[stefantalpalaru]

> [...] the belief that race exists. (Which it manifestly does, as a cultural construct.)

That's like saying that aliens exist as a cultural construct. Let's not mix reality and widely shared fantasies.

How would you call the unscientific belief that races exist in the human species, if not "racism"?

> a lot of time "racism" is used broadly to refer to bigotry based on race, ethnicity, or nationality

True, just like "vagina" is used to refer to the vulva. Errors need to be pointed out, not accepted in silence, even if the hoi polloi will make you pay for it.

[dragonwriter]

> That's like saying that aliens exist as a cultural construct.

No, its not. Its more like saying color exists as a product of perception. Races are a categorization, categorizations do not inherently exist at all, they exist as products of mind only.

> How would you call the unscientific belief that races exist in the human species, if not "racism"?

If by that you mean the unscientific belief that the cultural perception of race has a direct correspondence to inherent biological feature of humans, I'd call it something like "the erroneous belief in biological race".

Its pretty much logically orthogonal to racism; racists are probably more likely to believe that biological race is a thing than non-racists, but its quite possible to be a racist without believing in biological race (if it weren't, bigotry against, e.g., nationality -- which doesn't have the problem of people mistaking for an inherent biological trait -- wouldn't be a thing. Heck, bigotry based on sexual orientation seems to be inversely correlated with the belief that it is an inherent biological feature.)

> Errors need to be pointed out, not accepted in silence, even if the hoi polloi will make you pay for it.

Well, yes, that's why I am pointing out the error of your mistaken confusion of the erroneous perception that race is an inherent biological feature with "racism", a term which has always referred to belief in the superiority or inferiority of particular races, not belief in the biological inherency of race.

[drdeca]

I'm not sure that categories don't exist outside of the mind of a person.

I think sets (for example) probably have a real existence, in a sense.

some of the categories we choose might not have anything special about them to mark them as any more real than other categories that we would see as arbitrary, but that wouldn't mean that they aren't real, just that they aren't more real.

But maybe the ontology of abstract objects isn't very relevant here.

Also, I don't mean to say that the categories we use are all arbitrary, just that even the ones which are arbitrary (if any) I think still exist.

Also, I don't right now present any argument for why I believe what I do about abstract objects. I'm just stating beliefs that I have, and which your post seemed(?) to assume something that contradicts.

[stefantalpalaru]

> categorizations do not inherently exist at all

They do, after you define objective criteria for clustering the objects in a set. For biological race, the main criterium would reveal a genotype-level clustering that matches the phenotype differences - and we see this in dogs, but not in humans.