This is philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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In 1976 he won the men's de-C the Olympics. But four decades later Bruce Jenner announced

that he was now a she, and that henceforth she was to be known as Caitlin-Genner. The claim is sometimes made that gender is a social construct, but perhaps

the case of Caitlin-Genna complicates matters. Jesse Prens has been thinking about the subject of social construction.

Jesse Prince, welcome to Philosophy Bides.

Thank you, Nigel.

Great to be back with you.

The topic we're going to focus on is,

is everything socially constructed? Well Well let's just start by looking at

the notion of social construction. What does that mean?

The term is used differently by different authors. For me it begins with a question of how do we

understand the world and from that we get the notion that our access to the world is always

filtered through social practices through various norms, through methods of inquiry.

And you move from that to the idea that our access to the world

is filtered through us, to a second claim, a relativist claim,

that there are many perspectives on the world.

There are multiple different ways of constructing or viewing reality that people use and then

from there you start to realize that some of these, though perhaps not all, have equal claim to truth.

That is, there's no independent way to determine which of these different purchases on the world

is the authoritative one.

...