M.A. Diamond-Hunter

Measurement of racial populations is commonplace in many social sciences, and metaphysical accounts for the reality of race implicitly assume race is real because measurements of racial populations are successful, and therefore are best explained by a realist account of race. This paper challenges the first premise in this implicit argument: measurements of race in the social sciences are not successful due to a number of epistemic issues with the use of race in social-scientific survey instruments. The paper concludes by pointing towards a metaphysical solution that does not assume that empirical measures of race are coherent.

This chapter aims to be a comprehensive (yet non-exhaustive) overview of the ways the concept of race appears across medical practice - including historical uses, patient–physician interactions, pharmaceutical development, the use of machine learning tools in clinical settings, the recording of medical statistics, the controversial and continued use of race norming in medicine, and the ways in which racism affects patient diagnoses and outcomes. The focus on the ways that the concept is used in medical practice is to illustrate that an anti-realist ontological position (rather than a biological realist or a social constructionist one) is the best way to have a logically consistent position that can accommodate the empirical examples discussed in the chapter. The chapter concludes with a sketch of how to best deal with these issues with an eye toward future developments in medicine.

The growth in the direct-to-consumer genetic testing industry poses a number of challenges for healthcare practice, among a number of other areas of concern. Several companies providing this service send their customers reports including information variously referred to as genetic ethnicity, genetic heritage, biogeographic ancestry, and genetic ancestry. In this article, we argue that such information should not be used in healthcare consultations or to assess health risks. Far from representing a move toward personalized medicine, use of this information poses risks both to patients as individuals and to racialized ethnic groups because of the way it misrepresents human genetic diversity.

In this paper, I plan to show that the use of a specific population concept—Millstein’s Causal Interactionist Population Concept (CIPC)—has interesting and counter-intuitive ramifications for discussions of the reality of biological race in human beings. These peculiar ramifications apply to human beings writ large and to individuals. While this in and of itself may not be problematic, I plan to show that the ramifications that follow from applying Millstein’s CIPC to human beings complicates specific biological racial realist accounts—naïve or otherwise. I conclude with the notion that even if biological races do exist—by fulfilling all of the criteria needed for Millstein’s population concept (which, given particular worries raised by Gannett (Synthese 177:363–385, 2010), and Winther and Kaplan (Theoria 60:54–80, 2013) may not)—the lower-bound limit for the scope of biological racial realism is at the level of populations, and as such they cannot say anything about whether or not individual organisms themselves have races.

In 2018 Academic Placement Data and Analysis ran a survey of doctoral students and recent graduates on the topics of diversity and inclusivity in collaboration with the Graduate Student Council and Data Task Force of the American Philosophical Association. We submitted a preliminary report in Fall 2018 that describes the origins and procedure of the survey [1]. This is our final report on the survey. We first discuss the demographic profile of our survey participants and compare it to the United States general population, its doctoral students, and APA membership, finding several areas of underrepresentation (i.e. gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, and veteran status). We then discuss the results of questions regarding diversity and inclusivity. We find, for instance, that participant comfort in philosophy depends on gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and language status and that participants most often mentioned the theme of diversity when asked how philosophy could be more inclusive. Finally, we discuss the results of questions related to graduate program and placement. We find, for example, that underrepresented graduates are both less likely to recommend their graduate program to others and less likely to prefer an academic job. We close by making some recommendations for the APA and for the discipline based on our findings.