Mallon, Ron. "Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY November 10, 2008.

Social “construction,” “constructionism” and “constructivism” are terms in wide use in the humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks, facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a “naturalistic” approach—an approach that treats science as a central and successful (if sometimes fallible) source of knowledge about the world. If there is any core idea of social constructionism, it is that some object or objects are caused or controlled by social or cultural factors rather than natural factors, and if there is any core motivation of such research, it is the aim of showing that such objects are or were under our control: they could be, or might have been, otherwise. Determination of our representations of the world (including our ideas, concepts, beliefs, and theories of the world) by factors other than the world or our sensory experience may undermine our faith that any independent phenomena are represented or tracked, undermining the idea that there is a fact of the matter about which way of representing is correct. And determination of the non-representational facts of the world by our theories seems to reverse the “direction of fit” between representation and reality presupposed by our idea of successful epistemic activity. For both of these reasons, proponents and opponents of constructionist thought have held it to embody a challenge to the naturalism endemic in contemporary philosophy. But social constructionist themes can be and have been picked up by naturalists who accommodate and appropriate the interesting and important cultural phenomena documented by constructionist authors while attempting to avoid more radical anti-scientific and anti-realist theses widely associated with social constructionism. I begin by discussing social constructionism, and I then discuss some threads of contemporary naturalism. I go on to consider two different sorts of objects of social construction—representations and human traits—and discuss naturalistic, constructionist approaches to them. . . . Read the whole article here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-construction-naturalistic/.