Abstract
In a large and impressive body of published work, Quayshawn Spencer has meticulously articulated and defended a metaphysical project aimed at resuscitating a biological conception of race—one free from many of the pitfalls of biological essentialism. If successful, such a project would be highly rewarding, since it would provide a compelling response to philosophers who have denied the genuine existence of race while avoiding the very dangers that they sought to avoid. The aim of this paper is to subject those moves to careful scrutiny and thereby appraise the prospects for a new biologism about race.
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Notes
And of course not, like dodos, non-existent.
More on how important the “some” here is later. Readers should note that because of the parentheses, this should not be considered a direct quotation from Spencer.
This is Spencer’s most accessible characterizations of structure-like programs but perhaps not the most accurate. For more technically detailed accounts of these programs, see some of Spencer’s more technical papers, such as (Spencer 2013, 2018c, d), and also (Winther 2014) (Kaplan and Winther 2014), (Weiss and Fullerton 2005) and citations therein.
Thanks to Spencer for this example.
Adam Hochman has articulated similar worries in his (2014). He argues that Spencer’s account of being "biologically real" is too weak to contrast with anti-realism about biological race. Such anti-realists, he points out, do not believe that race talk is inconsistent with biology–or that it captures no biological features at all. They deny, rather, that race talk carves up the world in a way that ought to be recognized as valid by biologists
I use Ereshefky here because Boyd does not specify that a mechanism is required. But this means Boyd isn’t really going to help us to tease out which kinds are biological and which are not. And this is central to Spencer’s argument.
See, for example, (Goldfield 1997).
I thank Chike Jeffers for encouraging me to add these elements to the list and making the important poing that non only bad, racist social forces have shaped the social construction of races.
Spencer himself actually acknowledges this point in (Spencer 2014). He calls these mechanisms “social isolation mechanisms” and “social cohesion mechanisms.”
I thank an anonymous referee for providing this objection (verbatim).
Though not all–I am unaware of any place in which Spencer responds to the worries raised by, for example, the Novembre et al. (2008) study. Suffice it to say that its less than obvious to all parties what the path is from Spencer’s preferred notion of a genuine scientific kind to the claim that its exactly the k=5 partition that comes out of “Structure” that picks out the five real biological entities.
This echoes the point we made in 3.4 and 3.5, but here we can see the point getting purchase on an actual example.
For the rest of the paper, I will use this small cap font whenever the words in question are referring to the concept or the kind it picks out, and not the objects that fall under them. Ordinary english doesn’t do a great job of representing this difference, but in this context that is a very important distinction. People with four or more moles are of course real. But the concept PERSON WITH FOUR OR MORE MOLES does not pick out a real kind. So notice then, that the central topic of this paper is whether races (no caps) are biologically real, that is, whether WHITE PERSON and ASIAN PERSON are concepts that pick out real biological kinds. Not whether RACE is a real kind. And certainly not whether white people are real.
Some philosophers of biology argue that the word “species” picks out a heterogeneous set of kinds, such as historical species, genetically structured species, morphological species, ecospecies, etc, but no species-kind in general. But I’m not aware of anyone who denies that SPECIES is a kind. And certainly there are philosophers who think SPECIES is a kind or set of kinds, but that species themselves are not kinds.
To be quite a bit more specific, they say that they are trying to develop a race talk that facilitates communication of racial data across federal agencies, that can be used to collect federal statistics on race, and that can be used to enforce federal civil rights laws. But this is more or less what all operationalizations do.
And it doesn’t matter here whether we are talking about the one univocal notion of race, or just one particular folk one.
Hochman (2014) makes a similar point. He says "One consequence of Spencer’s view, hidden by his exclusive focus on ‘ordinary folk in the U.S.’, is that because folk racial taxonomy is different in different parts of the world, the philosophical race realist is necessarily a relativist about race. Race might be real in the U.S., but an illusion in Australia.”
Chike Jeffers (who studied with Mills), informs me that this was probably not Mills’ view. Still, I think he can very usefully be read as providing an argument for this–particularly since, in his "table 1" (p. 55) he provides a chart that would give you a function from the seven characteristic to race, and there are "?"s in the chart representing truth gaps in the function. After all, one nice way of defining “X doesn’t supervene on Y” is by saying “the function from Y to X sometimes has no determinate value.”
Notice that to maintain this, Spencer has to deny that the OMB can be taken at their word as to what they are doing, since his view conflicts with what they say. I believe he is willing to bite the bullet on this.
An anonymous referee has urged me to consider the following interpretation of Spencer here: "The best way to interpret him is that he is claiming that the co-extension of OMB races and n = 5 clusters is the DISCOVERY of a CONTINGENT truth, and so definition is not involved." Unfortunately, this cannot be right, since Spencer explicitly says that the OMB baptized an existing natural kind and made these race terms rigid designators. And rigidly designating terms pick out their referents necessarily. And of course Spencer has to say something like this on pain of falling to the main worry of this section: just because the extension of a concept is contingently coextensive with a real kind doesn’t mean the concept picks out a real kind. That’s the point of the “Donald Trump’s favorite kind of bird” example.
It is not perfetly clear what account of race Mills wants to offer in his (1998, Chap. 3), since he deliberately leaves things rather murky. But presumably he thinks the features in that define races as real social kinds are a complicated mix of biological, social, and personal-psychological characteristics
There are other motivations, but this is the one that matters most to us here.
Though you might of course wonder how it could ever have come out to be true that a classification system that appeals to people’s community attachments could ever have been identical to a real biological kind. I myself find this somewhat baffling.
I think naturalistically inclined philosophers of science should be wary of notions like a posteriori necessity and magical notion of reference of a kind that Putnam, in his more sensible moments, described as functioning via “noetic rays”(Putnam 1981, 51).
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Winsberg, E. Putting races on the ontological map: a close look at Spencer’s ‘new biologism’ of race. Biol Philos 37, 46 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-022-09878-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-022-09878-7