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  1. Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories.Ásta Ásta - 2018 - Oxford University Press.
    We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? Ásta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful? (...)
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  • Of Witches and White Folks.Daniel Wodak - 2021 - Wiley: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):587-605.
    A central debate in philosophy of race is between eliminativists and conservationists about what we ought do with ‘race’ talk. ‘Eliminativism’ is often defined such that it’s committed to holding that (a) ‘race’ is vacuous and races don’t exist, so (b) we should eliminate the term ‘race’ from our vocabulary. As a stipulative definition, that’s fine. But as an account of one of the main theoretical options in the debate, it’s a serious mistake. I offer three arguments for why eliminativism (...)
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  • (1 other version)Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections.Kwame Anthony Appiah - 1998 - In Amy Gutmann & Kwame Anthony Appiah (eds.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Princeton University Press. pp. 51--136.
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  • A Puzzle for Social Essences.Michael J. Raven - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (1):128-148.
    The social world contains institutions, groups, objects, and more. This essay explores a puzzle about the essences of social items. There is widespread consensus against social essences because of problematic presuppositions often made about them. But it is argued that essence can be freed from these presuppositions and their problems. Even so, a puzzle still arises. In a Platonic spirit, essences in general seem detached from the world. In an Aristotelian spirit, social essences in particular seem embedded in the world. (...)
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  • I—A More Radical Solution to the Race Problem.Quayshawn Spencer - 2019 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93 (1):25-48.
    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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  • Beyond the realism debate: The metaphysics of ‘racial’ distinctions.Olivier Lemeire - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 59:47-56.
    The current metaphysical race debate is very much focused on the realism question whether races exist. In this paper I argue against the importance of this question. Philosophers, biologists and anthropologists expect that answering this question will tell them something substantive about the metaphysics of racial classifications, and will help them to decide whether it is justified to use racial categories in scientific research and public policy. I argue that there are two reasons why these expectations are not fulfilled. First (...)
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  • Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument.Herman Cappelen - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    I call the activity of assessing and developing improvements of our representational devices ‘conceptual engineering’.¹ The aim of this chapter is to present an argument for why conceptual engineering is important for all parts of philosophy (and, more generally, all inquiry). Section I of the chapter provides some background and defines key terms. Section II presents the argument. Section III responds to seven objections. The replies also serve to develop the argument and clarify what conceptual engineering is.
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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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  • "But What Are You Really?": The Metaphysics of Race.Charles W. Mills - 1998 - In Charles Mills (ed.), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Cornell University Press. pp. 41-66.
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  • The Ordinary Concept of Race.Michael O. Hardimon - 2003 - Journal of Philosophy 100 (9):437-455.
    The ordinary concept of race is important and poorly understood. The present article seeks to address this problem by providing a general answer to the question: What is the concept of race?
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  • The Construction of Human Kinds.Ron Mallon - 2016 - Oxford: Oxford University Press UK.
    Ron Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. He considers what normative implications this social constructionism has for our understanding of our practices of representing human kinds, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and for our own agency.
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  • Basic Racial Realism.Joshua Glasgow & Jonathan M. Woodward - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3):449--466.
    In the debate over the reality of race, a three-way dispute has become entrenched: race is biologically real, socially real, or simply not real. These three theses have each enjoyed increasingly sophisticated defenses over roughly the past thirty years, but we argue here that this debate contains a lacuna: there is a fourth, mostly neglected, position that we call ‘basic racial realism.’ Basic racial realism says that though race is neither biologically real nor socially real, it is real all the (...)
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  • Race: A Philosophical Introduction.Paul C. Taylor - 2003 - Polity.
    Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. The result is the first philosophical introduction to the field of race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race. Provides the first philosophical introduction to the field of race theory. Outlines the main features and implications of race-thinking; asks questions such as: What is race-thinking? Don’t we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What (...)
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  • A Radical Solution to the Race Problem.Quayshawn Spencer - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1025-1038.
    It has become customary among philosophers and biologists to claim that folk racial classification has no biological basis. This paper attempts to debunk that view. In this paper, I show that ‘race’, as used in current U.S. race talk, picks out a biologically real entity. I do this by, first, showing that ‘race’, in this use, is not a kind term, but a proper name for a set of human population groups. Next, using recent human genetic clustering results, I show (...)
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  • Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race.David B. Wilkins, Kwame Anthony Appiah & Amy Gutmann - 1996 - Princeton University Press.
    In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice--whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action--provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together they provide a compelling response to our nation's most (...)
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  • [Book review] race and mixed race. [REVIEW]Zack Naomi - 1995 - In Anthony Appiah & Henry Louis Gates (eds.), Identities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 1--4.
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  • Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms.David Plunkett & Timothy Sundell - 2013 - Philosophers' Imprint 13 (23):1-37.
    In constructing semantic theories of normative and evaluative terms, philosophers have commonly deployed a certain type of disagreement -based argument. The premise of the argument observes the possibility of genuine disagreement between users of a certain normative or evaluative term, while the conclusion of the argument is that, however differently those speakers employ the term, they must mean the same thing by it. After all, if they did not, then they would not really disagree. We argue that in many of (...)
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  • The Genetic Reification of 'Race'? A Story of Two Mathematical Methods.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2014 - Critical Philosophy of Race 2 (2):204-223.
    Two families of mathematical methods lie at the heart of investigating the hierarchical structure of genetic variation in Homo sapiens: /diversity partitioning/, which assesses genetic variation within and among pre-determined groups, and /clustering analysis/, which simultaneously produces clusters and assigns individuals to these “unsupervised” cluster classifications. While mathematically consistent, these two methodologies are understood by many to ground diametrically opposed claims about the reality of human races. Moreover, modeling results are sensitive to assumptions such as preexisting theoretical commitments to certain (...)
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  • Racial discrimination: How not to do it.Adam Hochman - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (3):278-286.
    The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social (...)
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  • (1 other version)Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self.Linda Martín Alcoff - 2006 - New York, US: Oup Usa.
    Visible Identities critiques the critiques of identity and of identity politics and argues that identities are real but not necessarily a political problem. Moreover, the book explores the material infrastructure of gendered identity, the experimental aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites, and in several chapters looks specifically at Latio identity.
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  • Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept.Neven Sesardic - 2010 - Biology and Philosophy 25 (2):143-162.
    It is nowadays a dominant opinion in a number of disciplines (anthropology, genetics, psychology, philosophy of science) that the taxonomy of human races does not make much biological sense. My aim is to challenge the arguments that are usually thought to invalidate the biological concept of race. I will try to show that the way “race” was defined by biologists several decades ago (by Dobzhansky and others) is in no way discredited by conceptual criticisms that are now fashionable and widely (...)
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  • Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race.Charles Mills - 1998 - Cornell University Press.
    Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience.
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  • Resurrecting biological essentialism.Michael Devitt - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (3):344-382.
    The article defends the doctrine that Linnaean taxa, including species, have essences that are, at least partly, underlying intrinsic, mostly genetic, properties. The consensus among philosophers of biology is that such essentialism is deeply wrong, indeed incompatible with Darwinism. I argue that biological generalizations about the morphology, physiology, and behavior of species require structural explanations that must advert to these essential properties. The objection that, according to current “species concepts,” species are relational is rejected. These concepts are primarily concerned with (...)
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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 new perspective on the race debate.Robin O. Andreasen - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2):199-225.
    In the ongoing debate concerning the nature of human racial categories, there is a trend to reject the biological reality of race in favour of the view that races are social constructs. At work here is the assumption that biological reality and social constructivism are incompatible. I oppose the trend and the assumption by arguing that cladism, in conjunction with current work in human evolution, provides a new way to define race biologically. Defining race in this way makes sense when (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Semantics, cross-cultural style.Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2004 - Cognition 92 (3):1-12.
    Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases (...)
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  • Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism.Michael O. Hardimon - 2017 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    Many scholars and activists seek to eliminate “race”—the word and the concept—from our vocabulary. Their claim is clear: because science has shown that racial essentialism is false and because the idea of race has proved virulent, we should do away with the concept entirely. Michael O. Hardimon criticizes this line of thinking, arguing that we must recognize the real ways in which race exists in order to revise our understanding of its significance. Rethinking Race provides a novel answer to the (...)
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  • Race and Reference.Adam Hochman - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (2):32.
    The biological race debate is at an impasse. Issues surrounding hereditarianism aside, there is little empirical disagreement left between race naturalists and anti-realists about biological race. The disagreement is now primarily semantic. This would seem to uniquely qualify philosophers to contribute to the biological race debate. However, philosophers of race are reluctant to focus on semantics, largely because of their worries about the ‘flight to reference’. In this paper, I show how philosophers can contribute to the debate without taking the (...)
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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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  • Confusions about Race: A New Installment.Neven Sesardic - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3):287-293.
    In his criticism of my paper on the concept of race (Sesardic, 2010), Adam Hochman raises many issues that deserve further clarification. First, I will comment on Hochman’s claim that I attack a straw man version of racial constructionism. Second, I will try to correct what I see as a distorted historical picture of the debate between racial naturalists and racial constructionists. Third, I will point out the main weaknesses in Hochman’s own defense of constructionism about race. And fourth, I (...)
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  • Race and place: Social space in the production of human kinds.Ronald R. Sundstrom - 2003 - Philosophy and Geography 6 (1):83 – 95.
    Recent discussions of human categories have suffered from an over emphasis on intention and language, and have not paid enough attention to the role of material conditions, and, specifically, of social space in the construction of human categories. The relationship between human categories and social spaces is vital, especially with the categories of class, race, and gender. This paper argues that social space is not merely the consequent of the division of the world into social categories; it is constitutive of (...)
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  • Against Arguments from Reference.Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2):332 - 356.
    It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture (Machery et al. 2004). We argue that accommodating this variation within a theory of reference undermines arguments from reference.
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  • ‘Race': Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic.Ron Mallon - 2006 - Ethics 116 (3):525-551.
    In recent years, there has been a flurry of work on the metaphysics of race. While it is now widely accepted that races do not share robust, bio-behavioral essences, opinions differ over what, if anything, race is. Recent work has been divided between three apparently quite different answers. A variety of theorists argue for racial skepticism, the view that races do not exist at all.[iv] A second group defends racial constructionism, holding that races are in some way socially constructed.[v],[vi] And (...)
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  • What Is Race?: Four Philosophical Views.Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers & Quayshawn Spencer - 2019 - What is Race?: Four Philosophical Views.
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  • Do the Social Sciences Vindicate Race's Reality?Kareem Khalifa & Richard Lauer - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (21):1-17.
    Many humanists and social scientists argue—if not assume—that race's centrality in social-scientific research provides an empirical justification for its reality as a constructed kind. In this paper, we first regiment these arguments, and then show that they face significant challenges. Specifically, race-concepts' social-scientific success is compatible with race being neither constructed nor real.
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  • (1 other version)Arguments from Reference and the Worry About Dependence.Ron Mallon - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):160-183.
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  • On Race and Philosophy.Lucius Outlaw - 1995 - Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18 (2):175-199.
    Race and ethnicity are two of the most pervasive aspects of life in America. That there are different races and ethnies, that each person is a member of one or more races and ethnies, is probably taken for granted by most people. And difficulties of various kinds involving race and ethnicity in a variety of ways are abundant. Yet, both raciality and ethnicity—what determines and characterizes a race and an ethnie, respectively; whether or not it is ever appropriate to take (...)
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  • (1 other version)Race: Deflate or Pop?Adam Hochman - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57.
    Neven Sesardic has recently defended his arguments in favour of racial naturalism—the view that race is a valid biological category—in response to my criticism of his work. While Sesardic claims that a strong version of racial naturalism can survive critique, he has in fact weakened his position considerably. He concedes that conventional racial taxonomy is arbitrary and he no longer identifies ‘races’ as human subspecies. Sesardic now relies almost entirely on Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notion of race-as-population. This weak approach to ‘race’—according (...)
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  • Ambiguous Reference.Shaun Nichols, N. Ángel Pinillos & Ron Mallon - 2016 - Mind 125 (497):145-175.
    One of the central debates in the philosophy of language is that between defenders of the causal-historical and descriptivist theories of reference. Most philosophers involved in the debate support one or the other of the theories. Building on recent experimental work in semantics, we argue that there is a sense in which both theories are correct. In particular, we defend the view that natural kind terms can sometimes take on a causal-historical reading and at other times take on a descriptivist (...)
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  • (1 other version)Arguments from reference and the worry about dependence.Ron Mallon - 2007 - In Peter A. French & Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Philosophy and the Empirical. Blackwell. pp. 160-183.
    This paper raises concern with the use of theories of reference in philosophical discourse and then to consider the possibility of empirically validating this concern by reference to a novel sort of “quantitative” empirical approach suggested recently by Shaun Nichols (forthcoming). The concern is whether the particular theories of reference or reference relations employed in particular philosophical discussions are actually chosen with a view to entailing or accommodating a desired philosophical outcome. I argue that such dependent selections of assumptions about (...)
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  • (1 other version)Race: Deflate or pop?Adam Hochman - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57:60-68.
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  • Questions asked and unasked: how by worrying less about the ‘really real’ philosophers of science might better contribute to debates about genetics and race.Lisa Gannett - 2010 - Synthese 177 (3):363-385.
    Increased attention paid to inter-group genetic variability following completion of the Human Genome Project has provoked debate about race as a category of classification in biomedicine and as a biological phenomenon at the level of the genome. Philosophers of science favor a metaphysical approach relying on natural kind theorizing, the underlying assumptions of which structure the questions asked. Limitations arise the more metaphysically invested and less attuned to scientific practice these questions are. Other questions—arguably, those that matter most socially and (...)
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  • Epilogue.K. Anthony Appiah - 1996 - In David B. Wilkins, Kwame Anthony Appiah & Amy Gutmann (eds.), Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton University Press. pp. 179-184.
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