Abstract
Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or accept widespread social injustices. Social reality is also obscured in cases where ordinary thought and language simply is not perspicuous enough to represent the social objects, kinds, and structures that are central to understanding social injustice. In both cases, I argue that the critical social ontologist will benefit from using the tools and concepts of fundamental metaphysics.
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Notes
Example due to Inwagen (1990, pp. 101–102).
I am thinking of truthmaker theorists like Cameron (2010), specifically.
See Thomasson (2010) for an account of the conceptual analysis approach.
Though see Burman (2023) for a recent corrective to this trend.
See Passinsky (2021) for an articulation of this view.
See Stoljar (1995) for a review of this debate.
Or at least, we cannot appeal to the folk notion of feminized in a context in which there is no such notion publicly available. However, as a reviewer points out, the folk may well begin talking about the property feminized The fact that the folk are not currently talking about a property does not mean that they can never talk or have intuitions about it. My claim is twofold: (i) that we do not have to wait on the folk to start talking about feminized in order to theorize about it, in fundamental terms; (ii) even if the folk had intuitions about feminized, we may want an analysis of feminized, in which case the fundamentality approach would be useful.
As a reviewer noted: it may not be that people have folk views about gender kinds, either. In such a case, the things I say about the fundamentality approach will apply to the case of gender kinds.
Fine (2017a, p. 106) criticizes the tendency of fundamentality theorists to speak as if fundamentality inquiry is the only or most important form of metaphysical theorizing. I suspect such a tendency is responsibility for the common equivocation of what is metaphysically fundamental and what is theoretically fundamental (for metaphysicians).
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Richardson, K. Critical social ontology. Synthese 201, 204 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04197-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04197-0