Abstract
This chapter aims to show that there is a general theory of social ontology implicit in Amie Thomasson’s prolific philosophical work. In contrast to her books on fiction and metaphysics, this theory is not argued for in a single volume. The first objective is thus to make Thomasson’s important contribution to social ontology explicit by drawing out its core features. Despite its many advantages, such as its ability to take abstract social objects into account, there is a central difficulty: Thomasson’s new account of social groups is too narrow since it cannot accommodate opaque kinds of social groups. The second and related aim is to develop this objection and demonstrate that it must be resolved before we can take Thomasson’s theory of social ontology fully onboard. The chapter closes by suggesting that we can overcome this objection by even more pluralism—already a core feature in Thomasson’s social ontology.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See for instance the debate between John Searle and Barry Smith on the so-called “free-standing Y-terms,” similar to abstract social objects (2003), and my suggestion (2007) that opaque kinds of social facts, referred to as macro-facts, are reducible to a collection of facts at the micro-level, a solution later adopted by Searle (2010).
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This example comes from my Nonideal Social Ontology (2023) where I argue that economic class has been excluded from many theories and discussions in social ontology, and that this is a serious limitation. I also clarify the distinction between economic class and social class.
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Thomasson explicitly denies that the normative conception should provide jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for all social groups—that she is searching for the essence of social groups. So it is not an objection to her account that it excludes some groups that we intuitively take to be social groups. Rather, her account should be taken to answer the question: what function do particular social groups concepts have for our shared lives together? And the answer is that they give our lives a normative structure.
References
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Amie Thomasson for helpful discussions and comments on this paper.
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Burman, Å. (2023). Thomasson’s Social Ontology. In: Garcia-Godinez, M. (eds) Thomasson on Ontology. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23672-3_8
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