On the Semantics and Ontology of Race: Constructivism against Realism

This paper is an essay in philosophical ontology tasked with defending a constructionist approach to race. Anthony Appiah, in his In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture , argues that the concept of race is an “empty concept” precisely because it is both a semantic and an ontological fiction. He advises us to segregate race to the realm of the vague and fuzzy because all racial discourse, which he claims must transcendentally presuppose a biological notion of race in order to be meaningful, seductively misleads us to the extent that such discourse presupposes that the term "race" names a natural kind. While identifying the concept of race as deficient, he challenges us to learn “to think beyond race.” His rebuke of race as a dysfunctional concept takes the form of casting race as a virus spreading the contagion of bad thinking, that is, delusional, even paranoid thinking. This paper argues that while Appiah's theoretical interrogation of the concept of race is mainly accurate, race, nevertheless, is meaningful from a socio-cultural perspective . Discourse about race need not require that races exist in the sense of being natural kinds. Race, I shall be arguing, is a construction, i. e., human agents with varied interests, purposes, and linguistic resources devise the conditions of meaningfulness for the term "race". The general structure of the paper is as follows. I first present a critical discussion of Appiah’s view on race by examining his realist view of meaning and reference. Next, I critically review his main arguments against the concept of race. In part two of the essay, I offer a discussion of constructionism. I describe this position, offer examples, and say why it more adequately accommodates a defense of the concept of race by treating it as a socio-historical construction rather than a scientific natural kind. It is obvious that I challenge Appiah’s realist view that a meaningful concept is one that is intelligible and that the deciding grounds of the intelligibility is a matter of a concept referring to something that has existence. Meaningful concepts refer to objects whereas meaningless concepts do not refer to anything that has being