Metaphysics Work-in-Progress Group (Tuesday - Week 2, TT22)

Gender and race are plausible candidates to be social constructs. But what is it to be socially constructed? In this paper, I argue that we can explicate social construction as metaphysical emergence. Exploring different accounts of weak and strong emergence, I argue that there are reasons to think that while some socially constructed kinds are weakly emergent, others might be strongly emergent. Throughout the paper, I contrast my proposal with recent accounts of social construction in terms of metaphysical grounding. I argue that the emergence framework is better suited than the grounding framework for making sense of the range of social phenomena that constructionists about gender and race draw our attention to.  

Anyone interested in attending the seminar, please email Alex Kaiserman in order to be added to the mailing list.