1
Introduction
We humans are very ambivalent about the categorization of ourselves and others. Our categorizing into kinds of people – kinds of gender, and kinds of religion, for example – seems important for understanding the world, and it also seems crucial to our self-understanding and for our identity. At the same time, we are reluctant to categorize as it appears associated with practices of exclusion, stereotypes and misguided generalizations.
I remember this ambivalence from my early schooldays. I had a Canadian mother who spoke a different language and who, in contrast to the other Swedish moms, was never afraid to volunteer her opinions at parent-school meetings at our Swedish rural school. This was my sense of not belonging to the same category as my peers. At the same time, I was aware I was not as different as the Colombian boy at school. Moreover, I also took comfort in being different. Being Canadian became an explanation of the difference, and it was a source of secret pride. One of my friends tells me about his daughters who are Japanese-Estonian living in Finland and how they navigate between the different categories they belong to. They are fine to be picked up by their parents at school and at ease with their friends hearing them speak both Japanese and Estonian. It is when their grandmother shows up speaking Russian that they get embarrassed and ask their parents to pick them up instead.
This book is about these human kinds themselves, such as being Canadian or being a girl. Can this seemingly inescapable use of human categories be explained by something prior to their use, something outside our psychological disposition to categorize? And, what sort of knowledge can we hope to attain from these kinds? Finally, how can this knowledge be put to use in policies combating injustices, some of which we begin to fathom already in childhood? I hope to address these central questions in the course of this book.
I will suggest that many human kinds are historical kinds. They are historical kinds because any common tendencies among their members is achieved through chains of reproduction, or lineages, to common models. The past decades of work on cultural evolution has taught us about how humans reproduce not only their genetic material, but also a range of behavior, language, skills and knowledge through social learning and through a preexisting culture. Much of this cultural reproduction is only channeled among certain groups of individuals: groups which I will argue belong to kinds of a certain gender, ethnicity or ideology. Human historical kinds thus come about due to chains of reproduction that only exist between certain groups of individuals within a particular culture. Our biology also plays a role, but it sits in the backseat for the kinds I will discuss where culture is queen.
In building my account, it will be evident how very much indebted I am to Ruth Millikan’s account of both real kinds and historical kinds (1999, 2000, 2017). But our views also differ both in terms of focus1 and substance. Some specific differences will be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, but I should note the main difference from the outset. In the paper “Historical kinds and the ‘special sciences’”, Millikan dismisses much of the scientific importance of historical kinds by saying that: “[R]elatively few [historical kinds] have numerous and interesting properties in common, or have these with high regularity” (1999, p. 56). With respect to having “interesting properties” in common, I disagree with her outright, and hopefully my different cases of human kinds in Chapters 4–7 can convince you of just how interesting properties of historical kinds can be. With respect to the criteria of having “numerous” properties in common and of “high regularity”, I think these criteria are both too demanding and unnecessary for kindhood – especially in the human sciences. In the next chapter I will show why the criteria are unnecessary, adding my own criteria for kindhood.
So, in contrast to Millikan, it is my firm belief that human historical kinds also have a crucial and interesting scientific and moral role to play. Indeed, it is the aim of this book to demonstrate this point. I believe it is an important job, especially in a world that is increasingly skeptical of science in general and not least when it comes to the human sciences and its categories.
This brings me to the question of readership. As my discussion concerns a range of cases and tries to find a synthesis among materials from many fields – including evolutionary biology, anthropology, history, gender studies and developmental and social psychology – I would hope it appeals to a broad range of students and researchers. That said, this is a research monograph in philosophy, and not all I will say will be interesting or relevant to everyone, so I will give a brief roadmap of the book that indicates the readership I have in mind for each chapter.2
The next chapter (2) is intended to motivate the philosophical talk about natural kinds and human kinds. I argue that we need a notion of kinds to make robust knowledge claims in the human sciences, even if – or rather especially if – one wishes to resist the generalizations and categorizations associated with supposed kinds. My discussion focuses on key philosophy of science concepts such as induction, generalizations and common causes. I also touch on the issue of essentialism and the psychological and political debates surrounding the categorization of human kinds. My hope is that this discussion will both introduce the key issues for the following chapters and be accessible to a broad audience looking to have a sense of what all the philosophical fuss about kinds and human kinds is about.
Chapter 3 critically discusses popular alternative approaches to human kinds and identifies useful lessons from each approach. The accounts discussed are multiple realization, functionalism, social ontology, looping effects, homeostatic mechanisms and social construction. This chapter will probably mostly be interesting to philosophers who are more specialized on human kinds and who are curious about the discussion more broadly. Other readers can safely skip ahead.
Chapter 4 lays out the basics of my position about human kinds as historical kinds. It describes what historical kinds are and how we can explain them using the common-cause framework outlined in Chapter 2. This chapter really has two parts in terms of audience. For a general audience to get the basic idea of what historical kinds are, one may get away with reading only the relatively short beginning of Chapter 4 (Historical kinds), but if one wants some more arguments, for the position, I encourage general readers to also read Sections 4.1 (Lineages as common-cause explanations) and 4.2 (Humankind and Swampkinds: how lineages individuate).
The following Chapters 5–7, are all organized around particular case studies of human kinds as historical kinds. They will probably attract readers according to their interests in the particular cases, but also depending on what aspect of historical kinds one is interested in. My historical-reproductive account of human kinds raises an obvious issue of scope: how many human kinds are historical human kinds? Heads up that I will probably disappoint some readers by not directly answering this question. Instead, my argument will be on a case-by-case basis in Chapters 4–7.
Chapter 5 is on gender and how (re)classification according to cultural lineages helps us better demarcate our kinds of gender and resulting generalizations. Chapter 6 is about cultural kinds more broadly, which are not necessarily kinds of people, such as different religions and ideologies. I describe some principles that allow us to organize our knowledge based on such kinds to assist the identification of new kinds and novel properties. Chapter 7 discusses the particularly contentious cases of race and ethnicity from the purview of the Nordic north and the racial hygiene studies early of the 20th century. I argue that cases such as these demonstrate how some historical kinds, of say ethnicity and gender, may acquire a certain moral standing and give rise to group rights.
Those most interested in the moral and political role of human kinds should focus on Sections 2.4 (Human kinds as levers of social change), 3.2 (Human kinds as social institutions) and Chapter 7 (How historical kinds achieve a moral standing). I believe these parts of the book can also mostly be read independently of the other parts (perhaps assisted by the key section on historical kinds at the beginning of Chapter 4 and in the final summary (Chapter 8)).
Finally, to assist readers interested in the overall argument, I have tried to include summaries of each chapter’s arguments either at the beginning or end of each chapter. The conclusion tries to summarize the main claims of the book and references the part of the book in which the arguments for the claims are made. Now, let’s get to work.
Notes
2
Human kinds for knowledge and as levers for change
Human beings are grouped into kinds in the human and life sciences, but also in policy. Indeed, we use concepts like “women”, “Canadian” and “farmer” as a central part of our everyday conversation and learning.1 But the very ubiquity of these concepts and their unstable usage prompts the following question: how is it that we can have a science, bodies of reliable empirical knowledge about humans – knowledge which can also be produced outside academia (such as within think tanks, policy-making bodies and journalism) – that is not mere conjecture or a hunch? This concern about justifying knowledge in the human sciences is also at the forefront in public discourse. A common complaint, leveled at social sciences, gender studies and anthropology alike, is that they are not scientific enough (compared to biochemistry, for example).
To deal with this concern, I will argue we must find a way of backing up the empirical generalizations found in these bodies of knowledge. This will, in turn, require backing up the kinds upon which these generalizations rest. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we may want to have a closer look at what type of knowledge is in question.
2.1 Knowledge in the human sciences: generalizations, comparisons and generics
Here are two features (or at least, aims) of the scientific knowledge regarded as gold standard: knowledge that is strict and lawful and generalizations that are universally applicable.2 With the possible exception of some economists, I think there is also a general consensus that using this model of knowledge in the human sciences just will not do.
First, reliable generalizations are undoubtedly to be aimed at, but they are barely lawlike, much less constitute actual laws. Indeed, one common definition of generalizations in the human and “special” sciences is that they are ceteris paribus, i.e. they hold with exceptions (Fodor, 1974). As for the criterion that the generalizations should be universally applicable, this simply does not make much sense in the human sciences. Any knowledge that is applicable to some or most human beings should clearly not be applicable to chairs, reindeer or blocks of granite. Such knowledge is applicable specifically to all or a certain range of humans or a range of products of human activities.
That said, in making knowledge claims, it is also important to be careful about the precise scope of one’s generalizations. Consider the notion of a “case study”. The interest in such studies arguably lies in their potential to serve as a general model for other cases, but the scope will often need to be made explicit in order to be precisely a case study. The importance of being clear about one’s scope is a theme we will have reason to return to.
Clearly, we need a different standard to judge the body of empirical knowledge in the human sciences. While it is not strict, lawful or universal, this knowledge, arguably like all knowledge, does involve claims of generalizability. It is the empirical generalizations that the human sciences may sometimes acquire through experimentation, but more often through general observation, correlation and statistical inference.
Take, for example, the following sample of empirical generalizations that purport to be true factual statements in the human sciences: “Young women are more likely to go bust than are young men”; “Doctors have the highest rate of suicide of any professional group”; “Transgender students have a relatively higher risk of victimization”.3 These are claims about (young) women, (young) men, medical doctors and transgender students. The results are hardly important because they constitute scientific laws (they may not be lawlike at all). I suggest they are significant because they constitute a basis for generating broader knowledge about certain groups and certain individuals. This in turn can lead to policy interventions such as providing subsidies for young women starting their own businesses, implementing ...
