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Papers by michael root

The Sage Handbook of the Social Sciences, 2007

There isn’t one community-based approach to research in the social sciences but many, and they ca... more There isn’t one community-based approach to research in the social sciences but many, and they carry a variety of labels: for example, ‘action research’, ‘participatory research’, ‘participatory action research’, and ‘community- based participatory research’. They differ in degree of collaboration, but all assume that a social scientist should not take more from her subjects than she gives back to them, and that she should teach or embolden and not simply observe, survey or probe the members of the community she has chosen to be the subjects of her research.

American Philosophical Quarterly, 2001

Etude de la conception du temoignage developpee par Hume dans l'«Essai sur l'entendement ... more Etude de la conception du temoignage developpee par Hume dans l'«Essai sur l'entendement humain», concernant a la fois le domaine de la science et celui de la religion. Mesurant la credibilite du temoignage au sein de certaines communautes scientifiques, ainsi que le role de l'observation et de la convention dans son rapport a la verite, l'A. privilegie la position de Hume a celle, concurrente, de T. Reid.

The SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology

Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 2013

Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, 2007

Publisher Summary Race is often used as a descriptive or analytic category in the social sciences... more Publisher Summary Race is often used as a descriptive or analytic category in the social sciences when studying differences between individuals within the United States in social or economic traits. Social scientists routinely classify Americans by race when trying to describe or explain differences in income, employment, health care, crime, school performance, home ownership, drug addiction, or marriage and divorce within the population and often find that the differences in the United States between the races in each of a number of social or economic variables or traits are significant. In particular, they often find that the values of these variables differ more between racial groups than within them. Social scientists have a reason to use race as a descriptive or analytic category in their studies of individual differences in a social or economic trait even if they disapprove of racial classification or dream of a day when people are not classified by race or when a person's race makes no difference to her social or economic status.

Value-Free Science?, 2007

This chapter examines the sociology of sociological problems. The first section describes the his... more This chapter examines the sociology of sociological problems. The first section describes the history of the sociological study of social problems. The second explains how the history has been shaped by Weber's views on value freedom. The third shows why a study of social problems cannot be silent on questions of right and wrong and, at the same time, be socially relevant, and the fourth section considers whether a study can be both value laden and objective or scientific.

Nelson Goodman claims to have given us a criterion for likeness of meaning that is more stringent... more Nelson Goodman claims to have given us a criterion for likeness of meaning that is more stringent than simple coextensiveness and yet that avoids the familiar extentionalist objections. The notion of a nominal compound plays a key role in his account. I show that Goodman's comments concerning this notion are inadequate, that his comments concerning expressions like ‘unicorn-picture’ are subject to two serious objections: (1) they don't support his claims about likeness of meaning (i.e., the claims that his criterion is more stringent than simple coextensiveness) and (2) they make English an unlearnable language.

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2001

The biomedical sciences employ race as a descriptive and analytic category. They use race to desc... more The biomedical sciences employ race as a descriptive and analytic category. They use race to describe differences in rates of morbidity and mortality and to explain variations in drug sensitivity and metabolism. But there are problems with the use of race in medicine. This article identifies a number of the problems and assesses some solutions. The first three sections consider how race is defined and whether the racial data used in biomedical research are reliable and valid. The next three sections explain why racial variation in disease, including genetic disease, is not evidence that race is biological. The final section explains how a proper understanding of the role of race in medicine bears on public policy.

Philosophy of Science, 2005

Studies in the social and biomedical sciences of racial differences in socioeconomic status or he... more Studies in the social and biomedical sciences of racial differences in socioeconomic status or health within a population view the race of members as fixed and look for a difference in the frequency of a trait like average income or disease risk between racial subgroups. But, as I explain in this paper, there are good reasons to allow the race of members to vary with the trait whose variation within the population is to be described or explained. According to such a view of race, racial categories are more scientifically significant if membership in the categories is allowed to vary with differences in scientific interest rather than held constant across a variety of interests.

The Philosophical Review, 1992

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1977

QUINE'S THOUGHT EXPERIMENT MICHAEL ROOT W E think that we are so smart. Maybe w e are. But it is ... more QUINE'S THOUGHT EXPERIMENT MICHAEL ROOT W E think that we are so smart. Maybe w e are. But it is appropriate to ask how we got that way. The philosophers who have taken up this question and made it their work are the fathers and sons ofmodem philosophy. And the answers are various. Hume seems to think that we are not as smart as we think we are and Descartes, though more generous, predicates our wisdom on God and the natural light.

Biology & Philosophy, 2008

In the United States, the racial and ethnic statistics published by the National Center for Healt... more In the United States, the racial and ethnic statistics published by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) assume that each member of the U.S. population has a race and ethnicity and that if a member is black or white with respect to his risk of one disease, he is the same race with respect to his risk of another. Such an assumption is mistaken. Race and ethnicity are taken by the NCHS to be an intrinsic property of members of a population, when they should be taken to depend on interest. The actual or underlying race or ethnicity of members of a population depends on the risk whose variation within the population we wish to describe or explain.

Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 1982

Philosophy of Science, 2003

Race is a prominent category in medicine. Epidemiologists describe how rates of morbidity and mor... more Race is a prominent category in medicine. Epidemiologists describe how rates of morbidity and mortality vary with race, and doctors consider the race of their patients when deciding whether to test them for sickle-cell anemia or what drug to use to treat their hypertension. At the same time, critics of racial classification say that race is not real but only an illusion or that race is scientifically meaningless. In this paper, I explain how race is used in medicine as a proxy for genes that encode drug metabolizing enzymes and how a proper understanding of race calls into doubt the practice of treating race as a marker of any medically relevant genetic trait.

Philosophy of Science, 2000

Real kinds or categories, according to conventional wisdom, enter into lawlike generalizations, w... more Real kinds or categories, according to conventional wisdom, enter into lawlike generalizations, while nominal kinds do not. Thus, gold but not jewelry is a real kind. However, by such a criterion, few if any kinds or systems of classification employed in the social science are real, for the social sciences offer, at best, only restricted generalizations. Thus, according to conventional wisdom, race and class are on a par with telephone area codes and postal zones; all are nominal rather than real. I propose an account of real kinds that recognizes the current reality of race but not zip codes and shows how a kind can be both constructed and real. One virtue of such an understanding of realism is the light shed on our current practice of racial classification. Race is not a real biological kind but neither is race a myth or illusion. However, the question of whether a social kind is real is separate from whether the category is legitimate. W. E. B. Du Bois maintained that while there...