•  509
    Philosophical analysis and social kinds
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1): 89-118. 2006.
    [Sally Haslanger] In debates over the existence and nature of social kinds such as 'race' and 'gender', philosophers often rely heavily on our intuitions about the nature of the kind. Following this strategy, philosophers often reject social constructionist analyses, suggesting that they change rather than capture the meaning of the kind terms. However, given that social constructionists are often trying to debunk our ordinary (and ideology-ridden?) understandings of social kinds, it is not surp…Read more
  •  372
    Contemporary discussions of race and racism devote considerable effort to giving conceptual analyses of these notions. Much of the work is concerned to investigate a priori what we mean by the terms ‘ race ’ and ‘racism’ ; more recent work has started to employ empirical methods to determine the content of our “folk concepts,” or “folk theory” of race and racism. In contrast to both of these projects, I have argued elsewhere that in considering what we mean by these terms we should treat them on…Read more
  •  1615
    Feminism in metaphysics: Negotiating the natural
    In Miranda Fricker & Jennifer Hornsby (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 107--126. 2000.
  •  144
    I’ll start by giving a very brief summary of Sider’s position and will identify some points on which my own position differs from his. I’ll then raise four issues, viz., how to articulate the 3-dimensionalist view, the trade-offs between Ted’s stage view of persistence and endurance with respect to intrinsic properties, the endurantist’s response to the argument from vagueness, and finally more general questions about what’s at stake in the debate. I don’t believe that anything I say raises insu…Read more
  •  897
    What is a (social) structural explanation?
    Philosophical Studies 173 (1): 113-130. 2016.
    A philosophically useful account of social structure must accommodate the fact that social structures play an important role in structural explanation. But what is a structural explanation? How do structural explanations function in the social sciences? This paper offers a way of thinking about structural explanation and sketches an account of social structure that connects social structures with structural explanation
  •  1651
    Persistence through time
    In Michael J. Loux & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 315--354. 2003.
  •  12
    Oppressions: Racial and other
    Racism in Mind 97--123. forthcoming.
  •  71
    Gender, patriotism, and the events of 9/11
    Peace Review 15 (4): 457-461. 2003.
    In the weeks after 9/11/01, the events of that day were described in many ways. One of the most significant "spins" came from the government: initially the events were described as "a terrorist attack," but not long after they became an "act of war". We were told that what occurred was not a crime to be addressed by punishing the perpetrators, but an attack on a nation-state which requires us to take up arms against the enemy.
  •  268
    Feminism and Metaphysics: Unmasking Hidden Ontologies
    Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 99 (2): 192--196. 2000.
    Unlike feminist ethics, or feminist political philosophy, or even feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, feminist metaphysics cannot be said (yet!) to have standing as a full-fledged sub-discipline of either philosophy or feminist theory. Although one can find both undergraduate and graduate courses devoted to the other sub-fields just mentioned, a course in feminist metaphysics is a rare find; and there are few professional philosophers who would consider listing in their areas of spe…Read more
  •  687
  •  96
    Ontology and Pragmatic Paradox
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 92. 1992.
    Sally Haslanger; XIV*—Ontology and Pragmatic Paradox, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 293–314, https://doi.org/1.
  •  292
    Race, intersectionality, and method: a reply to critics
    Philosophical Studies 171 (1): 109-119. 2013.
    It is a great honor to have such excellent commentary on my book, and I am happy to have the opportunity to discuss these issues with others who have done such important work on the topics. I will reply to the commentaries separately, beginning with the critique by Charles Mills (2013) and moving on to Karen Jones’s (2013). Reply to MillsRevisiting my projectMills considers four views that pose challenges to my account of race as a hierarchical social category.(1) Kitcher (2007) and Andreasen (1…Read more
  •  855
    Humean supervenience and enduring things
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (3). 1994.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  9
    Future Genders? Future Races?
    Moral Issues in Global Perspective: Volume 2 2 102. 2006.
  •  107
    Bodies That Matter (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 30 (4): 107-109. 1998.
  •  306
    Distinguished Lecture: Social structure, narrative and explanation
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (1): 1-15. 2015.
    Recent work on social injustice has focused on implicit bias as an important factor in explaining persistent injustice in spite of achievements on civil rights. In this paper, I argue that because of its individualism, implicit bias explanation, taken alone, is inadequate to explain ongoing injustice; and, more importantly, it fails to call attention to what is morally at stake. An adequate account of how implicit bias functions must situate it within a broader theory of social structures and st…Read more
  •  159
    Persistence: Contemporary Readings (edited book)
    Bradford. 2006.
    How does an object persist through change? How can a book, for example, open in the morning and shut in the afternoon, persist through a change that involves the incompatible properties of being open and being shut? The goal of this reader is to inform and reframe the philosophical debate around persistence; it presents influential accounts of the problem that range from classic papers by W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, and Judith Jarvis Thomson to recent work by contemporary philosophers. The auth…Read more
  •  2967
    It is always awkward when someone asks me informally what I’m working on and I answer that I’m trying to figure out what gender is. For outside a rather narrow segment of the academic world, the term ‘gender’ has come to function as the polite way to talk about the sexes. And one thing people feel pretty confident about is their knowledge of the difference between males and females. Males are those human beings with a range of familiar primary and secondary sex characteristics, most important be…Read more
  •  103
    Defining Knowledge
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 8 41-55. 2000.
    With some notable exceptions, feminist epistemologists have not focused (like many contemporary analytic epistemologists) on the the semantics of claims to know: What are the truth conditions of claims of the form S knows that p? My goal in this paper is to suggest a way of approaching the task of specifying the truth conditions for knowledge while (hopefully) making clear how a broad range of feminist work that is often deemed irrelevant to the philosophical inquiry into knowledge is, in fact, …Read more
  •  437
    Studying While Black: Trust, Opportunity and Disrespect
    Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 11 (1): 109-136. 2014.
    How should we explore the relationship between race and educational opportunity? One approach to the Black-White achievement gap explores how race and class cause disparities in access and opportunity. In this paper, I consider how education contributes to the creation of race. Considering examples of classroom micropolitics, I argue that breakdowns of trust and trustworthiness between teachers and students can cause substantial disadvantages and, in the contemporary United States, this happens …Read more
  •  622
    Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements
    Res Philosophica 94 (1): 1-22. 2017.
    Racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice are more than just bad attitudes; after all, such injustice involves unfair distributions of goods and resources. But attitudes play a role. How central is that role? Tommie Shelby, among others, argues that racism is an ideology and takes a cognitivist approach suggesting that ideologies consist in false beliefs that arise out of and serve pernicious social conditions. In this paper I argue that racism is better understood as a set of practices, atti…Read more
  •  4777
    What good are our intuitions: Philosophical analysis and social kinds
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80 (1): 89-118. 2006.
    Across the humanities and social sciences it has become commonplace for scholars to argue that categories once assumed to be “natural” are in fact “social” or, in the familiar lingo, “socially constructed”. Two common examples of such categories are race and gender, but there many others. One interpretation of this claim is that although it is typically thought that what unifies the instances of such categories is some set of natural or physical properties, instead their unity rests on social fe…Read more