Race and Reif ication in Science

摘要

Alfred North Whitehead warned many years ago about "the fallacy of mis-aced 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.