| Author | : Ron Mallon |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 261 |
| Release | : 2016 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0198755678 |
Ron Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. He considers what normative implications this social constructionism has for our understanding of our practices of representing human kinds, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and for our own agency.
| Author | : Ron Mallon |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 272 |
| Release | : 2016-08-11 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 019107229X |
Ron Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. Social constructionist explanations of human kinds like race, gender, and homosexuality are commonplace in the social sciences and humanities, but what do they mean and what are their implications? This book synthesizes recent work in evolutionary, cognitive, and social psychology as well as social theory and the philosophy of science, in order to offer a naturalistic account of the social construction of human kinds. Mallon begins by qualifying social constructionist accounts of representations of human kinds by appealing to evidence suggesting canalized dispositions towards certain ways of representing human groups, using race as a case study. He then turns to interpret constructionist accounts of categories as attempts to explain causally powerful human kinds by appealling to our practices of representing them, and he articulates a view in which widespread representations produce entrenched social roles that could vindicate such attempts. Mallon goes on to explore constructionist concerns with the social consequences of our representations, focusing especially on the way human kind representations can alter our behaviour and undermine our self understandings and our agency. Mallon understands socially constructed kinds as the real, sometimes stable products of our cognitive and representational practices, and he suggests that reference to such kinds can figure in our everyday and scientific practices of representing the social world. The result is a realistic, naturalistic account of how human representations might contribute to making up the parts of the social world that they represent.
| Author | : Lawrence A. Hirschfeld |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 250 |
| Release | : 1996 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 9780262581721 |
Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power. Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them. Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child's notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood. After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults') representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.
| Author | : Sally Anne Haslanger |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 503 |
| Release | : 2012-10-25 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0199892628 |
In this collection of previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory and on the resources of contemporary analytic philosophy to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. Explicating the workings of these interlocking structures provides tools for understanding and combatting social injustice.
| Author | : Christopher Alexander |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 1216 |
| Release | : 2018-09-20 |
| Genre | : Architecture |
| ISBN | : 0190050357 |
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
| Author | : Dr Kate Stewart |
| Publisher | : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. |
| Total Pages | : 209 |
| Release | : 2014-11-28 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1409464628 |
Focusing on the socialization of the human use of other animals as resources in contemporary Western society, this book explores the cultural reproduction of human-nonhuman animal relations in childhood. With close attention to the dominant practices through which children encounter animals and mainstream representations of animals in children's culture - whether in terms of the selective exposure of children to animals as ‘pets’ or as food in the home or in school, or the representation of animals in mass media and social media - Our Children and Other Animals reveals the interconnectedness of studies of childhood, culture and human-animal relations. In doing so it establishes the importance of human-animal relations in sociology, by describing the sociological importance of animals in children's lives and children in animals’ lives. Presenting a new typology of the various kinds of human-animal relationship, this conceptually innovative book constitutes a clear demonstration of the relevance of sociology to the interdisciplinary field of human-animal relations and will appeal to readers across the social sciences with interests in sociology, childhood studies, cultural and media studies and human-animal interaction.
| Author | : Ásta |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 161 |
| Release | : 2018 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0190256796 |
We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? sta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful? In a careful, probing investigation, she reveals how social categories are created and sustained and demonstrates their tendency to oppress through examples from current events. To this end, she offers an account of just what social construction is and how it works in a range of examples that problematize the categories of sex, gender, and race in particular. The main idea is that social categories are conferred upon people. sta introduces a 'conferralist' framework in order to articulate a theory of social meaning, social construction, and most importantly, of the construction of sex, gender, race, disability, and other social categories.
| Author | : Klaus Truemper |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 318 |
| Release | : 2017-03-24 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 9780966355482 |
Is mathematics created or discovered? The answer has been debated for centuries. This book answers the question clearly and decisively by applying the concept of language games, invented by the philosopher Wittgenstein to solve difficult philosophical issues. Using the results of modern brain science, the book also explains how it is possible that eminent mathematicians and scientists offer diametrically opposed answers to the question of creation vs. discovery. Interested in the topic but intimidated by mathematics? Not to worry. If you are familiar with the elementary operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, you can follow the arguments of this book.
| Author | : Frederick Schmitt |
| Publisher | : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers |
| Total Pages | : 401 |
| Release | : 2004-09-01 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0585466653 |
Human life is conducted within a network of social relations, social groups, and societies. Grasping the implications of that fact starts with understanding social metaphysics. Social metaphysics provides a foundation for social theory, as well as for social epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, action theory, ethics, and political philosophy. This volume will interest anyone concerned with mind, action, or the foundations of social theory. Socializing Metaphysics supplies diverse answers, from a broad array of voices, to the basic questions of social metaphysics. What is it for human beings to stand in social relations or form social groups? Do these relations and groups bring about something above and beyond the individuals involved? Is there any sense to the notion of a human being apart from social relations? How can an individual achieve autonomy within a society? In what sense are human kinds like race and gender socially constructed? The answers are found within.
