If you want to know what the philosopher Sally Haslanger, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, is about in many of the essays in this volume, imagine the following situation: A daughter vehemently demands money from her mother for a crop top that she likes at school want to wear.
The mother allows the purchase of a top, but not a cropped one, because that is too revealing.
The daughter is angry: "But mom, you are just wrong.
Everyone knows crop tops are cute;
and I don't want to be a honk." The mother replied, "I'm sorry honey, crop tops aren't cute."
Who is right?
And why is an answer to this question important?
For Haslanger it is undisputed that crop tops are not cute in and of themselves, i.e. independent of human evaluation.
On the other hand, the dispute between mother and daughter is not just about pure taste.
Haslanger has no doubts that the mother is right in a way and that the daughter's distinction between the cuties and the honks is based on an illusion.
But what exactly is this illusion and why should the mother be in a better position to see through it than the daughter who is surely more familiar with the world of youth fashion and its trends and codes?
Haslanger, which is important, also recognizes this: In the daughter's school world, the statement that crop tops are cute is simply true.
The old terms should not simply be replaced by new ones
Almost all the questions that concern the philosopher Sally Haslanger, who is only known to insiders in this country, can be illustrated with this example.
On the one hand there is the question of a knowledge that is true but at the same time also false.
How can knowledge be true and false at the same time?
Linked to this question is a second one: Who is entitled, and for what reasons, to express criticism of knowledge that others believe to be true?
For example, who can claim that certain knowledge represents the influence of a harmful ideology?
From Haslanger's point of view, the example with the crop tops stands for a structurally anchored system of beliefs that already prescribes young girls to be "sexy" and thus follows a more male perspective.
The mother, that's how Haslanger should be read here,
The feminist impulse of these considerations is of course not accidental.
Haslanger sees herself explicitly as a feminist (and anti-racist) author and puts her demanding and not always easy-to-read theoretical work at the service of overcoming social injustice in practice.
This becomes particularly clear when it comes to the very big questions of gender and race.
“Gender and Race: (What) Are They?
(What) Shall they be?” is the title of an essay in the volume.
The second question in particular may sound unusual.
Questions of the type "What is x?" are typically philosophical questions, and Haslanger extensively discusses various methodological approaches to these questions.
There are not a few authors who, in an ontological sense, doubt that there are things to which all properties apply
which we commonly refer to with terms such as "man" or "woman" or even with the distinction between different "races".
Our concepts, it is assumed, are mistaken, they suggest a natural basis for our distinctions where there is no natural basis.