Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Talking about race is hard. One reason for this is that we lack a conceptual vocabulary that can represent the respects in which race is real and unreal, biological and social. I propose to introduce a set of concepts that can perform this task. The first, is the racialist concept of race: the traditional, pernicious essentialist and hierarchical race concept often mistakenly identified as the race concept. The second is the concept of socialrace, a socialrace being a social group that is taken to be a racialist race. The third is the minimalist concept of race, a biological concept that represents races as groups exhibiting patterns of visible physical features corresponding to differences in geographical ancestry. The fourth and final race concept is the concept of populationist race, a candidate scientific race concept that represents races as groups exhibiting patterns of phenotypic characters that trace back to geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding populations.