Kevin Richardson

Logical inferentialism is the view that the meaning of a logical expression consists in its inferential role. It is often contrasted with logical realism, the view that there exists mind-independent, metaphysically privileged logical structure. While logical inferentialism is typically regarded as metaphysically neutral, I argue that this neutrality is illusory: standard inferentialism entails logical idealism, the view that logical truth and consequence are mind-dependent. Moreover, I argue that logical idealism is defensible: rather than undermining inferentialism, it reveals its deep connection to contemporary forms of idealism.

According to race localism, there is no meaningful sense in which a person’s race remains the same across contexts as different as the United States, Brazil, Senegal, and so on. Against localism, race globalists argue that race is global because there are transnational connections between racialized groups. I argue that both positions capture important insights but rely on a misleading category-first framing of race. I propose a spatial theory of race, according to which race concepts and categories pick out regions of a multidimensional racial space, where the relevant dimensions include ancestry, skin color, and social identity. Race is local because different contexts racialize groups in different ways, leading to different racial kinds. Race is global because racialization operates against a shared set of dimensions. The spatial theory explains how race can vary across contexts while remaining systematically connected across them.

Human languages are powerful representational tools, but can they represent every possible kind of entity? This seems unlikely. We can easily imagine languages—God’s language, or that of advanced extraterrestrials—that represent features of reality that our actual languages fail to capture. Eklund (2024) calls these alien languages. Yet despite the intuitive pull of this picture, it is unclear what alien languages, so understood, would amount to. I argue that there are no alien languages in this sense; human languages can represent any entity that can be linguistically represented at all. Still, I propose an alternative sense in which a language can be alien. On my cognitive account of alien language, a language is alien when linguistic understanding of it requires cognitive resources not used in understanding human languages. This account better explains the sense in which we can and cannot speak an alien language. We can represent whatever alien languages represent, but understanding alien languages may require cognitive resources that we lack.

Can we draw deep metaphysical conclusions about non-linguistic reality by relying purely on facts about language? In Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality, Thomas Hofweber gives an affirmative answer. He appeals to what he calls inescapable concepts, concepts that humans cannot rationally dispense with, for the purpose of rational inquiry. His paradigm inescapable concepts include logical concepts (AND), semantic concepts (TRUTH), and normative concepts (OUGHT). He argues that such concepts must apply to reality, independently of further non-linguistic facts. In this paper, I argue that Hofweber’s theory both overgenerates and undergenerates inescapable concepts. In response to these problems, I propose that we adopt a more flexible notion of inescapability. According to the functionalist account of inescapable concepts, inescapability applies primarily to families of concepts. A family of concepts is inescapable if and only if you cannot rationally jointly replace every member of that family of concepts, for the purposes of rational inquiry. Individual concepts are only inescapable relative to a family of concepts individuated by a conceptual function. By taking concepts to be relatively inescapable, we make the theory of inescapable concepts more plausible and thereby show that we can genuinely bridge the language-metaphysics gap.

Instead of identifying as men or women, many people now identify as non-binary, agender, or genderqueer. Instead of identifying as gay or straight, many people now identify as bisexual, pansexual, or demisexual. There is an emerging shift away from identifying with the standard binary gender (male/female) and sexual orientation (gay/straight) categories. This shift has frightened some and been a source of confusion for others. This book presents a new way to understand gender and sexuality beyond the binary categories: the spatial theory. According to the spatial theory, a person’s gender or sexuality should be understood as a location within a multidimensional space. Just as the boundaries of countries divide up geographical territories, social boundaries divide up regions of gender and sexuality space. And just as each person has an exact location represented by a GPS coordinate, each person has a gender and sexual location that represents their distinctive way of being gendered or sexually oriented. The spatial approach to gender and sexuality fundamentally understands gender and sexuality as complex, diverse, and continuous. The spatial framework is a more accurate (and more just) way to understand the diversity of gender and sexuality.

One can be in solidarity with a social movement. For example, one can be in solidarity with the movement for black lives; perhaps this looks like wearing “Black Lives Matter” shirts. Alternatively, one can be in solidarity with feminists by attending a protest by a local feminist group. But what does it mean to be in solidarity with a social movement? Existing theories of solidarity explain what it means to be in solidarity with small, ideologically homogeneous social groups. This model of solidarity cannot be applied to large, complex social movements. The goal of this chapter is to give an account of what it means to be in solidarity with a social movement. On my view, being in solidarity with a social movement consists of being rationally responsive to movement actors while thinking of oneself as a movement actor.

In Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality, Thomas Hofweber argues for what he calls a reformed neo‐Kantian approach to metaphysics. On this approach, we can make substantive conclusions about reality on the basis of reflections about language alone. He appeals to what he calls inescapable concepts, concepts that humans cannot rationally dispense of, for the purpose of rational inquiry. He argues that such concepts – like the concepts of TRUTH and FACT – must apply to reality, independently of further non‐linguistic facts. In this paper, I argue that Hofweber's reformed neo‐Kantianism faces a historicist objection: purportedly inescapable concepts are more plausibly understood as historically contingent concepts; they are neither timeless nor inescapable. If the historicist objection is correct, neo‐Kantianism is infeasible. Nonetheless, I argue that a version of the idealist project is still worth pursuing. On the neo‐Hegelian approach to metaphysics, there are inescapable conceptual functions, where different concepts satisfy these functions throughout history. Neo‐Hegelians retain the basic idealist insight while making sense of the historical contingency of our conceptual repertoire.

In cases of institutional racism, the racist actor is not an individual who is racist or possesses racist motives; rather, it is an institution that embodies a racist ideology or otherwise has a racist impact. While the concept of institutional racism is useful, it is a general notion that fails to characterize specific forms of institutional racism. The goal of this paper is to define racial domination and show how it allows us to perspicuously describe common cases of racial injustice and institutional racism. Roughly: to racially dominate a group is to take advantage of their racial vulnerability in order to extract benefits from them.

The metaphysics of gender has largely focused on examples of interpersonal, linguistically articulated misrecognition. Cases of linguistic misgendering center an interaction between two people where one person refuses to recognize the gender identity of another. In light of these cases, metaphysicians of gender have devoted substantial attention to defining gender kinds and concepts. In this paper, I consider a different set of examples. I discuss cases of structural, materially articulated violence, patterns of targeted structural violence toward trans and gender-nonconforming people. Specifically, I argue that this kind of structural violence is explained by the gender binary, a social structure that (a) dictates the descriptive expectation that there are two biologically grounded genders, male and female, and (b) divides up social roles based on whether a person is male or female. I claim that metaphysicians of gender need to give a real definition of the gender binary, and I present my own preliminary account. The methodological upshot of this paper is that the metaphysics of gender is not limited to the task of determining who is (or is not) really a member of a gender kind.

Conceptual ethics concerns the question: what concepts ought we use? The goal of this paper is to answer a related foundational question: what determines what concepts we ought to use? According to one view, it is our values — our goals, interests, purposes, etc. — that determinate what concepts we ought to use. Call this the _subjective value determinacy thesis_ (SVT). In this paper, I take a critical look at SVT. While SVT is intuitive, it cannot make sense of conceptual disputes that are resolved by factors that are partly independent of our values. On my view, what concept we ought to use will be settled partly on the basis of moral or political values that we do not always possess. This is the _objective value determinacy thesis_ (OVT). Our values do not settle what concepts we ought to use; rather, they settle what options are considered relevant for the purposes of normative deliberation. One surprising consequence of OVT is that many conceptual disputes that are ostensibly non-moral — like engineering the concept of truth — have a fundamentally moral basis.

In her book Social Goodness, Charlotte Witt gives an account of the normativity of social norms, crucially appealing to (and naming) social role normativity. Social role normativity is a distinctive kind of normativity that follows from social roles. For example, teachers ought to teach and students ought to do their homework. According to Witt's artisanal model of social role normativity, we should make sense of social role normativity by reference to artisanal roles, like being a carpenter. Just as carpenters have skills, techniques, and expertise associated with their craft, social roles have skills, techniques, and expertise associated with them. The artisanal model presents the individual craftsperson, taught by a uniquely qualified expert, as the paradigm. Because of this, I argue that the artisanal model struggles to capture the messiness of the actual world, where expertise is distributed, unstable, and contested. To accommodate the real world, we should move away from Witt's individualistic artisanal model. Instead of focusing on individual artisans, our account of social role normativity should focus on communities and institutions that promote artisanal practices.

The goal of this article is to motivate the idea of a social reason and demonstrate its usefulness in social theorizing. For example, in a society that values getting married young, the fact that one is young is a reason to get married. In racist and sexist societies, we have social reasons to be racist and sexist. Social reasons give rise to social requirements and obligations, where these requirements often conflict with prudential and moral requirements. My application of reasons to social philosophy parallels Charles Mills' and Carole Pateman's applications of social contract theory to political philosophy. While they use social contract theory to make sense of patriarchy and white supremacy, I use the theory of normative reasons to make sense of social injustice. The theory of normative reasons meets non-ideal theory.

Critics of social injustice argue that the agent of transformative social change will (or should) be a mass agent; namely, an agent that is large, complex, and geographically dispersed. Traditional theories of collective agency emphasize the presence of shared intentions and common knowledge, but mass agents are too large for such cohesion. To make sense of mass agency, I suggest a new approach. On the solidarity theory of mass agency, a mass agent is composed of (a) organizers who intend to fight for social change and (b) supporters who are in solidarity with organizers.

Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or accept widespread social injustices. Social reality is also obscured in cases where ordinary thought and language simply is not perspicuous enough to represent the social objects, kinds, and structures that are central to understanding social injustice. In both cases, I argue that the critical social ontologist will benefit from using the tools and concepts of fundamental metaphysics.

An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy follows from the existence of constitutive social construction; there is indeterminacy in the social world because there is indeterminacy in how the social world is constructed.

It is natural to think that social groups are concrete material particulars, but this view faces an important objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these intuitions to show that the materialist view must be abandoned. I propose an alternative explanation. Social groups are concrete material particulars, but there is a psychological explanation of nonidentity intuitions. Social groups appear coincident but nonidentical because they are perceived to be governed by conflicting social norms.

According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of substantivity can be understood in a way that accommodates gender pluralism. First, I claim that gender terms (at least as used in the ontology room) are referentially indeterminate, where referential indeterminacy holds in virtue of the way the world is. Second, I propose a degree-theoretic (or scalar) account of metaphysical substantivity; genders are substantial to the degree that they are determinate. I conclude that gender is relatively, although not absolutely, substantial.

A generic grounding claim is a grounding claim that isn’t about any particular entity or fact. For example, consider the claim: an act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness. One natural idea is that generic grounding claims state mere regularities of ground. So if an act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness, then every possible right act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness. The generic claim generalizes over particular grounding relations. In this essay, I argue that this simple story is wrong. Generic grounding claims are not merely quantificational; rather, they express real definitions, where real definitions are (in part) claims about essence. My view has two major upshots: ('i') it makes better sense of debates where generic grounding claims are at issue (like debates about moral laws); ('ii') it clarifies the distinction between reductive and non-reductive metaphysical theories.