Brewer, Mark A. (2025) Race as a Regulatory Kind: Constructivist Realism Beyond Naturalism. [Preprint]
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Abstract
This paper critically examines the prospects for racial naturalism—the view that racial categories reflect biologically grounded, natural kinds. I distinguish between two main variants: Standard Racial Naturalism (SRN), which depends on discredited essentialist assumptions, and New Racial Naturalism (NRN), which appeals to genetic clustering and geographic ancestry. I argue that SRN is incompatible with modern evolutionary biology and population genetics, while NRN, in attempting to avoid essentialism, fails to preserve any robust notion of natural kindhood. To explain the empirical tractability and institutional durability of race without invoking biological realism, I introduce the concept of a regulatory kind: a socially constructed kind whose classificatory stability is maintained through recursive institutional enforcement. Race, I argue, simulates natural kindhood through epistemic feedback mechanisms embedded in administrative systems, data infrastructures, and policy regimes. This account preserves the metaphysical commitments of constructivist realism while explaining how race appears biologically significant without being a natural kind. It concludes that no existing version of racial naturalism satisfies the empirical, conceptual, or metaphysical conditions required of a coherent scientific taxonomy.
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