ABSTRACT
This can’t be right. On any version of conventionalism even distantly related to Locke’s, the extension of a general term is fixed by our concept of it in such a way that we could not be seriously wrong about which properties determine how we in practice classify things under the term. But the whole point of a political critique of classificatory practices as ideological is that the correspondence between our classificatory practices and unsavory properties is anything but transparent to us; if ideologically determined classificatory practices are to serve unsavory political functions our own conception of those practices must be a favorable one.
