Social kind vs. conferralist approaches to social ontology: ‘race’ as a case study

Abstract

ABSTRACT Philosophers often understand social categories as conferred or as social kinds. The relationship between conferralism and a social kind approach to social ontology remains unclear. Conferralism is often interpreted as a way of understanding the nature of social kinds, rather than as an alternative to a social kind approach. In this paper, I argue that these two approaches are in fact radically different, and I identify the challenges unique to each approach. The social kind approach requires social kinds to be identifiable on the basis of kind-specific social properties or relations while the conferralist approach does not, instead taking institutional classification practices and communal attitudes to be reality-conferring. While these are not mutually exclusive approaches to social ontology – some social categories are conferred and constitute social kinds – they are genuinely different. I use the debate about the existence of social races as a case study to show why it is useful to distinguish between social kind and conferralist approaches.