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Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique

New York, US: Oxford University Press (2012)

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  1. Deflating the functional turn in conceptual engineering.Jared Riggs - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11555-11586.
    Conceptual engineers have recently turned to the notion of conceptual functions to do a variety of explanatory work. Functions are supposed to explain what speakers are debating about in metalinguistic negotiations, to capture when two concepts are about the same thing, and to help guide our normative inquiries into which concepts we should use. In this paper, I argue that this recent “functional turn” should be deflated. Contra most interpreters, we should not try to use a substantive notion of conceptual (...)
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  • The Metaphysics of gender is (Relatively) substantial.Kevin Richardson - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):192-207.
    According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of (...)
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  • Critical social ontology.Kevin Richardson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-19.
    Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or (...)
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  • Social categories in the making: construction or recruitment?Samuli Reijula - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12315-12330.
    Real kinds, both natural and social categories, are characterized by rich inductive potential. They have relatively stable sets of conceptually independent projectable properties. Somewhat surprisingly, even some purely social categories show such multiple projectability. The article explores the origin of the inductive richness of social categories and concepts. I argue that existing philosophical accounts provide only a partial explanation, and mechanisms of boundary formation and stabilization must be brought into view for a more comprehensive account of inductively rich social categories.
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  • Explaining essences.Michael J. Raven - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1043-1064.
    This paper explores the prospects of combining two views. The first view is metaphysical rationalism : all things have an explanation. The second view is metaphysical essentialism: there are real essences. The exploration is motivated by a conflict between the views. Metaphysical essentialism posits facts about essences. Metaphysical rationalism demands explanations for all facts. But facts about essences appear to resist explanation. I consider two solutions to the conflict. Exemption solutions attempt to exempt facts about essences from the demand for (...)
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  • Metalinguistic disputes, semantic decomposition, and externalism.Erich Rast - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (1):65-85.
    In componential analysis, word meanings are (partly) decomposed into other meanings, and semantic and syntactic markers. Although a theory of word meaning based on such semantic decompositions remains compatible with the linguistic labor division thesis, it is not compatible with Kripke/Putnam-style indexical externalism. Instead of abandoning indexical externalism, a Separation Thesis is defended according to which lexical meaning need not enter the truth-conditional content of an utterance. Lexical meaning reflects beliefs about word meaning shared in a speaker community, and these (...)
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  • Hermeneutical injustice: an exercise in conceptual precision.Blas Radi - 2022 - Estudios de Filosofía (Universidad de Antioquia) 66:97-100.
    In addition to opening a fertile field for inquiry in analytical social epistemology, Miranda Fricker’s work has provided powerful conceptual tools that merge descriptive capacity and political potency. For this reason, over the last fifteen years, the conceptual repertoire introduced by the author has been well received in both academic and political arenas. At times, the concepts of both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice acquire excessive dimensions in the literature, and this undermines, on the one hand, their analytical precision and, on (...)
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  • The Points of Concepts: Their Types, Tensions, and Connections.Matthieu Queloz - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (8):1122-1145.
    In the literature seeking to explain concepts in terms of their point, talk of ‘the point’ of concepts remains under-theorised. I propose a typology of points which distinguishes practical, evaluative, animating, and inferential points. This allows us to resolve tensions such as that between the ambition of explanations in terms of the points of concepts to be informative and the claim that mastering concepts requires grasping their point; and it allows us to exploit connections between types of points to understand (...)
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  • Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering.Matthieu Queloz - 2022 - The Monist 105 (4):435-451.
    Against those who identify genealogy with reductive genealogical debunking or deny it any evaluative and action-guiding significance, I argue for the following three claims: that although genealogies, true to their Enlightenment origins, tend to trace the higher to the lower, they need not reduce the higher to the lower, but can elucidate the relation between them and put us in a position to think more realistically about both relata; that if we think of genealogy’s normative significance in terms of a (...)
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  • Debunking Concepts.Matthieu Queloz - 2023 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 (1):195-225.
    Genealogies of belief have dominated recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking at the expense of genealogies of concepts, which has in turn focused attention on genealogical debunking in an epistemological key. As I argue in this paper, however, this double focus encourages an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking. First, not all genealogical debunking can be reduced to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in (...)
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  • Political realism as ideology critique.Janosch Prinz & Enzo Rossi - 2017 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (3):334-348.
    This paper outlines an account of political realism as a form of ideology critique. Our focus is a defence of the normative edge of this critical-theoretic project against the common charge that there is a problematic trade-off between a theory’s groundedness in facts about the political status quo and its ability to consistently envisage radical departures from the status quo. To overcome that problem we combine insights from three distant corners of the philosophical landscape: theories of legitimacy by Bernard Williams (...)
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  • Natural kinds, normative kinds and human behavior.Diana Ines Pérez & Lucia Gabriela Ciccia - 2019 - Filosofia Unisinos 20 (3).
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  • Slurs, roles and power.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt & Jeremy L. Wyatt - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (11):2879-2906.
    Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren’t adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A (...)
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  • Revision, endorsement and the analysis of meaning.Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky & Kai Tanter - 2020 - Analysis 80 (4):693-704.
    Recently there has been much philosophical interest in the analysis of concepts to determine whether they should be removed, revised, or replaced. Enquiry of this kind is referred to as conceptual engineering or conceptual ethics. We will call it revisionary conceptual analysis (RCA). It standardly involves describing the meaning of a concept, evaluating whether it serves its purposes, and prescribing what it should mean. However, this stands in tension with prescriptivism, a metasemantic view which holds that all meaning claims are (...)
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  • Is Haslanger’s ameliorative project a successful conceptual engineering project?Mark Pinder - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-22.
    Supporters of conceptual engineering often use Haslanger’s ameliorative project as a key example of their methodology. However, at face value, Haslanger’s project is no cause for optimism about conceptual engineering. If we interpret Haslanger as seeking to revise how people in general use and understand words such as ‘woman’, ‘man’, etc., then her project has been unsuccessful. And if we interpret her as seeking to reveal the meaning of those words, then her project does not involve conceptual engineering. I develop (...)
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  • Sally Haslanger and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the Possibility of Metaphysics of Resistance and its Implications for Postcolonial Feminist Theologizing.Jeane C. Peracullo - 2020 - Feminist Theology 28 (2):130-146.
    In Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, contemporary feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger claims that the reality of race and gender is built on unjust social structures and must be resisted. Meanwhile, contemporary social theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extends the term ‘subaltern’ to Third World Asian women who were rendered inarticulate by centuries of oppressive masculinist, imperialist, and colonial rule. This article examines how a metaphysics of resistance, culled from philosophy and postcolonial studies, can contribute to expanding postcolonial feminist theologizing.
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  • Moving Bodies as Moving Targets: A Feminist Perspective on Sexual Violence in Transit.Louise Pedersen - 2020 - Open Philosophy 3 (1):369-388.
    Acts of sexual violence in transit environments are everyday occurrences for women across the globe, and the fear of being on the receiving end of sexual violence severely impacts women’s mobility patterns. Gill Valentine, in her examination of women’s fear of male violence and women’s perception and use of public space, has argued that the impact on women’s mobility amounts to a spatial expression of patriarchy. The aim of this paper is to expand upon Valentine’s notion of “the spatial expression (...)
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  • II—What Should ‘Impostor Syndrome’ Be?Sarah K. Paul - 2019 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93 (1):227-245.
    In her thought-provoking symposium contribution, ‘What Is Impostor Syndrome?’, Katherine Hawley fleshes out our everyday understanding of that concept. This response builds on Hawley’s account to ask the ameliorative question of whether the everyday concept best serves the normative goals of promoting social justice and enhancing well-being. I raise some sceptical worries about the usefulness of the notion, in so far as it is centred on doxastic attitudes that include doubt about one’s own talent or skill. I propose instead that (...)
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  • Finean Feminist Metaphysics.Asya Passinsky - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (9):937-954.
    Feminist metaphysicians have recently argued that many of the most influential contemporary meta-metaphysical frameworks are at odds with feminist metaphysics. In this paper I argue that the Finean framework of grounding, essence, and reality evades the main challenges that have been raised for alternative frameworks. The upshot of my discussion is that the Finean framework is an apt one for feminist metaphysics.
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  • What Social Construction Isn’t.Emilie Pagano - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (4):1651-1670.
    Just as contemporary metaphysics, in general, is marked by an interest in ground, contemporary social metaphysics, in particular, is marked by an interest in social construction. It’s no surprise, then, that some contemporary metaphysicians have come to understand social construction in terms of ground. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. In particular, I argue that any otherwise plausible account of construction as ground is objectionably revisionary. First, I discuss an argument for the view that construction is (...)
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  • It Just Looks the Same: An Evolutionary Psychological Account of Differences in Racial Cognition Among Infants and Older Humans.Kamuran Osmanoglu & Armin W. Schulz - 2019 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (3):631-647.
    Forms of racial cognition begin early: from about 3 months onwards, many human infants prefer to look at own-race faces over other-race faces. What is not yet fully clear is what the psychological mechanisms are that underlie racial thoughts at this early age, and why these mechanisms evolved. In this paper, we propose answers to these questions. Specifically, we use recent experimental data and evolutionary biological insights to argue that early racial cognition is simply the result of a “facial familiarity (...)
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  • Against Phylogenetic Conceptions of Race.Kamuran Osmanoglu - 2023 - Global Philosophy 33 (1):1-18.
    Biological racial realism (BRR) continues to be a much-discussed topic, with several recent papers presenting arguments for the plausibility of some type of “biological race.” In this paper, the focus will be on the phylogenetic conceptions of race, which is one of the most promising views of BRR, that define races as lineages of reproductively isolated breeding populations. However, I will argue that phylogenetic conceptions of race fail to prove that races are biologically real. I will develop and defend my (...)
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  • Carnapian explication, formalisms as cognitive tools, and the paradox of adequate formalization.Catarina Dutilh Novaes & Erich Reck - 2017 - Synthese 194 (1):195-215.
    Explication is the conceptual cornerstone of Carnap’s approach to the methodology of scientific analysis. From a philosophical point of view, it gives rise to a number of questions that need to be addressed, but which do not seem to have been fully addressed by Carnap himself. This paper reconsiders Carnapian explication by comparing it to a different approach: the ‘formalisms as cognitive tools’ conception. The comparison allows us to discuss a number of aspects of the Carnapian methodology, as well as (...)
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  • A sisterhood of letters.Rita Niineste - 2020 - Approaching Religion 10 (2).
    Solidarity has been a key topic for feminist thinkers of different times, schools and places. More than other disciplines, feminist theorists have dwelled upon the role of theory in the achievement of political and social goals. Calls for global sisterhood have incited proliferating debates as to the basis for solidarity between women and feminists. Theoretical disputes arising from the spread of deconstructionist ideas since the 1990s have led to a practical perplexity as to how to set feminist political goals if (...)
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  • Book review of Sophie Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. [REVIEW]Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic - 2020 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (5):1035-1040.
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  • The meaning of ‘populism’.Axel Mueller - 2019 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9-10):1025-1057.
    This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it (...)
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  • Medicine, anti-realism and ideology: Variation in medical genetics does not show that race is biologically real.Phila Mfundo Msimang - 2020 - SATS 20 (2):117-140.
    Lee McIntyre’s Respecting Truth chronicles the contemporary challenges regarding the relationship amongst evidence, belief formation and ideology. The discussion in his book focusses on the ‘politicisation of knowledge’ and the purportedly growing public (and sometimes academic) tendency to choose to believe what is determined by prior ideological commitments rather than what is determined by evidence-based reasoning. In considering these issues, McIntyre posits that the claim “race is a myth” is founded on a political ideology rather than on support from scientific (...)
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  • Notes from the Resistance: Some Comments on Sally Haslanger’s R esisting Reality.Charles W. Mills - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 171 (1):85-97.
    After a brief summary of the 17 essays in Sally Haslanger’s (2012) collection, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, I raise questions in two areas, the defense of constructionism and the definition of gender and race in terms of social oppression. I cite Robin Andreasen’s and Philip Kitcher’s essays arguing (in different ways) that races are both biologically real and socially constructed, and also Joshua Glasgow’s claim that constructionist arguments ultimately fail. I then cite Jennifer Saul’s critique that “oppression” (...)
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  • Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne: New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. xi + 338, US$27.95 (hardback). [REVIEW]Mari Mikkola - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):198-201.
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  • Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, edited by H.Maes and J.Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 344 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐960958‐1 hb £35. [REVIEW]Mari Mikkola - 2014 - European Journal of Philosophy 22 (S2):15-21.
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  • Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, edited by H.Maes and J.Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 344 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐960958‐1 hb £35. [REVIEW]Mari Mikkola - 2014 - European Journal of Philosophy 22 (S2):15-21.
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  • La rencontre du sémiotique et du « numérique »: Le rôle d’une modélisation conceptuelle.Jean-guy Meunier - 2020 - Semiotica 2020 (234):177-198.
    Résumé Dans cet article, nous discuterons de l’intégration du numérique à la sémiotique et proposerons qu’une modélisation conceptuelle puisse offrir un pont de dialogue entre ces deux domaines classiquement cloisonnés. Plus précisément, nous avancerons l’hypothèse que tout projet de recherche qui en appellera à l’informatique soit une démarche scientifique que s’il construit une théorie qui contient, en plus des modèles classiques que sont les modèles formel, computationnel et physique, un modèle conceptuel. Ce lieu, où les chercheur-es conceptualisent les multiples dimensions (...)
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  • Concepts as Tools Not Rules: a Commentary on (Re-) Defining Racism.José Jorge Mendoza - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (3):1-6.
    In (Re)Defining Racism, Alberto Urquidez argues that conflicting philosophical accounts over the definition of racism are at bottom linguistic confusions that would benefit from a Wittgensteinian-inspired approach. In this essay, I argue that such an approach would be helpful in disputes over the definition of metaphysically contested concepts, such as “race,” or semantically contested concepts, such as “racialization.” I disagree, however, that such insights would prove helpful or do very little for disputes concerning normatively contested concepts, such as “racism.”.
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  • Theories as recipes: third-order virtue and vice.Michaela Markham McSweeney - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (2):391-411.
    A basic way of evaluating metaphysical theories is to ask whether they give satisfying answers to the questions they set out to resolve. I propose an account of “third-order” virtue that tells us what it takes for certain kinds of metaphysical theories to do so. We should think of these theories as recipes. I identify three good-making features of recipes and show that they translate to third-order theoretical virtues. I apply the view to two theories—mereological universalism and plenitudinous platonism—and draw (...)
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  • The Problem of Peer Review is the Most Important Philosophical Problem.Matthew Mckeever - 2019 - Metaphilosophy 50 (3):286-295.
    As philosophers we should have as one of our aims to produce as much philosophical knowledge as possible. A lot of potential philosophical knowledge is lost because of the flaws of the peer review system, and so a lot of philosophical knowledge would be gained were the system improved. Accordingly, as authors we should write papers about how to fix peer review, and as editors we should accept such papers if they are good. This paper presents some familiar problems with (...)
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  • Luck, Value and Commitment.C. McKinnon - 2013 - Analysis 73 (3):568-576.
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  • Enculturating folk psychologists.Victoria McGeer - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1039-1063.
    This paper argues that our folk-psychological expertise is a special case of extended and enculturated cognition where we learn to regulate both our own and others’ thought and action in accord with a wide array of culturally shaped folk-psychological norms. The view has three noteworthy features: it challenges a common assumption that the foundational capacity at work in folk-psychological expertise is one of interpreting behaviour in mentalistic terms, arguing instead that successful mindreading is largely a consequence of successful mindshaping; it (...)
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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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  • Social kinds are essentially mind-dependent.Rebecca Mason - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3975-3994.
    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 (...)
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  • Pejoratives & Oughts.Teresa Marques - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (3):1109-1125.
    Chris Hom argued that slurs and pejoratives semantically express complex negative prescriptive properties, which are determined in virtue of standing in external causal relations to social ideologies and practices. He called this view Combinatorial Externalism. Additionally, he argued that Combinatorial Externalism entailed that slurs and pejoratives have null extensions. In this paper, I raise an objection that has not been raised in the literature so far. I argue that semantic theories like Hom’s are forced to choose between two alternatives: either (...)
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  • Social Construction and Achieving Reference.Ron Mallon - 2017 - Noûs 51 (1):113-131.
    One influential view is that at least some putatively natural human kinds are actually social constructions, understood as some real kind of thing that is produced or sustained by our social and conceptual practices. Category constructionists share two commitments: they hold that human category terms like “race” and “sex” and “homosexuality” and “perversion” actually refer to constructed categories, and they hold that these categories are widely but mistakenly taken to be natural kinds. But it is far from clear that these (...)
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  • Performance, self-explanation, and agency.Ron Mallon - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2777-2798.
    Social constructionist explanations of human thought and behavior hold that our representations produce and regulate the categories, thoughts, and behaviors of those they represent. Performative versions of constructionist accounts explain these thoughts and behaviors as part of an intentional, strategic performance that is elicited and regulated by our representations of ourselves. This paper has four aims. First, I sketch a causal model of performative social constructionist claims. Second, I articulate a puzzling feature of performative claims that makes them seem especially (...)
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  • Constructing race: racialization, causal effects, or both?Ron Mallon - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (5):1039-1056.
    Social constructionism about race is a common view, but there remain questions about what exactly constitutes constructed race. Some hold that our concepts and conceptual practices construct race, and some hold that the causal consequences of these concepts and conceptual practices also play a role. But there is a third option, which is that the causal effects of our concepts and conceptual practices constitute race, but not the concepts and conceptual practices themselves. This paper reconsiders an argument for the reality (...)
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  • Social Construction and Social Critique: Haslanger, Race and the Study of Religion.Thomas Lynch - 2017 - Critical Research on Religion 5 (3):284-301.
    Recent critiques of the category religion discuss the category as socially constructed, but the nature of this social construction remains underdeveloped. The work of Sally Haslanger can supplement existing discussions of ‘religion’ while also offering a new perspective on the connection between social construction and social critique. Her analysis of race provides resources for developing a philosophical account of the social construction of religion and can help scholars of religion conceptualize racialized religious identities. I offer an example of this approach (...)
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  • Understanding Race: The Case for Political Constructionism in Public Discourse.David Ludwig - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (4):492-504.
    The aim of this article is to develop an understanding-based argument for an explicitly political specification of the concept of race. It is argued that a specification of race in terms of hierarchical social positions is best equipped to guide causal reasoning about racial inequality in the public sphere. Furthermore, the article provides evidence that biological and cultural specifications of race mislead public reasoning by encouraging confusions between correlates and causes of racial inequality. The article concludes with a more general (...)
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  • Ontological Choices and the Value-Free Ideal.David Ludwig - 2015 - Erkenntnis (6):1-20.
    The aim of this article is to argue that ontological choices in scientific practice undermine common formulations of the value-free ideal in science. First, I argue that the truth values of scientific statements depend on ontological choices. For example, statements about entities such as species, race, memory, intelligence, depression, or obesity are true or false relative to the choice of a biological, psychological, or medical ontology. Second, I show that ontological choices often depend on non-epistemic values. On the basis of (...)
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  • Ontological Choices and the Value-Free Ideal.David Ludwig - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (6):1253-1272.
    The aim of this article is to argue that ontological choices in scientific practice undermine common formulations of the value-free ideal in science. First, I argue that the truth values of scientific statements depend on ontological choices. For example, statements about entities such as species, race, memory, intelligence, depression, or obesity are true or false relative to the choice of a biological, psychological, or medical ontology. Second, I show that ontological choices often depend on non-epistemic values. On the basis of (...)
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  • How Race Travels. Relating Local and Global Ontologies of Race. Philosophical Studies.David Ludwig - 2018 - Philosophical Studies:1-22.
    his article develops a framework for addressing racial ontologies in transnational perspective. In contrast to simple contextualist accounts, it is argued that a globally engaged metaphysics of race needs to address transnational continuities of racial ontologies. In contrast to unificationist accounts that aim for one globally unified ontology, it is argued that questions about the nature and reality of race do not always have the same answers across national contexts. In order address racial ontologies in global perspective, the article develops (...)
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  • Against the New Metaphysics of Race.David Ludwig - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (2):244-265.
    The aim of this article is to develop an argument against metaphysical debates about the existence of human races. I argue that the ontology of race is underdetermined by both empirical and non-empirical evidence due to a plurality of equally permissible candidate meanings of "race." Furthermore, I argue that this underdetermination leads to a deflationist diagnosis according to #hich disputes about the existence of human races are non-substantive verbal disputes. $hile this diagnosis resembles general deflationist strategies in contemporary metaphysics" I (...)
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  • Biological Explanations of Social Inequalities.Dan Lowe - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4):694-719.
    Inequalities of social goods between gender, racial, or other groups call out for explanation. Such inequalities might be explained by socialization and discrimination. But historically some have attributed these inequalities to biological differences between social groups. Such explanations are highly controversial: on the one hand, they have a very troubling racist and sexist history, but on the other hand, they are empirical claims, and so it seems inappropriate to rule them out a priori. I propose that the appropriate epistemic attitude (...)
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