ABSTRACT
People are what they are because society makes them that way—humans are products of societies. This chapter explains that changing the name does not change the thing itself. Despite Shakespeare's insistence, sometimes what a thing is depends on the label given. What a "thing" is may follow rather than precede the name given to it. In such cases, the label comes first, and what the thing is comes second. Most of us inherit the sort of common-sense view of language and the world assumed by Shakespeare, but this view became widely rejected by all critical scholars in the twentieth century. The chapter argues that that the labels people use to divide up and organize the stuff of the world have a constitutive role in creating the world they inhabit. The uses of these concepts and identities are sometimes in conflict; when competing groups use different conceptual schemes, they may literally see, taste, smell, and inhabit different worlds.
