History of Science and Technology Colloquium

Social scientists attempt to understand variations within a population in a socioeconomic or biomedical trait, e.g., household income, school achievement, unemployment, risk of heart disease or rate of diabetes-related death, by stratifying the population using a demographic variable like sex, age, race or ethnicity and studying the statistical relationship between the variable and the trait. In order to do so, they assign each member of the population or sample a race or ethnicity and assume that there is one correct way to make the assignment, e.g., by ancestry, other-reports or ancestry. I argue that there is no one correct way to assign an individual to a racial or ethnic category and that what race or ethnicity an individual should be assigned depends of the trait whose variation the social or biomedical scientist is attempting to understand; as a result, a member of the population might be assigned one race for the purpose of understanding a variation in one socioeconomic or biomedical trait and a different race for the purpose of understanding a variation in a different one, white in relation to sickle-cell disease and black in relation to academic achievement. I propose an approach to race and ethnicity similar to one some economists have adopted towards indices like poverty and unemployment, viz. that there is no best way to define 'poverty' or 'unemployment' and which definition is best depends on what the term is to be used for. My proposal would improve the research in the social and biomedical sciences on racial difference and oppose the common view that race is an intrinsic property of persons.

Sponsored by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.