Scholars increasingly deny that they are strictly biological. Instead, these scholars argue that they are socially constructed. One challenge is to square the notion of social kinds with the apparent perception of those categories. I argue that we do not perceive social categories such as race. Instead, racial categories are visually encoded based on visible markers that are proxies for social kinds. Thus, I argue that the assumption of seeing social categories commits us to a flawed theory of visual essentialism: the idea that some social kinds are visible properties that are biologically determined.

中文翻译：

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视觉本质主义和社会种类

学者们越来越多地否认它们是严格生物学的。相反，这些学者认为它们是社会建构的。一个挑战是将社会种类的概念与对这些类别的明显感知相结合。我认为我们没有感知种族等社会类别。相反，种族类别是根据作为社会种类代理的可见标记进行视觉编码的。因此，我认为，看到社会类别的假设使我们陷入了一个有缺陷的视觉本质主义理论：认为某些社会类别是由生物学决定的可见属性。