Social Construction and Achieving Reference1

Abstract

One influential view is that at least some putatively natural human kinds are actually social constructions, understood as some real kind of thing that is produced or sustained by our social and conceptual practices. Category constructionists share two commitments: they hold that human category terms like "race" (and racial terms) and "sex" (and sexual terms) and "homosexuality" and "perversion" actually refer to constructed categories, and they hold that these categories are widely but mistakenly taken to be natural kinds. But it is far from clear that these two commitments are consistent. The sort of mismatch between belief and underlying nature constructionists' suppose is often taken to indicate a failure of reference. Reliance on a causal-historical account of reference allows the preservation of reference, but unfortunately, constructionists' appropriation of causal historical accounts of reference is beset by difficulties that do not attend natural kind theorists' appeals to such accounts. Here, I set out these difficulties, but argue that they can be answered, allowing terms for apparently natural human kinds refer to some sort of social construction about which there is massive error.

Moral Constraints on Gender Concepts

“…Moreover, I argued that attempts like Diaz-Leon's to make facts about the contextualist semantics of 'woman' line up with facts about how we ought to treat each other morally, by building morality into semantics, 22 See Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975) for canonical treatments. See Mallon (2017) for a recent discussion of externalist views of social terms, errors in use, and other related issues. 23 As Fogal (2016) points out, "…polysemy is utterly pervasive in natural language…and it affects both content and function words.…”

Janus‐faced race: Is race biological, social, or mythical?

“…The view that race is a social kind is the most popular position in the philosophical literature on 'race' (Diaz-Leon, 2015;Haslanger, 2012;Mallon, 2017;Mills, 1998;Msimang, 2019Msimang, , 2019Pierce, 2014;Sundstrom, 2002a;Taylor, 2013). The idea of social kinds can be understood by way of analogy with kinds from the physical sciences, like gold.…”

Is “Race” Modern?

“…Yet most race theorists do believe that "race," defined as a social kind, is a product of modernity (e.g. Goldberg 2002;Holt 2002;Mallon 2017;Mills 1998;Omi and Winant, 2015). 5 The view that race is a social kind is often labelled "social constructionism about race," and I will be using this phrase to refer to the position.…”

“…The dominant view among race scholars is that “race” is modern (Alcoff 2005; Goldberg 2002; Hannaford 1996; Holt 2002; Malik 1996; Mallon 2017; Mills 1998; Omi and Winant, 2015; Smith 2015). In recent years, this view has been increasingly challenged.…”