'Race': Normative, not metaphysical or semantic

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 525-551

  Mallon, Ron ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33745452199     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/500495     Document Type: Review

References (159)

1. K. Anthony Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race," in Overcoming Racism and Sexism, ed. Linda A. Bell and David Blumenfeld (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 59-78, quote on 75;
2. Lucius Outlaw, "Toward a Critical Theory of 'Race,'" in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 58-82, quote on 58;
3. Philip Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), 87-120, quote on 90.
4. For example, Appiah, "Uncompleted Argument";
5. Dinesh D'Souza, "The One-Drop-of-Blood Rule," Fortes 158 (1996): 48;
6. Donal Muir, "Race: The Mythic Root of Racism," Sociological Inquiry 63 (1993): 339-50;
7. Yehudi Webster, The Racialization of America (New York: St. Martin's, 1992);
8. Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993),
9. and Philosophy of Science and Race (New York: Routledge, 2002).
10. Charles Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998);
11. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994);
12. Lucius Outlaw, "Toward a Critical Theory of 'Race,'"
13. and "On W. E. B. DuBois's 'The Conservation of Races,'" in Bell and Blumenfeld, Overcoming Racism and Sexism, 79-102 and On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996);
14. Adrian Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black," Transition 58 (1992): 4-32;
15. Michael Root, "How We Divide the World," Philosophy of Science 67 (2000): S628-S639;
16. Ronald Sundstrom, "Racial Nominalism," Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002): 193-210;
17. Paul Taylor, "Appiah's Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Reality of Race," Social Theory and Practice 26 (2000): 103-28.
18. The term "social construction" is sometimes used to identify the first view, the view that race does not exist at all (and is merely a social construction). In contrast, I use it as a label for the view defended by the second group, the view that race exists but is a social construction.
19. Robin Andreasen, "A New Perspective on the Race Debate," British Journal of the Philosophy of Science 49 (1998): 199-225,
20. and "Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?" Philosophy of Science 67 (2000): S653-S666;
21. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture."
22. To say these questions are normative is also to imply that they are action guiding and may involve a wide range of moral, semantic, prudential, or other considerations.
23. The rough distinction between eliminativists and conservationists admits of many finer distinctions. For example, because elimination of 'race' talk takes time, theorists differ over the time frame within which they see eliminativism operating. Many political conservatives and critics of multiculturalism (e.g., D'Souza, "One-Drop-of-Blood-Rule";
24. Webster, Racialization of America)
25. seek the immediate elimination of 'race' talk because they view it as quite harmful. More liberal skeptics, like Appiah, tend to wish that the significance attached to racial classification will decline over time (and perhaps ultimately disappear). Theorists also differ regarding the domains within which they endorse or reject the use of 'race' talk. For example, Appiah is relatively comfortable with the term 'race' being used in some discourses of population genetics, but he would like its importance decreased in marking social identity. See K. Anthony Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections," in Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, ed. K Anthony Appiah and Amy Guttmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 30-105.
26. Ronald Sundstrom agrees with Appiah that the policing of racial identity can be oppressive, but he also argues for the value of using 'race' talk to pick out racial properties (conceived as social constructions) in understanding generalizations in the social sciences. See Sundstrom, "Racial Nominalism," 193-210.
27. For example, Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity";
28. Joshua Glasgow, "On the New Biology of Race "Journal of Philosophy 100 (2003): 456-74;
29. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture";
30. Mills, Blackness Visible,
31. Zack, Race and Mixed Race
32. , and Philosophy of Science and Race.
33. Here I describe appeal to a theory of reference as the "semantic" strategy. If you prefer to distinguish the theory of reference from semantics, feel free to think of it as the "reference strategy."
34. Here I am developing earlier arguments in Andreasen, "A New Perspective,"
35. and "Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?";
36. Ron Mallon and Stephen P. Stich, "The Odd Couple: The Compatibility of Social Construction and Evolutionary Psychology," Philosophy of Science 67 (2000): 133-54;
37. and Ron Mallon, "Passing, Traveling, and Reality: Social Construction and the Metaphysics of Race," Nous 38 (2004): 644-73.
38. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 54.
39. Racial theorists should want something stronger than the rejection of racial essences. They should want to reject the claim that race is an interesting or useful biobehavioral kind (a kind linking biology with behavior) of any sort. Because nonessentialist accounts of races are compatible with members of the race instantiating a biobehayioral kind that supports generalizations, the rejection of racialism on the grounds that there are no racial essences is too weak (Ron Mallon, "Human Categories beyond Nonessentialism," Journal of Political Philosophy [forthcoming]). I ignore these complications here.
40. For debate over the continued usefulness of racial classification in scientific or medical endeavors, see, e.g., Nature Genetics 36, suppl. (2004).
41. This sort of argument is employed by, e.g., Andreasen, "A New Perspective," 206;
42. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 68;
43. D'Souza, "One-Drop-of-Blood Rule";
44. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 87-88;
45. Zack, Race and Mixed Race, 13-15;
46. and it is rooted in pioneering work done in human genetics in the 1970s by M. Nei and A. K. Roychoudhury, Richard Lewontin, and others. See M. Nei and A. K. Roychoudhury, "Gene Differences between Caucasian, Negro, and Japanese Populations," Science 177 (1972): 434-36,
47. and "Genetic Variation within and between the Three Major Races of Man, Caucasoids, Negroids, and Mongoloids," American Journal of Human Genetics 26 (1974): 421-43;
48. Richard Lewontin, "The Apportionment of Human Diversity," in Evolutionary Biology, vol. 6, ed. T. Dobzhansky, M. K. Hecht, and W. C. Steer (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1972), 381-98.
49. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity";
50. Zack, Race and Mixed Race,
51. and Philosophy of Science and Race.
52. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 34ff.
53. For example, in the philosophy of mind, analytic functionalists have argued that mental state terms pick out those physical states that uniquely satisfy most (or the most important) of the "platitudes" of commonsense psychology. See David Lewis, "How to Define Theoretical Terms," Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970): 426-46,
54. and "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50 (1972): 249-58.
55. Eliminativists like Stephen Stich and Paul Churchland have assumed something like such functionalism and gone on to argue that since nothing in fact satisfies the folk conception of beliefs, ordinary mental terms do not refer. See Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982);
56. Paul Churchland, "Eliminative Materialism and the Prepositional Attitudes," Journal of Philosophy 77 (1981): 67-90.
57. Compare William G. Lycan, Judgement and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
58. and Stephen P. Stich, "Deconstructing the Mind," in Deconstructing the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3-91.
59. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 38-71;
60. Zack, Race and Mixed Race, 11.
61. Some psychological evidence also suggests that people conceive of race in essentialist (although not necessarily biologically essentialist) terms. See Lawrence Hirschfeld, Race in the Making (Cambridge, MA: MIT Books, 1996).
62. Zack, Race and Mixed Race, 18.
63. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972);
64. Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning,'" in his Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215-71.
65. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Putnam'scase of a water-like substance with a different chemical structure (XYZ) on Twin Earth. Despite satisfying the description associated with 'water', Putnam argues that XYZ is not water because it has a different chemical structure.
66. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 137.
67. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 39.
68. A causal-historical approach to reference has been adopted and defended by numerous authors, e.g., Lycan, Judgement and Justification;
69. Paul Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
70. For example, Richard Boyd, "Confirmation, Semantics, and the Interpretation of Scientific Theories," in The Philosophy of Science, ed. Richard Boyd, Philip Gasper, and J. D. Trout (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
71. Appiah also considers the suggestion that racial terms may refer to persons sharing sets of superficial properties prototypically linked to race - including hair type, skin color, and body morphology. The proposal is that rather than a "thick," racialist set of features, persons classified by racial terms share only a thinner and not biologically explanatory set of features. While some do defend such thin accounts of race, I know of no defenses of them as referential candidates for causal-historical uses of race terms.
72. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 72-73;
73. Zack, Race and Mixed Race, 15.
74. Zack, Race and Mixed Race, 15.
75. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 73.
76. Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, 76.
77. Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, 76. Ibid.
78. Appiah thinks these mismatch arguments show that the putative referent violates what he calls "the adequacy condition" which requires that "some of what was thought to be true of what [a term] denoted must be at least approximately true of [the referential candidate]" ("Race, Culture, Identity," 40).
79. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 73;
80. Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, 77.
81. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 73;
82. Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, 69.
83. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 74.
84. Glasgow's, "On the New Biology" also employs mismatch arguments against population accounts of race.
85. Mills, Blackness Visible, xiv.
86. Outlaw, "Toward a Critical Theory of 'Race,'" "On W. E. B. DuBois,"
87. and On Race and Philosophy;
88. Mills, Blackness Visible,
89. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation;
90. Root, "How We Divide the World";
91. Sundstrom, "Racial Nominalism";
92. Taylor, "Appiah's Uncompleted Argument." Sundstrom makes explicit the worry about political conservatives.
93. I interpret the varieties of constructionism I discuss here as what Robin Andreasen has called "local" constructionist theses ("A New Perspective," 217). Local constructionists may claim that a thing or certain things or certain kinds of things are socially constructed, and they contrast with global constructionists who maintain that everything is a social construction.
94. Mills, Blackness Visible.
95. This reading ignores certain ambiguities in Mills's account. See Mallon, "Passing, Traveling, and Reality," sec. 2, for a more developed discussion.
96. Mills, Blackness Visible, 50ff.
97. For example, Mills writes that ancestry is "crucial not because it necessarily manifests itself in biological racial traits but simply, tautologously, because it is taken to be crucial, because there is an intersubjective agreement... to classify individuals in a certain way on the basis of known ancestry" (Blackness Visible, 58).
98. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
99. Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black," 30.
100. Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black," Ibid., 30-31.
101. Root, "How We Divide the World," S632.
102. Taylor, "Appiah's Uncompleted Argument."
103. There is ongoing dispute about whether DuBois really succeeds in avoiding a commitment to racialism. Compare Appiah, "Uncompleted Argument"; Outlaw, "On W. E. B. DuBois"; and Taylor, "Appiah's Uncompleted Argument."
104. That is 'racialism' as I have used the term: a view that entails the existence of biobehavioral racial essences. Taylor employs the term differently, to label the constructionist position he attributes to DuBois - a position that is realist but not essentialist about race.
105. Taylor, "Appiah's Uncompleted Argument," 122.
106. Another possibility for answering Appiah's skeptical argument would be to insist that a constructionist account provides a referential candidate for a causal-historical approach to racial terms. As far as I know, no constructionists have ever pursued this possibility. Perhaps this is because constructionists believe that causal-historical theories are incompatible with socially produced institutions and artifacts (as does Amie Thomasson, "Realism and Human Kinds," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 [2003]: 580-609).
107. However, Taylor's suggestion of a history of employing racial terms to pick out "socio-cultural objects" suggests the possibility that such objects might also figure as referents in a causal-historical approach. In order to develop this suggestion, we would want an account of how these sociocultural objects might figure as stable kinds. For an attempt at such an account, see Ron Mallon, "Social Construction, Social Roles, and Stability," in Socializing Metaphysics, ed. Frederick Schmitt (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 327-53.
108. Andreasen, "A New Perspective,"
109. and "Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?";
110. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture."
111. But note also that constructionist opponents of racial skepticism worry that the absence of a biological basis of race is also used to legitimate unfavorable social policies.
112. Frank Keil, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989);
113. Hirschfeld, Race in the Making.
114. Andreasen ("Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?" S664-S665) makes a similar point but to different effect.
115. Taxonomic divisions at the superspecies level are objective insofar as they represent monophyletic portions of the tree, but other questions remain open (e.g., how many and which monophyletic portions of the complete tree ought to be taxonomically identified). See Andreasen, "A New Perspective," for further discussion.
116. See Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chap. 9, for an overview of the ongoing debate over species concepts.
117. Andreasen, "A New Perspective," 200.
118. Andreasen, "Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?" S659 n. 4.
119. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 94.
120. The discussion draws on Andreasen's own account of the differences between the two views ("Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?" S659 n. 4).
121. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 102.
122. Although, presumably, the reason to be interested in nondimensional racial populations is that they may give rise to longer-lasting evolutionarily important clades.
123. There are many complications here. These include determining whether marriage rates are a good indicator of reproductive rates between racial populations (particularly given the history of American chattel slavery), assessing whether there are "bridge" populations (Kitcher ["Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 115-16 n. 18] notes, following a comment by Gregory Trianosky-Stilwett, that if white-Hispanic and black-Hispanic intermarriage rates are high, there may be no reproductive isolation), and considering how changes in racial designations in census reports affect such estimates.
124. More recent evidence from the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey indicates still low but gradually increasing black-white marriage rates, while both the rate of marriage and its growth are higher for Hispanic to non-Hispanic and white to nonwhite (mostly Asian); Rodger Doyle, "The Progress of Love," Scientific American, October 2003, 19.
125. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 90.
126. Kitcher's account thus presupposes the existence of the same sorts of practices of racial ascription and the causal effects of such practices typically emphasized in constructionist accounts (see "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 106).
127. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 73;
128. Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, 76.
129. Zack, Race and Mixed Race, 15.
130. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 95.
131. Andreasen notes, in a similar vein, that "low levels of interbreeding can be allowed; interbreeding is only a problem when it is extensive enough to cause reticulation" ("A New Perspective," 210).
132. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 95.
133. Zack, Race and Mixed Race, 10ff.
134. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," 73.
135. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 95. See also n. 68 above.
136. Thus Kitcher argues: "Long before the extremes [of reproductive isolation] are reached, the differences between inbreeding and outbreeding rates may be sufficient to preserve the genetic differences that underlie the distinct phenotypes - or, at least, sub-stantially to retard the erosion of those differences" ("Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 97).
137. See also his "Some Puzzles about Species," in What the Philosophy of Biology Is, ed. M. Ruse (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 183-208.
138. This reading is supported by Appiah's "Uncompleted Argument" that begins: "Contemporary biologists are not agreed on the question of whether there are any human races, despite the widespread scientific consensus on the underlying genetics. For most purposes, however, we can reasonably treat this issue as terminological. What most people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance of 'racial' difference is quite remote, I think, from what the biologists are agreed on" (59).
139. Andreasen, "A New Perspective," 218.
140. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," 92.
141. Kitcher's approach thus contrasts with Appiah and Zack in the way that Putnam's "scientific functionalism" (or " psychofunctionalism") contrasts with the commonsense or analytic functionalism of Lewis. See Hilary Putnam, "The Nature of Mental States," in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 223-31;
142. Lewis, "How to Define Theoretical Terms,"
143. and "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications";
144. Ned Block, "Introduction: What Is Functionalism?" in his Readings, 171-84.
145. Andreasen, "Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?" S662.
146. I suspect Appiah is well aware of the limitations of mismatch arguments, and it is for this reason that he stops short of concluding his discussion of referential theories by saying "there are no races" as he does elsewhere in the same work (e.g., "Race, Culture, Identity," 38).
147. This is not to imply that racial classification has not also had positive effects, e.g., by fostering a sense of pride or common identity.
148. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity."
149. See, e.g., Glasgow, "On the New Biology," 471.
150. This way also figures in the practice, at least in part, of Glasgow, Kitcher, Mills, and Zack.
151. Andreasen may also be employing a theory of reference in this way, as she stops short of endorsing a causal-historical theory while making it clear that she thinks that the correct theory of reference allows for mismatches between ordinary beliefs and the real referents of 'race' talk (which she takes to be populations); "A New Perspective," S662.
152. For example, if the descriptivist theory is the right approach, we must still make auxiliary assumptions about which beliefs (and whose beliefs) determine the description (e.g., Arnold's, DuBois's, beliefs of contemporary folk, scientists' beliefs, etc.). We must also make assumptions about how much of the description must be satisfied by a candidate for it to count as satisfying the description.
153. See also Mallon and Stich, "Odd Couple."
154. See, e.g., nn. 16 and 23 above for some defenders of descriptivist and causal-historical approaches, respectively.
155. Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen P. Stich, "Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style," Cognition 92 (2004): B1-B12.
156. Stich, "Deconstructing the Mind."
157. Taylor, "Appiah's Uncompleted Argument," secs. 6-7.
158. Taylor, "Appiah's Uncompleted Argument," Ibid., 126. As noted in the text, Taylor's target is Appiah's skepticism-cum-eliminativism. The present discussion extends to constructionist and naturalist conservationists also employing the semantic strategy.
159. Sally Haslanger, "Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?" Noûs 34 (2000): 31-55.