Connoisseurship and Social Constructionism

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Connoisseurship is a perfection of one's perceptual skills.

Someone says "Ah, yes, this is a very fine wine. I bet it's from the such and such region in the south of France."

Give the wine to me and I'll have no clue! All I could say is something like

"Well, it's red, and it's wine. It must be red wine!" 

I'm inexperienced with wine. My palate hasn't been trained. My wine tasting skills are... non-existent, really. To be a great wine connoisseur you need to be apprenticed. By apprenticeship you become experienced.

Our basic perceptual skills are honed by natural developmental processes, right? I suppose that the perceptual experiences of infants are hazy and indistinct. But, with time, their perceptual skills develop as they interact with mother and toys and all the rest.

Ordinarily, we don't need special apprenticeship to pick out a moving object from an unmoving background. (Think of a dog running around in your backyard. You don't need specially trained skills to pick the dog out from the background. You don't see a raw, 'uninterpreted' dance of colours, you see an object moving against a stationary background.)

Apprenticeship is kind of building/forming/constructing of skills and habits and sensitivities, etc. The natural development of infants is also a kind of building/forming/constructing. These both happen in a social context: both are kinds of building/forming/constructing that are social.

The problem with social constructionists (about all reality and not just social reality), is that they reason from the social construction of our awareness experiences/skills to the social construction of all reality.

It is logically impossible, so it goes, to begin with the world as it seems to us via our social constructed awareness experiences/skills, and proceed to make contact with the world as it is in itself. (I think Derrida would want write about the transcendental signified in itself, or something along those lines.)

Whatever Derrida thought about all this, it seems to me that most of his admirers, the admirers you actually encounter, are animated by the felt absence of these things in themselves. It's this felt absence of things in themselves that 'changes everything' and brings 'the end of the world', so to speak. (Though now that I think about it, all of this ignores the ethical passions which seem to animate them in their own self-understanding.)

But it's precisely this silly dualism of signs and the transcendentally signified in itself that's so wrongheaded. (I can't help but think Derrida agrees -- he has to. But I judge it to be more wrongheaded than he ever could?) To really get into Derrida, I think you need to feel horrified and haunted by the absence of things in themselves. I don't feel this at all -- I know nothing of these so-called things in themselves -- and I'm still not a social constructionist about all reality. (The social constructionists must think this is impossible, right? This shows how deep our differences are?)

From my perspective, I keep wanting to think of Derrida as trying to secure the metaphysical foundations before he proceeds to engage in practices. (Maybe this is unfair of me?) As a Reidian 2nd philosopher (of Common Sense), I see this as exactly backwards and maximally mistaken. Theory follows practice. And, for that matter, theorizing is a practice.

(If you're going to develop of theory of theory, you better start by engaging in some theorizing. And if you're going to engage in some theorizing, you'd better begin by engaging in the practice over which you're theorizing.)

Again, Derrida must ultimately be driving towards this, right? Still, I can't help but sense I'm out on a completely different path.