Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2):402-424 (2020)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 79,898

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Causal Power of Discourse.Dave Elder-Vass - 2011 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41 (2):143-160.
Material Parts in Social Structures.Elder-Vass Dave - 2017 - Journal of Social Ontology 3 (1):89-105.
Précis of The Ant Trap.Epstein Brian - 2016 - Journal of Social Ontology 2 (1):125-134.
What are groups?Katherine Ritchie - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (2):257-272.
Groups as Agents by Deborah Tollefsen. [REVIEW]Ritchie Katherine - 2016 - Journal of Social Ontology 2 (1):173-175.
Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Metaphysics of Social Groups.Katherine Ritchie - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (5):310-321.
The ontology of social groups.Amie L. Thomasson - 2019 - Synthese 196 (12):4829-4845.
The Poverty of Ontological Reasoning.Leonidas Tsilipakos - 2012 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42 (2):201-219.
Raimo Tuomela’s Social Ontology.J. Angelo Corlett & Julia Lyons Strobel - 2017 - Social Epistemology 31 (6):557-571.
Critical Theory and Processual Social Ontology.Emmanuel Renault - 2016 - Journal of Social Ontology 2 (1):17–32.
A Framework for Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2015 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 46 (2):147-167.
Groups and Oppression.Elanor Taylor - 2016 - Hypatia 31 (3):520-536.

Analytics

Added to PP
2018-09-21

Downloads
370 (#34,842)

6 months
47 (#37,471)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Katherine Ritchie
University of California, Irvine

Citations of this work

Pluralities, counterparts, and groups.Isaac Wilhelm - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (7):2133-2153.
The Identity of Social Groups.Kit Fine - 2020 - Metaphysics 3 (1):81-91.
Groups as pluralities.John Horden & Dan López de Sa - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):10237-10271.

View all 38 citations / Add more citations