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  1. Realism and Social Kinds in Conceptual Amelioration.Cyrill Mamin - manuscript
    I outline and defend a limited realism in socio-political conceptual amelioration (RSCA). RSCA claims that, in some cases, socio-political concepts are ameliorated to represent parts of a concept-independent reality more accurately. My main aim is to dissolve a seeming dilemma for RSCA: Whereas social kinds are mind-dependent (i.e. depending on human thought and action), realism implies that the kinds represented are ontologically independent of the concepts representing them. To dissolve this dilemma, I suggest considering two different roles concepts play concerning (...)
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  • Natural Kinds (Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Science).Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2023 - Cambridge University Press.
    Scientists cannot devise theories, construct models, propose explanations, make predictions, or even carry out observations, without first classifying their subject matter. The goal of scientific taxonomy is to come up with classification schemes that conform to nature's own. Another way of putting this is that science aims to devise categories that correspond to 'natural kinds.' The interest in ascertaining the real kinds of things in nature is as old as philosophy itself, but it takes on a different guise when one (...)
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  • Would a Viable Consent App Create Headaches for Consequentialists?Scott Woodcock - 2024 - Philosophy 99 (1):73-98.
    Greater public awareness of the occurrence of sexual assault has led to the creation of mobile phone apps designed to facilitate consent between sexual partners. These apps exhibit serious practical shortcomings in realistic contexts; however, in this paper I consider the hypothetical case in which these practical shortcomings are absent. The prospect of this viable consent app creates an interesting challenge for consequentialism – one that is comparable to the objection that the theory justifies killing innocent persons to prevent large (...)
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  • Él / Ella / They / Ze.Robin Dembroff & Daniel Wodak - 2023 - In Patricia Ruiz Bravo & Aranxa Pizarro (eds.), Pensando el género : lecturas contemporáneas. pp. 149-169. Translated by Aranxa Pizarro & Eloy Neira Riquelme.
    Spanish Translation of "He/She/They/Ze" (Ergo, 2018).
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  • Inductive Reasoning Involving Social Kinds.Barrett Emerick & Tyler Hildebrand - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-20.
    Most social policies cannot be defended without making inductive inferences. For example, consider certain arguments for racial profiling and affirmative action, respectively. They begin with statistics about crime or socioeconomic indicators. Next, there is an inductive step in which the statistic is projected from the past to the future. Finally, there is a normative step in which a policy is proposed as a response in the service of some goal—for example, to reduce crime or to correct socioeconomic imbalances. In comparison (...)
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  • Guilt, Blame, and Oppression: A Feminist Philosophy of Scapegoating.Celia Edell - 2022 - Dissertation, Mcgill University
    In this dissertation I develop a philosophical theory of scapegoating that explains the role of blame-shifting and guilt avoidance in the endurance of oppression. I argue that scapegoating masks and justifies oppression by shifting unwarranted blame onto marginalized groups and away from systems of oppression and those who benefit from them, such that people in dominant positions are less inclined to notice or challenge its workings. I first identify a gap in our understanding of oppression, namely how oppression endures despite (...)
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  • Are There Really Social Causes?August Faller - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (2):83-102.
    This article investigates the causal efficacy of social properties, which faces the following puzzle. First, for both intuitive and scientific reasons, it seems social properties have causal import. But, second, social properties are also characteristically extrinsic: to have some social property depends, in typical cases, on what one’s society is like around them. And, third, there is good reason to doubt that extrinsic properties make a genuine causal contribution. After elaborating on these three claims, I defend the following resolution to (...)
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  • Ideology: the rejected true.Kate M. Phelan - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Sally Haslanger argue that the ruling class’s beliefs create reality. Once these beliefs have created reality, they correspond to it, which is to say, they are true. It is therefore unclear how they constitute an ideology and hence how ideology critique might proceed. Feminists have responded to this by trying to show that the ruling class’s beliefs are nevertheless an ideology in some sense. In this paper, I attempt to convince them otherwise.
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  • (1 other version)Toward the “overthrow of Platonism”: Processist critical social ontology and ameliorative discourse.Paul Giladi - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (3):622-638.
    In this article, I argue that, for the purpose of developing an effective critical social ontology about gender groups, it is not simply sufficient to carve gender groups at their joints: one must have in view whether the metaphysical categories we use to make sense of gender groups are prone to ideological distortion and vitiation. The norms underpinning a gender group's constitution as a type of social class and the norms involved in gender identity attributions, I propose, provide compelling reason (...)
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  • Binarism Grammatical Lacuna as an Ensemble of Diverse Epistemic Injustices.Carla Carmona - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (3):339-363.
    This paper characterizes a phenomenon I call ‘binarism grammatical lacuna’ (BGL). BGL occurs when non-binary sex and gender identities are forced to choose between being he or she by the grammar of a language owing to the sex/gender binary. Although hermeneutical injustice (HI) lies at its core, given that non-binary communities come up with hermeneutical devices to overcome unintelligibility and these tools are discredited, a variety of epistemic injustices, besides HI, intertwine in BGL. I address contributory injustice, pragmatic competence injustice, (...)
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  • Demarcation, instantiation, and individual traits: Realist social ontology for mental disorders.Polaris Koi - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (6):793-813.
    Realists about mental disorder have been hasty about dismissing social explanations of how mental disorder is constituted. However, many social ontologies are realist ontologies. In order to create a meaningful distinction between realism and social metaphysics about mental disorder, I propose that realism about mental disorder is best understood as Individual Trait Realism (ITR) about them. For ITR, mental disorders exist in virtue of traits. I defend the view that ITR is compatible with social metaphysics, arguing that, in asking whether (...)
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  • Artifactual Normativity.Christopher Frugé - 2022 - Synthese 200 (126):1-19.
    A central tension shaping metaethical inquiry is that normativity appears to be subjective yet real, where it’s difficult to reconcile these aspects. On the one hand, normativity pertains to our actions and attitudes. On the other, normativity appears to be real in a way that precludes it from being a mere figment of those actions and attitudes. In this paper, I argue that normativity is indeed both subjective and real. I do so by way of treating it as a special (...)
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  • (1 other version)Money Without State.Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley Rettler & Craig Warmke - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (11):1-15.
    In this article, we describe what cryptocurrency is, how it works, and how it relates to familiar conceptions of and questions about money. We then show how normative questions about monetary policy find new expression in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These questions can play a role in addressing not just what money is, but what it should be. A guiding theme in our discussion is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Moral Landscape of Monetary Design.Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley Rettler & Craig Warmke - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (11):1-15.
    In this article, we identify three key design dimensions along which cryptocurrencies differ -- privacy, censorship-resistance, and consensus procedure. Each raises important normative issues. Our discussion uncovers new ways to approach the question of whether Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies should be used as money, and new avenues for developing a positive answer to that question. A guiding theme is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results of disciplines like computer science and (...)
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  • Social constructivism in mathematics? The promise and shortcomings of Julian Cole’s institutional account.Jenni Rytilä - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11517-11540.
    The core idea of social constructivism in mathematics is that mathematical entities are social constructs that exist in virtue of social practices, similar to more familiar social entities like institutions and money. Julian C. Cole has presented an institutional version of social constructivism about mathematics based on John Searle’s theory of the construction of the social reality. In this paper, I consider what merits social constructivism has and examine how well Cole’s institutional account meets the challenge of accounting for the (...)
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  • Essentializing Language and the Prospects for Ameliorative Projects.Katherine Ritchie - 2021 - Ethics 131 (3):460-488.
    Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have largely focused on generics and essentialism, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Even ameliorated nouns can continue to underpin essentialist thinking. I conclude by arguing that representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather it reveals that would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the (...)
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  • Social Ontology.Rebecca Mason & Katherine Ritchie - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Traditionally, social entities (i.e., social properties, facts, kinds, groups, institutions, and structures) have not fallen within the purview of mainstream metaphysics. In this chapter, we consider whether the exclusion of social entities from mainstream metaphysics is philosophically warranted or if it instead rests on historical accident or bias. We examine three ways one might attempt to justify excluding social metaphysics from the domain of metaphysical inquiry and argue that each fails. Thus, we conclude that social entities are not justifiably excluded (...)
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  • The Sexual Orientation/Identity Distinction.Matthew Andler - 2021 - Hypatia 36 (2):259-275.
    The sex/gender distinction is a staple of feminist philosophy. In slogan form: sex is “natural,” while gender is the “social meaning” of sex. Considering the importance of the sex/gender distinction—which, here, I neither endorse nor reject—it’s interesting to ask if philosophers working on the metaphysics of sexuality might make use of an analogous distinction. In this paper, I argue that we ought to endorse the sexual orientation/identity distinction. In particular, I argue that the orientation/identity distinction is indispensable to normative explanations (...)
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  • Social Kinds, Reference, and Meta-Ontological Revisionism.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2018 - Journal of Social Ontology 4 (2):137-156.
    Julian Dodd has characterized the default position in metaphysics as meta-ontologically realist: the answers to first-order ontological questions are thought to be entirely independent of the things we say and think about the entities at issue. Consequently, folk ontologies are liable to substantial error. But while this epistemic humility is commendable where the ontology of natural kinds is concerned, it seems misplaced with respect to social kinds since their ontology is dependent upon the human social world. Using art and art-kinds (...)
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  • The Problem of Culturally Normal Belief.Susanna Siegel - forthcoming - In Robin Celikates, Sally Haslanger & Jason Stanley (eds.), Rethinking Ideology. Oxford University Press.
    This paper defends an analysis of the epistemic contours of the interface between individuals and their cultural milieu.
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  • Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender.Robin Dembroff - 2018 - Philosophical Topics 46 (2):21-50.
    Gender classifications often are controversial. These controversies typically focus on whether gender classifications align with facts about gender kind membership: Could someone really be nonbinary? Is Chris Mosier really a man? I think this is a bad approach. Consider the possibility of ontological oppression, which arises when social kinds operating in a context unjustly constrain the behaviors, concepts, or affect of certain groups. Gender kinds operating in dominant contexts, I argue, oppress trans and nonbinary persons in this way: they marginalize (...)
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  • Moral Ecology, Disabilities, and Human Agency špace 1pc 2018 Wade Memorial Lecture.Kevin Timpe - 2019 - Res Philosophica 96 (1):17-41.
    This paper argues that human agency is not simply a function of intrinsic properties about the agent, but that agency instead depends on the ecology that the agent is in. In particular, the paper examines ways that disabilities affect agency and shows how, by paying deliberate attention to structuring the social environment around people with disabilities, we can mitigate some of the agential impact of those disabilities. The paper then argues that the impact of one’s social environment on agency isn’t (...)
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  • Panpsychism, intuitions, and the great chain of being.Luke Roelofs & Jed Buchanan - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):2991-3017.
    Some philosophical theories of consciousness imply consciousness in things we would never intuitively think are conscious—most notably, panpsychism implies that consciousness is pervasive, even outside complex brains. Is this a reductio ab absurdum for such theories, or does it show that we should reject our original intuitions? To understand the stakes of this question as clearly as possible, we analyse the structured pattern of intuitions that panpsychism conflicts with. We consider a variety of ways that the tension between this intuition (...)
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  • Kinds behaving badly: intentional action and interactive kinds.Sophie R. Allen - 2018 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 12):2927-2956.
    This paper investigates interactive kinds, a class of kinds suggested by Ian Hacking for which classification generates a feedback loop between the classifiers and what is classified, and argues that human interactive kinds should be distinguished from non-human ones. First, I challenge the claim that there is nothing ontologically special about interactive kinds in virtue of their members being classified as such. To do so, I reject Cooper’s counterexample to Hacking’s thesis that kind descriptions are necessary for intentional action, arguing (...)
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  • Collective Responsibility for Oppression.Titus Stahl - 2017 - Social Theory and Practice 43 (3):473-501.
    Many contemporary forms of oppression are not primarily the result of formally organized collective action nor are they an unintended outcome of a combination of individual actions. This raises the question of collective responsibility. I argue that we can only determine who is responsible for oppression if we understand oppression as a matter of social practices that create obstacles for social change. This social practice view of oppression enables two insights: First, that there is an unproblematic sense in which groups (...)
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  • Attempting art: an essay on intention-dependence.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2017 - Dissertation, Mcgill University
    Attempting art: an essay on intention-dependenceIt is a truism among philosophers that art is intention-dependent—that is to say, art-making is an activity that depends in some way on the maker's intentions. Not much thought has been given to just what this entails, however. For instance, most philosophers of art assume that intention-dependence entails concept-dependence—i.e. possessing a concept of art is necessary for art-making, so that what prospective artists must intend is to make art. And yet, a mounting body of anthropological (...)
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  • What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to classify them.Brian Epstein - 2017 - Synthese 196 (12):4899-4932.
    This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with (...)
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  • The metaphysics of social kinds.Rebecca Mason - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (12):841-850.
    It is a truism that humans are social animals. Thus, it is no surprise that we understand the world, each other, and ourselves in terms of social kinds such as money and marriage, war and women, capitalists and cartels, races, recessions, and refugees. Social kinds condition our expectations, inform our preferences, and guide our behavior. Despite the prevalence and importance of social kinds, philosophy has historically devoted relatively little attention to them. With few exceptions, philosophers have given pride of place (...)
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  • Feminist Metaphysics and Philosophical Methodology.Mari Mikkola - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (11):661-670.
    Over the past few decades, feminist philosophy has become recognised as a philosophical sub-discipline in its own right. Among the ‘core’ areas of philosophy, metaphysics has nonetheless until relatively recently remained largely dismissive of it. Metaphysics typically investigates the basic structure of reality and its nature. It examines reality's putative building blocks and inherent structure supposedly ‘out there’ with the view to uncovering and elucidating that structure. For this task, feminist insights appear simply irrelevant. Moreover, the value-neutrality of metaphysics seems (...)
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  • Social construction as grounding; or: fundamentality for feminists, a reply to Barnes and Mikkola.Jonathan Schaffer - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (10):2449-2465.
    Feminist metaphysics is guided by the insight that gender is socially constructed, yet the metaphysics behind social construction remains obscure. Barnes and Mikkola charge that current metaphysical frameworks—including my grounding framework—are hostile to feminist metaphysics. I argue that not only is a grounding framework hospitable to feminist metaphysics, but also that a grounding framework can help shed light on the metaphysics behind social construction. By treating social construction claims as grounding claims, the feminist metaphysician and the social ontologist both gain (...)
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  • What Is Sexual Orientation?Robin A. Dembroff - 2016 - Philosophers' Imprint 16.
    Ordinary discourse is filled with discussions about ‘sexual orientation’. This discourse might suggest a common understanding of what sexual orientation is. But even a cursory search turns up vastly differing, conflicting, and sometimes ethically troubling characterizations of sexual orientation. The conceptual jumble surrounding sexual orientation suggests that the topic is overripe for philosophical exploration. This paper lays the groundwork for such an exploration. In it, I offer an account of sexual orientation – called ‘Bidimensional Dispositionalism’ – according to which sexual (...)
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  • Conversational Exercitives and the Force of Pornography.Mary Kate Mcgowan - 2003 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 31 (2):155-189.
    This paper criticizes Langton's speech act account of MacKinnon's claim about (the subordinating force of) pornography and offers a different account of how speech might enact harmful norms and thus constitute harm.
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  • Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender.Andrea Veltman & Mark Piper (eds.) - 2014 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press USA.
    This collection of new essays examines philosophical issues at the intersection of feminism and autonomy studies. Are autonomy and independence useful goals for women and subordinate persons? Is autonomy possible in contexts of social subordination? Is the pursuit of desires that issue from patriarchal norms consistent with autonomous agency? How do emotions and caring relate to autonomous deliberation? Contributors to this collection answer these questions and others, advancing central debates in autonomy theory by examining basic components, normative commitments, and applications (...)
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  • Artistic Institutions, Valuable Experiences: Coming to Terms with Artistic Value.Henry John Pratt - 2012 - Philosophia 40 (3):591-606.
    Supposing that talk of a distinctively artistic type of value is warranted, what separates it from other sorts of value? Any plausible answer must explain both what is of value and what is artistic about artistically valuable properties. Flaws with extant accounts stem from neglect of one component or the other; the account offered here, based on careful attention to actual art-critical practices, brings both together. The “value” component depends on the capacity of artworks to provide subjectively valuable experiences, while (...)
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  • Ontological Commitments, Sex and Gender.Mari Mikkola - 2010 - In Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self. Springer Verlag. pp. 67--83.
    This paper develops an alternative for (what feminists call) ‘the sex/gender distinction’. I do so in order to avoid certain problematic implications that the distinction underpins. First, the sex/gender distinction paradigmatically holds that some social conditions determine one’s gender (whether one is a woman or a man), and that some biological conditions determine one’s sex (whether one is female or male). Further, sex and gender come apart. Since gender is socially constructed, this implies that women exist mind-dependently, or due to (...)
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  • Essence, Identity, and the Concept of Woman.Natalie Stoljar - 1995 - Philosophical Topics 23 (2):261-293.
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  • What Is Gender Essentialism?Charlotte Witt - 2010 - In Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self. Springer Verlag. pp. 11--25.
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  • Creativity, Freedom, and Authority: A New Perspective On the Metaphysics of Mathematics.Julian C. Cole - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (4):589-608.
    I discuss a puzzle that shows there is a need to develop a new metaphysical interpretation of mathematical theories, because all well-known interpretations conflict with important aspects of mathematical activities. The new interpretation, I argue, must authenticate the ontological commitments of mathematical theories without curtailing mathematicians' freedom and authority to creatively introduce mathematical ontology during mathematical problem-solving. Further, I argue that these two constraints are best met by a metaphysical interpretation of mathematics that takes mathematical entities to be constitutively constructed (...)
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  • Verbal Sparring and Apologetic Points: Politeness in Gendered Argumentation Contexts.Sylvia Burrow - 2010 - Informal Logic 30 (3):235-262.
    This essay argues that ideals of cooperation or adversariality in argumentation are not equally attainable for women. Women in argumentation contexts face oppressive limitations undermining argument success because their authority is undermined by gendered norms of politeness. Women endorsing or, alternatively, transgressing feminine norms of politeness typically defend their authority in argumentation contexts. And yet, defending authority renders it less legitimate. My argument focuses on women in philosophy but bears the implication that other masculine dis- course contexts present similar double (...)
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  • Interactive kinds.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (2):335-360.
    This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘interactive kinds’ first identified by Ian Hacking. An interactive kind is one that is created or significantly modified once a concept of it has been formulated and acted upon in certain ways. Interactive kinds may also ‘loop back’ to influence our concepts and classifications. According to Hacking, interactive kinds are found exclusively in the human domain. After providing a general account of interactive kinds and outlining their philosophical significance, I argue that they are not (...)
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  • (1 other version)Gender concepts and intuitions.Mari Mikkola - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (4):pp. 559-583.
    The gender concept woman is central to feminism but has proven to be notoriously difficult to define. Some feminist philosophers, most notably Sally Haslanger, have recently argued for revisionary analyses of the concept where it is defined pragmatically for feminist political purposes. I argue against such analyses: pragmatically revising woman may not best serve feminist goals and doing so is unnecessary. Instead, focusing on certain intuitive uses of the term ‘woman’ enables feminist philosophers to make sense of it.
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  • Naturalistic approaches to social construction.Ron Mallon - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social “construction,” “constructionism” and “constructivism” are terms in wide use in the humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks, facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a “naturalistic” approach—an approach that treats science as a central and successful (if (...)
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  • Naturalizing objectivity.Rebecca Kukla - 2008 - Perspectives on Science 16 (3):pp. 285-302.
    We can understand objectivity, in the broadest sense of the term, as epistemic accountability to the real. Since at least the 1986 publication of Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism, so-called standpoint epistemologists have sought to build an understanding of such objectivity that does not essentially anchor it to a dislocated, ‘view from nowhere’ stance on the part of the judging subject. Instead, these theorists have argued that a proper understanding of objectivity must recognize that different agential standpoints offer (...)
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  • Feminist philosophy of language.Jennifer Saul - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Much of feminist philosophy of language so far can be described as critical—critical either of language itself or of philosophy of language, and calling for change on the basis of these criticisms. Those making these criticisms suggest that the changes are needed for the sake of feminist goals — either to better allow for feminist work to be done or, more frequently, to bring an end to certain key ways that women are disadvantaged. In this entry, I examine these criticisms. (...)
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  • Feminist perspectives on sex and gender.Mari Mikkola - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (...)
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  • Feminist metaphysics.Sally Haslanger & Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir - 2008;2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • What good are our intuitions: Philosophical analysis and social kinds.Sally Haslanger - 2006 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80 (1):89-118.
    Across the humanities and social sciences it has become commonplace for scholars to argue that categories once assumed to be “natural” are in fact “social” or, in the familiar lingo, “socially constructed”. Two common examples of such categories are race and gender, but there many others. One interpretation of this claim is that although it is typically thought that what unifies the instances of such categories is some set of natural or physical properties, instead their unity rests on social features (...)
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  • Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?Sally Haslanger - 2000 - Noûs 34 (1):31–55.
    It is always awkward when someone asks me informally what I’m working on and I answer that I’m trying to figure out what gender is. For outside a rather narrow segment of the academic world, the term ‘gender’ has come to function as the polite way to talk about the sexes. And one thing people feel pretty confident about is their knowledge of the difference between males and females. Males are those human beings with a range of familiar primary and (...)
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  • A field guide to social construction.Ron Mallon - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 2 (1):93–108.
    forthcoming in Philosophy Compass [penultimate draft .pdf file] A survey of the contemporary social constructionist landscape.
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  • What are we talking about? The semantics and politics of social kinds.Sally Haslanger - 2005 - Hypatia 20 (4):10-26.
    Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all. The question arises: what do we mean by the terms? It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are definitive. However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credibility to social constructionist projects.
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