RACE AS "AN EVALUATIVE NOTION MASQUERADING AS A NATURAL KIND"

Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("Given, then, that we now know that the identity groups in modern multicultural states are plainly constructed on ethno-linguistic and cultural grounds, rather than on biological-essential grounds, why, again, do so many people remain normatively committed to racial identities? Sometimes it does happen that the removal of a social kind's natural undergirding in turn causes that category to largely wither away. Thus at least in the European cultural sphere, the category of 'witch,' surely a social kind and not a natural one, has, like phlogiston, largely withered away as a result of broad convergence by sometime in the eighteenth century upon the view that the term has no referent in the world. So, again, if witches can go the same way as phlogiston, why not race? Part of the answer to this question . . .  may come from recent empirical work in the cognitive anthropology of race. Francisco Gil-White, Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher, and others have argued that the categorization of human subgroups is grounded in a natural disposition of the human mind. On this account, we are cognitively predisposed to perceive different between biological kinds as rooted in something essential." Id. at 47. "With race, then, we are dealing with the seemingly paradoxical case of what might be called natural construction. Naturally construction, we might say, are those entities or categories that do not fade away when human inquiry finds that they are not in fact robust features of the natural landscape, and that linger as a result of a natural propensity of the human mind to organize the world by means of them. While it is certainly difficult to establish unambiguously the existence of such a thing, we may nonetheless cautiously hypothesize that race is just such a natural construction, to the extent that it enables us to understand why racial thought has had such a long history, in spite of the continual variation in the way racial classifications are made, and in spite of the fact that, today, such classifications continue to have normative significance even for many who are fully aware that they have no firm ground in nature." Id. at 50. "Race, it seems, is in the end really just an evaluative notion masquerading as a natural kind." Id. at 54.).