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Do We Need a Device to Acquire Ethnic Concepts?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Adam Hochman
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Abstract

Francisco Gil-White argues that the ubiquity of racialism—the view that so-called races have biological essences—can be explained as a by-product of a shared mental module dedicated to ethnic cognition. Gil-White’s theory has been endorsed, with some revisions, by Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher. In this skeptical response I argue that our developmental environments contain a wealth, rather than a poverty of racialist stimulus, rendering a nativist explanation of racialism redundant. I also argue that we should not theorize racialism in isolation from racism, as value judgments may play a role in essentialist thinking about the ‘other’.

Type
General Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 2013 , pp. 994 - 1005
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Paul Griffiths and Pierrick Bourrat for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme DP0878650 and an Australian Postgraduate Award through the University of Sydney.

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