Human kinds

[published in Routledge's "Philosophy and Method in the Social Sciences" series]

This study starts from a simple premise:  human practices are a fundamental constituent — arguably “the” fundamental constituent — of social reality.  It then poses the following question:  What would social scientists’ research look like if they took this insight quite seriously?

That, of course, would depend on what practices are in fact like:  what their generic features are, how they are constituted, how they might be identified and characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts, how they might change across time and space.  These are the kinds of questions that this book tries to tackle, insisting that their answers hold important implications for the effective practice of social science.

The book thus attempts to build a philosophical infrastructure for the empirical study of practices in the social sciences and humanities.  At the same time, it also tries to explore the implications of this ontology of human practices for issues in social theory and in the philosophy of the social sciences.  The book thus stands at the intersection of the philosophy of social science, social theory, and the social sciences.

This article presents the notion of looping effect, proposed by the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, in order to analyze how psychological knowledge, when classifying the activities and people features, modifies the way people think about themselves. This process results in the alteration of what was studied and thus requires of new research. The effect establishes a particular mode of interaction between the discipline and its public, which implies specific conditions in the production of knowledge about humans. Psychological knowledge is ordered in terms of different human kinds and the distinction Hacking introduces between human kinds and natural kinds is discussed, introducing the way the historian of psychology Kurt Danziger conceives the development of psychological categories. Finally, some guidelinesare proposed to pursue research in looping effects in psychological knowledge.

Background/Context: Over the last three decades, considerable attention has been given to the social and educational conditions of Black males. Such observations have led to the accusation that Black males are "in crisis." Although such pronouncements call national attention to the needs of Black males, these discourses have helped to normalize and fasten in place an unchanging and reworked narrative for discussing or addressing the conditions of Black males. The intent of this article is to show how, for numerous decades, both the findings and theories used to make sense of Black males within the social science and education literature have helped to produce a common-sense narrative about all Black males. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of this article is to trouble historical and contemporary beliefs about Black males and to help prompt new theories, research, and interventions that account for the complex needs of Black males' lives. This article historically documents the social science and educational literature about Black males from the 1930s to the present. Two interrelated questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the common and recycled discourses employed within and across historical periods to make sense of the social and educational conditions of Black males? (2) To what extent and in what ways have these discourses closed off the kinds of questions one can ask in the present to address the social and educational conditions of Black males? This article concludes with a discussion of how researchers and educators can begin to ask new questions about Black males that explore the complexities of Black males' lives, while also challenging the same old stories that pervade educational discourse. Research Design: Historicizing of knowledge was the method used in this project. Historicizing of knowledge as a method of analysis examines how trajectories of the past help to shape how "ideas and events of the present are constructed," in the words of Thomas Popkewitz. Employing this historical approach, this study focused on the visibility and

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has attracted considerable interdisciplinary interest. In fact, the idea of a group of people with abnormal morality and interpersonal relations raises important philosophical, legal, and clinical issues. However, before engaging these issues, we ought to examine whether this category is scientifically grounded, namely whether this way of grouping individuals is explanatory and not merely a byproduct of our tendency to segregate people seemingly different from us. In this paper, we frame the issue in terms of the question whether ‘psychopathy’ designates a natural kind. We argue that currently there is no sufficient evidence for an affirmative answer to this question. Furthermore, we draw some philosophical implications of this result and examine three ways of dealing with the category of psychopathy. These include: We could eliminate the category, revise it, or subscribe to a more encompassing account of kinds, which will be able to capture psychopathy as it is currently conceptualized. We argue that a revision of the category of psychopathy is to be expected with the empirical and theoretical advancements. However, we also emphasize its current role in research, clinical and forensic practices as a scientific category in the making, or as we argue, a pragmatic kind.

The notion that huge chunks of our reality could be nothing but elaborate forms of social construction, a self-perpetuating mechanism of our own assemblage, is an old and enduring one. Put alternatively, we know that concepts like “race”, “gender”, “pedophilia” or “being a geek” are socially constructed which means they are not real in the sense that fundamental particles and biological kinds are, but we can’t definitively articulate much about them because the phenomena being tackled is unstable. By the time we think we have a firm grasp of something, it flutters away in the distance, like a dandelion scattered by a turbulent wind, forever to be hidden from our reach.

Holding such an incomplete and static causal connection (between X being a human kind, therefore X being a complete figment of our collective imagination) only serves to be a thorn in the side of such an important idea because it masks the tangible repercussions that are brought to the table. In light of such a sentiment, it is the intention of this paper to demonstrate that human kinds do have the capacity to tell us much about the world, to pick out something real, because of the effects that they leave behind.

Subsequently, this essay will lay bare the various ways in which the potential for stability within the realms of the social sciences can be realised. Three theories shall be outlined in order to achieve this goal, namely, the theory of confirmation, hybridization and the Janus-faced conception of the self. However, before undertaking this project, let us take a moment to consider what hangs in the balance when we talk about the difference between “natural” and “human” kinds.

Review of:

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences

Hardcover: 264 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (July 15, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 9781107012745
Price: £55.00 (US$ 90.00)

Winner of the 2020 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society.

Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mechanisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders.