Individualistic and Structural Explanations in Ásta’sCategories We Live By

Aaron M Griffith

doi:10.1515/jso-2020-2003

Abstract

AbstractÁsta’sCategories We Live Byis a superb addition to the literature on social metaphysics. In it she offers a powerful framework for understanding the creation and maintenance of social categories. In this commentary piece, I want to draw attention to Ásta’s reliance on explanatory individualism – the view that the social world is best explained by the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that this reliance makes it difficult for Ásta to explain how many social categories are maintained and why certain categories are reliably available to us and so resistant to change. These explanatory deficiencies could be overcome, I argue, by eschewing explanatory individualism and positing social structures to figure in structural explanations of the maintenance and availability of social categories.

Highlights

Categories We Live By (2018) is a compelling and ambitious book aimed at providing a metaphysics of social categories, especially those of gender, sex, race, disability, and religion
According to Ásta, social categories are produced by the action of “conferral.” Individuals confer upon each other social properties that are social statuses
To identify with a location on the map is to take the norms, constraints, and enablements associated with the social location as applying to ourselves (2018, p. 122). Ásta summarizes her view like this: What is a social category? What is its nature? How is it created and sustained? My answer is that individual agents create and maintain social categories by the conferral actions of classifying and placing people in the contexts they travel...And when people come to each new encounter with the social maps that have operated in their prior contexts, we can get a picture of the systematicity of certain sorts of differential treatment in a way that still preserves the dynamic nature of human interactions and does not posit structures or structural agency

Summary

Introduction

Categories We Live By (2018) is a compelling and ambitious book aimed at providing a metaphysics of social categories, especially those of gender, sex, race, disability, and religion. Griffith is conferred upon an individual in a particular context by others, the conferrers are attempting to track (consciously or unconsciously) certain physical features – “base” properties – of the individual which, in that context, have social significance. My answer is that individual agents create and maintain social categories by the conferral actions of classifying and placing people in the contexts they travel...And when people come to each new encounter with the social maps that have operated in their prior contexts, we can get a picture of the systematicity of certain sorts of differential treatment in a way that still preserves the dynamic nature of human interactions and does not posit structures or structural agency. I conclude by suggesting that Ásta’s conferralist framework would benefit from being paired with an account of social structure that would provide structural rather than merely individualistic explanations of social categories and maps

Sustaining Social Categories

Availability of Social Categories and Maps

Structures and Structural Explanations