The project of this paper is to deliver a semantics for a broad subset of bare plural generics about racial kinds, a class which I will dub 'Type C generics.' Examples include 'Blacks are criminal' and 'Muslims are terrorists.' Type C generics have two interesting features. First, they link racial kinds with ​ socially perspectival predicates ​ (SPPs). SPPs lead interpreters to treat the relationship between kinds and predicates in generic constructions as nomic or non-accidental. Moreover, (...) in computing their content, interpreters must make implicit reference to socially privileged​ ​ perspectives which are treated as authoritative about whether a given object fits into the extension of the predicate. Such deference grants these authorities influence over both the conventional meaning of these terms and over the nature of the ​ objects ​ in the social ontology that these terms purport to describe, much the way a baseball umpire is authoritative over the meaning and metaphysics of 'strike'/​ strike ​. Second, terms like 'criminal' and 'terrorist' receive default ​ racialized ​ interpretations in which these terms conventionally token racial or ethnic identities. I show that neither of these features can be explained by Sarah-Jane Leslie's influential 'weak semantics' for generics, and show how my own 'socially perspectival semantics' fares better on both counts. Finally, I give an analysis of 'Blacks are criminal' which explores the semantic mechanisms that underlie default racialized interpretations. (shrink)

We argue that generic generalizations about racial groups are pernicious in what they communicate (both to members of that racial group and to members of other racial groups), and may be central to the construction of social categories like racial groups. We then consider how we should change and challenge uses of generic generalizations about racial groups.

Various sexist and racist beliefs ascribe certain negative qualities to people of a given sex or race. Epistemic allies are people who think that in normal circumstances rationality requires the rejection of such sexist and racist beliefs upon learning of many counter-instances, i.e. members of these groups who lack the target negative quality. Accordingly, epistemic allies think that those who give up their sexist or racist beliefs in such circumstances are rationally responding to their evidence, while those who do (...) not are irrational in failing to respond to their evidence by giving up their belief. This is a common view among philosophers and non-philosophers. But epistemic allies face three problems. First, sexist and racist beliefs often involve generic propositions. These sorts of propositions are notoriously resilient in the face of counter-instances since the truth of generic propositions is typically compatible with the existence of many counter-instances. Second, background beliefs can enable one to explain away counter-instances to one’s beliefs. So even when counter-instances might otherwise constitute strong evidence against the truth of the generic, the ability to explain the counter-instances away with relevant background beliefs can make it rational to retain one’s belief in the generic despite the existence of many counter-instances. The final problem is that the kinds of judgements epistemic allies want to make about the irrationality of sexist and racist beliefs upon encountering many counter-instances is at odds with the judgements that we are inclined to make in seemingly parallel cases about the rationality of non-sexist and non-racist generic beliefs. Thus epistemic allies may end up having to give up on plausible normative supervenience principles. All together, these problems pose a significant prima facie challenge to epistemic allies. In what follows I explain how a Bayesian approach to the relation between evidence and belief can neatly untie these knots. The basic story is one of defeat: Bayesianism explains when one is required to become increasingly confident in chance propositions, and confidence in chance propositions can make belief in corresponding generics irrational. (shrink)

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 will briefly comment on why I think that Hochman unjustifiably dismisses one of the potential sources of racial differentiation that were suggested in my paper. Before I start, though, a preliminary clarification is in order. Hochman kindly calls my article ‘‘one of the strongest defenses of racial naturalism in recent times’’, which might suggest to the reader that my goal was to offer a full-fledged biological explication of the concept of race. But in fact my ambition was more limited. As I explained: My aim in this paper was not to prove the biological reality of race. Rather, more modestly, I have tried to show that typical attempts to disconnect the concept of race from genetics have too quickly and too uncritically been accepted by many ‘‘race critics’’. (Sesardic, 2010, p. 160; italics added) I will continue defending the same position in this article. (shrink)

The phrase ‘social constructionism about race’ is so ambiguous that it is unable to convey anything very meaningful. I argue that the various versions of social constructionism about race are either false, overly broad, or better described as anti-realism about biological race. One of the central rhetorical purposes of social constructionism about race has been to serve as an alternative to biological racial realism. However, most versions of social constructionism about (...) class='Hi'>race are compatible with biological racial realism, and there are some race scholars who endorse both positions. Going a step further, David Reich has recently defended both social constructionism about race and racial hereditarianism. While Reich’s defense of racial hereditarianism is unconvincing, I show that most versions of social constructionism about race are indeed compatible with racial hereditarianism. I argue that we ought to replace the social constructionist “consensus” about race with the view that there are no races, only racialized groups. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes three concepts of "race": bio-genomic cluster/race, biological race, and social race. We map out realism, antirealism, and conventionalism about each of these, in three important historical episodes: Frank Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1962, A.W.F. Edwards' 2003 response to Lewontin (1972), and contemporary discourse. Semantics is especially crucial to the first episode, while normativity is central to the second. Upon inspection, each episode also reveals a variety of commitments to the metaphysics of (...) race. We conclude by interrogating the relevance of these scientific discussions for political positions and a post-racial future. (shrink)

A testimony is somebody else’s reported experience of what has happened. It is an indispensable source of knowledge. It only gives us historical cognition, however, which stands in a complex relation to rational or philosophical cognition: while the latter presupposes historical cognition as its matter, one needs the architectonic “eye of a philosopher” to select, interpret, and organize historical cognition. Kant develops this rationalist theory of testimony. He also practices it in his own work, especially while theorizing about (...) class='Hi'>race as a subject of natural philosophy. In three dedicated essays on this subject, he treats race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature (Naturforscher), who (as Kant puts it in the first Critique) learns from nature “like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them.” This view underwrites Kant’s use of travel reports (a type of testimony) in developing and defending his theory of race. (shrink)

In this paper I defend anti-realism about race and a new theory of racialization. I argue that there are no races, only racialized groups. Many social constructionists about race have adopted racial formation theory to explain how ‘races’ are formed. However, anti-realists about race cannot adopt racial formation theory, because it assumes the reality of race. I introduce interactive constructionism about racialized groups as a theory of racialization for anti-realists about (...) class='Hi'>race. Interactive constructionism moves the discussion away from the dichotomous (social vs. biological) metaphysics that has marred this debate, and posits that racialized groups are the joint products of a broad range of non-racial factors, which interact. (shrink)

Problematic perceptions about race damage our society. These attitudes can seem impossible to overcome, but philosophers Dr Jennifer Mensch, at Western Sydney University in Australia, and Dr Michael Olson, at Marquette University in the US, beg to differ. They are compiling a collection of 18th-century philosophical and scientific texts that helped shape the way people saw race across the Western world, and were used to justify colonisation. They believe that by exposing these historical roots of racism, opportunities (...) to improve societal attitudes to race will become easier to identify. -/- This article was produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE). (shrink)

As a response to the question posed in the title, this article presents a critical assessment of how the works of the nationalist–ideological philosophers can be seen as evidence against David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s ideas of race. Hume and Kant have certain ideas about race; if these ideas are true, then there is—and indeed, can be—no African philosophy. But there is African philosophy—that of nationalist–ideological philosophy; therefore, Hume’s and Kant’s ideas about race are incorrect.

We live in a world saturated in both racial and gendered divisions. Our focus is on one place where attitudes about these divisions diverge: language. We suspect most everyone would be horrified at the idea of adding race-specific pronouns, honorifics, generic terms, and so on to English. And yet gender-specific terms of the same sort are widely accepted and endorsed. We think this asymmetry cannot withstand scrutiny. We provide three considerations against incorporating additional race-specific terms into English, (...) and argue that these considerations also support eliminating the analogous gender-specific terms. With respect to these parts of speech, English should be no more gender-specific than it already is race-specific. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that generics (i.e., unquantified generalizations) are pervasive in communication and that when they are about social groups, this may offend and polarize people because generics gloss over variations between individuals. Generics about social groups might be particularly common on Twitter (X). This remains unexplored, however. Using machine learning (ML) techniques, we therefore developed an automatic classifier for social generics, applied it to 1.1 million tweets about people, and analyzed the tweets. (...) While it is often suggested that generics are ubiquitous in everyday communication, we found that most tweets (78%) about people contained no generics. However, tweets with generics received more “likes” and retweets. Furthermore, while recent psychological research may lead to the prediction that tweets with generics about political groups are more common than tweets with generics about ethnic groups, we found the opposite. However, consistent with recent claims that political animosity is less constrained by social norms than animosity against gender and ethnic groups, negative tweets with generics about political groups were significantly more prevalent and retweeted than negative tweets about ethnic groups. Our study provides the first ML-based insights into the use and impact of social generics on Twitter. (shrink)

Some generic generalizations have both a descriptive and a normative reading. The generic sentence “Philosophers care about the truth”, for instance, can be read as describing what philosophers in fact care about, but can also be read as prescribing philosophers to care about the truth. On Leslie’s account, this generic sentence has two readings due to the polysemy of the kind term “philosopher”. In this paper, I first argue against this polysemy account of descriptive/normative generics. In (...) response, a contextualist semantic theory for generic sentences is introduced. Based on this theory, I argue that descriptive/normative generics are contextually underspecified. (shrink)

In *Engaging Capital Emotions,* Douglas Berman and Stephanos Bibas argue that emotion is central to understanding and evaluating the death penalty, and that the emotional case for the death penalty for child rape may be even stronger than for adult murder. Both the Berman and Bibas article and the subsequent Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana (striking down the death penalty for child rape) raise difficult questions about how to measure the heinousness of crimes other than murder, and (...) about the role the pain suffered by victims and victims' families should play in this inquiry. In this Reply, I agree with the authors on the importance of confronting emotion's role in capital punishment, for reasons I discuss in Part A. However, I disagree with their claim that the moral outrage evoked by child rape supports making it a capital crime. Part B explores the difficulties of using the existence of moral outrage as a measure of appropriate punishment. Part C argues that the penal system should not merely reflect moral outrage, but channel and educate it. It suggests that the availability of the death penalty may create an anchoring effect, communicating the message that the death penalty is the proper way to express moral outrage and to honor the worth of murder victims. It explores the consequences of this message. Section II focuses on the role of emotion in deciding whether child rape should be a capital crime. Part A considers the problematic role of victim harm in determining whether the death penalty is appropriate. It explores the question, raised in Kennedy v Louisiana, of whether the effect of a capital trial on child rape victims ought to be part of the calculus. Part B argues that there are three particular problems with allowing juries to sentence child rapists to death: the deleterious effect of anger and empathy, the problem of generic prejudice, and the issue of race. (shrink)

Generic statements express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non-human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening property for artifacts, but this negativity bias did not also apply to human categories. (...) Experiment 2 examined an alternative hypothesis for this result, and Experiments 3 and 4 served as conceptual replications of the first experiment. Experiment 5 found that even preschoolers apply generics differently for humans and artifacts. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that these effects reflect differences between human and non-human categories more generally, as adults showed a negativity bias for categories of non-human animals, but not for categories of humans. These findings suggest the presence of important, early-emerging domain differences in people's judgments about generics. (shrink)

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 regarded as cogent. These criticisms often arbitrarily burden the biological category of race with some implausible connotations, which then opens the path for a quick eliminative move. However, when properly understood, the biological notion of race proves remarkably resistant to these deconstructive attempts. Moreover, by analyzing statements of some leading contemporary scholars who support social constructivism about race, I hope to demonstrate that their eliminativist views are actually in conflict with what the best contemporary science tells us about human genetic variation. (shrink)

Some generic sentences seem to be true despite the fact that almost all the members of the relevant kind are exceptions. It’s controversial whether generics of this type express relatively weak generalizations or relatively strong ones. If the latter, then we’re systematically mistaken about their truth, but they make no trouble for our semantic theorizing. In this brief note, I present several arguments for the former: sentences of the relevant type are weak generics.

Generics about social kinds (or GSKs) frequently propagate descriptions that carry normative force (e.g., 'women are emotional'). Some philosophers of language attribute this to GSKs’ tendency to transmit essentialist beliefs about social kinds. According to these accounts, utterances of GSKs implicate that there is something in the nature of social kinds that causes them to possess the properties described, and that individual members of these social kinds therefore ought to exhibit (or be expected to exhibit) these properties. (...) Here, I draw on empirical evidence to suggest an alternative account. According to my framework, an utterance of a GSK implicates a distinction between the social kind described and its salient conceptual opposite, producing what I call a dichotomizing perspective. For example, ‘women are emotional’ suggests that men are not. Importantly, such distinctions frequently persist in the societal common ground as a function of social power, in part due to their alignment with hierarchical social structures between dichotomized social kinds. This enables such GSKs to perpetuate biased patterns of attention, expectation, and behavior even in the absence of essentialist belief. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of generics in social cognition. First, we explore the nature and effects of the most common form of generics about social kinds. Second, we discuss the nature and effects of a less common but equally important form of generics about social kinds. Finally, we consider the implications of this discussion for how we ought to use language about the social world.

Generics are sentences such as Birds fly, which express generalizations. They are prevalent in speech, and as far as is known, no human language lacks generics. Yet, it is very far from clear what they mean. After all, not all birds fly—penguins don’t! -/- There are two general views about the meaning of generics in the literature, and each view encompasses many specific theories. According to the inductivist view, a generic states that a sufficient number of (...) individuals satisfy a certain property—in the example above, it says that sufficiently many birds fly. This view faces the complicated problem of spelling out exactly how many is “sufficiently many” in a way that correctly captures the intuitive truth conditions of generics. -/- An alternative, the rules and regulations view, despairs from this project and proposes instead that generics directly express rules in the world. Rules are taken to be abstract objects, which are not related to the properties of specific individuals. This view faces the difficult problem of explaining how people come to know of such rules when judging the truth of falsity of generics, and accounting for the strong intuition that a sentence such as Birds fly talks about birds, not abstract objects. -/- What seems to be beyond dispute is that generics, even if they do not express rules, are lawlike: they state non-accidental generalizations. Many scholars have taken this fact to indicate that generics are parametric on possible worlds: they refer to worlds other than the actual world. This, again, raises the problem of how people come to know about what happens in these other worlds. However, a rigorous application of standard tests for intensionality shows that generics are not, in fact, parametric on possible worlds, but only on time. This unusual property may explain much of the mystery surrounding generics. -/- Another mysterious property of generics is that although there is no language without them, there is no linguistic construction that is devoted to the expression of genericity. Rather, generics can be expressed in a variety of ways, each of which can also express nongenerics. Yet, each manifestation of generics differs subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) in its meaning from the others. -/- Even when these and other puzzles of genericity are solved, one mystery would remain: Why are generics, which are so easy to produce and understand in conversation, so difficult to analyze? (shrink)

Any adequate semantics of generic sentences (e.g., “Philosophers evaluate arguments”) must accommodate both what we call the positive data and the negative data. The positive data consists of observations about what felicitous interpretations of generic sentences are available. Conversely, the negative data consists of observations about which interpretations of generic sentences are unavailable. Nguyen argues that only his pragmatic neo-Gricean account and Sterken’s indexical account can accommodate the positive data. Lee and Nguyen have advanced the debate by arguing (...) that the negative data is a problem for both Nguyen’s and Sterken’s accounts; these two accounts seem to incorrectly predict that generics have felicitous interpretations that they, in fact, fail to have. In this paper, we advance this debate—and, more generally, the task of developing an adequate formal semantics of generics—by arguing that a neglected class of theories are compatible with both the positive data and the negative data. Specifically, we argue that treating the generic operator GEN as a relative gradable expression with a positive, upper- and lower- bounded scale helps accommodate the positive data and the negative data. While developing this view, we show how several previously developed semantics of generics may systematically accommodate both sets of data. One broad contribution of this paper is to show that, while they generate important desiderata, the positive and negative data cannot determine a unique semantics for generics. A further contribution of this paper is to highlight previously unnoted ways in which degree semantics may inform semantic theories of generic meaning. (shrink)

This paper is about an underappreciated aspect of generics: their non-specificity. Many uses of generics, utterances like ‘Seagulls swoop down to steal food’, express non-specific generalisations which do not specify their quantificational force or flavour. I consider whether this non-specificity arises as a by-product of context-sensitivity or semantic incompleteness but argue instead that generics semantically express non-specific generalisations by default as a result of quantifying existentially over more specific ones.

"Why are there 'transsexuals' but not 'transracials'?" "Why is there an accepted way to change sex, but not to change race?" I have repeatedly heard these questions from theorists puzzled by the phenomenon of transsexuality. Feminist thinkers, in particular, often seem taken aback that in the case of category switching the possibilities appear to be so different. Behind the question is sometimes an implicit concern: Does not the (hypothetical or real) example of individual “transracialism” seem politically troubling? And, if (...) it is, does not the case of transsexuality merit equivalent critique? Or, conversely, if one accepts transsexuals as people with legitimate demands (e.g., on medical resources or single-sex spaces), then would one not also be committed to accepting the putative transracial in analogous ways? Understanding the ontological constraints and possibilities with regard to transforming one’s identity is, I suggest, a project that should accompany ethical evaluation of those transformations. Under what circumstances is it (un)ethical to leave behind a gender or racial group with which one has once been affiliated? This question is, again, especially pressing for radical thinkers who endorse the claims that race and gender taxonomies are internally hierarchical and constituted through relations of oppression, domination, and normalization. Changing one’s identity under these circumstances will surely always be linked, however tenuously, to consideration of the larger political and cultural milieu in which such changes are advantageous or disadvantageous, complicit with oppressive norms and/or resistant to them. To illuminate these larger questions, in this paper, I first provide three examples of the analogy thesis in feminist thinking about race and sex change, each of which draws ethical conclusions about individual motivation, political strategy, or public policy, premised on the assumption that race and sex change are equivalent phenomena. None of these accounts consider the genealogy of each category as significant to contemporary possibilities. I next offer a descriptive analysis that highlights different norms at play in contemporary North American understandings: Sex–gender, I argue, is essentialized as a property of the individual’s body, while race is essentialized with reference to both the body and ancestry. This analysis, I conclude, shows politically significant disanalogies between the categories, and reveals the importance of genealogical accounts of race and sex in thinking ethically about changing ourselves. (shrink)

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 to which all genetic difference between populations is ‘racial’ and ‘the races’ are simply the populations we choose to call races—survived its early critiques. As it is being mobilised to support racial naturalism once more, we need to continue the debate about whether we should weaken the concept of race to mean ‘population’, or abandon it as a failed biological category. I argue that Sesardic’s case for racial naturalism is only supported by his continued mischaracterisation of anti-realism about biological race and his appeal to Dobzhansky’s authority. Rather than deflating the meaning of ‘race’, it should be eliminated from our biological ontology. (shrink)

Generic statements play a crucial role in concept learning, communication and education. Despite many efforts, the semantics of generics remain a controversial issue, as they do not seem to fit our standard theories of meaning. In this article, we attempt to shed light on this problem by focusing on how these sentences function in reasoning. Drawing on a distinction between property and diagnostic generics, we defend three theses: First, property generics are not about facts but express (...) relations between concepts. Second, generics play an important role in everyday reasoning by interacting with our expectations about the world. Third, diagnostic generics emphasise properties that separate the category in the generics from other categories in the same contrast class. We use the theory of conceptual spaces to advance measures of typicality and diagnosticity capable of modelling different aspects of generics and apply them to the modifier effect and the inverse conjunction fallacy. Finally, we discuss the pragmatics of generics. (shrink)

Nguyen argues that only his radically pragmatic account and Sterken’s indexical account can capture what we call the positive data. We present some new data, which we call the negative data, and argue that no theory of generics on the market is compatible with both the positive data and the negative data. We develop a novel version of the indexical account and show that it captures both the positive data and the negative data. In particular, we argue that there (...) is a semantic constraint that, in any context, the semantic value of GEN is upward monotone and non-symmetric. On the other hand, the pragmatic account has difficulty accommodating the negative data. This is because no pragmatic principles have been developed that can explain the negative data. In the paper, we focus on only the pragmatic account and the indexical account, but our discussion has broad implications for the debate on generics: any empirically adequate accounts of generics must be flexible enough to accommodate the positive data and yet constrained enough to accommodate the negative data. (shrink)

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the semantics of generics. And a relatively mainstream view in this work is that the semantics of generics must appeal to kinds. But what are kinds? Can we learn anything about their nature by looking at how semantic theories of generics appeal to them? In this article, we overview recent work on the semantics of generics and consider their consequences for our understanding of the metaphysics of kinds.

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 flight to reference. Drawing on the theory of reference literature and the history of meaning change in science, I develop some criteria for dealing with cases where there is uncertainty about reference. I then apply these criteria to the biological race debate. All of the criteria I develop for eliminating putative kinds are met in the case of ‘race’ as understood by twentieth century geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and his contemporary proponents, suggesting that we should eliminate it from our biological ontology. (shrink)

Scientists often communicate using generic generalizations, which are unquantified generalizations such as ‘Americans overestimate social class mobility’ or ‘sound waves carry gravitational mass’. In this paper, I explain the role of such generic generalizations in science, based on a novel theory about their characteristic meaning. According to this theory, a scientific generalization of the form ‘Ks are F’ says that F is one property based on which category K qualifies as a scientific kind. Because what it takes to qualify (...) as a scientific kind varies depending on the discipline, what a generic sentence entails also varies. Based on this semantic theory, I discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using generic language in science. (shrink)

This paper does two things. First, it interprets the work of W. E. B. Du Bois to reveal that the meanings of race terms are grounded by both a historical and an aspirational component. Race terms refer to a backward-looking component that traces the history of the group to its present time, as well as a forward-looking component that sets out values and goals for the group. Race terms thus refer to a complex cluster of concepts that (...) involve biological, sociological, historical, moral, and political properties. Second, the paper defends W. E. B. Du Bois’s conservationist thesis about races, which holds that we should maintain race talk and racial distinctions. But instead of offering philosophical evidence, this paper defends the plausibility of the conservationist thesis with evidence from contemporary biology and psychology. It argues that, instead of eliminating race terms or concepts, we should conserve and revise them. (shrink)

The three target articles constitute a powerful and persuasive call for actively anti-racist bioethics and biomedicine. All three articles reject race as a biological category. Nevertheless, they share a common commitment to racial classification. At one point, Ruqaiijah Yearby writes that “social race, like biological race, is an illusion created to establish racial hierarchy,” but mostly she writes about “races” as though they were not an illusion, but a reality. In this commentary I critique the racial (...) realism of the target articles. I argue that the biomedical fight against racism is best served by a form of anti-realist reconstructionism about race, which says that there are no races, only racialized groups—groups misunderstood to be races. Note that I do not defend the color blindness that Clarence H. Braddock (2020) persuasively rejects. Because of the role of skin color in racialization and racism, color blindness is a misguided goal. One can reject color blindness, though, without accepting racial realism... (shrink)

How do generics interact with modals? This note offers one observation about an interaction with 'might' that presents a challenge for standard theories.

The dispute about the role of class in understanding the life situations of people of color has tended to be overpolarized, between a class reductionism and an “it's only race” position. Class processes shape racial groups’ life situations. Race and class are also distinct axes of injustice; but class injustice informs racial injustice. Some aspects of racial injustice can be expressed only in concepts associated with class (e.g., material deprivation, inferior education). But other aspects of racial injustice (...) or other harms, such as racial discrimination or stigma, are not reducible to class concepts and cannot be fully addressed through class-focused policies. Overall, any attempt to fully secure racial justice for a racial group will require a combination of race-focused and class-focused policies. Anti-racist outlooks often neglect or downplay either the normative or the explanatory significance of class, or both—for example, by overlooking or downplaying the dignitary harms of class and the material harms of race; missing the historical dimension of class injustice; masking class by a narrowing of the complex normative structure of racial disparities; or not recognizing that a class-focused initiative (like raising the minimum wage) can address substantial racial justice concerns, even though not all of them. “Systemic racism” terminology recognizes class explanatorily but suppresses it normatively. Charles Mills's influential notion of “white supremacy,” while a powerful tool for conceptualizing and illuminating racial injustice, can also contribute to minimizing or masking the justice-related impact of class, as do some of Mills's specific discussions of class in various writings. (shrink)

As belief in the reality of race as a biological category among U.S. anthropologists has fallen, belief in the reality of race as a social category has risen in its place. The view that race simply does not exist—that it is a myth—is treated with suspicion. While racial classification is linked to many of the worst evils of recent history, it is now widely believed to be necessary to fight back against racism. In this article, I argue (...) that race is indeed a biological fiction, but I critique the claim that race is socially real. I defend a form of anti‐realist reconstructionism about race, which says that there are no races, only racialized groups—groups mistakenly believed to be races. I argue that this is the most attractive position about race from a metaphysical perspective, and that it is also the position most conductive to public understanding and social justice. (shrink)

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, (...) from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship. (shrink)

Our concern in this paper lies with a common argument from racial discrimination to realism about races: some people are discriminated against for being members of a particular race (i.e., racial discrimination exists), so some people must be members of that race (i.e., races exist). Error theorists have long responded that we can explain racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, so we need not explain it in terms of race itself. But to date there (...) has been little detailed discussion of whether it is better to explain racial discrimination in terms of race or in terms of racial attitudes alone. Our goal is to offer a novel and detailed argument in defense of explaining racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, by attending to the neglected phenomenon of misperception discrimination, which involves differential treatment due to misperceived race. We argue that the discriminatory action in misperception cases must be explained in the same way as cases where (according to the realist) the victim’s race is accurately perceived. Thus, the victim’s actual race cannot provide the best explanation. The main upshot of our argument is that explanatory arguments from racial discrimination to realism about race fail. (shrink)

We use generic sentences like ‘Blondes are stupid’ to express stereotypes. But why is this? Does the fact that we use generic sentences to express stereotypes mean that stereotypes are themselves, in some sense, generic? I argue that they are. However, stereotypes are mental and generics linguistic, so how can stereotypes be generic? My answer is that stereotypes are generic in virtue of the beliefs they contain. Stereotypes about blondes being stupid contain a belief element, namely a belief (...) that blondes are stupid. This belief is an attitude taken towards the same proposition expressed by the sentence ‘Blondes are stupid’, hence why we use the latter to articulate the former. -/- This generic account of stereotypes can help us better understand their inner workings. I focus on one feature of generics, variability in the types of facts that can make them true, and argue that it can explain how stereotypes shape inferential patterns and thereby guide how we treat members of stereotyped groups. This feature, in turn, illuminates the harms caused by stereotyping and suggests some courses of action. (shrink)

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 a framework that accounts for both continuities and discontinuities by looking beyond the referents of narrowly defined core concepts. By shifting the focus from narrow concepts to richer conceptions of race, racial ontologies become comparable through globally related but nonetheless distinct mappings between conceptions and property relations. The article concludes by showing how this framework can generate novel insights in case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. (shrink)

Debates over the reality of race often rely on arguments about the connection between race and science—those who deny that race is real argue that there is no significant support from science for our ordinary race concepts; those who affirm that race is real argue that our ordinary race concepts are supported by scientific findings. However, there is arguably a more fundamental concern here: How should we define race concepts in the first (...) place? The reason I claim that this definitional question is more fundamental is that our handling of the underlying definitional problem often determines the scientific support our ordinary race concepts need, and importantly the likelihood of finding such support. In short, the defini- tional question, “How do we define race?” often undercuts the question of whether race is scientifically meaningful. (shrink)

Race theorists have been unable to reach a consensus regarding the basic historical question, “is ‘race’ modern?” I argue that this is partly because the question itself is ambiguous. There is not really one question that race scholars are answering, but at least six. First, is the concept of race modern? Second, is there a modern concept of race that is distinct from earlier race concepts? Third, are “races” themselves modern? Fourth, are racialized groups (...) modern? Fifth, are the means and methods associated with racialization modern? And sixth, are the meanings attached to racialized traits modern? Because these questions have different answers, the debate about the historical origins of “race” cannot be resolved unless they are distinguished. I will explain the ways in which “race” is and is not modern by answering these questions, thereby offering a resolution to a seemingly intractable problem. (shrink)

In ‘Language and Race’, Luvell Anderson, Sally Haslanger, and Rae Langton highlight a slip of ambiguous expression exhibited by racial generics that harbor bad faith arguments, reduces social contingencies to racial essences, and masks oppression. They locate two psycholinguistic slips between classes of generics which communicate their use; one is between the characteristic generic and striking property generic and the other is between the characteristic generic and majority generic. I postulate three additional slips between classes of (...) class='Hi'>generics and speaker beliefs; one between the characteristic generic and the normative generic, another between normative generics and a speaker’s belief set, and another slip from a speaker’s belief set to a striking property generic. Together, the slips between generic classes constitute both a reception theory of the meaning of subject S’s utterance and the generic belief (re)generation process that structures the passage an assertion takes from a singular definite belief to a reinforcing normative generic inference in a minimal structure I name the key schema. (shrink)

Race is one of the most common variables in the social sciences, used to draw correlations between racial groups and numerous other important variables such as education, healthcare outcomes, aptitude tests, wealth, employment and so forth. But where concern with race once reflected the view that races were biologically real, many, if not most, contemporary social scientists have abandoned the idea that racial categories demarcate substantial, intrinsic biological differences between people. This, in turn, raises an important question (...) class='Hi'>about the significance of race in those social sciences: if there is no biological basis of race, why are racial categories useful to social scientists? More specifically, in virtue of what are racial categories a successful basis of informative, important social scientific generalizations? 2 We’ll call this social science’s race puzzle. (shrink)

How to respond to unauthorized migration and migrants is one of the most difficult questions in relation to migration theory and policy. In this commentary on Gillian Brock’s discussion of “irregular” migration, I do not attempt to give a fully satisfactory account of how to respond to unauthorized migration, but rather, using Brock’s discussion, try to highlight what I see as the most important difficulties in crafting an acceptable account, and raise some problems with the approach that Brock takes. In (...) thinking about unauthorized migration, both while trying to craft positive policies and while critiquing existing practices, we need to ask if we are most interested in a general account of how to respond to unauthorized migration, one that would apply to the large majority of cases and provide us a default approach, or if we are better served by taking a piecemeal approach, looking at why certain people or certain groups should be exempt from removal, even if they would otherwise be liable to it. In this paper, I will focus primarily on this distinction, and argue that it is at least important to provide an account of the "generic unauthorized". (shrink)

I argue that generic generalizations expressed in language (i.e. ‘generics’) are apt for clinical reasoning. I introduce generics and describe two problems in the use and interpretation of generics: Generics may license inaccurate judgements about the frequency of events or properties within a group (i.e. a problem with the ‘truth-aptness’ of generics) and may facilitate problematic beliefs about social kinds (e.g. prejudice or essentializing). I provide an account of clinical reasoning and describe some (...) features of what I call ‘good’ clinical reasoning. I offer examples of generics in clinical contexts and examine how the two problems with generics (i.e. of truth-aptness and social generics) can harm patients and impair clinical reasoning. However, I ultimately argue that generics are important for good clinical reasoning because they track ‘conspicuous’ features of disease processes (e.g. severe possible outcomes). Further, I argue that prejudicial generics are often irrational to believe. Social generics that are rational to believe need not lead to problematic implicatures about social kinds and can instead facilitate meaningfully articulating societal injustices. I then argue that statistical statements, which are tempting alternatives to generics in clinical reasoning, are no better than generics for good clinical reasoning. (shrink)

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 case for incorporating empirical evidence about public reasoning into philosophical debates about competing specifications of the concept of race. (shrink)

Policy-making must always pay attention to race. That is the central claim of this chapter. Regardless of whether some particular policy debate is ostensibly “racial”, policy-makers must attend to questions of race, because race is a ubiquitous, but frequently unnoticed, feature of our world. I examine the type of philosophical question about race that I think philosophers and policy-makers would do well to examine and consider how the question “What is race?” is pertinent to (...) policy debate. Examples will be drawn from Australia, the United States, and Britain to illustrate these abstract arguments. (shrink)

I argue that moral principles involve the same sort of generalization as ordinary yet elusive generic generalizations in natural language such as ‘Tigers are striped’ or ‘Peppers are spicy’. A notable advantage of the generic view is that it simultaneously allows for pessimism and optimism about the role and status of moral principles in our lives. It provides a new perspective on the nature of moral principles on which principles are not apt for determining the moral status of particular (...) actions while they may be apt, and even fundamental, to our acquisition of moral knowledge. A natural consequence of the view is variation among moral principles, with some regularly warranting exceptions and some appearing arguably exceptionless. I will also argue that this generic conception of moral principles has significant advantages, as a normative model of moral reasoning, over the view of moral principles as defaults advanced in recent years. (shrink)

Philosophical reflection on racial profiling tends to take one of two forms. The first sees it as an example of ‘statistical discrimination,’ (SD), raising the question of when, if ever, probabilistic generalisations about group behaviour or characteristics can be used to judge particular individuals.(Applbaum 2014; Harcourt 2004; Hellman, 2014; Risse and Zeckhauser 2004; Risse 2007; Lippert-Rasmussen 2006; Lippert-Rasmussen 2007; Lippert-Rasmussen 2014) . This approach treats racial profiling as one example amongst many others of a general problem in egalitarian political (...) philosophy, occasioned by the fact that treating people as equals does not always require, or permit, us to treat them the same. The second form is concerned with how racial profiling illuminates the nature, justification, and reproduction of hierarchies of power and privilege based on skin colour and morphology. This form of reflection on racial profiling is therefore less about the justification for judging people based on the characteristics of the group to which they (appear to) belong, and more concerned with the specific ways in which the association of racialized minorities – and, in particular, black people – with crime, contributes to, and reflects, racial inequality, and oppression.(Kennedy 1998; Zack, 2015; Lever, 2005; Lever 2007). Both approaches to profiling have much to recommend them and, taken together, they form an essential component of the political philosophy of race. The statistical approach has the merits of linking racial profiling, as practice, to a body of other practices that generate and justify inequalities based on factors other than race, but it typically offers little by way of insight into the role of racial profiling itself in sustaining racial inequality and injustice. The racial construction approach, for obvious reasons, is rather better at the latter task, but its insights tend to come at the price of a broader understanding of the ways in which inequality is reproduced and justified, or of the ethical dilemmas raised by our competing claims to security. As we will see, insights from both approaches can be synthesized to clarify what, if anything, is wrong with racial profiling and what broader conclusions for equality and security follow from the study of profiling. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the metaphysics of race as a valuable philosophical project against deflationism about race. The deflationists argue that metaphysical debate about the reality of race amounts to a non-substantive verbal dispute that diverts attention from ethical and practical issues to do with ‘race.’ In response, I show that the deflationists mischaracterize the field and fail to capture what most metaphysicians of race actually do in their work, which is almost (...) always pluralist and very often normative and explicitly political. Even if debates about the reality of race turn out to be verbal disputes, they are substantive, and worth having. (shrink)

Bare plural generic sentences pervade ordinary talk. And yet it is extremely controversial what semantics to assign to such sentences. In this paper, I achieve two tasks. First, I develop a novel classification of the various standard uses to which bare plurals may be put. This “variety data” is important—it gives rise to much of the difficulty in systematically theorizing about bare plurals. Second, I develop a novel account of bare plurals, the radical account. On this account, all bare (...) plurals fail to express propositions. The content of a bare plural has to be pragmatically “completed” by a speaker in order for her to make an assertion. At least the content of a quantifier expression has to be supplied. But sometimes, the content of a sentential operator or modal verb is also supplied. The radical account straightforwardly explains the variety data: Speakers’ communicative intentions vary wildly across different contexts. (shrink)