The Scalar Theory of Social Categories
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We live in a world in which the boundaries of race, gender, and sexual orientation are increasingly being contested. Commonly accepted social binaries—man/woman, black/white, heterosexual/homosexual—are proving to be a fraught way to understand social identity. In a series of recent papers, I argue for a philosophical alternative to binary conceptions of social identity. On my proposed scalar (or continuous) theory of social identity, social identities come in degrees; e.g., one is not simply a man, but one is a man to a lesser or greater degree. The scalar theory allows us to make sense of racial, sexual, and gender social identities that are often obscured by social binaries.
I have also written about the material nature of social groups and institutions. |
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Publications
- (Forthcoming) Critical Social Ontology, Synthese
- Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or accept widespread social injustices. Social reality is also obscured in cases where ordinary thought and language simply is not perspicuous enough to represent the social objects, kinds, and structures that are central to understanding social injustice. In both cases, I argue that the critical social ontologist will benefit from using the tools and concepts of fundamental metaphysics.
- (2023) Social Construction and Indeterminacy, Analytic Philosophy
- An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy follows from the existence of constitutive social construction; there is indeterminacy in the social world because there is indeterminacy in how the social world is constructed.
- (2023) Derivative Indeterminacy, Erkenntnis
- Indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) if it has its source in the way the world is (rather than how it is represented or known). There are two questions we could ask about indeterminacy. First: does it exist? Second: is indeterminacy derivative? I focus on the second question. Specifically, I argue that (at least some) metaphysical indeterminacy can be derivative, where this roughly means that facts about indeterminacy are metaphysically grounded in facts about what is determinate.
- (2023) Exclusion and Erasure: Two Types of Ontological Oppression, Ergo.
- In recent social metaphysics, philosophers have described forms of injustice that hold partly in virtue of metaphysical considerations: ontological oppression, ontological injustice, categorical injustice, and so on. The goal of this paper is to introduce another form of metaphysical injustice: ontological erasure. Ontological erasure occurs when an individual is wronged in virtue of it being indeterminate whether they are a member of a socially constructed group. My primary example of erasure concerns gendered groups that do not account for the possibility of trans people. In such cases, it is not that trans identity is considered and rejected; rather, the category of trans identity is ignored entirely.
- (2022) Social Groups are Concrete Material Particulars, Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
- It is common to think that social groups are concrete material particulars; for example, the chess club consists entirely of its members (or a fusion thereof). But such views, whether they take groups to be fusions or pluralities, suffer from a coincidence objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these intuitions to show that the materialist view must be abandoned. Other philosophers give a linguistic explanation of these intuitions. I propose an alternative explanation. Social groups are concrete material particulars, but we should provide a psychological, rather than linguistic, explanation of non-identity intuitions. On the psychological theory, social groups appear coincident but non-identical because they are perceived to be governed by conflicting social norms.
- (2022) The Metaphysics of Gender is (Relatively) Substantial, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
- According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of substantivity can be understood in a way that accommodates gender pluralism. First, I claim that gender terms (at least as used in the ontology room) are referentially indeterminate, where referential indeterminacy holds in virtue of the way the world is. Second, I propose a degree-theoretic (or scalar) account of metaphysical substantivity; genders are substantial to the degree that they are determinate. I conclude that gender is relatively, although not absolutely, substantial.
