Abstract
Elizabeth Barnes and Mari Mikkola raise the important question of whether certain recent approaches to metaphysics exclude feminist metaphysics. My own approach (from my book Writing the Book of the World) does not, or so I argue. I do define “substantive” questions in terms of fundamentality; and the concepts of feminist metaphysics (and social metaphysics generally) are nonfundamental. But my definition does not count a question as being nonsubstantive simply because it involves nonfundamental concepts. Questions about the causal structure of the world, including the causal structure of the social world, are generally substantive because their answers are not sensitive to any alternate, equally good conceptual choices we could have made. I also argue that such questions are substantive regardless of the ontology of social kinds.
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Notes
See Mikkola’s paper for this symposium, and also Barnes (2014).
For what it’s worth, the offending rhetoric in my book was, in the first instance, directed against competing accounts of a certain portion of metaphysics, and was not meant to exclude other portions of metaphysics. (I may well deserve criticism for implicitly treating that portion as the only one worth discussing, but in any case I did not mean to be asserting this.) The portion of metaphysics I had in mind is that portion which we may call “ultimate metaphysics”, the portion that asks questions like Hobbes versus Berkeley versus Descartes: “Is reality ultimately material, ultimately mental, or ultimately a mix?”. Others construe questions of ultimate metaphysics as being about ontology or essence or modality, whereas, I was arguing, we should think of them instead as being about structure.
It’s sometimes useful to speak of joint-carving as coming in degrees. The perfectly joint-carving concepts are the (absolutely) fundamental ones—concepts of physics, for instance; concepts of economics and social theory are less joint-carving; and cooked-up concepts like grue are still less joint-carving. Here, though, I’m using ‘joint-carving’ as an all-or-nothing concept, which includes both the first two groups of concepts, and excludes only the third group, the cooked-up concepts. (There then arises a question of just how joint-carving, in the degreed sense, a concept must be to count as joint-carving simpliciter in the present sense. I’m not going to try to settle that question, but at a minimum, I have in mind that playing a role in an explanatory causal theory is sufficient.)
The matter is more complex, since there is a further issue: is joint-carving at the fundamental level sui generis, or does it itself reduce to something else? I myself think the former, which is why I put the second choice in the text as concerning whether higher-level structure is sui generis. Someone who denies that lower-level joint-carving is sui generis could put the second choice as concerning whether higher-level jointcarving has the same status as lower-level jointcarving, i.e., whether higher-level joint-carving is “relatively” sui generis.
By Schaffer I mean the Schaffer of the present; Schaffer (2004) defended egalitarianism.
Actually the candidate meanings are only required to be equally joint-carving, in the degreed sense of ‘joint-carving’.
See, for example, Sider (2011, pp. 46–47).
Compare Barnes’s complaint that my “overlapping glosses of objectivity, joint carving, realism, etc., all rely on a picture of inquiry that aims to track the way the world is ‘in and of itself’, independent of human thought, human action, or human society”, and thus exclude realist views about those parts of the world that concern humans. I grant that the glosses are imperfect if understood under the counterfactual sense of ‘independent’, but I had in mind the candidate-selectional sense, which I think avoids the problem of false positives. That said, the intuitive glosses may be ill-advised, for the reason that Barnes gives, insofar as they are more naturally understood in the counterfactual sense.
Or anyway, there is no need to regard the theorist’s point of view as intruding; there is no obstacle to being a realist about these social concepts. One might embrace the intrusion of the theorist’s point of view, for political purposes say; see Mikkola’s discussion of contextual values, Haslanger (2000, section 2) and Haslanger (2012, 22–29).
Haslanger of course rejects the idea that gender is a “natural kind” in the sense of being rooted in nature and thus inevitable; but higher-level joints need not be “natural” or “fixed” in this sense; they can stand for made or constructed features. Understanding any part of the world requires recognizing the objective facts about that part of the world. If the objective facts about a certain part of the world involve the construction, by humans or groups of humans, of social structures, then an objective account of that part of the world needs to use concepts of social structures, in which case such concepts will carve at the joints, even though social structures are made and not fixed by “nature”.
And I see no reason in principle why the reductionist about higher-level joint-carving should find broader notions of causation or law, which may be applied to thick concepts as well as thin, as being more problematic than narrower notions of causation or law.
The example is Bennett’s (2009).
Setting aside McDaniel’s (2009) ontological pluralism, that is.
Assuming, that is, that the ontology of individual persons is not at issue—it’s clear that this is not Barnes’s concern.
I replaced Barnes’s ‘purely joint-carving’ with ‘fundamental’ in order to match the terminology of the present paper.
There are other relevantly plenitudinous ontologies beyond than those I discuss in the text, such as Fine’s (1999) ontology of variably embodied entities (though Fine does not regard his ontology as fundamental—p. 73), and Lewisian counterpart theory (1971) combined with either temporal parts (Quine 1950; Smart 1972; Sider 2001) or—my current preference—“atoms-plus-sets” (Sider 2011; chapter 13 2013a). Barnes in fact mentions the possibility of a fundamental ontology with a large enough domain to contain what one might have regarded as nonfundamental entities; she says: “for Lewis tables are in the domain of the fundamental quantifier, because of his universalism about mereology”.
Sider (2001) defends such an ontology.
Though probably not Haslanger herself; she explores the analogy between social structures and material constitution in Haslanger (2007, 78–80).
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Acknowledgments
This paper began as comments on Elizabeth Barnes, “Realism and Social Structure”, and Mari Mikkola, “Non-Ideal Metaphysics: On the Apparent Antagonism between Feminist and Mainstream Metaphysics” for an APA Session on Feminist Metaphysics, April, 2015. Thanks to Heather Battaly for helpful comments, to Barnes and Mikkola for their stimulating papers, and to Barnes for a lengthy and useful correspondence.
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Sider, T. Substantivity in feminist metaphysics. Philos Stud 174, 2467–2478 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0739-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0739-7