The ordinary concept of race

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 100, Issue 9, 2003, Pages 437-455

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EID: 60950214659     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2003100932     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Cf. Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 3.
2. Ernst Mayr, Animal, Species, and Evolution (Cambridge: Harvard, 1963), pp. 644-50;
3. Philip Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," in Leonard Harris, ed., Racism (New York: Humanities, 1999), pp. 87-117.
4. See, for example, Ashley Montagu, "The Concept of Race," in Montagu, ed., The Concept of Race (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 12-28 (hereafter "Concept");
5. K. Anthony Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," in Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Consciousness (Princeton: University Press, 1996), pp. 30-105; also see Zack.
6. Or does it? Immanuel Kant is widely regarded as the author of the first attempt to give a scientific definition of race based on a sharp distinction between race and species - see, for example, "Von der verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen," "Of the Different Human Races" (1777) in Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott, eds., The Idea of Race (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), pp. 8-26.
7. Richard A. Goldsby, Race and Races, Second Edition (New York: Macmillian, 1977).
8. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 1994).
9. The Concept of Law (New York: Oxford, 1961), pp. 115-57.
10. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard, 1971), p. 5.
11. "Concepts, Definitions, and Meaning," Metaphilosophy, IV, 4 (October 1993): 309-23, see p. 316.
12. Montagu, "Concept," p. 24.
13. "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes," in Gates, ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University Press, 1986), pp. 1-20, here p. 6.
14. Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argument," in Gates, ed., pp. 21-37, here p. 35.
15. Cf. Montagu, "Concept," p. 15.
16. "The Concept of Race in the Human Species in the Light of Genetics," in Montagu, ed., pp. 1-11, see p. 9 (hereafter "Species").
17. See Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," in Inquiries in Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford, 1984), pp. 183-98.
18. Jared Diamond proposes that human races could be defined by such "hidden" properties as the absence of anti-malarial genes (which would group Swedes together with Xhosas) and the presence of the enzyme lactase (which would group northern and central Europeans together with the Fulani of West Africa in the "lactase-positive race") - "Race and Color," Discover (November 1994): 84-89, here p. 86.
19. Consider, for example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's definition of a race as "a group of individuals that we can recognize as biologically different from others" - Genes, People, and Languages (New York: North Point, 2000), p. 25;
20. Mayr's characterization of 'race': "if the average difference between two groups of individuals is sufficiently great to be recognizable on sight, we refer to such groups of individuals as races" - Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge: Harvard, 1975);
21. Appiah, who thinks that "nobody has a race" finds no difficulty in speaking of "[c]lasses of people who share certain easily observable physical characteristics, most notable skin color and a few visible features of the face and head." These are "characteristics we are very good at recognizing" - "Race, " pp. 37, 68, and 69.
22. Diamond, who holds that "[t]he reality of human races is another common-sense 'truth' destined to follow the flat earth into oblivion" states matter of factly, "We know that different populations classified together in the human species are visibly different" - "Race and Color," p. 83 and 86.
23. Richard Lewontin, who, if not an eliminativist, is a celebrated critic of the ordinary conception of race, says that "[o]n a broad scale, there are large and obvious differences in skin color, hair form, stature, and language from one geographical region to another" - Human Diversity (New York: Scientific Library, 1995), p. 116.
24. and Zack, who calls upon us to "remove biological race from secular ontology," speaks nonchalantly of "evident human differences in skin color and morphology," p. 7 and p. 25.
25. "Intellectual Norms and Foundations of Mind," this JOURNAL, LXXXIII, 12 (December 1986): 697-720, see pp. 703, 716. Burge himself does not discuss the word 'race'.
26. Burge contrasts 'phlogiston' with ordinary words, p. 716n.
27. Cf. Appiah, "Race," p. 42.
28. My discussion of the ancestry condition draws upon Kitcher, especially pp. 92-97.
29. Mayr defines a (local) population as a "community of interbreeding individuals at a given location" - Populations, Species, and Evolution (Cambridge: Harvard, 1963) p. 82.
30. st Century America (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2001), pp. 25-47, see p. 29.
31. System Naturae (1758) in Race and the Enlightenment, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 10-14.
32. Histoire Naturelle Générale Et Particulière (1769) Natural History, General and Particular, in Eze, ed., pp. 15-28.
33. De generis humani varietate nativa, Third Edition (1795) On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, in Eze, ed., pp. 79-90.
34. The idea of the continent as a naturally given geographical unit has come under fire in recent times. Continents, like races, are said to be "socially constructed" - see, for example, Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents (Berkeley: California UP, 1997). It is of interest that the formation of the concept of continent and that of the (modern) concept of race were roughly coeval. One wonders if the two ideas are mutually entwined. Could it be that our idea of a continent (and hence subcontinent) derives in part from the idea of the habitat of a racial group? Could it be that the idea of a racial group gets part of its content from the idea of a group whose aboriginal home is a distinctive continent? Perhaps the concepts should be thought of as operating in tandem, each helping to fix the reference of the other.
35. Mayr, Animal, Species, and Evolution, pp. 645-46.
36. The characterization of the visible features of race as adaptive reactions to climatic variation is not uncontested - see, for example, Diamond, p. 88;
37. James Shreeve, "Terms of Estrangement," Discover (November 1994): 60;
38. Cf. Montague, "Concept," p. 24;
39. UNESCO, "First Statement on Race," in Montagu, Statement on Race (New York: Oxford, 1972), pp. 1-278, p. 46.
40. In a recent study Noah A. Rosenberg et al., found that a whopping 93-95% of the average proportion of human genetic variation is due to differences between individuals within the same population and that only a miniscule 3-5% is due to differences among populations - "Genetic Structure of Human Populations," Science, CCXCVIII (December 2002): 2381-85, see p. 2381.
41. Montagu, "Species," p. 3 (emphasis added).
42. On this topic, see Michael Root, "The Use of Race in Medicine as a Proxy for Genetic Differences," (forthcoming in Philosophy of Science, Proceedings).
43. Oxford English Dictionary, cited in Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (Williamsburg: North Carolina UP, 1968), p. 7.
44. Elliott Sober is especially clear on this point: "No phenotypic characteristics can be postulated as a species essence; the norm of reaction for each genotype shows that it is arbitrary to single out as privileged one phenotype as opposed to any other. Similar considerations show that no genotypic characteristics can be postulated as a species essence" - "Evolution, Population Thinking, Essentialism," in From a Biological Point of View (New York: Cambridge, 1994), pp. 201-32, here p. 225.