Dr Jade Fletcher will be giving a presentation titled “Realism and Debunking about Social Kinds” from 4-6 pm Wednesday May 4th. It is a Hyrbid event taking place in Castecliffe Seminar Room G5W and Teams. For any queries or a link to join the online meeting please email arche-fem-soc[at]st-andrews.ac.uk.

Realism and Debunking about Social Kinds  

Debates about realism and anti-realism in social constructionist metaphysics persist. Often, conceptions of realism stated in terms of mind-independence tend to rule out social kinds from being really real. Recently, there has been a lot of push-back by social metaphysicians to anti-realist readings of social constructionism. Defending the reality of a social kind is then understood to consist in showing that it is sufficiently objective, that it is causally efficacious, or perhaps deflating the distinction between the natural and the social.

This paper aims to articulate an often-ignored conception of realism which does justice to the core theoretical purpose of a range of social constructionist theories. According to epistemic conceptions of realism, realism should be characterised by the possibility of substantive error. For the realist, the search for truth is a matter of discovery not invention, and success is not guaranteed. I argue that this epistemological conception of realism best captures the aims and methods of the those social constructionist theories that aim to debunk our ordinary beliefs about the social world.