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79Reviving Rawls's linguistic analogy inside and outIn W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology Vol. 2, Mit Press. 2008.Marc Hauser, Liane Young, and Fiery Cushman’s paper is an excellent contribution to a now resurgent attempt (Dwyer, 1999; Harman, 1999; Mikhail, 2000) to explore and understand moral psychology by way of an analogy with Noam Chomsky’s pathbreaking work in linguistics, famously suggested by John Rawls (1971). And anyone who reads their paper ought to be convinced that research into our innate moral endowment is a plausible and worthwhile research program. I thus begin by agreeing that even if the…Read more
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554Making race out of nothing : psychologically constrained social rolesIn Harold Kincaid (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford University Press. 2012.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. Thi…Read more
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