2026/07/08 by Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky, Paul‐Mikhail Catapang Podosky
Social Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies #Race, Genetics, and Society #Political Philosophy and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1093/pq/pqag048
Abstract The debate over the inflation of racism should be understood not as a disagreement about first-order facts, but as a set of competing answers to the Pairing-Dependence Question (PDQ): why should a particular concept of racism be expressed by ‘racism’? Once PDQ is made explicit, prominent defences of inflation that appeal to explanatory power prove unsuccessful. Explanatory considerations may justify representing structural injustice with a concept, yet they underdetermine which word should express that concept. I conclude that inflation was presumptively unjustified because it exposed a term with entrenched moral-pragmatic significance to avoidable evaluative risk, given that the wider concept which it expresses could have been expressed by another term instead.