Sally Haslanger
Biographic Data
| ID | 208592 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sally Haslanger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sally |
| FAMILY NAME | Haslanger |
| SIGNATURE | HASLANGER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3898-4266 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 465 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Equitable Resilience Framework: An environmental justice strategy for community-led resilience planning
Practice Theory as a Tool for Critical Social Theory
What is the best method for undertaking critical social theory, and what are its ontological and normative commitments? Andreas Reckwitz has developed compelling answers to these questions drawing on practice theory. As a practice theorist myself, I am very sympathetic to his approach. This paper sketches a social theory that extends the reach of practice theory to include non-human animals and allows us to discriminate between importantly differ…
Analyzing social wrongs
Academic philosophy has witnessed a significant change in the last years from nonideal investigations of social wrongs as being a rather marginal topic in comparison to what was assumed to be more fundamental questions to those very investigations drawing significant attention and taking their rightful place in the midst of the profession of philosophy. Yet, despite these advances and the increasing awareness of social wrongs in relation to—for e…
Systemic and Structural Injustice: Is There a Difference
The terms ‘structural injustice’ and ‘systemic injustice’ are commonly used, but their meanings are elusive. In this paper, I sketch an ontology of social systems that embeds accounts of social structures, relations, and practices. On this view, structures may be intrinsically problematic, or they may be problematic only insofar as they interact with other structures in the system to produce injustice. Because social practices that constitute str…
Crisis and Critique: Philosophical Analysis and Current Events: Proceedings of the 42nd International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium
Contemporary deep-reaching changes - whether in financial or real economy, in Europe's political conditions, in the context of scientific theories, in the field of global (environmental) security, or gender relations - are also a challenge to philosophy. The volume comprises cutting-edge scholarly articles from renowned philosophers with various geographical backgrounds and from different philosophical strands. Next to investigating general quest…
Political Epistemology and Social Critique
Under conditions of ideology, a standard model of normative political epistemology—relying on a domain-specific reflective equilibrium—risks status-quo bias. Social critique requires a more critical standpoint. What are the aims of social critique? How is such a standpoint achieved and what grounds its claims? One way of achieving a critical standpoint is through consciousness raising. Consciousness raising offers a paradigm shift in our understa…
If You Are Committed to Justice, Why Aren't You an Activist? Comments on Allen Buchanan
In response to Buchanan's argument that ideologies function as doxastic immune systems, I invite him to expand on three issues. (1) What does it mean to have a perfect grasp of the principles of justice, and why should we think that someone with such a grasp should be in a position (even if unable) to act justly? (2) What is required to be fully epistemically responsible when in the grip of an ideology? (3) Might we learn more from contemporary C…
Practical reason and social practices
In this chapter, I argue that the study of practical reason can benefit from an engagement with social philosophy. In doing so, I sketch two ways in which practical reason is socially conditioned, corresponding to two ways of approaching practical reason: (i) as a human capacity for deliberation, (ii) as a normative structure. With respect to (i): most human reasoning makes use of tools that are provided by culture. The tools include language, co…
Going On, Not in the Same Way
This chapter considers, within an externalist semantics, several ways we might understand the project of improving our concepts to promote greater justice. The tools that culture provides us with—such as language, concepts, and inferential patterns—provide frames for coordination and shape our interaction. There are multiple ways these tools can fail us, for example by the limited structure of options they make intelligible. However, we can somet…
Why I Don’t Believe in Patriarchy: Comments on Kate Manne’s Down Girl
Failures of Methodological Individualism: The Materiality of Social Systems
So, given one form of ontological individualism, we must look for an explanation of the pattern of attitudes that gives rise to the pattern of actions which, in turn, constitutes the social fact.A familiar way to provide such explanations is to illuminate what would make the attitudes in question rational.This has motivated commitment to rational choice and gametheoretic explanations of social phenomena which are, at least implicitly, individuali…
Oppressions: Racial and Other
What Is Race?: Four Philosophical Views
What is race? This is a question that has haunted human interaction and vexed scholars. In this book, four race theorists debate how best to answer it, applying philosophical tools and principles of social justice to cutting-edge findings from the biological and social sciences. Each of the authors presents a distinct view of race. Sally Haslanger argues that race is a sociopolitical reality. Chike Jeffers maintains that race is not only politica…
What Is Race: Four Philosophical Views
What is a Social Practice
This paper provides an account of social practices that reveals how they are constitutive of social agency, enable coordination around things of value, and are a site for social intervention. The social world, on this account, does not begin when psychologically sophisticated individuals interact to share knowledge or make plans. Instead, culture shapes agents to interpret and respond both to each other and the physical world around us. Practices…
The Sex/Gender Distinction and the Social Construction of Reality
The claim that gender is socially constructed is broadly accepted, but what this means is controversial and often unclear. The point of saying that a concept or idea is socially constructed will vary depending on context. Social constructionism is generally offered as an alternative to essentialism; both come in different forms. Drawing on the link between thought and practice, Alison Stone explicitly takes up a genealogical approach to the socia…
Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements
Racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice are more than just bad attitudes; after all, such injustice involves unfair distributions of goods and resources. But attitudes play a role. How central is that role? Tommie Shelby, among others, argues that racism is an ideology and takes a cognitivist approach suggesting that ideologies consist in false beliefs that arise out of and serve pernicious social conditions. In this paper I argue that racis…
What is a (social) structural explanation?
Distinguished Lecture: Social structure, narrative and explanation
Recent work on social injustice has focused on implicit bias as an important factor in explaining persistent injustice in spite of achievements on civil rights. In this paper, I argue that because of its individualism, implicit bias explanation, taken alone, is inadequate to explain ongoing injustice; and, more importantly, it fails to call attention to what is morally at stake. An adequate account of how implicit bias functions must situate it w…
Studying While Black: Trust, Opportunity, and Disrespect1
How should we explore the relationship between race and educational opportunity? One approach to the Black-White achievement gap explores how race and class cause disparities in access and opportunity. In this paper, I consider how education contributes to thecreationof race. Considering examples of classroom micropolitics, I argue that breakdowns of trust and trustworthiness between teachers and students can cause substantial disadvantages and, …
Family, Ancestry, and Self: What Is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties?
This chapter argues against an argument one might take from David Velleman's chapter, “Family History,” that acquaintance with one's biological progenitors is important for human well-being—unless there are outweighing considerations. In contexts where such knowledge is highly valued, those without it may be stigmatized and their well-being diminished. So although it may be important to provide, as far as possible, information about one's biologi…
Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural
Is there a place within feminist inquiry for metaphysics? If we take an aporematic approach to metaphysics, then what questions we ask, and what puzzles arise, is going to depend on cultural and historical context, broader theoretical needs, etc. Where sexist and racist views are widely held and institutionalized, we need theories that diagnose, explain, and replace sexist and racist beliefs. These theories need not privilege a special female or …
Language, Politics, and “The Folk”: Looking for “The Meaning” of ‘Race’
Much of the contemporary discussion of race employs a “semantic strategy” according to which one first determines the ordinary meaning of “race,” and then inquires whether there is anything in the world corresponding to that meaning (see Glasgow 2009, 12). Although some inquire into the meaning of “race” a priori and others empirically, the strategy seems to assume an internalist approach to meaning. The chapter favors an externalist approach to …
Future Genders? Future Races?
If, as was argued in Chapter 7, we should aim for a day when there are no more men and women and are no more races (though there may be genders and ethnicities), then what will this future look like? Will it be one on which we are all alike, androgynous and a light shade of brown? The chapter argues that the interpretation of sexual difference is important to achieve justice in any society in which humans reproduce biologically, and that although…
A Social Constructionist Analysis of Race
This chapter outlines a social constructionist approach to the concept of race. The chapter argues that it is the most useful for interdisciplinary and popular debates about race and genetics. In order for a concept to function in this way, it must take into account the fact that “race” continues to identify groups and individuals in our social milieu because somatic markings are signals of social status and trigger different forms of interaction…
Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique
Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of sayin…
Distinguished Lecture: Social structure, narrative and explanation
Recent work on social injustice has focused on implicit bias as an important factor in explaining persistent injustice in spite of achievements on civil rights. In this paper, I argue that because of its individualism, implicit bias explanation, taken alone, is inadequate to explain ongoing injustice; and, more importantly, it fails to call attention to what is morally at stake. An adequate account of how implicit bias functions must situate it w…
Ontology and Social Construction
What is a Social Practice
This paper provides an account of social practices that reveals how they are constitutive of social agency, enable coordination around things of value, and are a site for social intervention. The social world, on this account, does not begin when psychologically sophisticated individuals interact to share knowledge or make plans. Instead, culture shapes agents to interpret and respond both to each other and the physical world around us. Practices…
What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds
Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all. The question arises: what do we mean by the terms? It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are definitive. However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credi…
Studying While Black: Trust, Opportunity, and Disrespect1
How should we explore the relationship between race and educational opportunity? One approach to the Black-White achievement gap explores how race and class cause disparities in access and opportunity. In this paper, I consider how education contributes to thecreationof race. Considering examples of classroom micropolitics, I argue that breakdowns of trust and trustworthiness between teachers and students can cause substantial disadvantages and, …
Failures of Methodological Individualism: The Materiality of Social Systems
So, given one form of ontological individualism, we must look for an explanation of the pattern of attitudes that gives rise to the pattern of actions which, in turn, constitutes the social fact.A familiar way to provide such explanations is to illuminate what would make the attitudes in question rational.This has motivated commitment to rational choice and gametheoretic explanations of social phenomena which are, at least implicitly, individuali…
Systemic and Structural Injustice: Is There a Difference
The terms ‘structural injustice’ and ‘systemic injustice’ are commonly used, but their meanings are elusive. In this paper, I sketch an ontology of social systems that embeds accounts of social structures, relations, and practices. On this view, structures may be intrinsically problematic, or they may be problematic only insofar as they interact with other structures in the system to produce injustice. Because social practices that constitute str…
Family, Ancestry and Self: What is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties
Family, Ancestry and Self: What is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties? By Sally Haslanger 1. Introduction In a series of recent papers, David Velleman has argued that it is morally wrong to bring a child into existence with the intention that the child will not have contact with one or both biological parents.1 Put another way, "other things being equal, children should be raised by their biological parents" ("Family" 362fn 3). The primary…
Persistence, change, and explanation
Why I Don’t Believe in Patriarchy: Comments on Kate Manne’s Down Girl
Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Humean supervenience and enduring things
The Equitable Resilience Framework: An environmental justice strategy for community-led resilience planning
Persistence, change, and explanation
Parts, Compounds, and Substantial Unity
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle articulates and defends two profound, though difficult, theses: (i) sensible substances are composites of matter and form, and (ii) primary substance is substantial form. I am concerned in this paper with two questions: first, in what sense is a sensible substance composite: How are we to understand the relevant notion of ‘part’, and the corresponding unity that results in the sensible individual? Second, how are Ari…
Humean supervenience and enduring things
Ontology and Social Construction
The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy
The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate…
What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds
Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all.The question arises: what do we mean by the terms?It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are de nitive.However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credibili…
Gender, Patriotism and the Events of 9/11
In the weeks after 9/11/2001, the events of that day were described in many ways. One of the most significant spins came from the government: initially the events were described as “a terrorist attack,” but not long after they became an “act of war.” We Americans were told that what occurred was not a crime to be addressed by punishing the perpetrators, but an attack on a nation-state, which requires us to take up arms against the enemy. Why does…
What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds
Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all. The question arises: what do we mean by the terms? It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are definitive. However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credi…
Persistence: Contemporary Readings
How does an object persist through change? How can a book, for example, open in the morning and shut in the afternoon, persist through a change that involves the incompatible properties of being open and being shut? The goal of this reader is to inform and reframe the philosophical debate around persistence; it presents influential accounts of the problem that range from classic papers by W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, and Judith Jarvis Thomson to …
I — Sally Haslanger: What Good are Our Intuitions?
In debates over the existence and nature of social kinds such as ‘race’ and ‘gender’, philosophers often rely heavily on our intuitions about the nature of the kind. Following this strategy, philosophers often reject social constructionist analyses, suggesting that they change rather than capture the meaning of the kind terms. However, given that social constructionists are often trying to debunk our ordinary (and ideology-ridden?) understandings…
Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Family, Ancestry and Self: What is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties
Family, Ancestry and Self: What is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties? By Sally Haslanger 1. Introduction In a series of recent papers, David Velleman has argued that it is morally wrong to bring a child into existence with the intention that the child will not have contact with one or both biological parents.1 Put another way, "other things being equal, children should be raised by their biological parents" ("Family" 362fn 3). The primary…
Family, Ancestry, and Self: What Is the Moral Significance of Biological Ties?
This chapter argues against an argument one might take from David Velleman's chapter, “Family History,” that acquaintance with one's biological progenitors is important for human well-being—unless there are outweighing considerations. In contexts where such knowledge is highly valued, those without it may be stigmatized and their well-being diminished. So although it may be important to provide, as far as possible, information about one's biologi…
Feminism in Metaphysics: Negotiating the Natural
Is there a place within feminist inquiry for metaphysics? If we take an aporematic approach to metaphysics, then what questions we ask, and what puzzles arise, is going to depend on cultural and historical context, broader theoretical needs, etc. Where sexist and racist views are widely held and institutionalized, we need theories that diagnose, explain, and replace sexist and racist beliefs. These theories need not privilege a special female or …
Language, Politics, and “The Folk”: Looking for “The Meaning” of ‘Race’
Much of the contemporary discussion of race employs a “semantic strategy” according to which one first determines the ordinary meaning of “race,” and then inquires whether there is anything in the world corresponding to that meaning (see Glasgow 2009, 12). Although some inquire into the meaning of “race” a priori and others empirically, the strategy seems to assume an internalist approach to meaning. The chapter favors an externalist approach to …
Future Genders? Future Races?
If, as was argued in Chapter 7, we should aim for a day when there are no more men and women and are no more races (though there may be genders and ethnicities), then what will this future look like? Will it be one on which we are all alike, androgynous and a light shade of brown? The chapter argues that the interpretation of sexual difference is important to achieve justice in any society in which humans reproduce biologically, and that although…
A Social Constructionist Analysis of Race
This chapter outlines a social constructionist approach to the concept of race. The chapter argues that it is the most useful for interdisciplinary and popular debates about race and genetics. In order for a concept to function in this way, it must take into account the fact that “race” continues to identify groups and individuals in our social milieu because somatic markings are signals of social status and trigger different forms of interaction…
Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground
Drawing on recent work by Sarah-Jane Leslie and others, this chapter considers how generics such as “Women are submissive” and “Blacks are violent” might implicate false claims about the nature of women and Blacks. Once these implicatures are accepted into the common ground, they become part of the ideology that sustains racist and sexist social structures. One form of critique, then, will be to take aim at such implicatures and block them throug…
Ontology and Social Construction
This chapter explores the concept of social construction and to show how debates over such philosophical notions as “truth”, “knowledge,” and “reality”, can be relevant to feminist and anti-racist politics: does it make sense to claim that there is a “male reality”? What would that mean? The chapter examines a strategy of argument claiming that because knowledge is socially constructed, there is no objective or independent reality. The chapter ar…
“But Mom, Crop-Tops Are Cute!”: Social Knowledge, Social Structure, and Ideology Critique
If social facts are constituted by a kind of social consensus, then those whose beliefs conform to the consensus seem to have knowledge. But how, then, can ideology critique gain an epistemic grip? The chapter developes this puzzle and consider whether recent relativist strategies in philosophy of language provide resources to show how social beliefs can be true relative to a milieu, and yet allow genuine disagreement between milieus.
What Good Are Our Intuitions?: Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds
In debates over the existence and nature of social kinds such as “race” and “gender”, philosophers often rely heavily on our intuitions about the nature of the kind. Following this strategy, philosophers often reject social constructionist analyses, suggesting that they change rather than capture the meaning of the kind terms. However, given that social constructionists are often trying to debunk our ordinary (and ideology ridden?) understandings…
Social Construction: The “Debunking” Project
In his book The Social Construction of What?, Ian Hacking offers a schema for understanding different social constructionist claims along with a framework for distinguishing kinds or degrees of constructionist projects. Hacking's efforts are useful, but his account leaves many of the philosophical aspects of social construction projects obscure, as are the connections, if any, with more mainstream analytic philosophy projects. This chapter aims t…
Social Construction: Myth and Reality
This chapter develops an account of social construction and defends a broad critical social realism according to which certain entities and kinds are socially constructed; however, the claim that they are socially constructed, on this account, provides no basis for concluding that they are anything less than fully real. The question arises how to distinguish natural and social kinds, if not by their reality. The chapter argues for a broad natural…
On Being Objective and Being Objectified
Catharine MacKinnon has argued that the stance of objectivity is a male stance and, more specifically, a stance of objectification: “to look at the world objectively is to objectify it.” This chapter develops an interpretation of MacKinnon's account of gender and objectification to determine how objectivity is relevant. The chapter argues that there are epistemic norms that, under conditions of injustice, help sustain the position of the dominant…
Sociology (35 works) · Epistemology (30 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies (25 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works)