The Construction of Human Kinds
Ron Mallon - Oxford University Press, 2016
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| Anteprima |
Ron
Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can
bring those kinds into being. Social constructionist explanations of
human kinds like race, gender, and homosexuality are commonplace in the
social sciences and humanities, but what do they mean and what are their
implications?
This book synthesizes recent work in evolutionary,
cognitive, and social psychology as well as social theory and the
philosophy of science, in order to offer a naturalistic account of the
social construction of human kinds. Mallon begins by qualifying social
constructionist accounts of representations of human kinds by appealing
to evidence suggesting canalized dispositions towards certain ways of
representing human groups, using race as a case study. He then turns to
interpret constructionist accounts of categories as attempts to explain
causally powerful human kinds by appealling to our practices of
representing them, and he articulates a view in which widespread
representations produce entrenched social roles that could vindicate
such attempts.
Mallon goes on to explore constructionist concerns
with the social consequences of our representations, focusing
especially on the way human kind representations can alter our behaviour
and undermine our self understandings and our agency. Mallon
understands socially constructed kinds as the real, sometimes stable
products of our cognitive and representational practices, and he
suggests that reference to such kinds can figure in our everyday and
scientific practices of representing the social world. The result is a
realistic, naturalistic account of how human representations might
contribute to making up the parts of the social world that they
represent.
