Race and Reification in Science |
Race and Reification in Science
Science Magazine
Volume 307
2005-02-18
pages 1050-1051
Troy Duster, Professor of Sociology
New York University
Alfred North Whitehead warned many years ago about “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (1), by which he meant the tendency to assume that categories of thought coincide with the obdurate character of the empirical world. If we think of a shoe as “really a shoe,” then we are not likely to use it as a hammer (when no hammer is around). Whitehead’s insight about misplaced concreteness is also known as the fallacy of reification. Recent research in medicine and genetics makes it even more crucial to resist actively the temptation to deploy racial categories as if immutable in nature and society…
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