Please join us for “Social Figments and Social Realities” with visiting scholar Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval (UC, Davis).

In virtue of what do social kinds like genders and races exist, if they do? Social constructionists about those kinds say: in virtue of our mental states about them. In particular, representational constructionism – an influential and common variety of constructionism – grounds the existence and nature of social kinds in the belief and belief-like representations about the kind that are widespread within society. But a puzzle arises. What if the representations of different milieux are drastically different? Should we say that the kind doesn’t exist or find some way to adjudicate the discrepancy? In this paper I argue instead that, in certain outcomes of such scenarios, each milieux grounds its own social category, or what I call a “social figment,” to denote its partial or perspectival nature.

Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC, Davis. Sandoval’s main areas of interest are Kant and other philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries (especially Leibniz). In addition to his historical work, Sandoval also has research interests in the philosophy of race and social ontology.