Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

On how to achieve reference to covert social constructions

05 June 2019  |  15:00  |  Seminari de Filosofia UB

Abstract

What does it mean to say that some features, such as gender, race and sexual orientation, are socially constructed? Many scholars claim that social constructionism about a kind is a version of realism about that kind, according to which the corresponding kind is a social construction, that it, it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructivists about human kinds such as gender, race and sexual orientation often make an additional claim, namely, that these kinds are social constructions but they are typically believed to be biological kinds (that is, people are typically wrong about the nature of these kinds). Ron Mallon (2017) calls social constructions that are (falsely) taken to be biological kinds covert social constructions. This talk is about how we could have terms in our natural language that come to refer to covert social constructions.