Ajinkya Deshmukh

Gender and race have received significant philosophical attention recently; they are the paradigm cases of social kinds in most philosophical accounts. I argue for the inclusion of caste as a social kind because it affects the lives of many people, and because it presents itself as an important test case for philosophers of social kinds. I explain some key concepts in the caste discourse, and show how caste is similar and dissimilar to gender and race. I consider how existing theories of social kinds can be adapted to explain the key features of caste. I argue that versions of an ameliorative account, a biologically realist account, and a conferralist account do not sufficiently explain caste as a social kind. I settle in favour of a structuralist account as the most promising theory for caste.

Gender and race have received significant philosophical attention recently; they are the paradigm cases of social kinds in most philosophical accounts. I argue for the inclusion of caste as a social kind because it affects the lives of many people, and because it presents itself as an important test case for philosophers of social kinds. I explain some key concepts in the caste discourse, and show how caste is similar and dissimilar to gender and race. I consider how existing theories of social kinds can be adapted to explain the key features of caste. I argue that versions of an ameliorative account, a biologically realist account, and a conferralist account do not sufficiently explain caste as a social kind. I settle in favour of a structuralist account as the most promising theory for caste.

We admit concepts like ‘sexual harassment’ into our collective hermeneutical pool, yet hesitate to do the same with the incel notion of ‘blackpill’ or ‘monkeybranching.’ Why this disparity? Incels present themselves as marginalized, and their own efforts to create new conceptual tools as legitimate responses to such marginalization. At face value, such a standpoint aligns with anti-oppression epistemologies, according to which we should take conceptual contributions from marginalized groups seriously. This raises the question whether the ‘incel standpoint’ warrants consideration, and whether our reluctance to do so is driven by an a priori moral condemnation of their political agenda. One response is to simply reject that incels are meaningfully marginalized. This paper takes a different approach. We accept that incels suffer marginalization in some important respects, yet suggest that it is nevertheless possible to distinguish, in a non-arbitrary way, genuine attempts to overcome what Miranda Fricker calls hermeneutical injustice from conceptual innovations which merely reinforce dominant ideologies, or even constitute forms of self-deception. Thus, it is possible to accept the marginalization of incels yet have good reasons to be sceptical about their conceptual and interpretive innovations. We do so, first, by putting forward a novel understanding of what hermeneutical empowerment consists in; second, by offering three criteria to assess conceptual engineering efforts. The two proposals, combined, enable a more robust (i.e. less arbitrary and less moralized) way to assess conceptual innovations. This approach can, in principle, apply to cases beyond that of incels.

We argue that Indian speakers’ discourse about reincarnation represents a counterexample to the ordinary-language evidence for the Kripkean thesis of material-origin essentialism. Advocates of the essentiality of origins contend not only that persons have the property of coming from the two particular gametes they actually came from essentially, but also that competent ordinary-language speakers find this view intuitively compelling. We adduce evidence from Indian speakers’ discourse, both ordinary-language remarks and published literature about reincarnation, to disconfirm that contention. We argue that the view that persons are mental entities is clearly coherent, intuitive, and not obviously necessarily false. We consider mental essentialism as an alternative, according to which persons are only accidentally embodied or biological. But we argue against it in favour of a modally relative anti-essentialism: what properties count as essential to an object and what properties count as accidental is not fixed but varies according to pragmatic utility.