Philosophy 1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Root Race, Sally Haslanger

• School: Western University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: Philosophy 1020
• Professor: Dennis Klimchuk

Document Summary

Many people who think about it claim that race does not exist, or that races are not real. One way to think of the claim is as denying that races are natural kinds. Working with the ideas from last class from: plato, coyne, mill. [w]ith social or human kinds, with kinds like race, what is real is dependent upon rather than independent of how we think and talk about ourselves. A naturally occurring category k is real if k makes extrapolations of many discoverable traits possible across all k things. Where k is a social category, extrapolation across all instances is not possible, but normalization is. And, real does not necessarily mean legitimate.