Kinds Before Their Concepts: Practical Anchoring and Conceptual Opacity in the Historiography of Race

Many social kinds are opaque in that they may be explanatorily useful without depending upon propositional attitudes directed at them. This article asks how historians can account for the emergence of opaque social kinds in advance of their recognition by contemporary actors without falling into problematic anachronism. To explore this problem, I examine the historical hypothesis that modern racial kinds emerged in the immediate post-Columbian period before the rise of race theories and discourses. While social ontology should support such theses, prevailing discursivist and intentionalist theories cannot. I propose a non-intentionalist practical model of social construction as an alternative.