Mason Westfall / Social categorization without base properties
Mason Westfall / Social categorization without base properties
March 12, Mason Westfall from Johns Hopkins visits to present his work on the metaphysics of social construction, "Social categorization without base properties," abstracted below. Lunch will be provided.
A common thought in writing on the metaphysics of social construction is that social properties are associated with non-social properties that play a special role—what Ásta calls a 'base property'. Our practices of categorization somehow aim at this non-social property. We perhaps take ourselves to be tracking it, or assume it obtains whenever we socially categorize. In this talk, I will challenge that thought. I argue that base properties play no important role in the psychology of social categorization. They are otiose for categorization, and undifferentiated in our conceptions of social categories. Left with no distinctive psychological role to play, base properties struggle to earn their metaphysical keep as well. I close by considering how to develop a constructionist metaphysics without base properties.