The Construction of Human Kinds

Abstract Social constructionist explanations of human kinds like race, gender, and homosexuality are commonplace in the social sciences and humanities, but what do they mean and what are their implications? The question is pressing in part because such putative constructs are among the most causally powerful kinds in the social sciences. Mallon’s book synthesizes a naturalistic account of the social construction of human kinds drawing on recent work in evolutionary, cognitive, and social psychology as well as social theory and the philosophy of science. Such a model makes clear that constructionist accounts can be hypotheses to explain causally powerful human kinds. Mallon draws links between the account and broader constructionist concerns with the political and social consequences of our kind representations. In contrast to apparently radical social constructionist approaches associated with debates over the nature of scientific fact, Mallon treats social constructs as the real, sometimes stable products of natural processes, and he suggests that reference to such constructs can figure in our everyday and scientific knowledge of the world. The result is a realistic, naturalistic account of how human representations might make up the world they represent.