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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique
New York, US: Oxford University Press (2012)
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Sex. Die meisten von uns haben ihn. Mal schlecht, mal gut, manchmal phänomenal. Die wenigsten denken lange drüber nach. Oder reden offen drüber. Dabei ist gar nicht so klar, was Sex eigentlich gut macht. Und wann ist Sex schlecht? Oder nicht nur schlecht, sondern sogar moralisch problematisch? Hilkje Hänel zeigt, dass es gar nicht so einfach ist, zwischen (moralisch) problematischem Sex und gutem Sex klar zu unterscheiden und dass es dabei häufig vor allem auf den Kontext und unsere Kommunikation ankommt. (...) |
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Claims that science may become 'self-fulfilling' through its impact on objects of study have recently risen to prominence. Despite radical statements about the supposed consequences of such accounts, however, the central notion of scientific self-fulfillment has remained obscure, leading to skewed views of its actual prevalence and significance. -/- Self-Fulfilling Science illuminates this underexplored phenomenon, drawing on insights from philosophy of science to address questions of its conceptualization, prevalence, and significance. The book critically engages with the popular notion that economic (...) |
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New philosophical essays on love by a diverse group of international scholars. Topics include contributions to the ongoing debate on whether love is arational or if there are reasons for love, and if so what kind; the kinds of love there may be ; whether love can explain the difference between nationalism and patriotism; whether love is an necessary component of truly seeing others and the world; whether love, like free will, is “fragile,” and may not survive in a deterministic (...) |
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Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the DSM's (...) |
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The articles collected in this symposium are result of the workshop Doing Justice to the Social, which was dedicated to the work of Sally Haslanger. The workshop took place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona between the 6 and 8 June 2016. The workshop was also the 10th Meeting of the NOMOS Network for Practical Philosophy. The network meetings focus on philosophical issues connected with practical concerns, examined in an open-minded manner. This sympo- sium collects articles by Rachel Sterken, (...) |
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Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) |
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A non-violent position drawn from the Anabaptist tradition (‘two-kingdom dualism’) is contrasted with the Christian pacifism with which that position is commonly conflated. It is argued that two-kingdom dualism more effectively leverages the philosophical and practical features of its particularly Christian character than does Christian pacifism – and that these features may have implications beyond the philosophy of religion. |
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Sally Haslanger has recently argued that philosophical focus on implicit bias is overly individualist, since social inequalities are best explained in terms of social structures rather than the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice, and I propose an alternative conception of social structure according to which implicit biases are themselves best understood as a special type of structure. |
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Open texture is a kind of semantic indeterminacy first systematically studied by Waismann. In this paper, extant definitions of open texture will be compared and contrasted, with a view towards the consequences of open-textured concepts in mathematics. It has been suggested that these would threaten the traditional virtues of proof, primarily the certainty bestowed by proof-possession, and this suggestion will be critically investigated using recent work on informal proof. It will be argued that informal proofs have virtues that mitigate the (...) |
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I defend an alternative to the two traditional accounts of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition: metacognition as primary versus social cognition as primary. These accounts have complementary explanatory vices and virtues. They also share a natural assumption: that interpretation in terms of mental states is “spectatorial”, aiming exclusively for an objective description of the mental facts about self and others. I argue that if one rejects this assumption in favor of the view that interpretation in terms of mental (...) |
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This essay explores the thesis that for vague predicates, uncertainty over whether a borderline instance x of red/large/tall/good is to be understood as practical uncertainty over whether to treat x as red/large/tall/good. Expressivist and quasi-realist treatments of vague predicates due to John MacFarlane and Daniel Elstein provide the stalking-horse. It examines the notion of treating/counting a thing as F , and links a central question about our attitudes to vague predications to normative evaluation of plans to treat a thing as (...) |
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Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView. |
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Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 355-373, October 2021. |
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The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the “muscles versus movements” debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, neurophysiologist (...) |
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Lloyd analyzes every proposed evolutionary explanation of female orgasm and argues that all but one suffers from serious evidential errors. Lloyd attributes these errors to two main biases: androcentrism and adaptationism. This paper begins by arguing that the explanation Lloyd favors—the by-product account—is guilty of the androcentrism which supposedly implicates the other explanations of female orgasm with numerous evidential discrepancies. This suggests that there is another error afflicting orgasm research in addition to the biases Lloyd identities. I attempt to diagnose (...) |
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The metalinguistic approach to conceptual engineering construes disputes between linguistic reformers and linguistic conservatives as metalinguistic disagreements on how best to use particular expressions. As the present paper argues, this approach has various merits. However, it was recently criticised in Cappelen’s seminal Fixing Language. Cappelen raises an important objection against the metalinguistic picture. According to this objection – the Babel objection, as I shall call it – the metalinguistic account cannot accommodate the intuition of disagreement between linguistic conservatives and reformers (...) |
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Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. (...) |
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Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be "essentially contestable". This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyse disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like democracy, freedom, genocide, rape, coercion, and the rule of law. Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who coined the term), for instance, argues that the central structural features of essentially contestable concepts secure (...) |
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Some alethic pluralists maintain that there are two kinds of truths operant in our alethic discourse: a realist kind and an anti-realist kind. In this paper, we argue that such a binary conception cannot accommodate certain social truths, specifically truths about race. Most alethic pluralists surprisingly overlook the status of racial truths. Douglas Edwards is, however, an exception. In his version of alethic pluralism—Determination Pluralism—racial truths are superassertible (anti-realist) true rather than correspondence (realist) true. We argue that racial truths exhibit (...) |
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Douglas Edwards is arguably the most prominent contemporary advocate of moderate alethic pluralism. Significantly influenced by Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch, his work on the nature of truth has become widely discussed in the topical literature. Edwards labels his version of moderate alethic pluralism determination pluralism. At first blush, determination pluralism appears philosophically promising. The position deserves thoughtful consideration, particularly because of its capacity to accommodate the scope problem. I argue, however, that upon analysis the view is better understood as (...) |
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Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView. |
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Conceptual analysis as traditionally understood can be improved by allowing the use of a certain kind of empirical investigation. The conceptual analysis in which the kind of empirical investigation in question is used can be called “empirical conceptual analysis”. In the present inquiry, I provide a systematic exposition of empirical conceptual analysis, so understood, considering what exactly empirical conceptual analysis is, the different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis, and the main application of the method within philosophy. It can be defined (...) |
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Meaningful work is an important ideal, but it seems hard to give an adequate account of meaningful work. In this article, I conduct a revisionary conceptual analysis of ‘meaningful work’, i.e. a conceptual analysis that aims at finding a better and more useful way to use this term. I argue for a distinction between cases where work itself is meaningful and cases where other sources of meaning are found at work. The term ‘meaningful work’ is most useful for the former (...) |
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This paper addresses the question of how human science categories yield projectable inferences by critically examining Ron Mallon’s ‘social role’ account of human kinds. Mallon contends that human categories are projectable when a social role produces a homeostatic property cluster (HPC) kind. On this account, human categories are projectable when various social mechanisms stabilize and entrench those categories. Mallon’s analysis obscures a distinction between transitory and robust projectable inferences. I argue that the social kinds discussed by Mallon yield the former, (...) |
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This article is a feminist intervention into the ways that disability is researched and represented in philosophy at present. Nevertheless, some of the claims that I make over the course of the article are also pertinent to the marginalization in philosophy of other areas of inquiry, including philosophy of race, feminist philosophy more broadly, indigenous philosophies, and LGBTQI philosophy. Although the discipline of philosophy largely continues to operate under the guise of neutrality, rationality, and objectivity, the institutionalized structure of the (...) |
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In recent work, Amie Thomasson has sought to develop a new approach to the philosophy of the categories which is metaphysically neutral between traditional realist and conceptualist approaches, and which has its roots in the ‘correlationalist’ approach to categories put forward in Husserl’s writings in the 1900s–1910s and systematically charted over the past few decades by David Woodruff Smith in his studies of Husserl’s philosophy. Here the author aims to provide a recontextualization and critical assessment of correlationalism in a Husserlian (...) |
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Two major questions have dominated work on the metaphysics of social groups: first, Are there any? And second, What are they? I will begin by arguing that the answer to the ontological question is an easy and obvious ‘yes’. We do better to turn our efforts elsewhere, addressing the question: “What are social groups?” One might worry, however, about this question on grounds that the general term ‘social group’ seems like a term of art—not a well-used concept we can analyze, (...) |
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Sally Haslanger undertakes groundbreaking work in developing an account of structural explanations and the social structures that figure in them. A chief virtue of the account is that it can show the importance of structural explanations while also respecting the role of individual autonomy in explaining many decisions, by demonstrating the way in which social structures may set up a ‘choice architecture’ in which these choices are made. This paper gives an overview of this achievement, and goes on to consider (...) |
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ABSTRACTIn this paper I investigate how conceptual engineering applies to mathematical concepts in particular. I begin with a discussion of Waismann’s notion of open texture, and compare it to Shapiro’s modern usage of the term. Next I set out the position taken by Lakatos which sees mathematical concepts as dynamic and open to improvement and development, arguing that Waismann’s open texture applies to mathematical concepts too. With the perspective of mathematics as open-textured, I make the case that this allows us (...) |
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What does it mean to say that the demands of justice are institutional rather than individual? Justice is often thought to be directly concerned only with governmental institutions rather than individuals’ everyday, legally permissible actions. This approach has been criticized for ignoring the relevance to justice of informal social norms. This paper defends the idea that justice is distinctively institutional but rejects the primacy of governmental institutions. I argue that the ‘pervasive structure of society’ is the site of justice and (...) |
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During the last decades of the 20th century, Western philosophy saw a renewed interest in religion, often referred to as ‘the return of religion’. At about the same time, a growing number of anthro... |
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What is social construction? This essay offers a survey of the various ways in which something could be socially constructed and then addresses briefly the questions whether social constructionism involves an untenable anti-realism and what, if anything, unifies all social construction claims. |
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Learning about feminism can be a revelation for many students. However, for others, it can be a confounding, troubling experience. These difficulties return as problems for the teacher: how to help... |
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Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 1-4. |
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A stereotype is a belief or claim that a group of people has a particular feature. Stereotypes are expressed by sentences that have the form of generic statements, like “Canadians are nice.” Recent work on generics lends new life to understanding generics as statements involving probabilities. I argue that generics (and thus sentences expressing stereotypes) can take one of several forms involving conditional probabilities, and these probabilities have what I call a naturalness requirement. This is the natural probability theory of (...) |
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This article is Part II in a pair of articles on racial realism. In Part I, I defined “racial realism” and discussed the major attempts in the past twenty years among metaphysicians of race and biologists to defend racial realism from the viewpoint of what biologists mean by “race.” In this article, I continue discussing and critiquing how metaphysicians of race have conceived of and defended racial realism, but with a focus on how ordinary people use “race.” I focus on (...) |
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One debate that metaphysicians of race have been consumed with since the 1990s is what we can call the US race debate, which is the debate about what the nature and reality of race is according to the dominant ways that ‘race’ and race terms are used to classify people in contemporary American English. In 2014, I contributed a defence of biological racial realism in the US race debate that utilized new results about human genetic clustering from population genetics. In (...) |
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In the early 2000s, Esteban Burchard and his colleagues defended a controversial route to the view that there’s a racial classification of people that’s useful in medicine. The route, which I call ‘Burchard’s route,’ is arguing that there’s a racial classification of people that’s useful in medicine because, roughly, there’s a racial classification with medically relevant genetic differentiation :1170–1175, 2003). While almost all scholars engaged in this debate agree that there’s a racial classification of people that’s useful in medicine in (...) |
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If people are inclined to attribute race to humanoid robots, as recent research suggests, then designers of social robots confront a difficult choice. Most existing social robots have white surfaces and are therefore, I suggest, likely to be perceived as White, exposing their designers to accusations of racism. However, manufacturing robots that would be perceived as Black, Brown, or Asian risks representing people of these races as slaves, especially given the historical associations between robots and slaves at the very origins (...) |
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To what extent should we focus on implicit bias in order to eradicate persistent social injustice? Structural prioritizers argue that we should focus less on individual minds than on unjust social structures, while equal prioritizers think that both are equally important. This article introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend the equal priority view. The transactive memory framework helps us see how structure can emerge from individual interactions as an irreducibly social product. If this is right, (...) |
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The ontological turn in anthropological methodology, at least in its conceptualization-oriented formulation, aims to turn away from the concepts and objects found within one’s own social setting in order to turn to indigenous conceptualization processes and take a look at “the things themselves.” This article aims to unpack what such constant reconceptualization amounts to, arguing that when modified to meet certain objections, the ontological turn could provide important ingredients for an alternative version of interpretive social science—one that wishes to understand (...) |
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A tension between acting morally and acting rationally is apparent in analyses of moral emotions that ascribe an inherent subjectivity to ethical thinking, leading thence to irresolvable differences between rational agents. This paper offers an account of emotional worthiness that shows how, even if moral reasons fall short of philosophical criteria of rationality, we can still accord reasonableness to them and recognize that the deliberative weight of social norms is sufficient to address the moral limitations of strategic rationality. |
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Elizabeth Barnes and Mari Mikkola raise the important question of whether certain recent approaches to metaphysics exclude feminist metaphysics. My own approach does not, or so I argue. I do define “substantive” questions in terms of fundamentality; and the concepts of feminist metaphysics are nonfundamental. But my definition does not count a question as being nonsubstantive simply because it involves nonfundamental concepts. Questions about the causal structure of the world, including the causal structure of the social world, are generally substantive (...) |
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In this paper, I present two tools that help shed light on deep disagreements and their epistemological consequences. First, I argue that we are best off construing deep disagreements as disagreements over conflicting understandings of certain concepts. More specifically, I suggest that deep disagreements are disagreements over how to understand concepts that play what Michael Friedman calls a “constitutive” role for speakers. Second, I argue that we need a better understanding of what speakers are doing when they engage in deep (...) |
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Implicit in much of the recent literature on conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics is the assumption that when speakers argue that we should talk or think about a concept in a specific way, they are doing so as inquirers—as speakers who are invested in arriving at the correct or best view of this concept. In this paper I question that assumption and argue that philosophers have been too quick to project idealized versions of themselves into the contexts of conceptual articulation (...) |
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Although it is a common claim in the ecological psychology literature that our perception of the environment’s affordances is influenced by socio-cultural norms, an explanation of how this is possible remains to be offered. In this paper, I outline an account of this phenomenon by focusing on the ecological theory of perceptual learning. Two main theses are defended. First, I argue that to account for how socio-cultural norms can influence perception, we must pay attention not only to the education of (...) |
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In this paper, I want to make two main points. The first point is methodological: Instead of attempting to give a classical analysis or reductive definition of the term “expertise”, we should attempt an explication and look for what may be called symptoms of expertise. What this comes to will be explained in due course. My second point is substantial: I want to recommend understanding as an important symptom of expertise. In order to give this suggestion content, I begin to (...) |
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