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Ron Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. He considers what normative implications this social constructionism has for our understanding of our practices of representing human kinds, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and for our own agency.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Constructing Human Kinds
- 1: Constructing and Constraining Representations: Was Race Thinking Invented in the Modern West?
- 2: Constructing Categories: Concepts, Actions and Social Roles
- 3: Social Roles that Matter
- 4: Natural Permission and the Naturalistic Fallacy
- 5: Performed Categories, Self-Explanation, and Agency
- Part II: Realizing Social Construction
- 6: Social Construction and Reality
- 7: Achieving Stability
- 8: Achieving Reference
- 9: Conclusion: Alternatives and Implications
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
About the author
Ron Mallon (Ph.D. Rutgers) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the PNP Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His work is at the intersection of the philosophy of psychology and social theory.
Summary
Ron Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. He considers what normative implications this social constructionism has for our understanding of our practices of representing human kinds, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and for our own agency.
Additional text
His book has much to recommend it. It is careful, scholarly, clear and tackles important issues . . . The book will be accessible to readers with a good undergraduate background in philosophy, and should be read by philosophers who want to understand the metaphysics and semantics of socially constructed kinds.
