What good are our intuitions? Philosophical analysis and social kinds

1 Across the humanities and social sciences it has become commonplace for scholars to argue that categories once assumed to be " natural " are in fact " social " or, in the familiar lingo, " socially constructed ". Two common examples of such categories are race and gender, but there many others. One interpretation of this claim is that although it is typically thought that what unifies the instances of such categories is some set of natural or physical properties, instead their unity rests on social features of the items in question. Social constructionists pursuing this strategy—and it is these social constructionists I will be focusing on in this paper—aim to " debunk " the ordinary assumption that the categories are natural, by revealing the more accurate social basis of the classification. 2 To avoid confusion, and to resist some of the associations with the term 'social construction', I will sometimes use the term 'socially founded' for the categories that this sort of constructionist reveals as social rather than natural. 3 Let me emphasize: the idea in saying that a category is socially founded is not to say that social factors are responsible for our attending to the category in question (which may be true of wholly natural categories); nor is it to say that the things in the category are less than fully real (material things may be unified by social features and there is no reason to deny that social properties and relations are fully real). The point, roughly, is to shift our understanding of a category so we recognize the real basis for the unity of its members. As we will see, there are importantly different sorts of cases. But because the difference between a natural and a social category has significance both for what's possible and for what we're responsible, the constructionist's general project, when successful, has important normative implications. Amongst those who aim to analyze our ordinary racial classifications, social constructionists are often at odds with error theorists (sometimes called eliminativists) and naturalists. Error theorists maintain, in agreement with social constructionists, that the items taken to fall within the category in question do not meet the supposed natural or physical conditions for membership; the error theorist often goes farther to claim that the conditions are vacuous: nothing satisfies them, (sometimes even that nothing could satisfy them). They conclude, then, that such things are illusory …