Ron Mallon, “The Construction of Human Kinds” (Oxford University Press, 2016)
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What is the central question about social construction that the episode introduces?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
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Hello, and welcome to the New Books and Philosophy podcast. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the podcast along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Today's interview is with Ron Mallon, Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. His new book, The Construction of Humankind, is just out from Oxford University Press. Social constructionists hold, in general, that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. This Kantian-inspired intake on the relation between mind and world has been contested for decades within philosophy of science, where in its most radical forms it holds that reality itself is dependent on human minds and that the idea of an objective reality is a myth.
More recently, debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play important roles in the human social world, such as racial or gender or mental illness categories, where those on the social constructionist side argue that these categories are not biological or natural and that alleviating social injustices that are aligned with these categories begins with recognizing that they are not inevitable, as the label natural or biological seems to imply. At the same time, controversy surrounding the case of Rachel Dolezal, a woman born of white parents who considers herself black, makes clear that the idea of race being just a matter of choice is not readily accepted, even by those who think race is not a biological category.
How then should we understand what social construction entails? More broadly, how does social construction even work? In his new book, Mellon provides an accessible analysis of what social construction involves, how human categories are constructed, and how some of these categories become entrenched and contribute to structuring our social interactions, to causally guiding both how we behave towards others and how we respond to them. On his view, our cognitive heritage leads us to add an element of essentialism into some of the most important social concepts, such as those of race and gender. He also articulates the salient methods by which our representations of categories and the categories themselves form a constructivist loop
providing important detail on how it is that a category emerges alongside the practice of conceiving of it as a category, and also on how categories stabilize. His moderate perspective on social constructionism will be helpful to those participating in debates about social construction, as well as those outside it. There's a great deal in the book to talk about, so I look forward to hearing from Ron Mallon himself.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the central question about social construction that the episode introduces?
0:00–25:56
2
How does Ron Mallon explain the basic debate between social constructionists and biological naturalists?
25:56–48:07
3
What personal and academic background led Mallon to write *The Construction of Human Kinds*?
48:07–1:04:43
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)