ABSTRACT
Social metaphysics is concerned primarily with metaphysical questions about the objects, structures, and categories that are central to human social life: gender, race, sex, disability, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, the nature of groups, collective belief and action, corporate personhood, and many others. Becoming a woman on her view is not a physiological process, nor is it a straightforward matter of deliberate choice and training, nor is it a causal effect of environmental factors interacting with particular features of one’s body. People are made into women, on her view, by social norms and widely held beliefs and attitudes that consider certain traits, preferences, behaviors, and social roles to “naturally” go along with being female. Despite the fact that some of the most important aspects of human social life involve mind dependent things, mind dependence has long been seen by many philosophers as a sign of unreality, a sign that thing in question is not really even candidate for serious metaphysical inquiry.
