Thursday, April 23, 1pm-2pm, LGRT 1681 (Lederle Tower, 16th floor)
CSSI and Statistics and Data Science Seminar
Lily Hu (Yale, Philosophy)
Title: Racial difference and difference-making
Abstract: A tension appears in contemporary social-scientific studies of the causal effects of race. Race is understood by most scholars today as a category that not only explains distinctive patterns of social inequality but is defined by these myriad social differences. But this fact about race, on the one hand, sits uneasily with a core tenet of the concept of cause, on the other. On the leading philosophical and scientific-methodological accounts of causation, a cause is something that makes a difference in conditions that are, broadly speaking, “otherwise equal.” But if race marks social difference, then what is it for two persons or groups that are differently racialized to be “otherwise equal” in the sense required for good causal inquiry? Those different in racial status are defined by a host of social differences. And yet the background conditions that must be installed for causal inquiry to get off the ground require leveling those inequalities. It would appear then that the very differences that define racial statuses both form the basis of causal inquiry about race and nullify the conditions of its possibility. The aim of this talk is to draw out this internal tension that appears in how race as a cause is constituted as an object of inquiry in the contemporary social sciences and to see how it might be resolved—without giving up on the scientific project of causal inquiry about race.
Bio: Lily is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Lily is also a contributing editor at Boston Review and has written there among other venues such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Phenomenal World, and The Law & Political Economy Project. Lily received a doctorate from Harvard in 2022 in Applied Mathematics & Philosophy.
