An Inquiry into The Nature of Racial Discourse

By Kamuran Osmanoglu

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1835206867
• ISBN13: 9781835206867
• Release Date: September 2023
• Publisher: Dhb Pe
• Length: 102 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"