Racist value judgments as objectively false beliefs: A philosophical and social-psychological analysis

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 77-95

  Clough, Sharyn ^a   Loges, William E ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79956314665     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00412.x     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Donald Davidson, "Three Varieties of Knowledge," in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 205-20;
2. Donald Davidson, "The Objectivity of Values," in Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 39-51.
3. Milton Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values (New York: Free Press, 1973);
4. Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Milton Rokeach, and Joel Grube, The Great American Values Test: Influencing Behavior and Belief Through Television (New York: Free Press, 1984).
5. Davidson, "Objectivity."
6. Elizabeth Anderson, "The Uses of Value Judgments in Science," Hypatia 19, no. 1 (2004): 1-24.
7. Daniel Mayton, Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, and William E. Loges, "Human Values and Social Issues: An Introduction," Journal of Social Issues 50, no. 4 (1994): 1-8.
8. Andrew Valls, ed., Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
9. Jorge L. A. Garcia, "The Heart of Racism," in Race and Racism, ed. Bernard Boxill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 399.
10. Andrew Valls, "Introduction," in Race and Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005): 8.
11. Garcia, "Heart," 405.
12. Kwame A. Appiah, "Racisms," in Anatomy of Racism, ed. D. Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 3-17;
13. Kwame A. Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
14. Appiah, Father's House, 13,
15. as quoted in Valls, "Introduction," 6.
16. See, for instance, Appiah, "Racisms," 3-17,
17. Appiah, Father's House, 13-20.
18. The literature on this point is extensive. For a recent review, see Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan, "On the Concept of Biological Race and its Applicability to Humans," Philosophy of Science 70 (2003): 1161-72.
19. Miriam Bloom, Understanding Sickle Cell Disease (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995).
20. Richard Lewontin, "The Apportionment of Human Diversity," Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 391-98;
21. Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
22. For a review of this literature, see Lisa Suzuki and Joshua Aronson, "The Cultural Malleability of Intelligence and Its Impact on the Racial/Ethnic Hierarchy," Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11 (2005): 320-27.
23. Alan H. Goodman, "Why Genes Don't Count (for Racial Differences in Health)," American Journal of Public Health (2000): 1699-1702;
24. Rodrick Wallace and Deborah Wallace, "Socio-economic Determinants of Health: Community Marginalisation and the Diffusion of Disease and Disorder in the United States," British Medical Journal 314 (May 3, 1997): 1341-45.
25. J. Phillipe Rushton and Arthur Jensen, "Wanted: More Race Realism, Less Moralistic Fallacy," Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11, no. 2 (2005): 328-36, at 332-33.
26. Portions of this argument appear in a Metascience review symposium and on-line as part of the MIT Symposium on Gender, Race and Philosophy in an exchange between Elizabeth Anderson, Linda Alcoff, Sharyn Clough, Marianne Janack, and Charles Mills. Sharyn Clough, "On the Very Idea of a Feminist Epistemology of Science: Response to Commentators on Beyond Epistemology: A Pragmatist Approach to Feminist Science Studies," Metascience 15 (2006): 27-37;
27. Sharyn Clough, "Commentary on Elizabeth Anderson's 'Uses of Value Judgments in Science,'" MIT Symposium on Gender, Race and Philosophy, Jan. 2006 Symposium I (2006): 1-6, available at http://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/ display/SGRP/Archive.
28. Davidson, "Three Varieties."
29. Anderson, "Uses," 11.
30. Sometimes, of course, meaningful empirical claims can also function more like rules or norms, where the assignment of truth values is beside the point. See, for example, Michael Hymers' illuminating discussion of Wittgenstein's claim regarding the dual nature of putatively descriptive propositions, like "This is my hand." This proposition can, in some contexts, function as an empirical truth, and sometimes, it can function logically as a rule around which other descriptive claims are organized and evaluated. Michael Hymers, "The Dignity of a Rule: Wittgenstein, Mathematical Norms, and Truth," Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 42, no. 3 (2003): 419-46. The capacity for a value judgment or a descriptive judgment to be true or false comes with the meaningfulness of the judgment, but the issue of whether truth values should be assigned in any given case is relative to the context in which the judgment is being used. We argue that, typically, the context of racist value judgments is such that the objective truth or falsity of the judgments is a real question and one that can be adjudicated rationally.
31. Ball-Rokeach et al., The Great American;
32. Rokeach, The Nature.
33. Milton Rokeach and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, "Stability and Change in American Value Priorities, 1968-1981," American Psychologist, 44 (1988): 775-84.
34. Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and William E. Loges, "Choosing Equality: The Correspondence Between Attitudes About Race and the Value of Equality," Journal of Social Issues 50, no. 4 (1994): 9-18.
35. Gerard Kleinpenning and Louk Hagendoorn, "Forms of Racism and the Cumulative Dimension of Ethnic Attitudes," Social Psychology Quarterly 56 (1993): 21-36;
36. James R. Kluegel and Eliot Smith, Beliefs About Inequality: Americans' Views of What Is and What Ought to Be (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1986);
37. Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, and Lawrence Bobo, Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985);
38. Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993).
39. Randall S. Peterson, "The Role of Values in Predicting Fairness Judgments and Support of Affirmative Action," Journal of Social Issues 50, no. 4 (1994): 95-116.
40. Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and Irving Tallman, "Social Movements as Moral Confrontations: With Special Reference to Civil Rights," in Understanding Human Values: Individual and Societal, ed. Milton Rokeach (New York: Free Press, 1979): 82-94.
41. Oscar H. Gandy, Katharina Kopp, Tanya Hands, Karen Frazer, and David Phillips, "Race and Risk: Factors Affecting the Framing of Stories about Inequality, Discrimination, and Just Plain Bad Luck," Public Opinion Quarterly 61 (1997): 158-82.
42. Adrian Carpusor and William E. Loges, "Rental Discrimination and Ethnicity in Names," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 36, no. 4 (2006): 934-52.
43. Kwame A. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005): 66.