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This course will consider the claim that there is no such thing as race, with a particular emphasis on the question whether races should be thought of as natural kinds: is our concept of race a natural kind concept? Is the term 'race' a natural kind term? If so, is Appiah right to conclude that there are no races? How should one go about "analyzing" the concept of race?

This course offers an advanced survey of current debates about the ontology, methodology, and aims of the social sciences.

This course will provide a selective historical survey of some philosophical approaches to questions of political economy and justice. Political economy is the integrated study of the relationships of government, political processes, property, production, markets, trade, and distribution from the standpoint of assessing these arrangements with respect to human welfare and justice.

The seminar will explore the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. We'll consider some notable attempts to account for a priori knowledge in the history of philosophy (e.g., by Plato, Descartes, Hume, and Kant), some influential critiques of the notion; we will end by considering some contemporary approaches to the a priori.

This paper provides an account of social practices that reveals how they are constitutive of social agency, enable coordination around things of value, and are a site for social intervention. The social world, on this account, does not begin when psychologically sophisticated individuals interact to share knowledge or make plans. Instead, culture shapes agents to interpret and respond both to each other and the physical world around us. Practices shape us as we shape them. This provides resources for understanding why social practices tend to be stable, but also reveals sites and opportunities for change. (Challenge social meanings! Intervene in the material conditions!)

One of the common themes in feminist research over the past decade has been the claim that reason is “gendered”: more specifically, that reason is “male” or “masculine.” Although feminists have differed in their interpretations of this claim and the grounds they offer for it, the general conclusion has been that feminist theory should steer clear of investments in reason and rationality, at least as traditionally conceived. For example, we should avoid an epistemology that privileges reason or the standpoint of reason; we should avoid theories of the self that take rationality to be a defining trait; and we should avoid endorsing moral and political ideals that glorify reason and the reasonable “person” (read: Man).

In response to commentaries by Esa Díaz León, Jennifer Saul, and Rachel Sterken, I develop more fully my views on the role of structure in social and metaphysical explanation. Although I believe that social agency, quite generally, occurs within practices and structures, the relevance of structure depends on the sort of questions we are asking and what interventions we are considering. The emphasis on questions is also relevant in considering metaphysical and meta-metaphysical issues about realism with respect to gender and race. I aim to demonstrate that tools we develop in the context of critical social theory can change the questions we ask, what forms of explanation are called for, and how we do philosophy.

Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical orientation so that we perform local social practices fluently. Connecting practical orientation to an account of ideology, I argue that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.

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.

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.

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.

This course explores the values (aesthetic, moral, cultural, religious, prudential, political) expressed in the choices of food people eat. It analyzes the decisions individuals make about what to eat, how society should manage food production and consumption collectively, and how reflection on food choices might help resolve conflicts between different values.

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.

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.”

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.

Josh Glasgow’s book A Theory of Race (2009) presents an important argument for the claim that race is an illusion and, that racial claims are, strictly speaking, false. They are false because the concept of race, according to Glasgow, makes a non-negotiable commitment to races being biologically based kinds, or at least to races not being wholly social kinds. Although Glasgow considers empirical evidence for this commitment (Ch 4), the data is inconclusive; instead he relies on a traditional method of thought experiment to argue that wholly social analyses fail to capture our intuitions (§6.2). Glasgow supports a reconstructionist approach which would have us adopt a family of concepts related to race, viz., race* concepts. Race*s are very much like races, except that it is not part of the concept of race* that race*s are biological kinds. (I take it that in ordinary circumstances post-reconstruction the terms ‘race’ and ‘race*’ are to be pronounced the same and spelled the same, but as we pre-reconstructionists consider the reconstructionist proposal, we use the ‘*’ to keep our meanings differentiated (139-40).

I am honored and delighted to have the opportunity to respond to the critiques of my book Resisting Reality offered by Arianna Betti, Mari Mikkola and Titus Stahl (and, in person, to Beate Rossler). I am especially grateful to Robin Celikates for having organized the symposium on my work and for having given us this opportunity for publishing the commentaries along with my reply.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The pursuit of consciousness becomes a form of political practice.1 I am a deep and longstanding fan of Catharine MacKinnon’s work, both her published work and her activism. Her insights have inspired my research for the past twenty years. One issue I’ve been working on recently is ideology critique, and how consciousness raising offers a basis not only for critique but also social change. As usual, I have turned to MacKinnon for insight.

How should we explore the relationship between race and educational opportunity? One approach to the Black-White achievement gap explores how race and class cause disparities in access and opportunity. In this paper, I consider how education contributes to the creation of race. Considering examples of classroom micropolitics, I argue that breakdowns of trust and trustworthiness between teachers and students can cause substantial disadvantages and, in the contemporary United States, this happens along racial lines. Some of the disadvantages are academic: high achievement is more difficult when one faces mistrust, ego depletion, effort pessimism, and insult. And within a knowledge economy, exclusion from knowledge work makes one vulnerable to injustice. But the problem goes deeper than achievement, for schools are contexts in which we develop self-understandings and identities that situate us as members of society. If students of color are systematically denied full participation in trusting conversations that create shared knowledge—especially, knowledge that holds power within the dominant culture—they are unjustly deprived resources to form flourishing selves that are suited to the positions of power and authority. The argument suggests that knowledge is not best understood simply as a commodity to be distributed, and opportunity is not just a matter of access. Moreover, even if access is granted, those who are motivated and talented can fail: they drain their willpower by coping with insults, or reasonably lose optimism about their efficacy. Over time, motivation may shift away from achievement, and under the circumstances this can be a rational response. The barriers to achievement are many, but true opportunity is impossible without trust and trustworthiness.

Introduction: 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. I deny that sagging pants are cool, cows are food, women are more submissive than men, and blacks are more criminal than whites. And moreover, I maintain that there is an objective basis for denying these claims even though the facts seem to support the face value affirmative response. But how can that be? We all know that male urban youth can barely walk with their pants belted around their thighs, that beef is a staple in the American diet, that blacks are incarcerated in the United States at a much higher rate than any other race, and that women defer to men in both work and family life. How could a denial of these facts be justified?

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.