Social Meaning and Philosophical Method

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

STUDYING WHILE BLACK

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

Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground

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

Exploring Race in Life, in Speech, and in Philosophy: Comments on Joshua Glasgow’s A Theory of Race

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)

Epistemic Housekeeping and the Philosophical Canon: A Reflection on Jane Addams’ “Women and Public Housekeeping"

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.

Individualism, Interpretation, and Injustice: A Reply to Stahl, Betti and Mikkola

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

Race, intersectionality, and method: a reply to critics

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)

Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements

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

What is a (social) structural explanation?

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

Family, Ancestry and Self: What is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties

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