Constitutive Construction in Social Ontology

Sally Haslanger (2020a, 2020b) proposes a way for semantic amelioration to avoid the ‘topic continuity problem’ (TCP) in conceptual engineering. TCP maintains that changing a concept’s content replaces the concept. Since this occurs in semantic amelioration, semantic amelioration necessarily seems an instance of conceptual replacement. Haslanger rejects this, however, maintaining that a concept’s function is essential to it, not its content. And since semantic amelioration doesn’t change a concept’s function, semantic amelioration isn’t conceptual replacement, according to Haslanger. In this paper, (...) I argue that Haslanger’s account of semantic amelioration requires a change in a concept’s function. Thus, semantic amelioration is in fact conceptual replacement on Haslanger’s account. To fix this, I propose combining Amie Thomasson’s (2020) work on concepts with Haslanger’s to yield a new functional essentialist view of concepts. (shrink)

In this paper, I interview Francesca De Vecchi (Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in Vita-Salute San Raffaele University) about her qualitative ontology and its social and normative implications. If at the foundation of our lifeworld there are significantly qualitative experiences, phenomenology can investigate the most important contemporary issues, such as gender disparity, socio-virtuality depersonalizations and political urgencies.

Taking up a recent critique of Nancy Fraser by Sally Haslanger, this paper defends the primary thesis of Marxist-Feminist unitarytheory that the systematic reproduction of modern forms of racial and gendered oppression is due to their co-articulation with thereproduction of capitalist social relations against three criticisms offered by Haslanger. It develops its defense of Fraser’s articulation of unitary theory by acknowledging a social ontological deficit in that theory insofar as it does not contain a theory of thesocial construction of human (...) kinds and amending this deficit by drawing on revised aspects of Haslanger’s own work. It arguesthat the global reproduction of race and gender as hierarchical social relations is a consequence of the reproduction of capitalism although local gender and race kinds are asymmetrically co-constituted by non-capitalist social practices. (shrink)

This chapter is an extended version (almost 2x in length) of an essay first published in Australasian Philosophical Review. -/- Abstract: In On Female Body Experience, Iris Marion Young argues that a central aim of feminist and queer theory is social criticism. The goal is to understand oppression and how it functions: know thy enemy, so as to better resist. Much of Sally Haslanger’s work shares this goal, and her newest article, “Cognition as a Social Skill,” is no exception. In (...) this essay, I will specify what I believe is special and insightful about Haslanger’s theory of oppression and her most recent addition to it. However, I also explore what it is missing, namely, an account of what Young calls “individual [embodied] experience, subjectivity, and identity.” Echoing a chorus of critical voices, I argue that this omission undermines Haslanger’s ability to effectively theorize group oppression and how to resist it. The core problem is this. Haslanger privileges a third-person methodology that prioritizes social structures over all else. I conclude by amplifying a collective call to action: any adequate theory of oppression must attend to both the lived experiences of individuals and to social structures, that is, to the broad institutional and cultural underpinnings of oppression. A theory that does only one, or the other, will fail. Through this analysis, the chapter contributes to an overall aim of this volume, namely, to advance our understanding of racial and gender-based group oppressions by paying closer attention to facts about embodiment. (shrink)

The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...) in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). (shrink)

Social constructionism is often considered a form of anti-realism. But in contemporary feminist philosophy, an increasing number of philosophers defend views that are well-described as both realist and social constructionist. In this paper, I use the work of Sally Haslanger as an example of realist social constructionism. I argue: that Haslanger is best interpreted as defending metaphysical realism about social structures; that this type of metaphysical realism about the social world presents challenges to some popular ways of understanding metaphysical realism.

There has been a significant amount of research, from a variety of disciplines, targeting the nature and political status of human categories such as woman, man, Black, and Latino. The result is a tangle of concepts and distinctions that often obscure more than clarify the subject matter. This incentivizes the creation of fresh terms and distinctions that might disentangle the old, but too often these efforts just add to the snarl. The process iterates, miscommunication becomes standard, and insufficiently vetted concepts (...) can gain central theoretical status. Over the last two decades, Sally Haslanger ’s work in this area – conveniently consolidated in the volume “Resisting Reality: Social construction and social critique” – has been a much needed corrective to this process; Haslanger ’s terms and distinctions really do disentangle. This review organizes and explicates central themes from Haslanger ’s volume. It then offers some critical comments, arguing that some of Haslanger ’s distinctions and proposals are less successful than others. (shrink)

Could some social kinds be natural kinds? In this paper, I argue that there are three kinds of social kinds: 1) social kinds whose existence does not depend on human beings having any beliefs or other propositional attitudes towards them ; 2) social kinds whose existence depends in part on specific attitudes that human beings have towards them, though attitudes need not be manifested towards their particular instances ; 3) social kinds whose existence and that of their instances depend in (...) part on specific attitudes that human beings have towards them . Although all three kinds of social kinds are mind-dependent, this does not make them ontologically subjective or preclude them from being natural kinds. Rather, what prevents the third kind of social kinds from being natural kinds is that their properties are conventionally rather than causally linked. (shrink)