Haslanger lays out the three major divisions in the book: §1 social construction; §2 race and gender; and §3 epistemological and methodological issues in philosophy. She concludes with a broader discussion of how her book instantiates a particular kind of social theory and critique (§4).

1. Social Construction

The term “social construction” is used widely in the social sciences and humanities. However, it means very different things to different theorists. Haslanger’s “overarching goal is to clarify and defend the more specific proposals that race and gender are socially constructed, and to situate these proposals within a broader philosophical and political picture” (2012: 5).

Haslanger identifies three philosophical questions concerning social construction:

• Realism: in what sense are social constructs real and in what sense are they illusory?
• Naturalism: what is the precise connection (if any) between social constructions and natural facts?
• Kinds: do social categories such as ‘women’ or ‘black’ have determine meanings? For that matter, what does it mean to have a determinate meaning?

2. Race and Gender

Haslanger focuses on two social constructs in particular: race and gender. She argues for a “focal analysis” that defines these constructs as “social classes.” A focal analysis treats a phenomenon as focal or core for the purposes at hand, and then explains other phenomena by their relationship to that focal point. For Haslanger, the core phenomenon involves patterns of social relationships that result in gendered and racial dominance.

Haslanger introduces some distinctions that will figure in subsequent chapters:

• ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are genders, and thus are social categories; ‘female’ and ‘male’ are sexes and thus are biological categories.
• ‘Black’ and ‘White’ (uppercase) are races, and thus are social categories; ‘black’ and ‘white’ (lowercase) are “colors.” (It’s unclear if they’re colors are biological categories.)

Haslanger holds that both race and gender are real, because being interpreted as a woman, man, Black, or White, has implications for one’s social position. Moreover, “the social relations defining gender and race consist in a set of attitudes and patterns of treatment towards bodies as they are perceived (or imagined) through frameworks of salience implicit in the attitudes” (2012: 7). As a result, if our attitudes radically change, our existing genders and races, most notably woman, man, Black, and White can also change (but, absent a biological intervention, different sexes and colors won’t change.)

Several questions emerge from Haslanger’s analysis of race and gender:

• Intersectionality: How exactly do race, gender, and other social categories interact with each other?
• Structure and agency: What is the relationship between individual agents and larger social structures?
• First– and third-person perspectives: How should analyses of race and gender triangulate between first- and third-person accounts of the relevant social phenomena?
• Material and cultural factors: How do material and social conditions interact in our understanding of social structures?

 

3. Language, Knowledge, and Method

Haslanger notes that her analyses of race and gender don’t accord with common sense. Following Quine, Haslanger denies a sharp line between theoretical and non-theoretical (everyday, commonsense) uses of a term. She also adopts semantic externalism—the view that the meanings of terms are not confined to what an individual speaker intends, but also depend on the social and natural environments in which a speaker uses a term—about race and gender. Her position thereby downplays the importance of common sense: first-person accounts of race and gender aren’t the sole arbiters of what those concepts mean. Consequently, Haslanger’s analyses are to be assessed “holistically, in light of broader considerations about our purposes, the inquiry we are engaged in, the community we are a part of, and expert information from those with greater empirical knowledge of the domain” (2012: 14).

 

4. Social Theory and Social Critique

Haslanger sees part of her task as that of “institutional critique.” Institutional critique involves a description of a social practice in a manner that highlights its normatively relevant features, and an evaluation that practice as good, bad, right, wrong, just, unjust, useful, useless, etc. Generally, philosophers excel at evaluation, but falter at description; non-philosophers have the opposite problem. Haslanger highlights the importance of getting both parts of critique right. Critiques don’t simply involve accurate descriptions; they also involve describing a social practice’s normatively relevant features. Since moral theories provide some of the richest repositories for describing these features, and moral theories are naturally seen as tools for evaluation, description requires evaluation. Conversely, moral theories must provide evaluations and prescriptions that are effective. However, effective evaluations and prescriptions require good descriptions of the social practices one wishes to change.

• Ideology Critique

While institutional critique focuses on changing social norms, laws, and practices, ideology critique focuses on “the conceptual and narrative frameworks that we employ in understanding and navigating the world, especially the social world” (2012: 17). Genealogical ideological critiques often highlight the historical and social contingency of concepts otherwise taken for granted. Ideologies can take many forms, but they all make a difference to with respect to social inequalities. When ideology is not recognized as such, it is hegemonic.

Ideology critique is especially important because a social practice’s structural features are often opaque to its practitioners. A social structure is a set of interdependent dispositions to respond to certain parts of the world through beliefs, desires, and habitual responses.

• Critical Theory

Ideology critique is part of critical theory. Critical theory begins with an assumption that current conditions are unjust. It then engages in the aforementioned process of description and evaluation of those conditions. Like all good theories, critical theory aims to be empirically adequate; but it also must be useful to the social movement of which it is a part. Critical theory takes knowers to be “situated,” i.e. “what we believe or understand about something is affected by how we are related to it” (2012: 24).

 

5. Questions

• Page 7: Haslanger draws the following analogy: gender: sex :: race: color. However, the biological categories, female and male, are in much better shape than the biological categories, black, white, So, how credible is this analogy? (See page 9 for a more precise definition of color = the set of physical features used as evidence of ancestral links to a particular geographical region.)
• Page 7: Haslanger seems to argue that if something has demonstrable social implications, then it’s real. But being labeled as a witch had demonstrable social implications, yet we wouldn’t claim that witches are real. Is this too loose of a criterion for reality?
• Does Haslanger’s naturalism, externalism, etc. make her position more or less difficult to refute than a position that simply tried to capture the everyday or commonsense conception of gender and race?
• Pages 22-23: What happens if a critical theory is wrong about what is unjust? How can that be settled if “not all rational inquirers must endorse” a critique’s assumptions?
• Page 24: As defined, situated knowing seems to be a completely empty thesis. Of course we have to stand in some relation to what we believe or understand. Presumably Haslanger has more specific relations in mind. What are they? Social relations? If so, then this seems like an empirical hypothesis, and one that’s liable to be refuted by any cross-cultural invariance we see in beliefs/understandings.