all of the restrooms to gender neutral restrooms, all gender restrooms. And so I remember the first time going in there shortly after this happened. And we were all going, yeah, great, gender, all gender restrooms, great. And then, but there were some restrooms that had urinals and some that didn't, but they had put cubicles around the urinals. And so it was my turn. I was waiting in line. I went in and there, I went into a cubicle and it had a urinal. And I said, oh, sorry, I need to wait. Would someone else like to use this cubicle or whatever? And someone else went in and didn't close the door. And I said, excuse me, but I know you're not used to closing the door, but please close the

door. And so we were kind of navigating in this space about how, what were the norms, because we don't have norms for public restrooms that are all gender, gender restrooms. And so, but it was an interesting thing. And now over years, now it's opened up again after the pandemic and I go in there. And there's a lot more interesting signage that makes it clear. you know, okay, this has, you know, this one has two urinals in it if you need them, you know, and there's a little marker about which one have the urinals and which one don't have the urinals, so you're not sort of waiting to go into one that you don't, you can't use or something like that. So, but I love that period of exploration to sort of see how the norms sort of made themselves

because we had to figure it out. Right. And we had to figure it out respectfully. and we had to figure it out together how to make it happen. So I think that in small context, that can happen where you like coordination can arise with people trying to solve a problem. But it's much more complicated when we're thinking nationally or in terms of laws or something like this.

This was a group of people who were already happy to participate in that negotiation. Yeah, it could work. And so I think that there are a couple of things that are important. One is to be sensitive to the empirical facts. So in Massachusetts, once gender identity was made more flexible so that, you know, trans women were women and trans men were men. And so they were permitted to go into restrooms. There was an open question about whether there would be an incredible. in violence or whether people would be more challenged in finding restrooms that they felt

comfortable in and safe in. And it turned out there, in the period of time when this was sort of a trial, there was no increase in violence in restrooms. And there weren't complaints that were lodged. I don't know if there might have been complaints that were not formally made, but there were no formal complaints. And so then it was ratified to continue. But there still are people who make the claim that allowing trans women into women's restrooms makes cis women unsafe. But there's an empirical question here about whether it does or not. And so one first sort

of one initial stab at how we should proceed is that, we need to get empirical data. We need to get empirical evidence about what works and what doesn't work. But that's not everything because I do think that there are people who, for one reason or another, do feel vulnerable because of their own history or because of their cultural understandings and expectations. And so I think that nowadays in most malls and airports in the U.S., you have family bathrooms, you have single stall, so to speak, you know, single occupancy restrooms, they're called or family restrooms, where someone who is not comfortable going in to one or the other has an option to go in. It may take longer because there may be more of a weight, but

Women are used to waiting. Yeah. It's about time, the rest of the world. So I think that there may be possibilities of both allowing trans women access to what cis women have access to, while also providing spaces for people who are less comfortable with that option, where they might feel safer. I mean, I like the answer because if I'm interpreting what I'm hearing correctly, rather than sitting back in our armchairs and reflecting on how the way the world should be,

faced with this realization that certain things are socially constructed and maybe not in the ideal way, it's more about a social practice and trying things out and being good empiricist and seeing what works. Totally, totally. That's what I'm all about. And because it's about coordination and efforts to impose terms of coordination on groups of people sometimes works but often doesn't work because it's not sufficiently sensitive to the needs of the people who are coordinating and the histories and the etc, etc. And so you've got to see what's, you've got to use the empirical information that you can get to see what's going to work. Well, one empirical question is just how willing people are to let terms be.

redefined. I mean, I think a good example of a success story is same-sex marriage, where some people would have just not defined that as part of marriage, and the world, parts of the world anyway, have more or less come on board with defining it to include same-sex couples. I mean, how much do you, as a philosopher, have to think about this practical problem of getting people to go along with the program? How malleable are these socially constructed terms? I think that's an excellent question. And I think that the job of a philosopher is to make proposals in the context of a social movement. So I don't think it's our job to sit at a desk and make up some new way of thinking and speaking about things,

but to be responsive to problems that have emerged on the ground where coordination is not working and to work with those people on the ground to see how we might redescribe the situation in a way that could be paradigm shifting, right, that could give you, whoa, a whole new way of looking at this. I mean, that's what one of the things that philosophers can be good at is sort of go, well, let's break that open and think about it this way. But you can't go too far because people are not going to go too far too fast, right? So you've got to kind of, but I'm very committed to working on the ground as part of a movement to see if there are ways to do this that can shift perspectives. Now, you're not going to get everybody to buy in for all different kinds of reasons, but I think part of the job of a social movement is to provide incentives to do so. incentives to go along with the pack because we're coordinating and we're doing, we're doing it fine and we're happy to do it. And if you don't want to be part of it, you know, okay, you can try and do it

your own way, but you're going to miss us because we're valuable and we're important and you're going to want to do it with us, right? That's an oversimplification, obviously. But the social movement is trying to change the way we do things, and people are very highly incentivized to do what we do. Now, the problem is when you get polarization, they say, oh, but we're not part of your we anymore. And I think that's a bit where we are on a number of different issues now.

So a question might be, how do you overcome polarization? And I think that sometimes there's an assumption that, well, you just use the law. But the law is not a simple solution. I mean, as we can see from, you know, racial integration, it blew back on itself very badly. And, you know, that's what generated the civil rights movement is after Brown-Bee Board of Education. And people were not going to integrate their schools. you know, in some states, in Virginia, I think it was, they shut down some of the school districts,

the public school districts, because they just made it all private so that they didn't have to integrate. So there are lots of strategies for a community to resist legal pressures because their cultural norms and their way of life and their self-understandings just can't tolerate that change. and they're not going to put up with the imposition of a new form of life. And so then the question is, and so then what happened is the civil rights movement moved in. It made some progress. But we're still faced with racial segregation. We're still struggling with that. So I don't think there's a, you know, moving from black to African American.

It was a good idea, but it didn't solve the problem. So language itself. I mean, I'm sure how good an idea it was. But at the moment, it seemed like a good idea. But, you know, just changing the language does not solve our problems. It's not enough. Just changing the law does not solve our problems. And that's where I wanted to move next into, you know, slightly more treacherous territory in some sense, because I'm betting that everyone listening to the podcast, almost everyone is happy with same-sex marriage. And even those who objected to it, you know, they thought it was unnatural. It didn't fit. But it. it was a hard case for them to make that they were really being inconvenienced by this shift. Whereas when it comes to gender or race, now we have a situation where there's a group that is benefiting from the socially constructed categories and another group that is being disadvantaged. And that's a harder thing to change maybe. And I know that maybe this is the time to talk about what I think is a claim that you've made about

how the fact that men are on top and women are on the bottom is an integral part of what we mean in the socially constructed language of men and women. Yeah. So in the period where we were trying to figure out what gender is, and we had the slogan, gender is the social meaning of sex, it started to seem as the social meaning of sex, it started to seem as though, oh, well, there is, and then we use the term woman for, you know, the social meaning of the female sex. It suddenly sounds like, well, women are not a unified category. The whole idea was that they're all different ways of being women and there's different social meanings,

et cetera, et cetera. And social meanings across class and across race and across whatever. And so it started to seem that it was such a heterogeneous category, this social, meaning of sex or the social meaning of femaleness, that we were going to lose the idea of women. How do you fight for the rights of women if you can't agree on what women are? If you can, exactly. And I can remember a T-shirt that I bought that said, I'll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy because people were suggesting that there was no way to sustain a feminist movement

if there are no women. And there are no women in general, right? There's there's there's we all are in these multiple categories and our social lives are dictated by so many things. So it was part of my project to think about, well, what would the feminist, what can a feminist movement really focus on when they're focusing on the rights of women or the well-being of women or the emancipation of women, etc. And it struck me that what I care about, at least, is fighting for those people who are interpreted to have a certain reproductive function, interpreted to be capable of menstruation and pregnancy, capable of growing breasts, etc. I'm sorry, you disappeared for like two seconds there. You said you were fighting for people who are interpreted to have. Okay, got it.

So let's put it this way. People's bodies are interpreted as male or female, whether they are male or female or not. And that has been the case forever, right? There are people who have male bodies but live as women and people who have female bodies and live as men. but it seems to me that what I was most concerned with when I was, you know, thinking as a feminist was the ways in which people's bodies are interpreted as female ends up having a consequence for what opportunities they have, what resources they have, etc. And those resources and opportunities are, you know, disadvantaged compared to those whose bodies are interpreted as male, right? So I know that's a lot to try and get across. But the basic idea is it's about how the interpretation of your body plays a role in the justice of your opportunities and your life, right?

Those sorts of things. And so, and I wanted it to be the case that those interpretations don't dictate, you know, what your possibilities are in life. That's a very simple, you know, I think, I hope all of your listeners will think that that's a good idea. That's how my body isn't interpreted as male or female shouldn't dictate what my opportunities are and what, how much I make or what I can, who I can love. I mean, part of my job as the podcast host is to imagine the contrary. So, I mean, let's imagine the best version of the contrary opinion where you say, look, males and females are different. They have certain things they're good at, certain. roles that they're good at playing. Let's not fight that. Let's just let that difference exist and

celebrate it and allow social roles to reflect that. I don't believe that, but you know, that would be the, I think that that sounds not completely crazy if you didn't know anything about the real world. Well, you know, one of the things John Stuart Mills said in his Subjection of Women, the book, the subjection of women is that we have never treated women as equals. We have never given them the opportunity to do what they wanted to do because we have told them what was right and proper for them to do. So how could you possibly make a claim based on the evidence about what women want or how they're going to best live their lives or what will make them most successful. Because we don't have a control, right?

It's always been dictated for women that they have a particular role and for men that they have a particular role. And so if we are good empiricists, we ought to step back from that and try to see what happens. And what we find often is that a lot of men really hate masculinity and a lot of women really hate femininity. And that they have to struggle to conform to it. And they are much happier when they, you know, don't have a woman, you know, is a physicist. She's happy to be a physicist and to tell her that her proper role is in the home, you know, taking care of babies. she will look at you like you're out of your mind. And so I think that that's, so when I'm thinking about defining gender, the way I see it is it continues to be the social meaning of the reproductive body or the, but what I want to say is that men and women, as we have known them, as they have existed up until now, are the social meaning.

of the imagined or perceived female body and the social meaning of that with respect to oppression, good privilege and subordination. So when we're fighting for women, we're fighting for those people who have been subordinated because of the way their body has been interpreted. Now, some people have thought, well, but that's not what I mean by women. And I go, yeah, sure, that's fine.

You know, I'm not arguing that that's what we all have to mean in all contexts whenever we use the term. I'm using this term in a particular way that draws on this history of gender being the social meaning of sex, of woman being the term that's used for gender, for understanding gender as a category that's a primary concern for a movement, for the feminist movement. When people turn to telehealth for weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience, and all shift directly to your door in discrete

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We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. And how does this come to sort of practical advice for our behavior as human beings, right? I mean, most people, like you say, there's a lot of things that are socially constructed, not given naturally. And part of that is how we dress, how we cut our hair, ways that code us instantly as either masculine or feminine. Is that badge? We resist that? Would it be more emancipatory if we didn't have these stereotypical behaviors?

Or are some of them benign and we can enjoy them? them because some people do enjoy them. Like I dress in a certain way and it's totally like a guy. And I'm not that motivated to change. Yeah. No, I think that that's fine. So my view is not we should all become androgynous. But it's that having long hair and breasts and wearing a dress should not have consequences for you in terms of your pay, in terms of your career opportunities, in terms of, you know, other things that you might want to do with your life. You shouldn't be assumed that you're going to be the one to cook dinner or clean the house or if you're dressed in a coat and tie that you're the kind of person who wants to take care of the outside of the house

and mow the lawn and, you know, do that sort of thing. I mean, there's this incredible, the detail of gender norms about what you're supposed to do, et cetera, given your body type. And you're thinking, really? If you have a certain body type, you cut the lawn. If you have another body type, you vacuum the house. Oh, my God. That's so ridiculous.

You know, but it's to say two things. One is to notice that that is contingent. It's historical and culturally and historically and historically specific. And that there's nothing natural about it that you have to conform to. If you want to, that's good. but that also it is often correlated with privilege and disadvantage, that these sorts of things that people, men go out and women stay home. And, well, what does it mean if you stay home and don't get to go out?

Well, among other things, you may not be able to form a network of people who you can turn to should things get rough at home because you're confined to the home. or, I mean, I know that's a class assumption that women stay home and men go out because not all classes or culture certainly is that true. But I'm trying to give an example of how even simple norms that look benign can have serious consequences for your well-being and your rights and your and you're flourishing. You know, this is brought up a million things I want to ask all at once. let me just try to mention one of them and you can respond. I was once invited to go to a social kind of, I don't know, it was an informal kind of

organization, but it was only men. Only men were allowed. And it was like, we're not anti-woman. We just want a space for men to come and be men. And I said, no, I don't want to do that. I kind of like hanging out with women. It seems like a very arbitrary kind of dividing line. I want to hang out with interesting people no matter what their gender is.

And one of my friends who was a member said, you know, in all. sincerity, and he's, you know, very progressive feminist guys. Like, we're not in any way, you know, it's not misogynist or anything like that, but it is a great networking opportunity. And I said, but, but that's the problem. You have a great networking opportunity from which you're explicitly excluding half the population. That sounds wrong to me. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the kind of thing. I mean, there's all kinds of ways in which, I mean, I actually think that women do need to have certain spaces for self-segregation in order to, you know, have conversations about, I mean, part of the reason is that because we're, because both men and women are expected to have certain

desires and certain preferences and certain talents and certain forms of life, when you don't, it's very tempting to think that there's something wrong with you, that you are to blame, because it's natural. So you must be abnormal or unnatural or something like that. And when you meet with others who are in a similar situation and you find out, oh, you don't like to do that either, you're not good at that either. Your husband acts that way too. Then what happens is that you begin to see it's not necessarily all your fault, that there's

a structural problem here. There's a more systematic problem here. And that is the beginning of consciousness raising. That's a crucial movement. So it could be that for men getting together, what they realize, there's one thing is, I hate being masculine. I don't like football or, you know, whatever. I'm stereotyping, obviously. But I don't want to, you know, be the one to make the money.

I want to be the one to take care of the child. Again, stereotyping and sort of using ancient history. But it's a way that you can begin to notice these structural patterns that are not good for everybody. They're good for some people, but they're not good for everybody. And then you can begin to identify what needs to change. So let me once again try to rephrase and state back and you can correct my misimpression. But it sounds like I might get this wrong just because I already believe it. so maybe I'm not hearing the subtleties.

But it sounds like, look, if in a particular household that has a couple, the one man and one woman, if the woman wants to be the one who does all the cooking and the man wants to be the one who mows the lawn, that's fine. And even if in 90% of such households, that's the division of labor, that's fine as long as, number one, in the 10% where the woman wants to mow the lawn and the man wants to do the cooking, that's also fine. And number two, we're sure that this purportedly innocent division of labor is not actually smuggling in some inequity somehow. Yeah.

Yeah. And that second part is also really important because it's not just, oh, we're just all going to sort of mix and match our happy gender categories and such like that because we have to be super attentive to the possibility that the mixing and matching of norms and. features of people, it creates inequities. And some of even the benign ones, when you collect them, there's a kind of a spiraling effect or a kind of accumulation of small privileges can make a big privilege. And you want to be very sensitive to when that happens and how that happens. I don't know if you're familiar with her work, but I did a great podcast with Kaelin O'Connor. Oh, I love Kailen.

Yeah, she's amazing. And she uses game theory to show how you could start from a purportedly neutral situation and the inequities come about because someone's going to win, someone's going to lose. It makes perfect sense. Yeah. And then you get more bargaining power. Yeah. A little bit more bargaining power each time. Right. And then you get a lot more bargaining power.

And that's exactly the problem. So everyone. everyone goes along, right. Exactly. Okay, so let me then, this is going to be a little bit of shift of gears, but I think there's some continuity here, because we've smuggled in notions of what would be just, what would be better, what would be an improvement on society.

So where did those come from? I know that a lot of your work, you know, we've talked about the social construct of reality, but a lot of your work has also dealt with critical theory, making the world a better place, ideal theory is, I guess, maybe the best place to start. Because I think that the idea that we make a better world or we decide what the better world would be by deciding first what the perfect world would be, ideal world,

and then moving in that direction, that seems super duper natural to me. But I did a podcast with Elizabeth Anderson and she began to talk me out of it by saying, like, how in the world do we know what the ideal theory is? We still know that we can be better than we are now. Yeah. So I think Anderson is a big influence in my work as well. So I like to separate political theory from social theory. Okay. So political theory is going to be concerned with the state and state power to enforce human rights, basically. You know, what we want is, First Amendment, you know, whatever, Bill Rights, and thinking about mechanisms for enforcement. But that doesn't really touch a lot of our lives.

Like how, and it's part of liberalism in the liberal state is that you're supposed to leave people absolutely free to form their own conceptions of the good and to live accordance with their conception of the good. But that makes it seem as though, okay, you've got the state and then you've got individuals who are just making their own individual choices about how to live. Right. Sounds good. But in fact, we live in societies and we participate in social practices. And social practices reinforce certain divisions of labor and gender norms and all of these sorts of things.

and it's very difficult for an individual by him or herself to just say, I'm not going to do it that way, right? Because you might not get a job then or whatever, and then you won't support yourself, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we need to think about what are better and worse ways to live collectively, about how are we going to organize ourselves around family divisions of labor. Think of something as simple like the scheduling of meals. So the scheduling of meals varies quite a bit, culture to culture. But it's kind of helpful to have an understood background assumption about meals, because after all, kids go to school. They get meals in the middle of the day.

I was born in the north of northern parents and moved to the south. And in the south, the big meal was the middle of the day, at least. and it was very weird. I started gaining a lot of weight because I would have a big meal in the middle of the day at school. And then I'd come home and have a big meal at night for dinner. And it was like, whoa, this is a little, it's difficult, right? So are my family going to then start having just a snack in the evening when our traditions have been big meals in the evening, et cetera? How do you do this?

And there's also restaurant times, you know, if you want to, if you want to have, like, lunch at 3.30 in the afternoon in some places, you know, it's kind of hard to find a good place to have lunch at 3.30 in the afternoon. So we'd need to coordinate about that, but it's not going to make sense for the state to say, okay, everybody has to have breakfast at eight and lunch at noon and dinner at six. This is the way to do it. So you've got to find ways to sort of manage this. Now, that's a trivial example, but as you can imagine, it has a lot to do with who picks up the kids at school, right? So does the, the, the, Does the nurse call the mom or the dad?

Well, back in the day before Massachusetts had marriage equality, they always called the mom. And it was like, I don't want you to always call me. It's natural. I work as hard as my husband does. And I don't, you know, why don't you call him? Well, it was interesting that once marriage equality came in, they didn't indicate mother and father on the forms to go to school. It's parent one and parent two.

And so you were supposed to put which parent should be called first as parent one. So it just, you know, which was great. But see, there is a change in a practice that had a legal incentive because of marriage equality, but it changed so many things about parenting and who was going to be called. Who would have to leave work? How would they get out of work, et cetera, et cetera. So there were changes there. But subtle changes like that can ripple through a society because once, you know, there's changes

and, well, I switched from the food, the meals example to parenting examples. But what I'm trying to emphasize is that these small differences in how we divide labor or how we organize our time can make a difference and can have elements of justice in it as well. Because if women are always the one being called away from work, then they're going to be seen as much less reliable. and they're going to not be able to have certain kinds of jobs that you have to be available on call at any moment, et cetera, et cetera, like that. So we have to figure these out not just as a matter of convenience, but they can have justice implications as well. So then the issue is, well, how do you do that? Do you design a society that's the perfect society that has their meals at the right time, that has their pickup from school practices at the right? No, of course, that's ridiculous, right? So from my point of view, even if ideal theory makes sense in the political domain, which I'm not saying it does, in the social domain where I mostly work, it seems ridiculous, right? It seems as though you can't do it. So what you have to do is analyze practices that are currently in place to determine who's being advantaged and who's being disadvantaged by those practices.

How does that pattern that like Kaelan O'Connor talks about, how does that bargaining power get reduced if you're the one who always has to pick up the kid, right? Or always has to go home with them when they're sick. Something like how does that reduce your bargaining power in various ways? Because you're not bringing home the bacon. And so, et cetera, et cetera. And so when you start to analyze the practice, you can then begin to nudge people in different to different standard, different expectations. expectations, different rules for how it is done. And then again, I think that's what social movements do. And sometimes they use law to make that first move or a 10th move or something like that. But sometimes they just, you work in your own school. You know, I'm kind of, it's bottom up kind of work. You go to the principal and say, can we have a new policy where we do it this way rather than that way? And then you start from there. And then the next school, your neighbor, they send there's kids to a different school and they go, oh, that's so great. I'm going to see if my school will do that.

And then suddenly, et cetera. I mean, this brings up a digression, which will take us back to where we were before, but is an important one, which is, let me give us slightly better, perhaps, worry about this way of thinking about things, which is, look, life is hard. Getting through life is hard, knowing how to behave, especially when you're young, when you're growing up. And, you know, as much as I agree that we have a patriarchy and men get a lot of benefits from the world, life can be really hard for young men in the modern world. And when you are constantly upending the expectations and changing what they are, I think that there's reasons to be sympathetic to worries that people don't know what to do, and that makes

their lives harder. Yeah. I have no, there's no question about that. And I do think that when you have a system of coordination that works, things are going to get worse before they get better if you try to change it. Right. Because you have to go into a certain period of confusion and chaos because all you had was that old system of coordination. And now you're not coordinating very well. It also, I think, makes clear that you can't just be a breaker, right?

a breaker of a system, a disruptor, because you have to have a different alternative that people can begin to move toward. Because otherwise, they're not going to move. They're going to be stuck because if they say, okay, you're going to break it, but then we have nothing else. Or everybody's going in different directions. That's not working for me. So they're going to retreat. And I think that's part of what's happening now with polarization. Some of it, I mean, some of it, there's lots of different explanations, but

some of it is things are changing and things are changing around gender and around marriage and around race and around all these things and they have been for a long time and we've got to a kind of tipping point possibly and when you get to a tipping point and you don't know what the other side looks like you don't want to go over the edge right you're just going to go oh no no sorry i'm backing up i'm backing up you know fast because i'm not going to go over that tipping point because it looks It's the unknown. It's chaotic. I don't know how to behave. Everything I believed in is suddenly false. And so I think that that's a real problem with social change. And social change is often, you know, ugly. So it's a great way of putting it. It reminds me, I just keep bringing up old podcasts.

But one of the very first ones I did was with Anthony Pinn, who is a black atheist theologian at Rice University. and he's very interested in the question of why blacks in the United States have such low levels of atheism among them. And he actually grew up as a childhood preacher. And he just, look, it's kind of obvious the answer. It's because you atheists, you're only tearing things down. You're only taking away the church and the belief. You haven't given them a soft landing. You haven't replaced these social structures.

So, you know, I think that this is just completely in line with what you just said. But it's always good to emphasize the constructive part of this very ambitious program. Yeah, totally. And it's very hard because I, in my experience, a lot of people are very worried who theorize in this domain are worried about making the positive step because they don't want to impose their values on others. And I think that there's something right about that. We don't want to impose our values on others. But first of all, I think that there's a process of coming to concretize our values to get. So sometimes what we disagree about is not the high value. This is an Andersonian point. It's not the higher value, but how it's been concretized or operationalized. And so what we need to do is think of ourselves as not having conflicting values, but maybe different understandings of what the world is like. Some of us might have empirically more adequate beliefs than others. And so it's not a disagreement of values. It's a disagreement. about the world. And so we have to sort of begin to resolve some of that. And some of it is that we share the value, but we don't, we don't see how that value is realized in this other practice. And so we have to reveal to someone how that value is revealed in a different practice. And that's

hard work. And it's not always through argument. Sometimes you have to get them to try on the practice. Maybe rarely through argument. Yeah. You have to sort of embody. audience to feel that, oh, I know, I see, this is something that I can do, I can believe in, etc. But that's hard to get people to do. And it takes trust. It takes tremendous trust to move outside your comfort zone. Yeah, I mean, I get this a lot. People ask me as a scientist, podcaster, et cetera, you know, like, how can I, when I go to visit my family at Thanksgiving, how can I make them more rational? How can I make them see true facts? And, And usually my answer is something along the lines of, you know, don't try to argue them into your worldview.

Just be an exemplar of a successful worldview, right? Like live life, be a person that they would want to be or be friends with. But that brings up, I want to re-ask the question about, or I mean, I ask too many questions at once. So let's focus in on the idea of critical theory. It's been in the news lately for not necessarily sensible reasons. but number one, how do you think of what critical theory is? And number two, how does it fit into this thing you just said, which I think is extremely sensible, that we can't ignore the constructive part.

We can't just be critical, right? We have to impose, not impose, but we have to offer some alternative ways of living and being. Yeah. So critical theory is a complicated tradition. and there's a European version of the Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in particular French critical theory. And then there's critical race theory that is more commonly embraced in the U.S. I see critical theory, the commonality in these different forms of critical theory,

as being that we start our theorizing on the ground from where, within a social movement. So you are not trying to be neutral and sort of do the ideal theory thing, come up from a neutral perspective to what an ideal would be. You're on the ground looking at struggles that people are having in their current situations and the kinds of suffering that people are facing. and trying to provide tools for people in those situations to articulate the nature of their suffering and to articulate their complaints with the current social formations and the current

structures. So the first moment is negative. The first moment is, I can't do this anymore. This is, like, not okay with me. Right. So for me, I mean, for some people, it's, I can't put up with being oppressed as a person of color, but mine is I can't put up with oppressing people of color, right? I mean, so there's both. It's not just one side or the other. It's, there's, you know, things are wrong and I can't take it anymore. And so you go into that space and try to find ways of articulating what's wrong, why is it wrong, what are alternative paradigms. So think of Marx, right? Marks and the working class, okay, we have. have a notion of exploitation, the appropriation of surplus value. This was a theory to try to explain

why there was dissatisfaction and frustration and misery in the part of the working class. So there is that negative part of it. And in critical race theory, I think that there is that as well of looking at, look, what is the nature of this suffering? It's not just Jim Crow and legal segregation. It's deeper than that. It has a long history. What is that history? What is the social meaning of blackness? How does that meaning infiltrate our lives and play a role in our everyday encounters? So there's that kind of articulation that the critical theorist offers. But it's also trying to open new possibilities for given the paradigm shift. for seeing different ways of organizing ourselves, organizing ourselves with different meanings.

What would the meaning of whiteness be if whiteness were not just, you know, Anglo-Christian domination, you know, something that what would it be? What is that going to be like? How were we going to live whiteness or are we going to give up race entirely? Right. So those sorts of questions become. And then for some of the critical theorists, what you do is you, again, don't go to the high heights, you know, the upper reaches of theory, but work collectively on the ground with people to try and do the work I was mentioning, to do the collective rethinking of the practices, the collective rethinking of the meanings and the language and the norms that would get us. through that paradigm shift. And I think this is, I hear what you're saying, and I've heard it before, and it does make sense, but this is where I do have worries, I think, that are non-trivial.

To the extent that you say, look, we talk about the world in a certain vocabulary, we take it for granted. There's a lot of hidden things going on here that some maybe are useful, some maybe are just oppressive and bad, let's interrogate them. That all sounds good to me. But then the tying of it to a social or even an activist kind of perspective where you say, here's something wrong about the world and, you know, I want to make the world better and that's informing how I do this rethinking of my categories. Is that a, that doesn't seem like a necessary connection to me.

I mean, maybe it's useful, maybe it's helpful. But I want to imagine that whether or not I should have it, there is just a perspective that says forgetting about what I want the world to be, I want to understand it better. I want to be able to think about it better and say true things about it, whether or not I'm that interested in going out there and making it a better place. How valid is that perspective, would you say? So where you're doing kind of normative inquiry, but not on the ground? Yeah, I mean, in the ivory tower.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I have no problem with people doing ivory tower work on the normative. I think there are many distinctions that it's important for us to be able to make, you know, that take a lot of work and a lot of thought to be able to sort out. I have no problem with that. It's more a question of So think of it this way. This might work, might not. But when we're reasoning about things, we reason about means to ends and we reason about ends. It's not clear we reason about ends, but we, let's say that the ideal theorist thinks that we're reasoning about ends, about our goals, our objectives, the ultimate values.

I think that there's that ivory tower reasoning is not always the best. at helping us think about our ends. Because understanding our ends needs to be grounded in our experience, our history, our form of life, what we have been raised to value and things like that. It is very textured. It is very concrete. I think. Now, but there are lots of questions that come up about, you know, what distinctions do we need to make

when we're articulating those ends or when we're trying to think about the means toward those ends and such like that. And I think that there's definitely a place there for ivory tower work. because it takes, I mean, as Aristotle would say, it takes leisure to be able to spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff and making those distinctions. Now, we call it work, but we also know that it's really kind of, yeah, we're lucky, we're privileged that way, yes.

It's not work in the sense of real work. Anyway, but it's, but there's a kind of, and I think most cultures have spaces for people to do this sort of reflection and clarification and distinction making. It might be in a priesthood. It might be, you know, in a spiritual practice of various kinds. We tend to think of, and our philosophers tend to think that reason is our spiritual practice.

I don't think that's a good, I don't think it is, but, you know, that's the way some people think of it. But I do think that there's space for that and a need for that. But I also think that if it's not well informed, by what people on the ground are valuing and what matters to them and why it matters to them, then it can go really badly astray. You know, what can I say? But that's a really good answer. I get it.

Reason is or should be the slave of the passions in some sense. I've become a moral constructivist in my middle age. And I think that, like you put it very well, the ends are things that are, I'm going to paraphrase because I can't remember exactly, but the ends that we shoot for are not purely intellectual constructions, right? I mean, they come out of how we live, who we are, how we were born, our genetics for that matter, right? Who knows? And our environment. Our environment, our friends.

Your geography is going to be relevant and your biology and your history. And your history. I mean, all of these things are going to be super important and to think that you can sort of come up with a picture. of how it's all supposed to work, I think that's really hard. There's one thing to move in a direction, but there's another thing to figure out what direction you want to move in, and these are, you know, closely related with different things to do. Yeah, and you can help. I mean, the ivory tower also enables people to articulate their values and ends, gives them choices for how to think about it. And this is where the paradigm shifting

comes, because sometimes you can think this is your end, but it's a, It's a tangle. And you want to go, no, it does, you can untangle it and take this. And that could be, we leave that other baggage alone. Leave it behind. Move forward. Well, good. I think maybe then this gives us a very good place to wrap up with because I'm interested in,

as someone who likes interdisciplinary engagement and thought and so forth, and is frustrated by our beloved home, the academy, in its sort of inability to be nimble when thinking about some of these things. There was, I hope I don't want to take a quote out of context, where there's a quote in an interview you did where you mentioned philosophers being limited in their intelligences. And that plural there is very important. You're not saying that their intelligence is limited. They're very, very smart, but there are varieties of intelligence.

And believe me, physicists are exactly the same way. I've often mentioned how scientists in academia are in, in a very real sense, often anti-intellectual, because when they talk about things that are not their science, they're just not interested. It's just not what they do. And philosophers, I'm sure, are the same way. What can we do about that? Should we do anything about it? Should we just live with it? Just sprinkle the academy with different kinds of intelligences so that collectively we get it right? Or should individuals try to be a little bit more flexible in these ways? I think that's a really good, good question, and I don't think I have a very good answer. But I think that we do need to value different contributions to philosophy or to intellectual life. There are many ways to contribute, not just reasoning, not just experimenting, et cetera, like that, because you can bring to your work social understanding and emotional understanding and perceptual acuity that I think often is not well appreciated in the academy.

And as individuals, you can bring that and be allowed to bring it and you can value it. So there's a kind of two parts to that. One is we can allow ourselves as individual. to bring those parts of ourselves into the academy and value other people bringing that into the academy. We can also value people who have it when we lack it and bring them in because they have it. They have emotional intelligence or social intelligence or perceptual intelligence. So we can value them, bring them in. I don't have it and acknowledge that you don't have it and you want someone who has it to bring it in. But I also think that we need to think differently about

what we're trying to do in some parts of the academy. I think I'm a believer that there's intrinsic value and knowledge that we ought to allow people to do completely esoteric sort of wild and crazy things for their own sake because they're of value and I never want to stand in the way of them doing it. But I do think that there are contemporary challenges that require us to do interdiscipline work. And it sounds like you agree that we, that, you know, solving climate change is not just an engineering problem. It's a, it's a social problem. I mean, et cetera, et cetera. It'd pick any major challenge. And there's going to, it's going to require people from different disciplines and people,

people with very different intelligences to be involved in it. So I think expanding, uh, interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary programs, interdisciplinary institutes and such. And I think it's people downplay how difficult that is. I mean, I was a director of women's and gender studies at MIT for a number of years. And I had to learn other, I had to get a feel for different languages and different methodologies and different ways of doing things in order to communicate with my faculty, right? Because They weren't communicating with each other, and I wanted to communicate with all of them and such. And it's very hard and it's very time-consuming, but we're not really rewarded for doing that. And we're not – so just even recently, I was told that one of my interdisciplinary courses wouldn't count toward a distribution requirement in philosophy.

And it blew my mind. It blew my mind because I was thinking that this is like so deeply philosophical to be engaged in this conversation. I got them to change their mind. So it became – but it's that sort of expectation, the gateposts of the disciplines that are so often locked. And I think that we should be moving in that direction as well. I mean, that would be a really good place to end, except that you brought something else up that I have to follow up on when you mentioned climate change and the, I think of the interdisciplinary impulse, again, at the purely ivory tower level. But it's even more crucial when it comes to saving the world. Oh, totally.

Climate change is one of them, but also the future of democracy is the other one that is an obvious thing that we worry about. So maybe I'll give you a chance to say some words about that, especially in the context of this. tipping point that you and your friends, and I count myself among them, want to bring about where we're changing society radically. And I'm sure that as good as it is, it feeds into polarization, right? I mean, there's a whole half of the country that reacts against it, and this is why critical race theory is in the news, not because of critical race theory, but because it's a symbol to react against. And we're trying to make the world a better place, but also giving ammunition to those who want to resist it. And that's a tricky.

thing to negotiate in a democracy? Yes, definitely it is. So I think that oftentimes people I talk to, they want an answer and they want it now. And because things aren't going so well. And I think that that's not possible to have an answer and to have it now. I think that we have to see ourselves as part of a very long-term process. And we may be in a really conflict-prone moment in that process. And the process may go very wrong.

But we can't control it, right? We're not, nobody is in control, to be honest. Right. It is a social process, which like a natural process has its own forces that are working that none of us have the levers to manage or manipulate. Societies are complex dynamic systems, right? They are, they're not, nobody has control of them. And there are things that we can do, small things often, collections of small things, many, you know, many, many small things. things, but even coming up with the answer of how it should happen won't make it happen, right? And so we have to throw ourselves into it with some hope and humility and do what we can. Okay, that's the perfect place to end.

I think you summed it up very, very well, doing what we can, hope and humility. Sally Hassling here, thanks so much for being on the Mindsgate podcast. Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure. I enjoyed it and found you a very stimulating conversation partner. So I hope there'll be other times when we can talk a podcast or not. There should be. Thanks very much.