First, two links to relevant posts. Social Constructs. Ingroup and Outgroup.
Gene Wolfe quote from The Book of the New Sun:
Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.
I wouldn’t go as far as that, but it is true that we “socially construct” distinct disjunctive categories for entities may not be completely distinct and disjunctive, and that is fine, as long as the categories have explanatory and utility power.
