Josephine Lovejoy
Dissertation
My dissertation lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of social kinds. In it, I defend an account of social kinds called the Naturalness View. This account integrates social kinds into the framework of metaphysical naturalness. I also argue in favor of two surprising claims: Social kinds are not socially constructed, and social kinds cannot undergo change. Nevertheless, we can account for the appearance of kind construction via instances of social kinds, and the appearance of kind change via social kind terms.
My committee consists of Annina Loets (chair), Alexander Roberts, Sam Roberts, Elanor Taylor, and Dee Payton.
Papers
*Title redacted for blind review.*
Abstract. Many people are attracted to the view that social kinds—e.g., being a landlord, being a woman, being money—are socially constructed. Call this view Social Kind Construction (SKC). I show that SKC entails a version of contingentism about properties that even proponents of property contingentism would be hesitant to endorse. In response to this concern, I propose an alternative view—Social Kind Instantiation (SKI)—that makes sense of the phenomenon that SKC attempts to track but lacks SKC's strong metaphysical commitments. Where K is a social kind, SKI holds that for any x that is K, x's being K is socially constructed. As desired, SKI nicely captures the content of extant kind constructionist claims in the literature. But it also turns out that SKI advances a key political aim of social constructionist analyses: that of debunking the so-called Inevitability Assumption. Indeed, it does so arguably better than SKC does.
Abstract: Social metaphysicians widely help themselves to social kinds in their theorizing. At the same time, the nature of these kinds is poorly understood. I give an account of social kinds in terms of metaphysical naturalness. This account holds that a social property F is a social kind just in case it is sufficiently natural, relative to the other social properties, and there is at least one social property G such that F is strictly more natural than G. I call this The Naturalness View of Social Kinds and argue that it provides insight into longstanding questions about social kinds while neatly integrating social kinds into an extant metaphysical framework.
Abstract. Here are two observations that have been made about race and gender: they are socially constructed, and they shape one another. I bridge the theoretical gap between these observations by showing that social constructionist accounts of race and gender must be consistent with their interaction—I call this the “Consistency Criterion” (CC). This criterion calls into question the effectiveness of popular social constructionist theories of race and gender, such as those that identify them with social structures. I argue that in their standard formulation, these structuralist views do not satisfy CC. In response, I develop a modified structuralist view, which I call “Social Structure Monism” (SM). By modeling race and gender as dimensions of a single social structure, SM delivers the desired result: what it is to be a member of a gender kind consists, in part, in one’s race. In addition, it does so without assuming that race and gender always interact in additive ways.
Projects
Here are two claims which seem to be incompatible: (1) Social kinds change over time, (2) Social kinds are properties. I resolve the tension by offering a meta-semantic, rather than metaphysical, analysis of (2). On this view, social kind terms are semantically plastic. Hence, what changes is not social kinds themselves, but the meaning of social kind terms
I argue that data from the social world puts pressure on traditional ways of thinking about naturalness. In particular, it suggests that a property’s degree of naturalness is not always necessary, nor wholly mind-independent. Doing so clarifies what a realist account of naturalness demands and calls into question some of the desired theoretical roles for natural properties.
Presenting at Metaphysical Mayhem (Rutgers University, May 2025).
Photograph courtesy of Rose Fonth.