Ron Mallon

What does it mean to say a thing is socially constructed? What is implied by something's being a social construction? I explore these questions in what follows, focusing on constructionist claims concerning human kinds. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the dissertation and discusses a number of background questions relevant to the realist, naturalistic approach to social constructionism I take. ;In Chapter 2, I develop the notion of a social role and review a body of empirical literature suggesting that social roles explain many behavioral regularities. I go on to suggest that the stability of such roles might be explained by the stability of social conventions. I conclude that such social roles count as causally homeostatic kinds, that are explanatory, stable and can support induction. ;In Chapter 3 , I offer a case study of the social construction of concepts, suggesting that what appears to be ail empirical dispute between evolutionary approaches to the human emotions and those who favor a social constructionist account may be explained as a dispute over the theory of meaning and of reference. Once one sets aside this semantic dispute, the empirical questions are much more tractable. ;In Chapter 4, I examine the dispute over racial constructionism. I distinguish two aspects of the debate---one centered on the metaphysics of race and the other on the normative status of 'race' talk. I ask whether various metaphysical readings of racial constructionism can achieve the normative goals some racial conservationist constructionists set for it. I conclude that constructionism leaves the crucial normative questions about 'race' talk in place. ;Finally, in Chapter 5, I consider the project of revealing putatively natural categories to be social constructions, examining three models of how such research is intended to undermine constructed categories. I conclude that two models are unsuccessful, but that a third model I develop may explain how such research might be efficacious. I briefly discuss the implications of this model in attempting to understand contemporary putative social constructions such as race and gender.

Evolutionary psychology and social constructionism are widely regarded as fundamentally irreconcilable approaches to the social sciences. Focusing on the study of the emotions, we argue that this appearance is mistaken. Much of what appears to be an empirical disagreement between evolutionary psychologists and social constructionists over the universality or locality of emotional phenomena is actually generated by an implicit philosophical dispute resulting from the adoption of different theories of meaning and reference. We argue that once this philosophical dispute is recognized, it can be set to the side. When this is done, it becomes clear that the two approaches to the emotions complement, rather than compete with, one another

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 a third group maintains racial population naturalism, the view that races may exist as biologically salient populations albeit ones that do not have the biologically determined social significance once imputed to them.[vii] The three groups thus seem to disagree fundamentally upon the metaphysical character of race.

Recent work by Joshua Knobe has established that people are more likely to describe bad but foreseen side‐effects as intentionally performed than good but foreseen side‐effects (this is sometimes called the ‘Knobe effect’ or the ‘side‐effect effect’. Edouard Machery has proposed a novel explanation for this asymmetry: it results from construing the bad side‐effect as a cost that must be incurred to receive a benefit. In this paper, I argue that Machery’s ‘trade‐off hypothesis’ is wrong. I do this by reproducing the asymmetry between judgments about good and bad side‐effects in cases that cannot plausibly be construed as trade‐offs.

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 reference give us little reason to think the assumptions are true. I go on to argue that if we became convinced that such assumptions really are chosen simply to ensure a desired outcome, it would give us reason for skepticism about arguments from reference since it would undermine our sense that such arguments tracked any independent truth about the reference of our words or concepts.

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 linguistic analogy turns out to be weak, it can do titanic work in serving, "as an important guide to empirical research, opening doors to theoretically distinctive questions that, to date, have few answers" (p. XXX). Granting the importance of the empirical investigation of moral judgment generally, and of research designed to probe the linguistic analogy specifically, I will nonetheless argue that there is simply no evidence that there is a specialized moral faculty, no evidence that the stronger version of the linguistic analogy is correct (p. XXX).

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 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.

Social constructionist explanations of human thought and behavior hold that our representations produce and regulate the categories, thoughts, and behaviors of those they represent. Performative versions of constructionist accounts explain these thoughts and behaviors as part of an intentional, strategic performance that is elicited and regulated by our representations of ourselves. This paper has four aims. First, I sketch a causal model of performative social constructionist claims. Second, I articulate a puzzling feature of performative claims that makes them seem especially implausible: the puzzle of intention and ignorance. Like other constructionists, performative constructionists are especially interested in explaining thoughts and behaviors that are widely but mistakenly believed to be the unintentional consequences of membership in a natural kind. But why doesn’t the intentional performance of a category undermine this ignorance? My third aim is to resolve this puzzle. I suggest that a plausible understanding can be found in the failure to locate one’s mental states in a causal explanation of one’s thoughts and actions. Finally, I argue that this model implies that the sorts of theories we offer of particular behaviors can create or destroy agency and responsibility with regard to those behaviors

A core question of contemporary social morality concerns how we ought to handle racial categorization. By this we mean, for instance, classifying or thinking of a person as Black, Korean, Latino, White, etc.² While it is widely FN:2 agreed that racial categorization played a crucial role in past racial oppression, there remains disagreement among philosophers and social theorists about the ideal role for racial categorization in future endeavors. At one extreme of this disagreement are short-term eliminativists who want to do away with racial categorization relatively quickly (e.g. Appiah, 1995; D’Souza, 1996; Muir, 1993; Wasserstrom, 2001/1980; Webster, 1992; Zack, 1993, 2002), typically because they view it as mistaken and oppressive. At the opposite end of the spectrum, long-term conservationists hold that racial identities and communities are beneficial, and that racial categorization —suitably reformed —is essential to fostering them (e.g. Outlaw, 1990, 1995, 1996). While extreme forms of conservationism have fewer proponents in academia than the most radical eliminativist positions, many theorists advocate more moderate positions. In between the two poles, there are many who believe that racial categorization is valuable (and perhaps necessary) given the continued existence of racial inequality and the lingering effects of past racism (e.g. Haslanger, 2000; Mills, 1998; Root, 2000; Shelby, 2002, 2005; Sundstrom, 2002; Taylor, 2004; Young, 1989). Such authors agree on the short-term need for racial categorization in at least some domains, but they often differ with regard to its long-term value

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 “sex” 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.

Social “construction,” “constructionism” and “constructivism” are terms in wide use in the humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks, facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a “naturalistic” approach—an approach that treats science as a central and successful (if sometimes fallible) source of knowledge about the world. If there is any core idea of social constructionism, it is that some object or objects are caused or controlled by social or cultural factors rather than natural factors, and if there is any core motivation of such research, it is the aim of showing that such objects are or were under our control: they could be, or might have been, otherwise.

Recent work by Joshua Knobe has established that people are far more likely to describe bad but foreseen side effects as intentionally performed than good but foreseen side effects (this is sometimes called the 'Knobe effect' or the 'side-effect effect.' Edouard Machery has proposed a novel explanation for this asymmetry: it results from construing the bad side effect as a cost that must be incurred to receive a benefit. In this paper, I argue that Machery's 'trade-off hypothesis' is wrong. I do this by reproducing the asymmetry between judgments about good and bad side effects in cases that cannot plausibly be construed as trade-offs.

Among race theorists, the view that race is a social construction is widespread. While the term ‘ social construction’ is sometimes intended to mean merely that race does not constitute a robust, biological natural kind, it often labels the stronger position that race is real, but not a biological kind. For example, Charles Mills writes that, ‘‘the task of those working on race is to put race in quotes, ‘race’, while still insisting that nevertheless, it exists ’’. It is to ‘‘make a plausible social ontology neither essentialist, innate, nor transhistorical, but real enough for all that’’. Racial constructionism, thus conceived, is a metaphysical position that contrasts both with the view that race is an important biological kind and with the more recent claim that race does not exist. The desire for a constructionist metaphysics of race emerges against the background of a cluster of normative disputes, including

In recent years, numerous articles and books in the humanities and the social sciences have been devoted to understanding the ascription of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, mental illness, and other ‘human kind’ concepts to persons. What may be more surprising given the enormous volume of this research and the diversity of its sources is that much of it shares a common commitment to understanding the categories picked out by these concepts in an non- essentialist way. For example, Iris Marion Young suggests of social groups (including races, genders, classes, age groups, and ethnicities) that they.

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have some advice for moral philosophers and deontic logicians trying to understand deontic notions like ought: give up trying to provide a univocal, domain-general treatment. The domain-specific character of human cognition means that such a research program is probably fruitless and probably pointless. It is probably fruitless, since a univocal account of the meaning of "ought" will not capture the multiple inferential patterns of deontic reasoning exhibited in different contexts (and similarly for lots of other words like "obligation," "entitlement," etc. - but let’s stick with "ought"). And it is probably pointless, because even if a domain general logic can be developed, it will "fail to capture major distinctions the human mind makes when reasoning deontically" (ms 5). As a result, it is "not likely to be widely understood and adopted" so it will "not succeed in guiding ethical decisions beyond an esoteric circle of specialists" (ms 5).