Quotes About Constructs

Our classification of mental disorders is no more than a collection of fallible and limited constructs that seeks but never finds the truth - but this remains our best current way of communicating about, treating, and researching mental disorders. [...] It is good to know and use the DSM definitions, but not to reify or worship them.

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light.

I'd always thought that, in all the great sci-fi constructs, there's always the guy who seems like he's the commander, but then you reveal that there's an even bigger puppet master up above and beyond him.

The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The conclusion is inescapable: we are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.

Politics disabuses a person of the notion that you can please everybody. It is an inescapable fact that people will always have different opinions, and some people are going to disagree. Sooner or later, a person constructs his or her own "platform" and stands on it, regardless of what others think, say, or do. It is also true that some people delight in another person's demise.

As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.

Character and emotionality don't always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs.

Nirvana was pop. You can have distorted guitars and people say it's alternative, but you can't break out of pop music's constructs and still get extensive radio play and media coverage.

to be conscious of myself is to be aware of myself as a node point in a web of information exchange, which corporately constructs the idea of objects, selves, persons.

Strike two for Utopia. The problem with the damned things always comes when you try to introduce actual people into your philosophical constructs.

The cognitive aspect of ideology is rooted in the fact that knowledge and frameworks of interpretation are collective and cumulative human constructs.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

while many of the absolutes we cling to are social constructs (varying across cultures and over time), behind these changing constructs we also find some universal human constants.

Human fears are very often irrational constructs of the mind.

And this brings us to a third erroneous concept: that nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it.

modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.

What I'm drawn to most as a filmmaker are these tribes that are seen as 'fringe' cultures. We live in a society where many young people feel alienated, and these family constructs are an antidote to that.

A core plank of left-wing academic thought is that gender and race are 'socially constructed.'

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation "theory" is even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs "chimeras" rather than theories.

Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.

All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions.