Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:57:42.689Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Against the New Metaphysics of Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

David Ludwig
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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 nonempirical evidence owing to a plurality of equally permissible candidate meanings of “race.” Furthermore, I argue that this underdetermination leads to a deflationist diagnosis according to which disputes about the existence of human races are nonsubstantive verbal disputes. While this diagnosis resembles general deflationist strategies in contemporary metaphysics, I show that my argument does not presuppose controversial metametaphysical assumptions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 244 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I would like to thank the participants of “GRSelona2—Second Barcelona Conference on Gender, Race, and Sexuality: Issues in Metaphysics” and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

References

Alcoff, Linda. 2005. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
American Anthropological Association. 1998. “Statement on Race.” http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm.Google Scholar
Andreasen, Robin. 1998. “A New Perspective on the Race Debate.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2): 199–225.10.1093/bjps/49.2.199CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andreasen, Robin 2000. “Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?” Philosophy of Science 67:653–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andreasen, Robin 2007. “Biological Conceptions of Race.” In Philosophy of Biology, ed. Matthan, Mohan and Stephans, Christopher, 455–81. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame. 2006. “How to Decide If Races Exist?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106:365–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boxill, Bernard. 2004. “Why We Should Not Think of Ourselves as Divided by Race.” In Racism in Mind, ed. Levine, Michael and Pataki, Tamas, 209–24. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Chalmers, David. 2009. “Ontological Anti-Realism.” In Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, ed. Chalmers, David et al., 77–129. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Daniel, Reginald. 2010. Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States. University Park: Penn State University Press.Google Scholar
Diaz-Leon, Esa. 2012. “Social Kinds, Conceptual Analysis, and the Operative Concept: A Reply to Haslanger.” Humana Mente 22:57–74.Google Scholar
Edwards, A. W. F. 2003. “Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin’s Fallacy.” BioEssays 25 (8): 798–801.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feldman, Marcus, and Lewontin, Richard. 2008. “Race, Ancestry, and Medicine.” In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, ed. Koenig, Barbara et al., 89–101. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Franklin-Hall, Laura. Forthcoming. “Natural Kinds as Categorical Bottlenecks.” Philosophical Studies.Google Scholar
Gannett, Lisa. 2010. “Questions Asked and Unasked.” Synthese 177 (3): 363–85.10.1007/s11229-010-9788-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gissis, Snait. 2008. “When Is ‘Race’ a Race? 1946–2003.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (4): 437–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Glasgow, Joshua. 2003. “On the New Biology of Race.” Journal of Philosophy 100 (9): 456–74.Google Scholar
Glasgow, Joshua 2009. A Theory of Race. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Glasgow, Joshua 2010. “Another Look at the Reality of Race, by Which I Mean Race-f.” In New Waves in Metaphysics, ed. Hazlett, Allan, 54–71, New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Glasgow, Joshua, Shulman, Julie, and Covarrubias, Enrique. 2009. “The Ordinary Conception of Race in the United States and Its Relation to Racial Attitudes.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (1–2): 15–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 2005. “Why Race Still Matters.” Daedalus 134 (1): 102–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardimon, Michael. 2003. “The Ordinary Concept of Race.” Journal of Philosophy 100:437–55.10.5840/jphil2003100932CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardimon, Michael 2012. “The Idea of a Scientific Concept of Race.” Journal of Philosophical Research 37:249–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. 2010. “Language, Politics, and ‘the Folk’: Looking for ‘the Meaning’ of ‘Race.’” Monist 93:169–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haslanger, Sally 2012. Resisting Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsch, Eli. 2007. “Ontological Arguments: Interpretive Charity and Quantifier Variance.” In Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, ed. Sider, Theodore, Hawthorne, John, and Zimmerman, Dean W., 367–81. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sider, Theodore, Hawthorne, John, and Zimmerman, Dean W. 2011. Quantifier Variance and Realism: Essays in Metaontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hochman, Adam. 2013. “Against the New Racial Naturalism.” Journal of Philosophy 110 (7): 331–51.10.5840/jphil2013110625CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochman, Adam 2014. “Unnaturalised Racial Naturalism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 46:79–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jenkins, Carrie. 2013. “Merely Verbal Disputes.” Erkenntnis 79 (1): 1–20.Google Scholar
Kalinowski, Steven. 2011. “The Computer Program STRUCTURE Does Not Reliably Identify the Main Genetic Clusters within Species: Simulations and Implications for Human Population Structure.” Heredity 106:625–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, Jonathan, and Winther, Rasmus. 2012. “Prisoners of Abstraction? The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of ‘Race.’” Biological Theory 7:1–12.Google Scholar
Kitcher, Philip. 1999. “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture.” In Racism, ed. Harris, Leonard, 87–117. New York: Humanity Books.Google Scholar
Harris, Leonard 2007. “Does ‘Race’ Have a Future?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (4): 293–317.Google Scholar
Leroi, Armand. 2005. “A Family Tree in Every Gene.” Journal of Genetics 84 (1): 3–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maglo, Koffi. 2011. “The Case against Biological Realism about Race: From Darwin to the Post-genomic Era.” Perspectives on Science 19 (4): 361–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mallon, Ron. 2006. “‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic.” Ethics 116 (3): 525–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mallon, Ron, et al. 2009. “Against Arguments from Reference.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2): 332–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morning, Ann. 2011. The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pigliucci, Massimo. 2013. “What Are We to Make of the Concept of Race?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3): 272–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pigliucci, Massimo, and Kaplan, Jonathan. 2003. “On the Concept of Biological Race and Its Applicability to Humans.” Philosophy of Science 70 (5): 1161–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, Hilary. 1987. “Truth and Convention.” Dialectica 41 (1–2): 69–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Root, Michael. 2003. “The Use of Race in Medicine as a Proxy for Genetic Differences.” Philosophy of Science 70 (5): 1173–83.10.1086/377398CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Noah, et al. 2002. “Genetic Structure of Human Populations.” Science 298 (5602): 2381–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saul, Jennifer. 2006. “Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. 80 (1): 119–43.Google Scholar
Sesardic, Neven. 2010. “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept.” Biology and Philosophy 25 (2): 143–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sider, Ted. 2012. Writing the Book of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Slater, Matthew H. Forthcoming. “Natural Kindness.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.Google Scholar
Spencer, Quayshawn. 2013. “Biological Theory and the Metaphysics of Race: A Reply to Kaplan and Winther.” Biological Theory 8 (1): 114–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Quayshawn 2014a. “A Radical Solution to the Race Problem.” Philosophy of Science 81 (5): 1025–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Quayshawn 2014b. “The Unnatural Racial Naturalism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 46:38–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Templeton, Alan. 1998. “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective.” American Anthropologist 100 (3): 632–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Templeton, Alan 2013. “Biological Races in Humans.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3): 262–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Torres, Jada, and Kittles, Rick. 2007. “The Relationship between ‘Race’ and Genetics in Biomedical Research.” Current Hypertension Reports 9 (3): 196–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tuggy, David. 1993. “Ambiguity, Polysemy, and Vagueness.” Cognitive Linguistics 4 (3): 273–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Varzi, Achille. 2011. “Boundaries, Conventions, and Realism.” In Carving Nature at Its Joints, ed. Campbell, Joseph K., O’Rourke, Michael, and Slater, Matthew H., 129–53. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Winther, Rasmus, and Kaplan, Jonathan. 2013. “Ontologies and Politics of Biogenomic ‘Race.’” Theoria 60 (136): 54–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zack, Naomi. 2007. “Ethnicity, Race, and the Importance of Gender.” In Race or Ethnicity, ed. Gracia, Jorge, 101–21. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar