Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?
- 1 January 2000
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Philosophy of Science
- Vol. 67 (S3) , S653-S666
- https://doi.org/10.1086/392853
Abstract
Race was once thought to be a real biological kind. Today the dominant view is that objective biological races don't exist. I challenge the trend to reject the biological reality of race by arguing that cladism (a school of classification that individuates taxa by appeal to common ancestry) provides a new way to define race biologically. I also reconcile the proposed biological conception with constructivist theories about race. Most constructivists assume that biological realism and social constructivism are incompatible views about race; I argue that the two conceptions can be compatible.Keywords
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