Social Categories in Context

Social categories play a central role in inquiry. Some authors have argued that social categories can only play this role because they have a particularmetaphysicalstatus, 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 thatcannot havethe 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.