An Inquiry Concerning the Nature of Racial Discourse

In this dissertation, I assess the nature of racial discourse from an interdisciplinary perspective. I argue against the new biological racial realism, according to which races are genetic natural kinds or distinct parts of the human phylogenetic tree. I show—on both empirical and theoretical grounds—that the reality of race cannot be supported in this way. Then, I turn to evolutionary biology and psychology for a proper account of race that can underwrite racial discourse. According to this account, there is no specific psychological mechanism that has evolved to track races in humans: racial cognition in early infancy is the result of a psychological mechanism that humans have evolved to assess similarities/differences in human faces, and racial cognition later in life is the result of various mechanisms that evolved to track social groups of one kind or another.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Kansas

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Osmanoglu, Kamuran

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Schulz, Armin W

• Philosophy of science
• facial familiarity
• phylogenetics
• race
• racial cognition
• social construction

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright held by the author.

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:17175

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/34509