Elund

are you saying that because the definition of a heap is vague, there are multiple feasible definitions of a heap, so some people (using one definition) would call a candidate heap a heap and other people (using another definition) would say it isn't a heap?

Not that they are necessarily using multiple definitions, but the common definitions themselves do not specify an exact range in quantity in which a cluster of things could be considered a heap. Two people could disagree about whether something is a heap despite using the same vague definition of "heap". They may be comparing the candidate heap relative to things that they have experienced being called heaps in... (read more)

I could still call certain things heaps even if I had a sharp definition of a heap.

Sorry, what I meant was, "Heaps as they are currently defined can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap." They can also be said to not exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap. However, it is extremely difficult if not impossible for any definition to have absolutely no ambiguity at all, and even if that was possible, language can still be considered a social construct in the sense that linguistic terms are constructed socially. Vague terms have an extra... (read more)

"Social construct" implies an arbitrary choice -- our society decided to split humanity into races this way, but another society might do it in an entirely different way and all such ways are equally valid, which is to say, there are no underlying "real" differences.

Supposing someone wanted to split humanity into arbitrary races based on actual genetics (which is not how the concept of race originally started because genetics wasn't known at the time), it would make sense for most races to be African, since Africa has far more human genetic diversity than all the other continents combined do. The reason races are delineated the way they are now is due to... (read more)

Part of the reason is that if you restrict to the population of the United States they are (more-or-less) a separate genetic cluster

Well, I wasn't restricting to the population of the United States. Anyway, race is still a socially constructed identity. This is apparent with mixed-race people who often identify with one race more than another based on how they were raised, how they look, how other people identify them, and whether they act more like a stereotypical member of one of their races than another. The race they identify most with might not be the one that makes up the largest proportion in their ancestry.

Only because anyone who dares to point

I never said race wasn't a useful concept. I specifically said in my earlier post: .

I'm not saying that "heap" and "race" are not useful terms. They do correlate with actual differences,

I think my initial post that started this discussion may have been a source of misunderstanding. When I called race a social construct, I wasn't trying to say that race is a useless concept, but instead indicate that it could be useful as a cultural/identity concept. Initially when I talked about "mixed race" and "Hispanic" not technically being races, I was defining race according to the mainstream definition that treats race as a genetically distinct group of people, since that is my... (read 354 more words →)