Pluralism, Opacity, and Values in the Social World

Katharine Jenkins’s Ontology and Oppression helps bridge the chasm between discussions of social ontology in analytic metaphysics and treatments of injustice and oppression in social and political philosophy. In this commentary on Jenkins’s book, I address three main issues. First, I question a central innovation of the book—its espousal of a new form of pluralism about race and gender kinds, which posits that race and gender are not unitary kinds but can have three different types of manifestation in the social world. Second, I consider how Jenkins’s central notion of “ontic injustice” interacts with a prominent distinction between social kinds that have to be explicitly represented (“transparent”) and those that need not be represented (“opaque”). Third, I take up the issue of evaluative or normative considerations in social theorizing and their place in taxonomizing the social world. I ask whether, in rejecting what she calls the “ontology first” approach to theorizing about trans people, Jenkins stakes a position that opposes scientific categorization on the basis of nonepistemic values.