Abstract
Feminist metaphysics is guided by the insight that gender is socially constructed, yet the metaphysics behind social construction remains obscure. Barnes and Mikkola charge that current metaphysical frameworks—including my grounding framework—are hostile to feminist metaphysics. I argue that not only is a grounding framework hospitable to feminist metaphysics, but also that a grounding framework can help shed light on the metaphysics behind social construction. By treating social construction claims as grounding claims, the feminist metaphysician and the social ontologist both gain a way to integrate social construction claims into a general metaphysics, while accounting for the inferential connections between social construction and attendant notions such as dependence and explanation. So I conclude that a grounding framework can be helpful for feminist metaphysics and social ontology.
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Notes
In this vein Butler (1990: 7; cf. Ásta 2011) says: “Perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender… with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.” Thus Butler accepts Gender but holds that sex is socially constructed too.
For instance, Alcoff (2006: 172) holds that gender has a partly biological basis.
Of course I cannot prove the negative existential that there is no reductive conceptual analysis of grounding to be found (though when has reductive conceptual analysis ever succeeded?) I only mean to say that it is legitimate to use the concept regardless, without any such analysis to hand.
According to Kim (1994; cf. Salmon 1984), the lesson to be drawn from the failure of deductive-nomological accounts of explanation is that explanations must be backed by dependencies, to provide direction and linkage. Grounding is a form of dependence. In this vein Audi (2012: 104) says: “The reason we must countenance grounding is that it is indispensable to certain important explanations.”
I think that Socially constructed fits Haslanger’s (1995: 30) description of gender as “a constitutive social construction,” Haslanger and Ásta’s (2011: §2.3) notion of “social constitution,” and Ásta’s (2011, 2013) notion of gender as “conferred,” by which she means (2011: 62) that gender is “dependent in some way on human thoughts, attitudes, and practices,” and (2013: 219) that gender is “a property that something has in virtue of some attitude, action, or state of subjects, or group of subjects.” On this point I agree with Mikkola (2015: 8), who comments: “rewriting Haslanger’s definition in grounding terms (I submit) is faithful to the original.” I also think that Socially constructed fits Bennett’s (Bennett 2011a) general conception of a “building” relation, where being constructed is equated with being built.
Thus Barnes (2014: 337) explains Haslanger’s view as follows: “Social structures are created by complex, repeated patterns of human social interaction.” Barnes (2016: §4.2) gives the causal analogy of wheel ruts. The connection between American society and {American society} is more of an automatic mathematical relation, and has nothing much to do with complex, repeated patterns of social interaction which constitute social routines.
See Sider (2016) for his reply to these concerns.
For instance, Horgan and Potrč (2012) and I (Schaffer 2012) debate whether—on the shared “monistic” premise that the whole cosmos is fundamental—one should also posit non-fundamental parts to the cosmos. I argue for parts, to support Moorean truisms about hands, and provide extensions for referential semantics. And elsewhere I object to Sider’s (2011) refusal of non-fundamental entities, arguing (2013: 750) that “Nonfundamental entities are explanatorily fruitful posits.”
I have changed the example. Barnes (2014: 342–5) considers a debate between Haslanger and Jenkins as to the status of trans women who do not “pass” as cis women. But the underlying point should be the same.
I was initially inclined to be more concessionary to Barnes with respect to the Haslanger-Stone debate, but I thank Asya Passinsky (personal communication) for convincing me that the “intermediate grounding steps move” works there too.
My thanks to Ásta Sveinsdóttir (personal communication) for helping me get the details right.
Witt (2011) embraces the gender essentialist view that one’s gender is part of what makes one the social individual one is. So for Witt one cannot endure changing one’s gender at all. (For her successful gender reassignment surgery would destroy the old social individual and create a distinct social individual.) So Witt too comes out as holding a distinctive position on the grounds of gender. (Two caveats: first, Witt considers the idea that “transgender” may count as a third gender, in which case a transgendered social individual may preserve their gender; secondly, Witt distinguishes the social individual from both the human organism and the person, so she can allow that the human organism and person survive even if the old social individual does not.) What matters for present purposes is that a grounding framework can succeed in distinguishing different views about the nature of gender.
In a nutshell, Bennett and deRosset accept that the whole grounds necessitate the grounded output, while Mikkola argues that the relevant social relations are contingent. After all, she (2015: 12) reasons: “Perhaps all money has been abolished via political–institutional means even though (in the short run) the appropriate acceptance-dependence still obtains: we accept that certain pieces of paper count as money; the revolution simply destroyed all those pieces of paper!” But I think that Mikkola simply has not specified the whole social grounds fully. The whole grounds must include the political-institutional matters as well, since (by hypothesis) this is a further matter on which the existence of money depends.
One immediate problem is that there are other views of what grounds the grounding facts that Mikkola does not consider (cf. Dasgupta 2014). But for me the deeper problem is that I just don’t see a connection between any alleged failure of the Bennett-deRosset view, and the claim that grounding is normatively loaded.
This paper grew out of comments on Elizabeth Barnes’s “Realism and Social Structure” and Mari Mikkola’s “Non-Ideal Metaphysics: On the Apparent Antagonism between Feminist and Mainstream Metaphysics,” delivered at the 2015 Pacific APA. Thanks to Elizabeth Barnes and Mari Mikkola, and also to Louise Antony, Janelle Derstine, Aaron Griffith, Ron Mallon, Rebecca Mason, Asya Passinsky, Laurie Paul, Ted Sider, Jason Stanley, Ásta Sveinsdóttir, and Charlotte Witt.
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Schaffer, J. Social construction as grounding; or: fundamentality for feminists, a reply to Barnes and Mikkola. Philos Stud 174, 2449–2465 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0738-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0738-8