Social categories play a central role in inquiry. Some authors have argued that social categories can only play this role because they have a particular metaphysical status, such as a connection to natural kinds or to comparatively joint-carving properties. This reflects the broadly realist idea that categories that play important roles in inquiry do so for metaphysical reasons. In this paper I argue that such metaphysical views of social categories cannot accommodate ‘empty’ social categories, cases in which social categories that cannot have the metaphysical features attributed to them by such accounts still play a central role in inquiry. I defend an alternative approach: context-dependent naturalness, an analogue of metaphysical naturalness that concerns context-dependent, rather than metaphysical, structure.

中文翻译：

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上下文中的社会类别

社会类别在探究中起着核心作用。一些作者认为，社会类别只能发挥这种作用，因为它们具有特定的形而上学地位，例如与自然物种的联系或与相对共同的雕刻特性的联系。这反映了广泛的现实主义观点，即在探究中发挥重要作用的类别是出于形而上学的原因。在本文中，我认为这种关于社会范畴的形而上学观点不能容纳“空洞的”社会范畴，在这种情况下，社会范畴不能有这些描述赋予他们的形而上学特征在探究中仍然发挥着核心作用。我为另一种方法辩护：上下文相关的自然性，一种形而上学自然性的类似物，它涉及依赖于上下文的结构，而不是形而上学的结构。