Listen... I've focused on the word "believe" here. Everything we BELIEVE about the Civil War today is entirely a social construct.
A social construction, or social construct or a social concept is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society which exists solely because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules. Obvious social constructs include such things as games, language, money, school grades, titles, governments, universities, corporations and other institutions. Social constructionism is a school of thought that attempts, to varying degrees, to analyze seemingly natural and given phenomena in terms of social constructs. http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Social_construction
To say of something that it is socially constructed is to emphasize its dependence on contingent aspects of our social selves. It is to say: This thing could not have existed had we not built it; and we need not have built it at all, at least not in its present form. Had we been a different kind of society, had we had different needs, values, or interests, we might well have built a different kind of thing, or built this one differently. The inevitable contrast is with a naturally existing object, something that exists independently of us and which we did not have a hand in shaping. http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1153/socialconstruction.pdf
I believe that the American Civil War was won by the Union. And I believe that DNA is a molecule that in human cells consists of two strands of linked nucleotides twisting around each other to form a double helix. You haven’t noted anything about these beliefs that is “an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society which exists solely because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules.” People in Sri Lanka who are adequately educated about American history and/or biology (and most seem to be) would agree with the facts I just stated about the American Civil War and DNA.
Be sure to absorb professor Boghossian’s further comments (my bolding):
Talk of the social construction of belief, however, requires some elaboration of the core idea. For it is simply trivially true of any belief that we have that it is not necessary that we should have had it and that we might not have had it had we been different from the way we actually are. Consider our belief that dinosaurs once roamed the earth. It is obviously not inevitable that we should have come to this belief. We might never have considered the question. Having considered it, we might have arrived at a different conclusion, for a variety of causes: we might not have been interested in the truth; we might not have been as intelligent at figuring it out; we might never have stumbled across the relevant evidence (the fossil record).
These observations supply various boring senses in which any belief might be considered dependent on contingent facts about us. The important question concerns the role of the social once all of these factors have been taken into account: that is, keeping our skills and intelligence fixed, and given our interest in the question and our desire to learn the truth about it, and given our exposure to the relevant evidence, do we still need to invoke contingent social values to explain why we believe that there were dinosaurs? If the values, would have arrived at a different and incompatible belief – then we could say that our belief in dinosaurs is socially constructed. answer is ‘Yes’ – if it’s true that another society, differing from us only in their social values, would have arrived at a different and incompatible belief – then we could say that our belief in dinosaurs is socially constructed.
http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1153/socialconstruction.pdf
The only thing you’ve said about the “social construct” of (beliefs or knowledge about) DNA is of this trivial sort--i.e., that people in some society where information about DNA is not even available would not have such knowledge and beliefs about DNA molecules.
In contrast, when I say that sexual orientation is (possibly) a social construct, what I mean is that sexual orientation categories (particularly heterosexual and homosexual) are not innate, biological traits, but are the product of social conditioning or pressures. And, just as Jonathan Katz did in
The Invention of Heterosexuality, one can point to a number of societies in which the sexual behavior of the members contradict such innate sexual orientation categories (especially heterosexual and homosexual): for example, ancient Greece and Rome, and, more recently, various primitive societies in Melanesia. In the latter case, we know that about 90% of men (at least) regularly engaged in sexual relationships with males (which, as with the ancient Greco-Romans, were age-structured relationships rather than sex-structured) as well as with females. In some of these primitive societies, men held the belief that sex with women was somehow draining of their energies, and sex with males was energizing. That definitely does not sound like a society where most people are biological Kinsey Zeros (which is generally how majorities in modern Western cultures self-identify--though the percentage has become increasingly smaller in the past decade or so, which would seem to be another bit of evidence pointing to sexual orientation as a social construct). One can also note a large number of non-human animal species where the majority of individuals do not engage exclusively different-sex sexual relationships. See
Biological Exuberance by Bagemihl.
If it is true that sexual orientation categories are not innate biological traits, then sexual orientation is apparently a social construct.
