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It may seem, especially in the next section, that I’m telling you what I mean by race rather than what we mean by it. And this may make it seem as if I’m making it all up as I go. This is an occupational hazard in philosophy, and hence another aspect of what it can mean to approach race as a philosopher.

I should say that this is an aspect of what it means to approach race as a philosopher of a particular kind – as someone working in the wake of figures like John Dewey and John Austin. Working in the traditions epitomized by those figures means taking terms in common usage and availing myself of their commonness. The philosopher working in this vein takes herself as a representative figure, empowered to think the thoughts that anyone with sufficient time and leisure might think, committed to using and refining the language that we all share. In this spirit, then, when I attribute meanings and actions and assumptions to some “we,” I am speaking from my experience as one of us. To do philosophy like this is to act as a supremely interested observer of what we do, someone encouraged to push past familiar assumptions and customs in search of the organizing structures that lie behind what we do.

One currently popular alternative to this approach is particularly relevant to the study of race. Instead of revising the tradition of armchair speculation to arrive at the approach noted above, I could conduct surveys and polls, in the hope of producing empirical generalizations about what we think. Approaching race theory in that way might make me a social scientist of some sort: someone whose expertise comes in at the observation stage, or in working through that stage in a certain way, using certain tools (statistical analysis, experimental design, and so on). The expertise of the philosopher, such as it is, comes into play later, at the teasing-out stage, or perhaps earlier, in refining the language in which scientists pose their questions. This sort of work should be informed by the scientist’s best hypotheses, but should consist principally in thinking through the implications of what we say.

Then again, turning to empirical inquiry might simply make me a different kind of philosopher. I am thinking here of what is now called “experimental philosophy,” and of the way this work has been brought to bear on race theory by philosophers like Josh Glasgow and Edouard Machery.⁷ The burden of this work is in part to break the stranglehold that armchair reflection has on our methods, even in areas where actual data might be quite useful. Instead of considering the ethical dimensions of human agency in a speculative vacuum, experimental ethicists ask – in conversation with researchers in psychology and elsewhere – about the empirical conditions under which people are in fact more likely to behave in the ways that we think of as virtuous and vicious. Similarly, experimentally inclined philosophers of race sometimes eschew the assumption of representativeness that I rely on above and turn instead to essentially psychological studies of what people in fact mean when they use racial discourse.

There is considerable value in this experimental work. For one thing, it takes the real world seriously, which is an important safeguard against speculative flights of fancy. For another, it highlights certain implications of our beliefs and commitments more clearly and directly than armchair reflection does. For example, if certain ways of thinking about race correlate more robustly with racial prejudice than others, this is something that people interested in fighting prejudice should know. And if the vast majority of people who use race-talk in fact understand themselves to be talking about pixies and goblins, this is something that theorists devoted to exploring “folk” concepts of race should know.

These virtues aside, though, experimental philosophy still leaves room for the sort of project I have in mind, and might require it. Like me, the experimental race theorist wants to know what we mean when we talk about race. Unlike me, he or she is willing to conduct the polls and surveys that will yield hard data in answer to this question. But, just as with the social scientist, old-fashioned philosophical reflection will help in thinking through the limitations and the implications of these data. (I presume the thoughtful experimentalist will agree with this.) We still need to ask whether the survey questions import assumptions that need to be unpacked, and whether the experimental subject’s assent means what it seems to. And it will be difficult to ask these questions responsibly without being informed by a body of critical reflections on the content, uses, history, and structure of racial discourse – without, in short, an old-fashioned philosophy of race.

Beyond these considerations of experimental design and interpretation, we need to ask specifically philosophical questions about the prospects for discursive innovation. Might a theoretical concept of race – a concept as distant from folk understandings as the physicist’s account of light is from mine – do some useful work? Might an innovation in popular discourse be similarly useful, and in fact be on the horizon? These are not questions about whether people in fact assent to P, or whether their refusal to do so correlates with their assent to R. They are questions about whether assenting to some distinct but related proposition Q would be a worthwhile outcome if we could bring it into being, and whether some specific constellation of human practices is developing itself in ways that will incline people to think Q rather than P or R. If we answer these latter questions in the affirmative, we will have to work up the resources for finding, understanding, and deploying these new concepts. And we might have to unearth those resources from a painting or a play, rather than from a summary of survey responses. In short, and once again, we might have to do the work of old-fashioned philosophy.

This defense of (very) old-fashioned philosophy is in no way meant to provide a blanket defense of the stories I propose to tell in my capacity as a representative thinker. If my story about us – which is to say, about us by and large – fails to ring true, then take that as a provocation to compose a better story, one that does less violence to our intuitions about what we mean and do, or one that shows us how to reconstruct our practices until they serve us more effectively. This provocation is also the work of philosophy.