About this topic
Summary Social ontology studies the metaphysics of social phenomena. Topics include the nature of groups, collective action, and social construction. Social metaphysics is important for other areas of philosophy, including critical feminist and race theory, moral collective responsibility, and action theory.
Key works An early and prominent account of social construction can be found in Searle 1995, and a highly influential discussion of social construction is contained in Haslanger 2012. Accounts of collective action are in Gilbert 1989 and Tuomela 1995. A recent and important general metaphysics of the social world is presented in Epstein 2015.
Introductions

Haslanger 2000Tuomela 2005Epstein 2017.

Related

Contents
1096 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 1096
Material to categorize
  1. How Not to Not Change the Subject (And How to Actually Not Change the Subject).John Mancini - forthcoming - Southwest Philosophy Review.
    Sally Haslanger (2020a, 2020b) proposes a way for semantic amelioration to avoid the ‘topic continuity problem’ (TCP) in conceptual engineering. TCP maintains that changing a concept’s content replaces the concept. Since this occurs in semantic amelioration, semantic amelioration necessarily seems an instance of conceptual replacement. Haslanger rejects this, however, maintaining that a concept’s function is essential to it, not its content. And since semantic amelioration doesn’t change a concept’s function, semantic amelioration isn’t conceptual replacement, according to Haslanger. In this paper, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. “Retour à la philosophie”. La sociología como mediación metafísica en la obra de J. Freund.Juan Carlos Valderrama-Abenza - 2020 - Metafísica y Persona. Filosofía, Conocimiento y Vida 12 (24):49-68.
    Conocido sociólogo, escritor extraordinariamente prolífico en el ámbito de la teoría y el análisis político, la polemología, la historia, epistemología y metodología de las ciencias sociales, Julien Freund fue, sin embargo, como dedicación fundamental, filósofo. No obstante, su filosofía apenas ha recibido atención por parte de los especialistas. Pretendemos mostrar en este artículo la relevancia de esta aproximación filosófica como clave de lectura del conjunto de la obra del autor francés, y de qué manera él mismo concibió su atención a (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Gender Unrealism.Nathan Robert Howard & N. G. Laskowski - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    While intimately familiar, gender eludes theorizing. We argue that well-known challenges to gender’s analysis originate in a subtle ambiguity: questions about gender sometimes express questions about gender categories themselves (e.g., womanhood, manhood, and so on), while at other times expressing questions about what makes someone a member of these categories. Distinguishing these questions accentuates gender’s connections to morality, making a novel “antirealist” view of gender, or as we call it, “unrealist” view, especially natural. Gender’s relations to identity, sex, and social (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Psychologism: from atomism to externalism.Kirk Ludwig - forthcoming - In Stephanie Collins, Brian Epstein, Sally Haslanger & Hans B. Schmid (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Ontology. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter introduces psychologism as the thesis that social facts can explained in terms of more basic facts about individuals, their psychological states, their actions, their relations, and their environments. It argues psychologism should be our default stance toward social reality. It reviews psychologistic approaches to shared intention and how shared intentions can help explain conventions, status functions, and organizations. It provides a deflationary account of corporate attitudes. It argues that neither physical nor social externalism about thought content are incompatible (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Responsibility Magnets and Shelters in Institutional Action.Kirk Ludwig - forthcoming - In Säde Hormio & Bill Wringe (eds.), Collective Responsibility: Perspectives on Political Philosophy from Social Ontology. Springer.
    This chapter investigates the Institutional Distribution Question for backwards-looking collective moral responsibility for institutional action, namely, the question how blame is to be distributed over members of an institution in virtue of its being collectively to blame for some harm. The distribution of blame over members of an institution for harms that the institution brings about must take into account the different institutional roles of its members. This is the primary difference between the question of distribution of responsibilities in unorganized (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  6. Social Identity at the Margins: A Decolonial Approach.Youjin Kong - 2024 - In Hilkje C. Hänel & Johanna Müller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory. Routledge. pp. 305-314.
    The author explores the metaphysics of social identities by using non-ideal theory as a method. She aims to understand what social identities are by examining the experiences of marginalized people – the experiences of people having a social identity as X (e.g., “Latina,” “Muslim woman”) in the non-ideal world, where they are marginalized by virtue of being X. To this end, the author delves into the decolonial feminist philosophies of Uma Narayan, Mariana Ortega, and María Lugones, and engages their conceptual (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Corporate Weakness of Will.Kenneth Silver - forthcoming - Journal of Business Ethics:1-17.
    Proponents of corporate moral responsibility take certain corporations to be capable of being responsible in ways that do not reduce to the responsibility of their members. If correct, one follow-up question concerns what leads corporations to fail to meet their obligations. We often fail morally when we know what we should do and yet fail to do it, perhaps out of incontinence, akrasia, or weakness of will. However, this kind of failure is much less discussed in the corporate case. And, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. What is Social Organizing?Megan Hyska - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    While scholars of, and participants in, social movements, electoral politics, and organized labor are deeply engaged in contrasting different theories of how political actors should organize, little recent philosophical work has asked what social organizing is. This paper aims to answer this question in a way that can make sense of typical organizing- related claims and debates. It is intuitive that what social organizing does is bring about some kind of collectivity. However, I argue that the varieties of collectivity most (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. Tragic Genealogies: Adorno's Distinctive Genealogical Method.Benjamin Randolph - 2023 - Radical Philosophy Review 26 (2):275-309.
    As genealogy has gained greater disciplinary recognition over the last two decades, it has become increasingly common to call any historically oriented philosophy, such as Theodor W. Adorno’s, “genealogy.” In this article, I show that Adorno’s philosophy indeed performs genealogy’s defining functions of “problematization” and “possibilization.” Moreover, it does so in unique ways that constitute a significant contribution to genealogical practice. Adorno’s method, here called “tragic genealogy,” is particularly well-suited to the genealogical analysis of traditional philosophical problems and to the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. World humanities - Towards an ontology of policy.Andrew Gibson & Søren Bengtsen - 2023 - Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 23 (1):3-22.
    The border-crossing nature of science is well recognised, and has long been a focus of policy-makers with an interest in governing this space. The international aspect of the humanities is less clearly understood, and the extent to which it has been a focus of policy is similarly not well conceptualised. UNESCO’s efforts in this area provide a useful corpus of texts through which international humanities policy can be explored. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, this paper considers what UNESCO’s attempts (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. An Ontological Argument against Mandatory Face-Masks.Michael Kowalik - manuscript
    Face-coverings were widely mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic, on the assumption that they limit the spread of respiratory viruses and are therefore likely to save lives. I examine the following ethical dilemma: if the use of face-masks in social settings can save lives then are we obliged to wear them at all times in those settings? I argue that by en-masking the face in a way that is phenomenally inconsistent with or degraded from what we are innately programmed to detect (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  12. Disagreement about the kind law.Muhammad Ali Khalidi & Liam Murphy - 2020 - Jurisprudence 12 (1):1-16.
    This paper argues that the disagreement between positivists and nonpositivists about law is substantive rather than merely verbal, but that the depth and persistence of the disagreement about law, unlike for the case of morality, threatens skepticism about law. The range of considerations that can be brought to bear to help resolve moral disagreements is broader than is the case for law, thus improving the prospects of reconciliation in morality. But the central argument of the paper is that law, unlike (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  13. Metaphors of Intersectionality: Framing the Debate with a New Image.Maria Rodó-Zárate & Marta Jorba - 2020 - European Journal of Women's Studies.
    Whereas intersectionality presents a fruitful framework for theoretical and empirical research, some of its fundamental features present great confusion. The term ‘intersectionality’ and its metaphor of the crossroads seem to reproduce what it aims to avoid: conceiving categories as separate. Despite the attempts for developing new metaphors that illustrate the mutual constitution relation among categories, gender, race or class keep being imagined as discrete units that intersect, mix or combine. Here we identify two main problems in metaphors: the lack of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  14. Ontology, Experience, and Social Death: On Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism.Patrick O'Donnell - 2020 - APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 20 (1).
    This is a long critical discussion of Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism, focusing primarily on Wilderson's claim that Blackness is equivalent to Slaveness. The article draws out some strengths of the book, but argues that the book's central arguments often rest on shaky methodological, metaphysical, epistemic, and political grounds. Along the way, we consider some complications endemic to the project of evaluating a text so clearly geared towards Black audiences from the perspective of a non-Black reader.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  15. The Metaphysics of Legal Organisations.Rachael Mellin - 2020 - In Rachael Mellin, Raimo Tuomela & Miguel Garcia-Godinez (eds.), Social Ontology, Normativity and Law. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. pp. 159-178.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. Corona e communis: imunidade, comunidade e o COVID-19.Maurício Fernando Pitta - 2020 - Voluntas: Revista Internacional de Filosofia 11:e32.
    Diante da pandemia do Novo Coronavírus, muitos foram os problemas levantados pela filosofia a partir do modo “imunitário” com o qual a civilização industrial lidou com a crise, e muito tem sido aventado sobre a necessidade de se repensar o sentido da noção de comunidades de apoio e de resistência. Exemplos disso não faltam; dentre os filósofos que abordaram a crise, encontram-se desde Giorgio Agamben a Paul B. Preciado, entre outros. Neste artigo, pretendemos partir da discussão sobre imunologia e paradigma (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  17. Social Ontology. Emotional Sharing as the Foundation of Care Relationships.Guido Cusinato - 2018 - In S. Bourgault & E. Pulcini, Emotions and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Peeters.
    The origin of the concept of “emotional sharing” can be traced back to the first edition of Sympathiebuch [1913/23], in which Max Scheler paved the way to a phenomenology of emotions and to social ontology. The importance of his findings is evident: consider the central role of emotional sharing in Michael Tomasello’s analysis and the lively debate on social ontology and collective intentionality.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Instituutioiden olemassaolosta eli filosofinen saunailta Searlen ja Hegelin seurassa.Heikki Ikäheimo - 2005 - In Jussi Kotkavirta (ed.), Muoto ja metodi. pp. 163-173.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lectures.Marilyn Frye - manuscript
    Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lectures, given at Michigan State University, February 2008.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. (1 other version)David Braybrooke, ed., Social Rules: Origin; Character; Logic; Change. [REVIEW]Raimo Tuomela - 1997 - Philosophy in Review 17:3-5.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21. Raimo Tuomela, The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View Reviewed by.Theodore R. Schatzki - 2003 - Philosophy in Review 23 (6):409-411.
  22. Tuomela, Raimo, The Philosophy of Social Practices – A Collective Acceptance View, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 274 pp. + xi. [REVIEW]Thomas Søbirk Petersen - 2005 - SATS 6 (1).
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
Approaches to Social Ontology
  1. The Importance of Realism about Gender Kinds: Lessons from Beauvoir.Theodore Bach - 2023 - Analyse & Kritik 45 (2):269-295.
    Beauvoir’s The Second Sex stands out as a master class in the accommodation of conceptual and inferential practices to real, objective gender kinds. Or so I will argue. To establish this framing, we will first need in hand the kind of scientific epistemology that correctly reconciles epistemic progress and error, particularly as pertains to the unruly social sciences. An important goal of the paper is to develop that epistemological framework and unlock its ontological implications for the domain of gender. As (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Reality and Semiosis.Marc Champagne - 2022 - In Jamin Pelkey (ed.), Bloomsbury Semiotics Volume 1: History and Semiosis. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 129–147.
    This chapter investigates whether signs and their action, semiosis, are real. It critically surveys three arguments. The first argument consists in holding that semiosis must be real, because denying the reality of signs is self-defeating. This self-confirming status seems to imply that semiosis is the very means by which we partition the mind-independent and mind-dependent. One would then need to clarify this ontological neutrality or priority. The second argument consists in identifying an instance of sign-action that is mind-independent. Instead of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Motivating a Pragmatic Approach to Naturalized Social Ontology.Richard Lauer - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (4):403–419.
    Recent contributions to the philosophy of the social sciences have motivated ontological commitments using appeals to the social sciences (_naturalized_ social ontologies). These arguments rely on social scientific realism about the social sciences, the view that our social scientific theories are approximately true. I apply a distinction formulated in metaontology between ontologically loaded and unloaded meanings of existential quantification to argue that there is a pragmatic approach to naturalized social ontology that is minimally realist (it treats existence claims as true (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  4. Aspiration and Self-Realization: The Ameliorative Projects of Steve Biko.David Miguel Gray - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2):142-162.
    Work on the conceptual amelioration of race concepts is usually negative or critical: it uncovers social features that contribute to racial hierarchies. Much less focus has been placed on how ameliorative accounts contribute to positive change. Using an account of race developed by Steve Biko during South African apartheid, I will argue that we can extract a novel account of positive amelioration in which racial categories can have normative or aspirational force, contributing to positive change.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Same-tracking real kinds in the social sciences.Theodore Bach - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-26.
    The kinds of real or natural kinds that support explanation and prediction in the social sciences are difficult to identify and track because they change through time, intersect with one another, and they do not always exhibit their properties when one encounters them. As a result, conceptual practices directed at these kinds will often refer in ways that are partial, equivocal, or redundant. To improve this epistemic situation, it is important to employ open-ended classificatory concepts, to understand when different research (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  6. What the Right to Eduation Is, and What It Ought to Be : Towards a Social Ontology of Eduction as a Human Right.Christian Norefalk - 2022 - Dissertation, Malmö University
    During the second half of the 20th century education has been recognized as a human right in several international conventions, and the UN also holds that “Education shall be free” and that “Elementary education shall be compulsory” (UN, 1948, Article 26). The education-as-a-human right-project could be viewed as a good intention of global inclusion in recognizing that all individuals have a right to education in virtue of being humans, and the idea of education as a human right thus has a (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Ontology of plays for autonomous teaming and collaboration.David Kasmier, Eric Merrell, Robert Kelly, Barry Smith, Curtis Heisey, Donald Evan Maki, Marc Brittain, Ronald Ankner & Kevin Bush - 2021 - Proceedings of the 14Th Seminar on Ontology Research in Brazil (Ontobras 2021), Ceur 3050, 9-22.
    We propose a domain-level ontology of plays for the facilitation of play-based collaborative autonomy among unmanned and manned-unmanned aircraft teams in the Army’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) mission domain. We define a play as a type of plan that prescribes some pattern of intentional acts that are intended to reliably result in some goal in some competitive context, and which specifies one or more roles that are realized by those prescribed intentional acts. The ontology is well suited to be extended (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Filosofia e Direito: Estudos.Daniel Pires Nunes, Jayme Paviani & Gabriel Guilherme Frigo - 2020 - Caxias do Sul - Galópolis, Caxias do Sul - RS, Brasil: EDUCS.
    “O estudo de questões jurídicas, em seus aspectos filosóficos, é um modo de compreender um dos fenômenos mais completos da vida humana, da vida em sociedade, embora os aspectos legais sejam diferentes em cada grupo social. Nesse sentido, Filosofia e Direito: estudos é uma contribuição que serve para aprofundar a presença jurídica de bases filosóficas. É preciso recordar que as distinções servem para a compreensão humana e para melhor entender a unidade dos fenômenos. Enquanto a ciência estuda os aspectos dogmáticos (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. Beyond team-directed reasoning: participatory intentions contribute to a theory of collective agency.Duijf Hein - 2017 - Logique Et Analyse.
    Philosophical accounts of collective intentionality typically rely on members to form a personal intention of sorts, viewed as a mental state. This tendency is opposed by recent economic literature on team-directed reasoning, which focuses on the reasoning process leading up to the formation of the members’ intentions. Our formal analysis bridges these paradigms and criticizes the team- directed reasoning account on two counts: first, team-directed reasoning is supposed to transcend traditional game and decision theory by adopting a certain collectivistic reasoning (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  10. Searle on Collectively Intending Symbolic Social Institutional Status.Dale Jacquette - 2014 - Balkan Journal of Philosophy 6 (1):21-32.
    Searle’s social ontology is criticized on two grounds: (1) that Searle’s arguments do not adequately support his commitment to logically and conceptually irreducible collective-to-individual intentionality, and (2) his formulation of the constitutive rule of collective intentionality conferring symbolic social status on intended objects does not express the required concept as clearly, unequivocally, or economically as available alternatives. Two corresponding positive recommendations are offered in response to both criticisms for developing a conservatively improved neo-Searlean philosophy of social phenomena,practices and institutions.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. Anchoring versus Grounding: Reply to Schaffer.Brian Epstein - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):768-781.
    In his insightful and challenging paper, Jonathan Schaffer argues against a distinction I make in The Ant Trap (Epstein 2015) and related articles. I argue that in addition to the widely discussed “grounding” relation, there is a different kind of metaphysical determination I name “anchoring.” Grounding and anchoring are distinct, and both need to be a part of full explanations of how facts are metaphysically determined. Schaffer argues instead that anchoring is a species of grounding. The crux of his argument (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  12. The Genuine Possibility of Being-with: Watsuji, Heidegger, and the Primacy of Betweenness.Carolyn Culbertson - 2019 - Tandf: Comparative and Continental Philosophy 11 (1):7-18.
  13. Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  14. (1 other version)John Searle: Od aktów mowy do rzeczywistości społecznej.Barry Smith - 2003 - Roczniki Filozoficzne 51 (1):265-292.
    Polish translation of "John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality", -/- We provide an overview of Searle's contributions to speech act theory and the ontology of social reality, focusing on his theory of constitutive rules. In early versions of this theory, Searle proposed that all such rules have the form 'X counts as Y in context C' formula – as for example when Barack Obama (X) counts as President of the United States (Y) in the context of US political (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  15. Language and society.Frank Hindriks - 2011 - In Ian Jarvie Jesus Zamora Bonilla (ed.), The Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences. SAGE Publications. pp. 137.
  16. Ontological individualism reconsidered.Brian Epstein - 2009 - Synthese 166 (1):187-213.
    The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims—explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individualism has more recently been understood as a global supervenience claim. While explanatory individualism has remained controversial, ontological individualism thus understood is almost universally accepted. In this paper I argue (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   44 citations  
  17. Artificial institutions: A model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems. [REVIEW]Nicoletta Fornara, Francesco Viganò, Mario Verdicchio & Marco Colombetti - 2008 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 16 (1):89-105.
    Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  18. John Searle and His Critics.Ernest Lepore (ed.) - 1991 - Cambridge: Blackwell.
    For more than three decades John Searle has been developing and elaborating a unified theory of language and mind. What has emerged is an impressive and detailed account of intentionality embracing both mental states and linguistic behaviour. Though the developing theory has been presented in a steady stream of books and articles over the last thirty years, two items stand out as major landmarks: the publication of Speech Acts in 1969 and of Intentionality in 1983. Both of these seminal books (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  19. On the scope and limits of generalizations in the social sciences.Daniel Little - 1993 - Synthese 97 (2):183 - 207.
    This article disputes the common view that social science explanations depend on discovery of lawlike generalizations from which descriptions of social outcomes can be derived. It distinguishes between governing and phenomenal regularities, and argues that social regularities are phenomenal rather than governing. In place of nomological deductive arguments, the article maintains that social explanations depend on the discovery of causal mechanisms underlying various social processes. The metaphysical correlate of this argument is that there are no social kinds: types of social (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  20. Mistakes.Paul A. Roth - 2003 - Synthese 136 (3):389-408.
    A suggestion famously made by Peter Winch and carried through to present discussions holds that what constitutes the social as a kind consists of something shared – rules or practices commonly learned, internalized, or otherwise acquired by all members belonging to a society. This essays argues against the explanatory efficacy of appeals to this shared something as constitutive of a social kind by examining a violation of social norms or rules, viz., mistakes. I argue that an asymmetric relation exists between (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  21. Realism in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences.Matti Sintonen, Petri Ylikoski & Kaarlo Miller (eds.) - 2003 - Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    Realism in Action is a selection of essays written by leading representatives in the fields of action theory and philosophy of mind, philosophy of the social sciences and especially the nature of social action, and of epistemology and philosophy of science. Practical reason, reasons and causes in action theory, intending and trying, and folk-psychological explanation are some of the topics discussed by these leading participants. A particular emphasis is laid on trust, commitments and social institutions, on the possibility of grounding (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  22. The “making” of teenage pregnancy.James Wong - 1997 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 11 (3):273 – 288.
    I will do two things in this paper. First, I examine the issue of construction in the social sciences by using “teenage pregnancy” as an example. Following Michel Foucault's genealogical studies, I show that new categories were constructed to study teenage pregnancies, but that the construction involved does not support an extreme theory of construction—a theory which allows of nothing like “reality”. Second, I study the interaction between the categories used in investigations of teenage pregnancies and those to whom such (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
Grounding and Anchoring in Social Ontology
  1. Etic Theorizing Unanchored.Michael J. Raven - forthcoming - Journal of Social Ontology.
    Etic theorizing uses the theorist’s social notions to theorize about their subject. This theorist may claim that Genghis Khan was a war criminal even though his actions predate the enactment of the Geneva Conventions. Brian Epstein considers a modal etic theorist who claims that Genghis Khan would have been a war criminal even if the Geneva Conventions were never enacted. Epstein argues that this has metaphysical import: it requires postulating a novel metaphysical notion of “anchoring”. Drawing from some familiar issues (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Social kind realism as relative frame manipulability.Yorgos Karagiannopoulos & Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (6):1655–1679.
    In this paper we introduce the view that realism about a social kind K entails that the grounding conditions of K are difficult (or impossible) to manipulate. In other words, we define social kind realism in terms of relative frame manipulability (RFM). In articulating our view, we utilize theoretical resources from Epstein’s (Epstein, The ant trap: Rebuilding the foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford University Press, 2015) grounding/anchoring model and causal interventionism. After comparing our view with causal and principle-based (Tahko, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  3. Towards a Deflationary Truthmakers Account of Social Groups.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-18.
    I outline a deflationary truthmakers account of social groups. Potentially, the approach allows us to say, with traditional ontological individualists, that there are only pluralities of individuals out there, ontologically speaking, but that there are nevertheless colloquial and social-scientific truths about social groups. If tenable, this kind of theory has the virtue of being both ontologically parsimonious and compatible with ordinary and social-scientific discourse—a virtue which the stock reductive / ontological dependence accounts of social groups arguably lack.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  4. Theorizing with a purpose: The many kinds of sex.Sally Haslanger - 2015 - In Catherine Kendig (ed.), Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice. Routledge. pp. 129-144.
    The paper indicates how social kinds may be internally and objectively unified in a way continuous with physical kinds. It argues that the practice of theorizing is continuous with other practices to the extent that theorists, like anyone engaged in a practice, needs to make choices that are responsive to purposes (and corresponding values) guiding the practice. The paper discusses Epstein's theory of anchoring, and argues for a theory of scaffolding social kinds.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  5. Open Questions in the Metaphysics of Habitable Categories.Axel Barceló - 2021 - EurAmerica 4 (50):669-707.
    My purpose in this text is to offer a general roadmap for navigating most current debates in the metaphysics of social categories regarding what sort of fact it is for a person to inhabit one social category or another—for example, what makes a person Mexican, or gay, or rich. With this goal in mind, I propose classifying the debating positions into three broad camps: common sense theories, socio-historical accounts, and performative theories. I characterise their main differences, identifying the main challenges (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  6. How to Project a Socially Constructed Sexual Orientation.Peter Finocchiaro - 2021 - Journal of Social Ontology 7 (2):173-203.
    Was bisexuality a widespread feature of ancient Greek society? This question is an instance of cross-cultural projection -- of taking the means through which people are categorized in one culture and applying it to members of another. It’s widely held by those who think that sexual orientation is socially constructed that its projection poses a problem. In this paper, I offer a more careful analysis of this alleged problem. To analyze projection, I adapt Iris Einheuser’s substratum-carving model of conventionalism to (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
1 — 50 / 1096