I defend a novel view of how social kinds (e.g., money, women, permanent residents) depend on our mental states. In particular, I argue that social kinds depend on our mental states in the following sense: it is essential to them that they exist (partially) because certain mental states exist. This analysis is meant to capture the very general way in which all social kinds depend on our mental states. However, my view is that particular social kinds also depend on our (...) mental states in more specific ways—some of them causal, others metaphysical. I defend a minimal but metaphysically important notion of essence—one that takes as primary that the essential properties of a kind constitute its identity—and argue that this minimal notion of essence is all that is needed to vindicate my claim that social kinds are essentially mind-dependent. (shrink)

Yes. I defend this claim against the charge of race reductionism and the charge that ‘white interests’ cannot figure meaningfully into structural explanations of racial inequality. We then distinguish two explanatory roles for white supremacy. The racial role approach attempts to trace the causal effects of white supremacy's normative white/non-white hierarchy on life chances. The racial materialism approach treats racial inequality as an emergent feature of social orders which depend on conventional racial divisions in labor performance. Each approach emphasizes a (...) different level of explanation for the same basic fact: white interests both drive and are served by racial inequality. (shrink)

According to a current trend in social ontology, by articulating claims of social construction in terms of metaphysical grounding, we can shed light on the metaphysics of social construction and understand deep truths about social identities like race and gender. Focusing on two recent accounts, I argue that this move from social construction to grounding has limitations. While there are intelligible grounding claims that can explain certain ideas in social ontology, such grounding claims add nothing to what we have learnt (...) from constructionists about race and gender. Although some applications of this grounding approach attempt to remedy this and offer detailed analyses of how social kinds are grounded, they yield results that are inconsistent with some very plausible views about social construction. Thus, if we want to illuminate the metaphysics of social construction, we must explore other alternatives. (shrink)