Pragmatism, Ontology, Social Justice

Kraut describes the tendency of some contemporary pragmatists to understand humans and our place in the world in terms of inferential connections and social practices rather than in terms of correspondence between our words and thoughts and the facts that those words and thoughts purport to represent. That tendency leads to the view that the sorts of normativity by which our social practices are appropriately judged do not depend on human-independent facts. Kraut argues that if this is correct, then some recent work in social ontology is mistaken, namely, work that assumes that the difference between natural kinds and socially constructed kinds is relevant to questions of social justice. In emphasizing that such kinds are constructed, social constructionists hope to ameliorate the conditions of those of have historically faced injustice and oppression. Kraut argues that the ontology of social construction offers no aid in achieving that goal. The question of the ontological status of human kinds, and in particular the question whether kinds like gender are socially constructed, turns out to be “politically inert” and to have no bearing on matters of social justice.