El presente trabajo identifica en la obra de Wilfrid Sellars dos tesis relevantes para el debate contemporáneo en ontología social. La primera dice que podemos entender la realidad social como estando compuesta parcialmente por estructuras causales o coercitivas. La segunda, que la realidad social se le presenta a los agentes como estando constituida por estructuras coercitivas. El trabajo defiende estas tesis interpretativas recurriendo a los escritos de filosofía práctica de Sellars, y especialmente a su explicación del funcionamiento de los imperativos (...) hipotéticos y categóricos. A su vez, contrasta esta interpretación de corte causal con las concepciones —de índole normativa— predominantes tanto en la ontología social contemporánea como entre los seguidores de Sellars. (shrink)

El propósito de este trabajo es exponer una estrategia explicativa que está en el núcleo de A Spirit of Trust de Robert Brandom. Esta estrategia consiste, de acuerdo con nuestra lectura, en tratar la oposición epistemológica entre apariencias y realidad —y otras oposiciones conceptuales emparentadas— como una distinción interna, normativa e histórica. Mostraremos cómo Brandom hace funcionar esta estrategia apelando al procedimiento de la rememoración, que permite, al ubicar diferentes representaciones en una secuencia de desarrollo histórico, entender la distinción entre (...) apariencias y realidad como la distinción entre cómo nos representamos qué son las cosas y cómo deberíamos representárnoslas. (shrink)

In contemporary social ontology, normative attitudes are often regarded as the essential element to account for the existence of the social/normative realm. However, by emphasizing their foundational explanatory role, philosophers have been led to overlook or misrepresent some aspects of their structure. The first part of this paper attempts to offer a more proportioned analysis of the structure of normative attitudes; according to it, normative attitudes are essentially _sanctions_ that have a _projective_ or _generalizing_ aim, that is, sanctions that manage (...) to point beyond the acts they directly target. The second part of the paper engages in a polemic with two prominent authors in the social-ontology/normativity debate, Brandom and Searle, and shows that, by building their views on normative attitudes with the almost exclusive purpose of meeting foundational explanatory constraints, they fail to adequately conceptualize crucial aspects that make normative attitudes normative at all. (shrink)

This paper aims to consider some semantic aspects of the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice overlooked in recent literature. First, we examine different cases of hermeneutical injustices and we propose to classify them according to their semantic structure. The core of this classification lies in the distinction between cases related to problems of content and cases related to problems of circulation of social concepts. Second, we criticize a semantic conception, implicit in much of the literature concern- ing hermeneutical injustice, according to (...) which concepts are mere labels. We show that this conception cannot provide an adequate understanding of the different cases of hermeneutical injustice that we identify: first, because it fails to capture the dynamics of conceptual change or refinement that these cases involve and, second, because it leads to diagnosing them as mere problems of concept application. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to develop an ontological reading of the ethical and epistemic phenomenon that Miranda Fricker describes as testimonial injustice. In order to do this, we will resort to the ideas put forward by Ian Hacking concerning the relations between social classifications and social kinds. On the one hand, we will deal with the processes that Hacking terms “making up people”, namely, processes in which the articulation of certain classifications make possible to existence of certain types (...) of people. We will argue that episodes of testimonial injustice, that express the effects of stereotypical classifications, can be construed as part of the social processes of making up people because those episodes contribute to fabricate the epistemic attributes, such as credibility, of certain types or kinds of people. On the other hand, in order to conceptualize the ontological setting under which the phenomenon of testimonial injustice becomes recognizable and reproachable, we will draw on Hacking’s idea of “interactive kinds”. We contend that the concept of “interactive kinds” underlines the fundamentally unstable nature of human kinds and that emphasizing this dynamic aspect can illuminate the social conditions that make testimonial injustice ethically blameworthy. In this sense, we will argue that testimonial injustice can become the object of a normative point of view only insofar as the kinds whose existence is made possible by stereotypical classification are already undergoing a process of change. (shrink)