[kelseyfrog]

It's really a shame Dawkins hasn't dipped his toe into social epistemology. It's very clear that this is a grounding issue that's highlighting that different categories have different grounding rules and that within categories, individuals have different grounding rules. Furthermore, grounding rules have cultural-geofraphic territories and change over time.

It's how I can get a new job and call myself a Data Scientist, but as Rachel Dolezal is mentioned in the article, cannot alter her appearance and be Black. The categories are simply grounded in different things.

Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir, does a phenomenal job at describing this principle in Categories We Live By. It's a plus that it's both fairly short and approachable.

[ryandv]

> It's how I can get a new job and call myself a Data Scientist, but as Rachel Dolezal is mentioned in the article, cannot alter her appearance and be Black.

This theme was already explored in the literature [0]:

> Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner* graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one’s race in the way it might be to change one’s sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism.

Unfortunately, just as is happening here, instead of engaging with the substance of the paper on its own merits, there were widespread calls to simply retract the paper and dispose of it down the memory hole [1].

[0] Tuvel, R. (2017). In Defense of Transracialism. Hypatia, 32(2), 263–278. doi:10.1111/hypa.12327 (https://sci-hub.se/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_transracialism_controv...

[kelseyfrog]

> Unfortunately, just as is happening here, instead of engaging with the substance of the paper on its own merits, there were widespread calls to simply retract the paper and dispose of it down the memory hole.

What's your explanation for this, what do you suppose the retraction advocates explanation is, and why might they be different?

[tim333]

I'm glad Dawkins has not got into social epistemology. His reasoning seems very clear.

For comparison here is some Asta, where the jargon leaves me unclear at what she is saying:

>Gender is a paradigm case for me. However, even if we assume that my account does justice to the construction of gender, the question remains whether this notion of social construction and social meaning is really adequate for accounting for the metaphysics of all social categories of individuals. Perhaps the two aims pull in opposite direction here: theorizing the type of social construction involved with gender, on the one hand, and offering a general metaphysics of social categories of individuals, on the other.,

[kelseyfrog]

Asta is simply applying a little self-critique by asking, "Is my account complete?" You can rest assured that not understanding the quoted passage does not influence one's ability to understand the rest of the work.