What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds

Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all.The question arises: what do we mean by the terms?It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are de nitive.However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credibility to social constructionist projects.When we talk of gender and race, at one level it is pretty clear what we're talking about.Although there are cases where it is hard to tell from casual observation what race or gender a person is, and although there are borderline cases in which our ordinary criteria don't give us a clear answer, we are all pretty well versed in the practice of assigning people a race and a gender.Yet, at another level, it is not so clear what we mean when we say "I'm a white woman" or "Barack Obama is a black man."For example, race eliminativists maintain that talk of races is vacuous (no one is white or black, Asian or Latino, because there are no races); others argue that race continues to be a meaningful biological kind; and still others argue that race is a social category.Feminists have questioned the legitimacy of dividing us into two sexes, males and females, and many have grown dubious of the sex/gender distinction altogether; in everyday discourse the term 'gender' now seems to be equivalent to 'sex'; and yet many feminist theorists still argue that gender is a social category.How do we make sense of all this?Are the apparent disagreements real disagreements, or are the different parties to these discussions really talking about different things?Elsewhere I've defended social constructionist accounts of race and gender (Haslanger 2000).I believe that races and genders are real categories to be