Key elements of John Searle’s articulation of the Standard Model of Social Ontology can be found within Max Weber’s ideal type of legal-rational authority. However, the fact that, for Weber, legal-rational authority is just one of three types of legitimate authority, along with traditional and charismatic authority, suggests limitations to the Standard Model’s scope of applicability. Where Searle takes himself to have provided an account of “the structure of human civilization,” Weber’s taxonomy suggests that Searle has only given us an (...) account of a way of being a civilization. This understanding of traditional authority also reveals why the Standard Model misconstrues the structure of ordinary, informal statuses, such as friendship. (shrink)

The conferralist account of social properties that Ásta develops and defends in Categories We Live By is persuasive in many ways. Conferralism could however do better, by its own lights, at handling the phenomenon of intersectionality. This paper first suggests a friendly amendment to the schema for conferrals that Asta offers. This helps to explain the difficulty concerning intersectionality. Finally, the paper suggests a way of developing the conferralist account that would resolve this difficulty.

Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of institutions, which neither assumes that institutions are beneficial or oppressive, and where ideology is understood as a (...) structuring and stabilizing phenomenon that helps maintain specific distributions of rights and duties by conferring perceived legitimacy onto them. (shrink)

In considering patriarchy as potentially institutional and as a characteristic also of contemporary Western societies, a fundamental issue concerns how to make sense of largely informal institutions to begin with. Traditional accounts of institutions have often focused on formalized ones. It is argued here, however, that the principal idea behind one commonly accepted conception of institutions can be developed in a way that better facilitates an explication of informal institutions. When applied to the phenomenon of patriarchy, such an approach can (...) then also allow us to ontologically make sense of gray areas and hierarchies of authority, as well as the intersectionality of social positions. (shrink)

Mari Mikkola’s Pornography: A Philosophical Introduction is a rich, thorough, and important book. With great skill and precision, Mikkola maps the conceptual terrain of pornography; summarises and assesses key debates in the existing literature; and contributes her own insights – chiefly, in my view, an appealing artefactual definition of pornography, and a strong case for a methodological commitment to discussing pornography in a way that is grounded in empirical reality. The result is much more than the promised ‘introduction’: it is (...) a key critical study that will, I am sure, play a major role in shaping future debates on this topic. I focus on a brief part of the book where Mikkola offers a critique of a paper of mine on pornography and social ontology. In short, I think Mikkola’s critique is correct, and I’ll attempt a re-working of the argument I made in that paper which, I hope, avoids the problems she identifies. (shrink)