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On Haslanger’s Meta-Metaphysics: Social Structures and Metaphysical Deflationism E. Díaz-León University of Barcelona DOI: 10.2478/disp-2018-0013 BIBLID [0873-626X (2018) 50; pp.201–216] Abstract The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). Keywords Ontological realism, gender, race, social constructionism, concepts. The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed.1 But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts try- ing to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates 1 See for instance Haslanger 2000, Mikkola 2011, Ásta 2011, Witt 2011 and Jenkins 2016 for different views about gender, and Andreasen 2000, Glasgow 2009, Haslanger 2000, Jeffers 2013, Spencer 2014 and Díaz-León 2015 for dif- ferent views about race. Disputatio, Vol. X, No. 50, December 2018 © 2018 Díaz-León. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License 202 E. Díaz-León of different views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political consid- erations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to meta- physical deflationism offered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). We can then conclude that this view is a serious contender and deserves further attention. Barnes (2017) focuses on Sally Haslanger’s work on gender and race as a case study, and argues that the best way of understanding her views about the nature of gender and race is in terms of a version of ontological realism about these debates. In par- ticular, Barnes argues that metaphysical deflationism cannot capture what those debates are really about, and what Haslanger’s views are trying to accomplish. In response, I will argue that we can under- stand the debates in the metaphysics of gender and race in general, and Haslanger’s accounts of gender and race in particular, within the framework of metaphysical deflationism. For instance, Haslanger (2000) offers a characterization of gender and race in terms of social structures, and more recently she has offered a characterization of so- cial structures in terms of networks of social relations, where social rela- tions are constituted through social practices, which are in turn under- stood in terms of interdependent schemas and resources (2016: 125–6). Here I will not focus on the question of whether Haslanger herself is committed to either ontological realism or deflationism. Instead, I will focus on the question of whether understanding Haslanger’s accounts of gender and race and other social structures within the framework of metaphysical deflationism can capture what those ac- counts aim to do and why they matter. Barnes characterizes the contrast between metaphysical realism and metaphysical deflationism as follows: metaphysical deflationism is roughly the view that there are different ways of describing real- ity and there isn’t one of them that is privileged. In addition, dis- putes in metaphysics are just about which of these different descrip- tions we should use, given different purposes. Metaphysical realists On Haslanger’s Meta-Metaphysics 203 deny this: they believe that there are certain areas of reality that are explanatorily more important than others. In addition, they be- lieve that disputes about metaphysics are disputes about “what the world is like, not what our words or concepts are like” (2017: 2418). Barnes argues that according to her interpretation, debates in so- cial ontology are better captured by the framework of metaphysical realism, since they concern issues about what the world is like, not just about which terms and concepts we should use to describe the world. Against this, I want to suggest that there is a version of meta- physical deflationism that can better capture what debates about the nature of gender and race are about. I will first present my version of metaphysical deflationism, and I will then argue that it can overcome Barnes’ objections. 1 Metaphysical deflationism revisited My version of metaphysical deflationism draws on the work by Amie Thomasson (2007, 2008, 2015, 2017). There are some important differences with respect to Barnes’ characterization, so I will try to explain what these differences are, but as I will argue, there are enough similarities so that my defence of metaphysical deflationism as a view about the metaphysics of gender and race is in opposition to Barnes’ defence of ontological realism. What is metaphysical deflationism? First of all, some preliminary clarifications are in order. For our purposes here, I will assume that some form of permissivism about properties is correct (see Schaffer 2009). In particular, I will assume that for any predicate that is satis- fied by some entities in the actual world, there is a corresponding property. For example, my nose and my left toe and the Eiffel Tower have a property in common, albeit a not very interesting one. Con- sequently, there will be many alternative descriptions of reality that are all equally correct. For example, there are descriptions of reality that include a predicate for the property of being either my nose or my left toe or the Eiffel Tower, and descriptions that do not include such predicate, but they can all describe reality accurately. Hilary Putnam (1981) has made a similar point using the following example (as explained in Boghossian 2006 and Mikkola 2016): let us consider a picture with three black dots. If we are asked how many objects 204 E. Díaz-León there are in the picture, there are at least two different (but equally correct) ways of answering the question, depending on which con- cept of object we are using: we could answer ‘3’ (in the sense of three non-overlapping objects), or ‘7’ (including those three, plus the three different combinations of two dots each, plus the combina- tion of the three dots). Do we have good reasons to say that there is a unique answer that is the best one? According to metaphysical de- flationism, we cannot give an answer to this question independently of which concepts or classification system we are using. As we have seen, the answer depends on which concept of object we use. Thomasson (2015, 2017) has argued that metaphysical deflation- ism is committed to the claim that debates in metaphysics are solvable by a combination of conceptual analysis and empirical investigation. She claims that there are two versions of metaphysical deflationism. On the one hand there is the verbal dispute idea, according to which different parties in a metaphysical debate use a central term with dif- ferent meanings, so that when one utters a sentence like ‘x is C’ and the other utters ‘x is not C’, they are using ‘C’ with different mean- ings, and therefore their utterances could both be true at the same time. On the other hand there is the easy ontology idea, according to which disputes in metaphysics (such as existence questions of the form ‘Do Xs exist?’) are easy to solve by a combination of conceptual analysis (that is, what are the application conditions for something to fall under ‘X’?), and empirical investigation (that is, are there any entities in the world that satisfy those application conditions?). In my view these two versions are not so different, since both assume that questions in metaphysics can be solved by a combination of concep- tual analysis, that is, finding out the application conditions for the term one is using, and empirical investigation, in order to find out what entities, if any, satisfy those application conditions. It could be the case that different speakers associate the term with different ap- plication conditions, or that they really use the term with the same application conditions. In either case, the crucial idea is that in order to solve the debates, we need to figure out what the application con- ditions are, and whether something satisfies those application condi- tions. For example, in order to answer a question such as ‘how many objects are there in this picture?’, we need to figure out what we mean by ‘object’. On Haslanger’s Meta-Metaphysics 205 It is usually assumed that metaphysical deflationism is committed to the view that all the different ways of describing reality are equally good, since it is only a matter of which concepts or classification sys- tem we choose. As we saw above, Barnes suggests that metaphysical deflationism is committed to the claim that there isn’t a description of reality that is privileged, whereas ontological realism claims that there is a description that is privileged.
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