Like when people say time is a construct, or virginity is a construct.
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It’s a concept that society has created. So over time people on earth decided these things matter and have put it into our every day life. Because it’s a “construct” it’s not a real tangible thing, you can’t touch it. It’s just an idea.
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a construct (usually in this context more specifically a “social construct”)is anything created and/or given special meaning by humankind, to serve some purpose for some humans. Usually when used in this way, it is meant to point out that if we don’t like the special meaning it’s given or the purpose it serves, we can change it.
For instance, while the passage of time is something that we undoubtedly experience, we have constructed the concept of a day to coincide with our biological processes of sleep during the dark times and wakefulness during the light times, divided these up arbitrarily, and made things to track things.
And while indeed, the state of “has this person had sex in their life, y/n?” is a factual thing that in some cases can be inferred by some biological mechanism (this is a lot more faulty than people tend to think, but I’m not going into all the other reasons that a hymen could break than penetrative sex right now), how much that matters is entirely made up by the collective human society we’ve created.
I think they are referring to the idea of a social construct. Basically, the thing in question doesn’t concretely exist but exists as an idea we,as a group of people, agree on.
Money is a great example. Like you can’t eat currency, you can’t directly build with it, you can’t really do anything directly with the pieces of paper, but people fight wars and kill their fellow man because we all agree that the paper is important.
I could be wrong, but I feel like “the foundation of an idea” or like “a projection of we perceive as reality” and that idea that it can be challenged? This question is going to have me pondering for a while
A construct is something that has been created by people as opposed to naturally occurring, those things are not constructed but rather discovered. You seem to specifically be talking about social constructs which are ideas society have collectively created to help us interact with and understand the world. My go to example is colors, light reflects of of surfaces, certain frequencies get absorbed it bounces back into our eyes hits our cone sensors which triggers a reaction that varies based on the frequencies of the light. We didn’t construct any of this it’s just a property of the universe. However we have given names to these reactions and these are social constructs. If you ask any American person what color a Barbie dolls car is they will tell you it’s pink. No one is going to say it’s red, even though pink is really just a light shade of red. But this isn’t universal, Russians use two different names for blue one light and one dark just like we do for pink and red. Some languages don’t use a separate word for blue and green.
Who is right here? Which language uses all of the correct color names and none of the uncorrect ones? Well all of them are correct, or none of them are there is not test we can do to discover what is the true name of a certain frequency of light. We kind of just have to agree that we all just made up these names. That might not cause a lot of controversy but you can look at a lot of ideas that are important to human’s the same way and make some people very angry. Race, gender, time, money etc. different societies have constructed these ideas differently then we do around the world and throughout history also but you are much more likely offend someone by having a different opinion on these then you would be by say picking a different paint then they would expect.
Here’s something to make your head hurt: time doesn’t exist.
It really doesn’t. There’s no such thing as a ‘time particle’. Clocks don’t measure time; time is defined to be ‘what clocks measure’.
When we say ‘I’ll be there at four o’clock’, we’re only measuring physical variables based on other physical variables: ‘it’s four o’clock when the hands of the clock are in this position and I’m in this location’.
So, the answer to your question is: when a person says that time is a construct, they’re referring to the fact that there’s nothing really being measured. It’s an arbitrary system used to record a position in space.
It’s implying form and/or order, applied artificially or abstractly, in order to help understand something.
A construct is anything that was constructed. A social construct is an idea that was invented by society, like virginity. When we say that virginity is a social construct, we’re saying that it doesn’t actually exist outside of just being an idea that society came up with.
This is not to say that social constructs don’t matter. As any sociologist will tell you, ideas that were invented by society DO matter very much, regardless of how stupid and contrived they are, and influence us constantly. Just because race is a social construct doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t matter.
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