Abstract

In Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward A Reconstruction of Philosophy, Phillip Kitcher argues in Chapter 6, “Does ‘Race’ Have a Future” that developments in evolutionary biology may support a separation of our species into subcategories that could be regarded as races. The human species, he argues, could possibly be divided, using a similar methodology to that employed by evolutionary biologists, into relatively stable and isolated breeding populations that bear distinctive and salient clusters of significant genotypic and phenotypic traits. Hence, the eliminativist claim that there is nothing in the world that corresponds to our use of the term ‘race’ is mistaken. There is, in short, a scientifically legitimate..