Race in the Social Sciences

with Richard Lauer

Race has been at the forefront of public and scientific discourse. The Black Lives Matter movement has put a spotlight on racial injustices related to policing. Lurking in the background is a larger network of racial inequalities with respect to income, wealth, health, education, occupational opportunities, and housing. If we are to understand these inequalities—much less change them—then we must understand what race is.

Yet, the nature of race is contested throughout the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences. Constructionists hold that races exist but only in virtue of certain social conditions. Antirealists hold that while our mistaken ideas about race have had tangible consequences, races do not exist. Biological realists hold that races exist in virtue of certain biological conditions, while making sure to avoid the ills of scientific racism. The current debate between proponents of these different positions appears to be at a standstill—in no small part because of deeper disagreements about the very methods used to evaluate different proposals for what race is.

Race in the Social Sciences offers a way out of this impasse and in the process offers a novel position regarding the ontology of race. Its driving idea is that race’s role in empirically successful social science provides a powerful guide to what race is. We argue that social science is permissive with respect to the ontology of race. Thus, there is little for constructionists, antirealists, and biological realists to debate: since each can be reconciled with successful social science, they are all admissible stances concerning the reality of race. However, this permissiveness has its limits: there remains a minimal, core conception of race that successful social science requires. This minimal conception thereby enjoys a privileged role in the ontology of race: it is (or at least ought to be) presupposed by the other views.

In defending these positions, we use race as a touchstone for engaging several perennial issues in the philosophy of science and the methodology of the social sciences: When do we have sufficient scientific evidence to claim that something is real? What is the relationship between quantitative and qualitative social science? What is the appropriate scientific response when evidence underdetermines a hypothesis? How should social, political, and moral values inform science? What is the relationship between the social and biological sciences?

tentative book Outline

PART I: How to Do the Ontology of Race
1. Naturalizing the Social Ontology of Race
2. Do the Social Sciences Vindicate Races’ Reality?
3. Voluntarism and Contractarian Meta-Ontology
PART II: Doing the Ontology of Race
4. Ontological Obligations: Naturalized Minimalism
5. Ontological Permissions 1: Constructionism
6. Ontological Permissions 2: Antirealism
7. Ontological Permissions 3: Biological Realism
8. Conclusion: Ontologies of Race in a Pluralistic Society

relevant publications

This project was inspired by our article, Do the Social Sciences Vindicate Races' Reality?, which will be the basis of Chapter 2. Chapter 3's core ideas--which animate all of Part II--are a novel extension of my work on questions in science. In short, a stance is characterized by a set of relevant questions, where relevance is a function of interests, social roles, and background commitments. Stance A is obligatory from the perspective of Stance B if all of the relevant questions characteristic of Stance A are a proper subset of the relevant questions characteristic of Stance B. Contractarian meta-ontology identifies the stance obligatory from the perspective of all other permissible stances in a given domain. In our project, this stance will specify the minimum commitments about what race is that are needed to do empirically successful social-scientific research.