Abstract

Haslanger (2000) has argued that we should ameliorate concepts of race or gender to better capture existing structural inequalities. Her analysis was criticized by Simion (2018a), who argued that a concept should be ameliorated only if doing so preserves epistemic accuracy. But, as I argue, this criticism misses Haslanger's target. In response, Podosky (2018) and McKenna (2018b) have argued that conceptual revisions need not preserve "epistemic accuracy" since concepts can "shape reality", not just represent it. Here I argue that social kind concepts need not "shape" the corresponding social kinds: neither causally nor constitutively. This raises doubts about the function of ameliorative projects for social kind concepts as means to change social reality.