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SoSe 21: Conceptual Amelioration for Social Identity Concepts

Vanessa Carr

Comments

The central purpose of this seminar course is to investigate the notion of conceptual amelioration and its role in efforts to provide an account of social identity concepts — especially concepts of gender and race. The notion of conceptual amelioration lines up roughly with what is sometimes characterised as conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, or revisionary metaphysics. An ameliorative approach supposes that we can and should change certain of our concepts, guided by consideration of the purposes that we want our concepts to serve, and how those purposes might best be served. An ameliorative approach has been advocated, most notably by Sally Haslanger, for social identity concepts, in order to achieve feminist and anti-racist ends. Feminism is the movement that focuses on opposing the system of patriarchy, and anti-racism is the movement that focuses on opposing the subordination of racialised groups. The course will begin (in Wk 2, after an introductory week) with a discussion of Haslanger’s seminal paper ‘Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?’, where an ameliorative approach to concepts of gender and race is proposed, and laid out as contrasting with (although connected to) alternative, “descriptive”, approaches to accounting for these concepts. At this stage we will start to raise and consider such questions as (1) What is it to ameliorate our concepts? (2) Can we distinguish between an ameliorative and a descriptive approach to concepts? (3) Is amelioration possible? (4) Is amelioration necessary? (5) Is amelioration desirable? (6) Should we ameliorate our concepts in the manner that Haslanger proposes? (7) Have any of our concepts already been ameliorated? (8) How common is an ameliorative approach in philosophy in general? (9) What happens to our old concepts? (10) What does amelioration mean for disagreement? With these questions having been raised, we will then turn to look at historic proposals regarding our concepts of gender, sex and race (Wks 3-9). This provides useful background for understanding the nature of Haslanger’s proposal, and potential criticisms of it. In discussing the various historic proposals, we will also consider whether they can and should be understood as following an ameliorative approach themselves. We will then return to Haslanger, with a discussion of a development of her (2000) proposal in a slightly later (2006) paper (Wk 10). We will also return here to the questions raised in Wk 2, to consider them in the light of Haslanger’s more developed proposal, and our exploration of various alternative understandings of our concepts of gender, sex and race in Wks 3-9. We will follow this by addressing some challenges that have been put to Haslanger’s ameliorative approach (Wks 11-13): one which argues that an ameliorative approach is unhelpful and unnecessary for feminist goals (Wk 11), and another which argues that it is only possible in a very restricted sense (Wk 12). We will end with a discussion of Haslanger’s response to the latter challenge, and with student presentations of their critical reactions to the debate over the ameliorative approach to social identity concepts (Wk 13). close