Another gem from Esa Diaz-Leon. I really enjoy Esa’s papers—which I’ve been reading since we were both looking at phenomenal consciousness: they’re models of clarity, carefulness and concision. (As well as, as far as I can tell, being basically right about things.) Here she distinguishes between “causal" and “constitutive" social construction, and points out that only the latter is inconsistent with the sort of things social construction is supposed to be inconsistent with: natural-kind status, biological realism, intrinsicality. Which makes constitutive constructions the best things to lean on for social change.
One nit: at p1140 she puts the question as “is the property that all things that fall under X have in common just a matter of being classified in that way by individuals like us, or do they share an underlying nature or ‘essence’, independently of how we classify things?” This seems to lump kinds produced by looping—where the process of classification causally produces properties—on the constitutive side, rather than the causal (where presumably it belongs).