ABSTRACT
People engaged in the “race debates”—arguments regarding the biological reality of race—often seem to be talking past one another. One reason for this is the range of different positions that each of the sides in the race debates can (and do) stake out—so unless one knows which, exactly, of the many potential claims someone is making when they claim that for example “race is biologically real” it will be unclear what will even count as evidence for or against such a claim. The problem is often compounded by a kind of “slippage,” where an author will, for example, defend a very weak version of a position, but then make claims that follow only from the more robust version. Careful attention to this slippage, and the range of possible meanings associated with realism about biological race, can at least reveal what kinds of empirical evidence might be relevant to the particular question at hand.
