The Construction Of Human Kinds

Author : Ron Mallon
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780198755678

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The Construction of Human Kinds by Ron Mallon Pdf

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
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0262581728

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Race in the Making by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld Pdf

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 : Peter L. Berger,Thomas Luckmann
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2011-04-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781453215463

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The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger,Thomas Luckmann Pdf

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.

Author : Ásta
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780190256791

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Categories We Live by by Ásta Pdf

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? Ásta 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. Ásta 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 : Lawrence A. Hirschfeld
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:475343483

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Race in the Making by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld Pdf

Author : Matthew Cole,Kate Stewart
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2016-05-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317084723

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Our Children and Other Animals by Matthew Cole,Kate Stewart Pdf

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 : Omoseni Adepoju,Clinton Aigbavboa,Nnamdi Nwulu,Michael Onyia
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2021-10-13
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9783030859732

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Re-skilling Human Resources for Construction 4.0 by Omoseni Adepoju,Clinton Aigbavboa,Nnamdi Nwulu,Michael Onyia Pdf

This book examines the burgeoning revolution in the construction industry known as Construction 4.0, the attendant need for re-skilling human resources, and key stakeholders' roles in developing the required skills for Construction 4.0. It views the lack of 21st-century skills and skills gap in the industry as significant challenges limiting the uptake and implementation of Construction 4.0 technologies, especially in developing countries. In order to determine the skills required, this book examines the critical technologies of Construction 4.0, such as building information modelling (BIM), robotic construction, 3D printing and drones, which have transformed the construction industry, thereby creating digital, intelligent and sustainable construction solutions. Furthermore, the book considers the benefits, risks and relevant skills required to implement Construction 4.0 technologies.

Author : Christopher Alexander
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2018-09-20
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780190050351

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A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander Pdf

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 : Sally Haslanger
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2012-04-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199892648

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Resisting Reality by Sally Haslanger Pdf

Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. In these previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory to explore and develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. Although the central essays of the book focus on a critical social realism about gender and race, these accounts function as case studies for a broader critical social realism. To develop this broader approach, several essays offer reworked notions of ideology, practice, and social structure, drawing on recent research in sociology and social psychology. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional essays in the book situate this approach to social phenomena in relation to philosophical methodology, and to specific debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The book as a whole explores the interface between analytic philosophy and critical theory.

Author : Judith Lorber,Susan A. Farrell
Publisher : SAGE Publications, Incorporated
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 1991
Category : Social Science
ISBN : UOM:39076001188114

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The Social Construction of Gender by Judith Lorber,Susan A. Farrell Pdf

Essentialist notions of gender difference are being challenged increasingly by research on the social construction of gender. Lorber and Farrell present a key collection of current research which illustrates how the constructivist approach has been applied to a variety of issues, including those centred on the family, the workplace, social class, ethnic identity and politics. Much of the recent work in this area has appeared in the journal Gender and Society which is the genesis of most of the papers in this volume.

Author : Ian Hacking
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2000-11-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780674254275

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The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking Pdf

Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality. Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse—very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the “culture wars” in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook. Written with generosity and gentle wit by one of our most distinguished philosophers of science, this wise book brings a much needed measure of clarity to current arguments about the nature of knowledge.

Author : Joshua Glasgow,Sally Haslanger,Chike Jeffers,Quayshawn Spencer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2019-05-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780190610197

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What Is Race? by Joshua Glasgow,Sally Haslanger,Chike Jeffers,Quayshawn Spencer Pdf

Across public discourse, in the media, politics, many branches of academic inquiry, and ordinary daily interactions, we spend a lot time talking about race: race relations, racial violence, discrimination based on race, racial integration, racial progress. It is fair to say that questions about race have vexed our social life. But for all we speak about race, do we know what race is? Is it a social construct or a biological object? Is it a bankrupt holdover from a time before sophisticated scientific understanding and genetics, or can it still hold up in biological, genetic, and other types of research? Most fundamentally, is race real? In this book, four prominent philosophers and race theorists debate how best to answer these difficult questions, applying philosophical tools and the principles of social justice to cutting-edge findings from the biological and social sciences. Each presents a distinct view of race: Sally Haslanger argues that race is a socio-political reality. Chike Jeffers maintains that race is not only political but also, importantly, cultural. Quayshawn Spencer pursues the idea that race is biologically real. And Joshua Glasgow argues that either race is not real, or if it is, it must be real in a way that is neither social nor biological. Each offers an argument for their own view and then replies to the others. Woven together, the result is a lively debate that opens up numerous ways of understanding race. Above all, it is call for sophisticated and principled discussion of something that significantly permeates our lives.

Author : Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2013-05-16
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781107244597

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Natural Categories and Human Kinds by Muhammad Ali Khalidi Pdf

The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences.

Author : Oxford University Press
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 14 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2010-05-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780199803705

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The Social Construction of Crime: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide by Oxford University Press Pdf

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of criminology find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In criminology, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Criminology, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study and practice of criminology. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

Author : Benjamin Gregg
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2011-12-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781139505413

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Human Rights as Social Construction by Benjamin Gregg Pdf

Most conceptions of human rights rely on metaphysical or theological assumptions that construe them as possible only as something imposed from outside existing communities. Most people, in other words, presume that human rights come from nature, God, or the United Nations. This book argues that reliance on such putative sources actually undermines human rights. Benjamin Gregg envisions an alternative; he sees human rights as locally developed, freely embraced, and indigenously valid. Human rights, he posits, can be created by the average, ordinary people to whom they are addressed, and that they are valid only if embraced by those to whom they would apply. To view human rights in this manner is to increase the chances and opportunities that more people across the globe will come to embrace them.