UC Irvine

Some kinds that, upon reflection, seem to be in some sense “made up by us,” can nevertheless appear natural. For instance, there are reasons to think that races and genders lack a biological essence of the sort associated with paradigmatic natural kinds, and yet they are widely regarded as natural categories. This phenomenon of a kind appearing natural calls out for explanation. One kind of explanation that has been given is that such kinds are in fact unified by a social position. This dissertation critically examines this explanation and the metaphysical view implied by it. It also defends another way of explaining the phenomenon of interest, namely, by thinking about representations and certain mechanisms involving those representations.In this dissertation, I examined the question of how a kind that appears natural could be social. I studied the ways that the claim that some kind is socially constructed has been understood and evaluated prominent proposals for how to understand such claims while also considering existing critiques of those proposals. I studied how the notion of an explanation has typically been understood in various subfields, as well as the various ways one might understand the claim that some phenomenon is distinctly social. I came to the view that for a kind to be social, for a kind to be socially constructed in an important sense, is for the kind to be featured in regularities that are explained in part by joint intentional mechanisms involving certain sorts of covertly normative contents. I argued that this proposal provides a more direct answer to the question I sought to answer, the appearance question, than does the prominent approach to understanding the notion of social construction and of social kinds while also avoiding some of what I take to be practical and theoretical shortcomings of that approach.