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Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality > Philosophy of Race > Conceptions of Race > Race as a Biological Kind
Race as a Biological Kind
Edited by David Miguel Gray (University of Memphis)
About this topic
| Summary | Is race something we can fully explain in terms of the natural world around us? Races thought of as biological kinds invoke some type of racial 'naturalism'. While the term ‘Naturalism’ is used in many different ways, we can think of Naturalism as the view that properties within a particular domain of investigation are physical properties. For instance, there are lots of domains of inquiry where we may believe in non-physical properties. You might believe in numbers, which are a kind of abstract object as they aren’t located in time or space. Or you might think that moral properties like the wrongness of pushing someone in front of a car, is a non-physical property: that is, if we look at all the physical stuff involved in pushing someone in front of a car: e.g. the car, the person, the act of pushing, you might think that the wrongness is not among those physical parts. If one were to be a naturalist about moral properties, they might claim that the moral properties are among the physical parts. But leaving that difficult debate on moral naturalism aside, we can say that to be a naturalist about race is to say that racial properties just are physical properties. If you are wondering what, aside from physical properties, racial properties could be, one possible alternative is that racial properties are social properties. Social properties are those that are dependent on human acts and decisions while physical properties are thought to be independent of human acts and decisions. Take an example of an object like the Great Sphinx of Giza. The property of being made of limestone is a natural property of the statue. Limestone isn’t something that is the result of human actions or decision making. However, the fact that this object is a statue isn’t a natural property. Someone decided to shape the limestone into a couchant sphinx. So what’s the upshot of thinking of races as being composed of natural properties? Well, that means that races exist independently of any human actions or decision making processes. Races are something in the world that natural scientists can investigate and discover. The opposing view would be that races are created by people, and this treats races as social constructions. So now we have an idea both of what it means to think of races in terms of natural properties as well as what that view can be contrasted with. This leads us to the question which natural properties? For the naturalist there are lots of different accounts of what a race could be. Before the 20th century when race seemed to be studied primarily by natural historians the following features were associated with racial naturalism 1. Races have either natural essences or some set of observable natural properties that are shared by all or most members of that race. 2. These natural properties are inheritable 3. These natural properties place races into a hierarchical systems where they can be differentiated in terms of physical, behavioral, intellectual, and moral characteristics. I’m not going to spend any time on these older views as they aren’t currently held for any scientific reasons in the scientific communities. While these views were central to earlier scientific theories of race, nowadays, they only pop up infrequently among those who have a limited and/or motivated understanding of biological properties. This leads us to what some philosophers like, Josh Glasgow, have called “The New biology of race”. Unlike the old biology of race the new biology holds that races have natural properties that are common to most members of that race. These natural properties give us no reason to think that any intellectual, moral, or behavioral characteristics can be attributed to races in virtue of shared natural properties. While there are many possible accounts of which natural properties could be used to define race, one approach, that has gained a following, is to think of races as partially defined by, or caused by, reproductively isolated breeding populations. A population is a group of the same species that live in the same place. What makes a population a breeding population is that members of this group can and do sexually reproduce. However, there are a few things that could make a breeding population reproductively isolated. One way is that the breeding population is geographically cut off from other breeding populations of their own species. (For instance, you could imagine a group of people cut off from others because they live on an island, or are separated by mountains or desserts). In this case geographic properties of our world would shape our natural properties. Another way a breeding population could be reproductively isolated is that even though a population is located together and could interbreed, portions of that population don’t interbreed with other portions. For instance, if there were cultural taboos about subgroups of wealthy or short individuals breeding with subgroups of poor or tall individuals, those subgroups could be reproductively isolated even if they live in the same location. In this case, social elements of our world would shape our natural properties. So that’s what reproductively isolated breeding populations are. But how might they be used to define race? One way is that we can often define race in terms of ancestral relations. For instance, if someone is of a particular race, let’s call it race X, we can explain conditions for that individual being of that race: if one’s parents are both of race X, then one is also of race X. You might see a couple problems here. First, what happens when one parent is of race X but another parent is of race Y? In this case we might have to say that the offspring are either a new race (Z?) or don’t have a race as they are the product of non-isolated breeding populations. Second, even if one’s parents are both members of race X what makes them members of that race? The answer is that their parents were also of race X. But now we are off on an infinite regress: the explanation of what makes someone a member of a race is not answered but just pushed back a generation each time that question gets asked. We need an explanation that stops the infinite regress. One of two answers is normally given here. One option is to say that one’s ancestor is a member of race X in virtue of sharing similar phenotypic, or observable, properties specific to other members of one’ s reproductively isolated breeding population. A second option is to say that one’s ancestor is a member of race X in virtue of sharing similar genotypic, or genetic, properties specific to other members of one’s reproductively isolated breeding population. Given that much of our genetic makeup plays no direct role in our observable traits, the genotypic similarities would not necessarily mean that races have phenotypic similarities. So the accounts I just sketched which make use of ancestral relations among reproductively isolated breeding populations and either genotypic or phenotypic properties is one way to develop a naturalistic account of race. I should note that in an attempt to be quite inclusive of a variety of naturalist theories, I have not specified the different ways this account can be developed in order to respond to various concerns. (For detailed examples of this sort of approach see key works below). -David Miguel Gray |
| Key works | Here are three naturalist accounts of race. Philip Kitcher. “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture” in Racism, L. Harris (ed.), New York: Humanity Books. 87-117. Robin Andreasen 2005. “The Meaning of ‘Race’: Folk Conception and the New Biology of Race*” The Journal of Philosophy, 94-106. Quayshawn Spencer 2014. “A Radical Solution to the Race Problem” Philosophy of Science, 1025-1038. And for an attack on naturalist accounts see: Joshua Glasgow, 2005. “On the New Biology of Race, The Journal of Philosophy, 456-74. |
| Introductions | Ned Block’s “How Heritability misleads about Race” https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html Alan Templeton “Biological Races in Humans” |
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- I—A More Radical Solution to the Race Problem.Quayshawn Spencer - 2019 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93 (1):25-48.One debate that metaphysicians of race have been consumed with since the 1990s is what we can call the US race debate, which is the debate about what the nature and reality of race is according to the dominant ways that ‘race’ and race terms are used to classify people in contemporary American English. In 2014, I contributed a defence of biological racial realism in the US race debate that utilized new results about human genetic clustering from population genetics. In (...)
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- Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism.Michael O. Hardimon - 2017 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Many scholars and activists seek to eliminate “race”—the word and the concept—from our vocabulary. Their claim is clear: because science has shown that racial essentialism is false and because the idea of race has proved virulent, we should do away with the concept entirely. Michael O. Hardimon criticizes this line of thinking, arguing that we must recognize the real ways in which race exists in order to revise our understanding of its significance. Rethinking Race provides a novel answer to the (...)
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- The Explication Defence of Arguments from Reference.Mark Pinder - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (6):1253-1276.In a number of influential papers, Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich have presented a powerful critique of so-called arguments from reference, arguments that assume that a particular theory of reference is correct in order to establish a substantive conclusion. The critique is that, due to cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions supposedly undermining the standard methodology for theorising about reference, the assumption that a theory of reference is correct is unjustified. I argue that the many extant responses to Machery et al.’s (...)
- Are Clusters Races? A Discussion of the Rhetorical Appropriation of Rosenberg et al.’s “Genetic Structure of Human Populations”.Melissa Wills - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (12).Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I contend, (...)
- Race: Deflate or Pop?Adam Hochman - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57.Neven Sesardic has recently defended his arguments in favour of racial naturalism—the view that race is a valid biological category—in response to my criticism of his work. While Sesardic claims that a strong version of racial naturalism can survive critique, he has in fact weakened his position considerably. He concedes that conventional racial taxonomy is arbitrary and he no longer identifies ‘races’ as human subspecies. Sesardic now relies almost entirely on Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notion of race-as-population. This weak approach to ‘race’—according (...)
- Beyond the realism debate: The metaphysics of ‘racial’ distinctions.Olivier Lemeire - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 59:47-56.The current metaphysical race debate is very much focused on the realism question whether races exist. In this paper I argue against the importance of this question. Philosophers, biologists and anthropologists expect that answering this question will tell them something substantive about the metaphysics of racial classifications, and will help them to decide whether it is justified to use racial categories in scientific research and public policy. I argue that there are two reasons why these expectations are not fulfilled. First (...)
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- Against the New Metaphysics of Race.David Ludwig - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (2):244-265.The aim of this article is to develop an argument against metaphysical debates about the existence of human races. I argue that the ontology of race is underdetermined by both empirical and non-empirical evidence due to a plurality of equally permissible candidate meanings of "race." Furthermore, I argue that this underdetermination leads to a deflationist diagnosis according to #hich disputes about the existence of human races are non-substantive verbal disputes. $hile this diagnosis resembles general deflationist strategies in contemporary metaphysics" I (...)
- Thinking about populations and races in time.Roberta L. Millstein - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52:5-11.Biologists and philosophers have offered differing concepts of biological race. That is, they have offered different candidates for what a biological correlate of race might be; for example, races might be subspecies, clades, lineages, ecotypes, or genetic clusters. One thing that is striking about each of these proposals is that they all depend on a concept of population. Indeed, some authors have explicitly characterized races in terms of populations. However, including the concept of population into concepts of race raises three (...)
- Are human races cladistic subspecies?Zinhle Mncube - 2015 - South African Journal of Philosophy 34 (2):163-174.In the article titled ‘A new perspective on the race debate’，Robin O. Andreasen argues that contrary to popular scientific belief, human races are biologically real—it is just that we are wrong about them. Andreasen calls her contemporary biological concept of race ‘the cladistic race concept’ (or CRC). Her theory uses theory from cladistics—a systematic school founded by entomologist Willi Hennig in 1950—to define human races genealogically as cladistic subspecies. In this paper I will argue that despite its promise as a (...)
- Introduction: Genomics and Philosophy of Race.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Roberta L. Millstein & Rasmus Nielsen - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52:1-4.This year’s topic is “Genomics and Philosophy of Race.” Different researchers might work on distinct subsets of the six thematic clusters below, which are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive: (1) Concepts of ‘Race’; (2) Mathematical Modeling of Human History and Population Structure; (3) Data and Technologies of Human Genomics; (4) Biological Reality of Race; (5) Racialized Selves in a Global Context; (6) Pragmatic Consequences of ‘Race Talk’ among Biologists.
- Race, Genes, and the Ethics of Belief: A review of Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance. [REVIEW]Jonny Anomaly - 2014 - Hastings Center Report 44 (5):51-52.A Troublesome Inheritance, by Nicholas Wade, should be read by anyone interested in race and recent human evolution. Wade deserves credit for challenging the popular dogma that biological differences between groups either don't exist or cannot explain the relative success of different groups at different tasks. Wade's work should be read alongside another recent book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. Together, these books represent a major turning point in the public (...)
- Unnaturalised Racial Naturalism.Adam Hochman - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 46 (1):79-87.Quayshawn Spencer (2014) misunderstands my treatment of racial naturalism. I argued that racial naturalism must entail a strong claim, such as “races are subspecies”, if it is to be a substantive position that contrasts with anti-realism about biological race. My recognition that not all race naturalists make such a strong claim is evident throughout the article Spencer reviews (Hochman, 2013a). Spencer seems to agree with me that there are no human subspecies, and he endorses a weaker form of racial naturalism. (...)
- Realism, Antirealism, and Conventionalism about Race.Jonathan Michael Kaplan & Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1039-1052.This paper distinguishes three concepts of "race": bio-genomic cluster/race, biological race, and social race. We map out realism, antirealism, and conventionalism about each of these, in three important historical episodes: Frank Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1962, A.W.F. Edwards' 2003 response to Lewontin (1972), and contemporary discourse. Semantics is especially crucial to the first episode, while normativity is central to the second. Upon inspection, each episode also reveals a variety of commitments to the metaphysics of race. We conclude by interrogating (...)
- Hysteria, race, and phlogiston. A model of ontological elimination in the human sciences.David Ludwig - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (1):68-77.Elimination controversies are ubiquitous in philosophy and the human sciences. For example, it has been suggested that human races, hysteria, intelligence, mental disorder, propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, the self, and the super-ego should be eliminated from the list of respectable entities in the human sciences. I argue that eliminativist proposals are often presented in the framework of an oversimplified “phlogiston model” and suggest an alternative account that describes ontological elimination on a gradual scale between criticism of empirical (...)
- If Not Races, then What? Toward a Revised Understanding of Bio-Social Groupings.Lucius T. Outlaw - 2014 - Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35 (1-2):275-296.
- A Radical Solution to the Race Problem.Quayshawn Spencer - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1025-1038.It has become customary among philosophers and biologists to claim that folk racial classification has no biological basis. This paper attempts to debunk that view. In this paper, I show that ‘race’, as used in current U.S. race talk, picks out a biologically real entity. I do this by, first, showing that ‘race’, in this use, is not a kind term, but a proper name for a set of human population groups. Next, using recent human genetic clustering results, I show (...)
- Racial Norms: A Reinterpretation of Du Bois' “The Conservation of Races”.David Miguel Gray - 2013 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 51 (4):465-487.I argue that standard explanations of Du Bois' theory of race inappropriately characterize his view as attempting to provide descriptive criteria for races. Such an interpretation makes it both susceptible to Appiah's circularity objection and alienates it from Du Bois' central project of solidarity—which is the central point of “Conservation.” I propose that we should understand his theory as providing a normative account of race: an attempt to characterize what some races should be in terms of what other races are. (...)
- Against the New Racial Naturalism.Adam Hochman - 2013 - Journal of Philosophy 110 (6):331–51.Support for the biological concept of race declined slowly but steadily during the second half of the twentieth century. However, debate about the validity of the race concept has recently been reignited. Genetic-clustering studies have shown that despite the small proportion of genetic variation separating continental populations, it is possible to assign some individuals to their continents of origin, based on genetic data alone. Race naturalists have interpreted these studies as empirically confirming the existence of human subspecies, and by extension (...)
- Racial discrimination: How not to do it.Adam Hochman - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (3):278-286.The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social (...)
- Was Race thinking invented in the modern West?Ron Mallon - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (1):77-88.The idea that genuinely racial thinking is a modern invention is widespread in the humanities and social sciences. However, it is not always clear exactly what the content of such a conceptual break is supposed to be. One suggestion is that with the scientific revolution emerged a conception of human groups that possessed essences that were thought to explain group-typical features of individuals as well the accumulated products of cultures or civilizations. However, recent work by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists suggests (...)
- “Sanguinary amusement”: E. A. Freeman, the comparative method and Victorian theories of race.Vicky L. Morrisroe - 2013 - Modern Intellectual History 10 (1):27-56.This article seeks to revise the conventional portrait of the historian E. A. Freeman as an arch-racist and confident proponent of Aryan superiority. Focusing on the relatively obscure Comparative Politics, it is argued that, while attitudes towards race were hardening in the later nineteenth century, Freeman combined the insights of the practitioners of the Comparative Method and the Liberal Anglican philosophy of Thomas Arnold to define the Aryan race as a community of culture rather than of blood. Explicitly rejecting biological (...)
- Confusions about Race: A New Installment.Neven Sesardic - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3):287-293.In his criticism of my paper on the concept of race (Sesardic, 2010), Adam Hochman raises many issues that deserve further clarification. First, I will comment on Hochman’s claim that I attack a straw man version of racial constructionism. Second, I will try to correct what I see as a distorted historical picture of the debate between racial naturalists and racial constructionists. Third, I will point out the main weaknesses in Hochman’s own defense of constructionism about race. And fourth, I (...)
- Biological races in humans.Alan R. Templeton - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3):262-271.Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense, but biological concepts of race are needed to access their reality in a non-species-specific manner and to see if cultural categories correspond to biological categories within humans. Modern biological concepts of race can be implemented objectively with molecular genetic data through hypothesis-testing. Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of (...)
- The Idea of a Scientific Concept of Race.Michael O. Hardimon - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Research 37:249-282.This article challenges the orthodox view that there is and can be no scientifically valid concept of race applicable to human beings by presenting a candidate scientific concept of biological race. The populationist concept of race specifies that a “race” is a subdivision of Homo sapiens—a group of populations that exhibits a distinctive pattern of genetically transmitted phenotypic characters and that belongs to an endogamous biological lineage initiated by a geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding population. The viability of the (...)
- Joshua Glasgow, A Theory of Race (New York: Routledge, 2009).Tom Martin - 2012 - Philosophical Papers 41 (1):175-179.Philosophical Papers, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 175-179, March 2012.
- Darwin’s explanation of races by means of sexual selection.Roberta L. Millstein - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (3):627-633.In Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore contend that “Darwin would put his utmost into sexual selection because the subject intrigued him, no doubt, but also for a deeper reason: the theory vindicated his lifelong commitment to human brotherhood”. Without questioning Desmond and Moore’s evidence, I will raise some puzzles for their view. I will show that attention to the structure of Darwin’s arguments in the Descent of Man shows that they are far from straightforward. As Desmond and (...)
- Another Look at the Reality of Race, by Which I Mean Race-f.Joshua Glasgow - 2011 - In Allan Hazlett (ed.), New Waves in Metaphysics.Recently the idea that race is biologically real has gained more traction. One argument against this claim is that the populations identified by science do not sufficiently map onto the concept of race as deployed in the relevant racial discourse, namely folk racial discourse. Call that concept the concept of race-f. Robin Andreasen (2005) argues that this "mismatch" criticism fails, on a variety of grounds including: ordinary folk semantically defer to scientists; scientists can disagree about facts; historians disagree about the (...)
- Race as a Physiosocial Phenomenon.Catherine Kendig - 2011 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 33 (2):191-222.This paper offers both a criticism of and a novel alternative perspective on current ontologies that take race to be something that is either static and wholly evident at one’s birth or preformed prior to it. In it I survey and critically assess six of the most popular conceptions of race, concluding with an outline of my own suggestion for an alternative account. I suggest that race can be best understood in terms of one’s experience of his or her body, (...)
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