Meeting 9: Are Races Real (3/11)

Readings:

• Appiah, "Why There Are No Human Races" [CIEB §22]
• Andreasen, "A New Perspective on the Race Debate" [CIEB §23]

We turn this week to the question of the reality of race. Do our racial concepts correspond to anything genuine in reality or are they merely social constructs? From this simple starting point, lots of interesting methodological issues arise: does the question of the reality of race automatically engage our concepts? Andreasen suggests that it might not. Perhaps there are (real) races and our ordinary understanding of what they are is flawed. In Sober’s introduction to the section on race, he offers an apt analogy to the one time presumption that whales are fish. We can revise this view on the influence of new information without rejecting that fish are a taxonomically-respectable group. Andreasen’s essay attempts to make biological sense of races as subspecies on a cladist model of taxonomy.

Appiah’s approach is different: he is a skeptic of race, placing a great deal of emphasis on the question of whether there is anything in biology that might vindicate our ordinary concept. His approach bears some resemblance to skepticism about the reality of species from the apparent lack of essential properties characterizing them.

As you might expect, my take on this issue is somewhat different: I’m not convinced that what we ought to be looking for is biological reality. Here the HPC/SPC kind view might help some, as it is not a specifically-biological account. I’m not yet sure how the details might go — what the clustered properties would be, whether presumptive clusters would feature the sort of stability (or homeostasis) required, and so on. My suspicion is that there might be something in the neighborhood of stable clusters of biologically/culturally-interesting properties/dispositions that might feature a kind of dwindling stability (think back to the discussion of metastability).

Study Questions

• Describe the difference between the “ideational” and the “referential” views of meaning.
• How does the analogy to acids work for Appiah?
• In what sense does Appiah see Jefferson as interested in a BIOLOGICAL conception of race?
• Compare Appiah’s take on Jefferson and Arnold on the race question.
• Describe the relevance of evolution to the race question. Do Appiah and Andreasen see its relevance in the same way?
• What, in brief, is Appiah’s argument that there are no human races?
• Describe the “no subspecies” argument against the reality of race (both varieties). How does it differ from the “no human subspecies” argument?
• How does Andreasen propose to use cladism to understand human races?