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The abstract is available here: https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/o:1639136

The claim that gender (or other categories) is socially constructed is broadly accepted, but what this means is controversial and often unclear. In this chapter, I will sketch some different meanings of the claim that something is socially constructed and why these claims matter. For the purposes of this chapter, my focus will be to consider how the different senses of construction might apply especially in the case of gender.

In 1913, the National American Woman Suffrage Association published a broadside by Jane Addams, of about 740 words, titled “Women and Public Housekeeping.” A broadside is a poster, printed on one side, to be distributed or hung, and then thrown away. In the contemporary context, it is something like a flyer, maybe a blog post. In the world of publishing, broadsides are historical “ephemera.”

The idea of a natural kind purports to be of something that constitutes “the world’s joints” and is captured in good explanations. Traditionally, natural kinds are assumed to be “mind-independent.” But a plausible account of explanation takes it to be a practice of asking and answering questions. Explanations should be evaluated as answers to legitimate questions; good answers are not always in terms of “mindindependent” kinds. Drawing on the example of sex, this paper explores some of the ways differences in the word are either marked or created by us, and how these differences matter for our explanatory purposes. I argue, following Epstein (2015), that explanatory kinds can be both anchored and grounded in social facts and, moreover, that explanatory projects – like other practical projects - depend on theoretical scaffolds to provide means toward our ends.

The idea of "what's normal" has two importantly different uses. On one hand, "what's normal" is a statistical concept: what's normal is what is statistically probable. On the other hand, "what's normal," is a normative concept. What's normal is how things "ought" to be, or how things are when circumstances are favorable. The normative sense of 'normal,' can be linked to the historical concept of essence. Things manifest their nature or essence under normal conditions; in other conditions they emerge deformed: a normal pregnancy will result in a normal offspring. Moreover, the normatively normal is invoked to back social norms: women ought to stay home with their babies because it is in the nature of things, or in the nature of things when circumstances are favorable. However, what's "normal" is not always natural, and what's natural is not always best. Interestingly, the confusions just sketched are reinforced by the fact that we use generics such as 'cars have radios,' 'birds fly,' or 'boys don't cry,' to state all three sorts of claims: statistical regularities, claims about natures, and claims about norms. Scholars have suggested that the variety in different forms of generics prevents a unified account. In this essay, I offer a proposal for understanding how the many different kinds of generics can be understood as differing in their implicatures due to essentialist assumptions that are included by default in the common ground of conversation. This helps explain how essentialist ideology is expanded and sustained.

There are special challenges in writing a Presidential Address: you want to address a very broad group of philosophers with knowledge and abilities that far exceed your own, and you want to say something that will be as engaging as possible. Philosophers have addressed a great many issues, with different methods, and I want there to be space in our discipline for all of them. I myself love arcane philosophical topics – put me in a world where I could spend my time pouring over Aristotle’s Metaphysics and I’d be happy – and I believe that philosophy yields knowledge and that is intrinsically valuable. I also love kinds of philosophy that many would not regard as philosophy at all: philosophy as it emerges in thinking about personal and family issues, philosophy in the context of political activism, and philosophy that is inextricable from empirical research.

Racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice are more than just bad attitudes; after all, such injustice involves unfair distributions of goods and resources. But attitudes play a role. How central is that role? Tommie Shelby, among others, argues that racism is an ideology and takes a cognitivist approach suggesting that ideologies consist in false beliefs that arise out of and serve pernicious social conditions. In this paper I argue that racism is better understood as a set of practices, attitudes, social meanings, and material conditions, that systematically reinforce one another. Attitudes play a role, but even the cognitive/affective component of ideologies should include culturally shared habits of mind and action. These habits of mind distort, obscure, and occlude important facts about subordinated groups and result in a failure to recognize their interests. How do we disrupt such practices to achieve greater justice? I argue that this is sometimes, but not always, best achieved by argument or challenging false beliefs, so social movements legitimately seek other means.

A philosophically useful account of social structure must accommodate the fact that social structures play an important role in structural explanation. But what is a structural explanation? How do structural explanations function in the social sciences? This paper offers a way of thinking about structural explanation and sketches an account of social structure that connects social structures with structural explanation.

Recent work on social injustice has focused on implicit bias as an important factor in explaining persistent injustice in spite of achievements on civil rights. In this paper, I argue that because of its individualism, implicit bias explanation, taken alone, is inadequate to explain ongoing injustice; and, more importantly, it fails to call attention to what is morally at stake. An adequate account of how implicit bias functions must situate it within a broader theory of social structures and structural injustice; changing structures is often a precondition for changing patterns of thought and action and is certainly required for durable change.

How do we achieve social justice? How do we change society for the better? Some would argue that we must do it by changing the laws or state institutions. Others that we must do it by changing individual attitudes. I argue that although both of these factors are important and relevant, we must also change culture. What does this mean? Culture, I argue, is a set of social meanings that shapes and filters how we think and act. Problematic networks of social meanings constitute an ideology. Entrenched ideologies are resilient and are barriers to social change, even in the face of legal interventions. I argue that an effective way to change culture is through social movements and contentious politics, and that philosophy has a role to play in promoting such change.

It is a great honor to have such excellent commentary on my book, and I am happy to have the opportunity to discuss these issues with others who have done such important work on the topics. I will reply to the commentaries separately, beginning with the critique by Charles Mills (2013) and moving on to Karen Jones’s (2013).

Are sagging pants cool? Are cows food? Are women more submissive than men? Are blacks more criminal than whites? Taking the social world at face value, many people would be tempted to answer these questions in the affirmative. And if challenged, they can point to facts that support their answers. But there is something wrong about the affirmative answers. In this chapter, I draw on recent ideas in the philosophy of language and metaphysics to show how the assertion of a generic claim of the sort in question ordinarily permits one to infer that the fact in question obtains by virtue of something specifically about the subject so described, i.e., about women, or blacks, or sagging pants. In the examples I’ve offered, however, this implication inference is unwarranted. The facts in question obtain by virtue of broad system of social relations within which the subjects are situated, and are not grounded in intrinsic or dispositional features of the subjects themselves. The background relations are obscured, however, and as a result, the assertion is at least systematically misleading; a denial functions to block the problematic implication. Revealing such implications or presuppositions and blocking them is a crucial part of ideology critique.

In a series of recent papers David Velleman has argued that it is morally wrong to bring a child into existence with the intention that the child will not have contact with one or both biological parents. (Velleman, 2005, 2008) Put another way, “other things being equal, children should be raised by their biological parents.” (Velleman, 2005 362fn 3) The primary targets of his argument are those who use anonymous donor egg or sperm to conceive a child. On his view, there is a significant value in being parented by and having ongoing contact with one’s biological relatives. “What is most troubling about gamete donation is that it purposely severs a connection of the sort that normally informs a person’s sense of identity, which is composed of elements that must bear emotional meaning, as only symbols and stories can.” (Velleman, 2005 363) Let’s be clear. He is not just interested in the possibility of having information about one’s biological progenitors, but actual knowledge by acquaintance. So the kind of profile that is typically made available by gamete donors or in closed adoptions is insufficient, and even information that is revealed through open records is not enough. A face-to-face relationship with both biological progenitors is, unless there are substantial overriding considerations, morally required.