Åsa Burman has recently introduced the important notion of telic power and differentiated it from deontic power in an attempt to build a bridge between ideal and non-ideal social ontology. We find Burman’s project promising but we argue that more is to be done to make it entirely successful. First, there is a palpable tension between Burman’s claim that telic power can be ontologically independent of deontic power and her examples, which suggest that these forms of power share the same (...) basis. Second, it is not completely clear how telic power helps non-ideal social ontologists explain oppression, since Burman thinks that both forms of power are transparent to social agents. We offer solutions to both problems. First, we question the thesis that telic power can exist without deontic power. Burman contends that this is possible because some social roles involving telic power can exist independently of institutions, which are––in her opinion––the source of deontic power. Against Burman, we suggest that all social roles involve deontic power, whether or not they are institutional. Second, we argue that while the exercise of deontic power requires a mutual recognition of the social roles of the interacting agents and, therefore, an acceptance of the associated norms, the exercise of telic power does not require acceptance of the relevant norms. This is why invoking telic power is useful in explaining how oppression and injustice can arise. Lastly, we suggest that the relation between teleological normativity and telic power has not been fully clarified by Burman and requires a deeper analysis. (shrink)

Famously Ryle imagined a visitor who has seen the colleges, departments, and libraries of a university but still wonders where the university is. The visitor fails to realize that the university consists of these organizational units. In this paper I ask what exactly the relation is between institutional entities such as universities and the entities they are composed of. I argue that the relation is constitution, and that it can be illuminated in terms of constitutive rules. The understanding of the (...) ontology of institutions that constitutive rules provide, however, is incomplete. In order to capture the practical significance of institutions, I introduce the notion of a status rule. Status rules concern the normative powers of institutions. The status account of institutions defended here is used to solve the problem of freestanding status terms: it turns out to be rather difficult to identify the entities of which statuses such as corporations and electronic money are composed. Unable to solve this problem, Searle concludes that they are created out of thin air. I criticize this claim and argue that these statuses are imposed on persons. (shrink)

Dans ce livre très original, Markus Gabriel avance une théorie du soi humain qui surmonte les blocages inhérents aux positions standards en philosophie de l’esprit contemporaine. Son point de vue, le néo-existentialisme, est intégralement antinaturaliste, en ce sens qu’il rejette toute théorie selon laquelle l’ensemble de nos meilleures connaissances scientifiques naturelles serait pleinement capable de rendre compte de l’esprit humain. L’auteur montre plutôt que l’esprit humain consiste en une prolifération ouverte de vocabulaires mentalistes. Leur rôle dans la forme de vie (...) humaine consiste à rendre compte du fait que l’être humain ne se fond pas simplement dans la nature inanimée et le reste du règne animal. Les humains s’appuient sur un autoportrait qui les situe dans un contexte aussi large que possible au sein de l’univers. Ce qui distingue cet autoportrait de notre connaissance de la réalité naturelle, c’est que nous changeons en vertu de nos croyances, vraies ou fausses, au sujet de nous-mêmes. (shrink)

© The Authors [2017]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Sher believes that our basic epistemic situation — that we aim to gain knowledge of a highly complex world using our severely limited, yet highly resourceful, cognitive capacities — demands that all epistemic projects be undertaken within two broad constraints: epistemic freedom and epistemic friction. The former permits us to employ our cognitive resourcefulness fully while undertaking epistemic projects, while the latter requires that (...) such projects always be substantially grounded in both the mind and reality. Epistemic Friction is an exploration of the latter constraint — the former being left for later work — that demonstrates the complementary nature of three projects that Sher has been working on, largely independently of one another, over the past three decades: a dynamic, neo-Quinean model of knowledge, a substantivist theory of truth, and... (shrink)

Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article’s author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle’s notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses more than it enlightens. The distinction is exposed between regulative and constitutive rules as being primarily a (...) linguistic one: whereas deontic powers figure explicitly in regulative rules, they feature only implicitly in constitutive rules. Furthermore, he contends that Searle’s collective acceptance account of human rights cannot adequately account for the fact that people have these rights even when they are not recognized. Finally, It is argued that a conception of collective intentionality that involves collective commitment is needed in order to do justice to the normative dimension of institutions. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things,—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to a critical ontology of social objects. Recent works on collective intentionality and norm-following neglect the question how free agents can be brought to collectively intend to x , although x is not in their own interest. By arguing for a natural disposition to empathic understanding and drawing on recent research in the neurosciences, this article outlines an ontological framework that extends collective intentionality to questions of oppression and status asymmetries. In a contribution to this (...) journal, Wisnewski (2005) unfortunately mischaracterizes the problem of meaning in social criticism. Implementing status problems in studies of collective intentions and construing social facts as both subjective and objective in character helps explain why agents can have persistent "misunderstandings" of social objects. (shrink)

We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional approach against (...) more contentious social constructivist approaches to science and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

John Searle’s theory of social ontology posits that there are indispensable normative components in the linguistic apparatuses termed status functions, collective intentionality, and collective recognition, all of which, he argues, make the social world. In this paper, I argue that these building blocks of Searle’s theory are caught in a petitio of constitutive circularity. Moreover, I note how Searle fails to observe language in reciprocal relation to the institutions which not only are shaped by it but also shape language’s practical (...) applications. According to Searle, social theorists that tried to show a connection between society, culture, and language all failed to see the constitutive role of language in the making of social reality. Consequently, I believe that Searle is himself guilty of a certain kind of blind presumption, and argue that Hegel’s philosophy of culture, which Searle dismisses as implausible, offers a more cohesive account of the normative transactions between human beings and their social world. (shrink)

This paper disputes the widespread assumption that beliefs and desires may be attributed as theoretical entities in the service of the explanation and predic- tion of human behavior. The literature contains no clear account of how beliefs and desires might generate actions, and there is good reason to deny that principles of rationality generate a choice on the basis of an agent’s beliefs and desires. An alter- native conception of beliefs and desires is here introduced, according to which an attribution (...) of belief is, in a certain sense, an assertion on the believer’s behalf and an attribution of desire is, in a certain sense, a command on the desirer’s behalf. In terms of this conception of the attribution of beliefs and desires, we can begin to understand how attributions of beliefs and desires can be explanatory, although we still cannot expect the attribution of beliefs and desires to generate predictions based on an assumption of rationality. Finally, the reality of beliefs and desires is likened to the reality of money; it is the reality of things governed by objective norms. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

Traditionally, social entities (i.e., social properties, facts, kinds, groups, institutions, and structures) have not fallen within the purview of mainstream metaphysics. In this chapter, we consider whether the exclusion of social entities from mainstream metaphysics is philosophically warranted or if it instead rests on historical accident or bias. We examine three ways one might attempt to justify excluding social metaphysics from the domain of metaphysical inquiry and argue that each fails. Thus, we conclude that social entities are not justifiably excluded (...) from metaphysical inquiry. Finally, we ask how focusing on social entities could change the character of metaphysical inquiry. We suggest that starting from examples of social entities might lead metaphysicians to rethink the assumption that describing reality in terms of intrinsic, independent, and individualistic features is preferable to describing it in terms of relational, dependent, and non-individualistic features. (shrink)

This paper discusses Raimo Tuomela's we-mode account in his recent book "Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents" and develops the idea that mode should be thought of as representational. I argue that in any posture – intentional state or speech act – we do not merely represent a state of affairs as what we believe, or intend etc. – as the received view of 'propositional attitudes' has it –, but our position relative to that state of affairs and thus (...) ourselves. That is, we represent the subject through what I call "subject mode" and its position through what I call "position mode". I argue that the key to understanding collective intentionality is to understand how we represent others as co-subjects of positions rather than as their objects. This is shown on various levels of collective intentionality. On the non-conceptual level of joint attention we experience others as co-subjects who we attend with rather than to and who we are at least also disposed to act jointly with. On the conceptual level of the we-mode we represent others as co-subjects of positions of knowledge, intention, belief and shared values. Organizations and thus group agents in Tuomela's sense I propose to understand in terms of what I call "role mode", that is, in terms of the positions individuals and groups take as occupants of certain roles, for example, as committee members, or as chancellor of Germany. I try to show how this account, while very much in the spirit of Tuomela's, can avoid his fictionalism about group agents and some other problems of his account, while steering between the Scylla of excessive individualism and the Charybdis of extreme collectivism. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous research (...) has rarely examined in depth the ontological structure of art categories, how they are generated and maintained, and how they function. This dissertation fills this gap. The proposal of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. Categories (especially genres) should be analyzed as clusters of rules that regulate the responses and behaviors of agents in the artworld. The visual mundaneness is a critical reason to consider Duchamp's "Comb" (1916) provocative, given the existence of the readymade as a set of rules that justifies such reasoning. The critical and appreciative practice of which categorization is a part is a social practice of making, declaring, proposing, reforming, and developing rules of appreciation. How we appreciate artworks, and how criticism guides our appreciation, is sensitive to how we categorize artworks. How we categorize artworks is sensitive to what categories have been set up in our community and which categories are active regarding each artwork. (shrink)

A short entry on the nature of social power, in particular on the question whether it can be understood in terms of powers as discussed in the metaphysics literature (in French).

This book consists of a dialogue between two interlocutors, Pablo and a student, who discuss a great range of issues in social philosophy and political theory, and in particular, the emergence, working properties and economic effects of institutions. It uses the dialogical form to make philosophy more accessible, but also to show how ideas develop through intellectual interaction. The fact that one of the interlocutors is the "student" in a place in the real world makes the dialogue quasi-fictive in character (...) and enables the active engagement of the reader. After all, we are all philosophers and we develop our own philosophy by exchanging views and arguments. The dialogue form is and should remain the principal form of philosophizing, since ideas, like butterflies, do not merely exist – they develop. This is certainly the case in actual philosophical interaction, and it can be the case in written philosophical exposition. Although the dialogue does not presuppose prior acquaintance with the respective philosophical and social scientific literature under discussion in this book, it makes arguments more accessible, and conveys the feeling that there are no definite solutions to philosophical problems. (shrink)

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (shrink)

According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, ‘Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods’. In recent years Big History has been developing very fast indeed. Big History courses are taught in the schools and universities of several dozen countries. Hundreds of researchers are involved in studying and teaching Big History. The unique approach of Big History, the interdisciplinary genre of (...) history that deals with the grand narrative of 13.8 billion years, has opened up a vast amount of research agendas. Big History brings together constantly updated information from the scientific disciplines and merges it with the contemplative realms of philosophy and the humanities. It also provides a connection between the past, present, and future. Big History is a colossal and extremely heterogeneous field of research encompassing all the forms of existence and all timescales. Unsurprisingly, Big History may be presented in very different aspects and facets. In this volume the Big History is presented and discussed in three different ways. In its first part, Big History is explored in terms of methodology, theories of knowledge, as well as showcasing the personal approach of scholars to Big History. The second section comprises such articles that could clarify Big History's main trends and laws. The third part of this book explores the nature of teaching Big History as well as profiling a number of educational methods. This volume will be useful both for those who study interdisciplinary macroproblems and for specialists working in focused directions, as well as for those who are interested in evolutionary issues of Astrophysics, Geology, Biology, History, Anthropology, Linguistics and other areas of study. (shrink)

The state of recent as well as older research on social ontology suggests a paradigmatic approach, according to which it is our consciousness that must provide the framework for conceptualising the social. I, however, argue that Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following opens up a new horizon for the ontology of the social. The fact that the rules of our language are social in nature and that we need not be aware of them in order to follow them shifts the problem to (...) what lies behind consciousness. The ontological conceptualisation of the social must focus on our implicit knowledge instead, which is always an enabling condition for our consciousness: for we share some of this implicit knowledge with others, as can be seen from Wittgenstein and the case of language. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the issue of compatibility of social institution and convention. At first, it introduces the modest account of conventionality building on five distinctive features – interdependence, arbitrariness, mind-independence, spontaneity, and normative-neutrality – which constitute conventional behaviour, then it presents the two major theories of social institutions that explain them in terms of rules, or equilibria. The argument is that conventions cover a wide-ranging area and cannot be identified with the category of institutions because it would be too (...) restrictive and contradictory to the initial modest account. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is objectivity in international human rights law, against which the justifiability of arguments can be determined, and which could advance the universality versus relativity of human rights debate. Revisiting the three schools of treaty interpretation and applying the three elements of Radbruch’s rule of law, I discuss how the interpreter’s job of balancing those schools has limited room for manoeuvre. I further propose an approach to help jurists detect unjustifiable arguments in treaty interpretation, (...) often in the disguise of relativism. That approach consists of: a non-justifiable argument contradicts all three schools of treaty interpretation; or ignores all three; a justifiable argument is supported by at least one of these schools; a better argument is a more balanced argument, i.e. supported by more elements of interpretation. Finally, I argue that there is a degree of objectivity in each school of treaty interpretation, which is supported by shared intention and speech act theory, and can therefore be held to apply to the whole process of treaty interpretation. I illustrate above arguments with a case, a doctrine, and a country. (shrink)

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to (...) mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap (sometimes), or are entirely absent. (shrink)

This essay examines the concept of leadership as it is commonly understood within the field of leadership studies today. The inquiry is framed by an analysis of three generally accepted definitions of leadership. I look at the selected definitions from four angles, which I call the four dimensions of leadership: the behavioral (what the leader does, or ought to do, that makes it leadership), the asymmetrical (in what sense a leader is different from the others in the group), the social (...) (what it is that the leader is leading), and the teleological (what the direction is). By doing this, I find that these definitions can be problematic, if instructively so. I identify two underlying concerns. The first problem is the tendency to fuse informal and formal leadership into a single concept. I argue that informal and formal leadership can be more helpfully understood, rather, as two separate, if sometimes overlapping, concepts, each needing its own definition and analysis. This is because formal leadership is a functional concept, while informal leadership is not; this entails not only that each type of leader is leading a different type of entity, but also that each is judged by different standards. The second problem is, paradoxically, a bias against leadership. To put this less polemically: scholars who recognize that organizational success can be hindered by excessive emphasis upon hierarchy, and who thus study the dynamics of egalitarian collaboration, can inadvertently generate confusion by allowing the honorific of “leadership” to be applied also to that work. So, I propose definitions of the two key concepts, formal and informal leadership, with the suggestion that this provides a helpful method of sorting leadership scholarship into three categories: formal leadership; informal leadership; and egalitarianism. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lower-level individualistic science. The standard argument for this position is the Fodorian multiple realizability argument. Its defenders endorse token–token identities between “higher-level” social objects and pluralities/sums of “lower-level” individuals, but they maintain that the properties expressed by social science predicates are often multiply realizable, entailing that type–type identities between social and individualistic properties are ruled out. In this paper I argue that the multiple realizability argument for explanatory (...) holism is unsound. The social sciences are indeed irreducible, but the principled reason for this is that the required token–token identifications cannot in general be carried through. In consequence, paradigmatic social science predicates cannot be taken to apply to the objects quantified over in the lower-level sciences. The result is that typical social science predicates cannot even be held to be co-extensive with individualistic predicates, which means type–type identifications are ruled out too. Multiple realizability has nothing to do with this failure of co-extensiveness, because the relevant social science predicates are not multiply realized in the sense intended by the explanatory holists, a sense which presupposes reductive token–token identifications. (shrink)

In this review essay, I examine the central tenets of sociologist Dave Elder-Vass’s recent contribution to social ontology, as put forth in his book The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Elder-Vass takes issue with ontological individualists and maintains that social structures exist and have causal powers in their own right. I argue that he fails to establish his main theses: he shows neither that social structures have causal powers “in their own right” (in any sense of (...) this expression) nor that they exist. (shrink)

I use the collection of “carnal ethnographies” of martial arts and combat sports assembled by Raul Sanchez and Dale Spencer under the title Fighting Scholars to spotlight the fruitfulness of deploying habitus as both empirical object (explanandum) and method of inquiry (modus cognitionis). The incarnate study of incarnation supports five propositions that clear up tenacious misconceptions about habitus and bolster Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action: (1) far from being a “black box,” habitus is fully amenable to empirical inquiry; (2) the (...) distinction between primary (generic) and secondary (specific) habitus enables us to capture the malleability of dispositions; (3) habitus is composed of cognitive, conative and affective elements: categories, skills, and desires; (4) habitus allows us to turn carnality from problem to resource for the production of sociological knowledge; and (5) thus to realize that all social agents are, like martial artists, suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments. (shrink)

Universal social institutions, such as marriage, commons management and property, have emerged independently in radically different cultures. This requires explanation. As Boyer and Petersen point out ‘in a purely localist framework would have to constitute massively improbable coincidences’ . According to Boyer and Petersen, those institutions emerged naturally out of genetically wired behavioural dispositions, such as marriage out of mating strategies and borders out of territorial behaviour. While I agree with Boyer and Petersen that ‘unnatural’ institutions cannot thrive, this one-sided (...) explanation of universal social institutions in terms of genetic human nature is unsatisfactory. Drawing on the literature on multi-level selection and gene-culture coevolution, I argue that universal social institutions are first and foremost the products of cultural selection. They occupy fitness peaks in the landscape of cultural possibilities, much in the same way that biological adaptations occupy fitness peaks in the landscape of biological possibilities. To show this, I use game-theory. By modelling the domains of social interaction in which marriage, commons management, and property emerged as Prisoner’s dilemma situations, it becomes clear how an institutional framework allows the group to move to an interactive equilibrium with a larger payoff. Institutions do so by incentivising all parties to adopt a cooperative strategy. They are culturally selected ways of optimising genetically constrained domains of human social interaction. (shrink)

The question of what art is and why certain objects and events are considered art is examined. In the light of John Searle’s Social Philosophy, a hybrid Institutionalist-Functionalist explanation of what counts as art is presented. However, Searle’s apparatus applied to the ontology of the work of art is not enough to answer the question of why art has the status it exhibits. The proposal is to trace back the ontology of art to the origins of the dichotomy between freedom (...) and necessity, and more specifically to the notion of “end in itself” presented by Kant, as the status that persons have. Ultimately, the ontology of art emerges as a projection of the status “end in itself”, of personhood, to objects and events. (shrink)

This paper presents the outline of an ontology of the social realm that aims to provide a new perspective to the study of social phenomena. It will be argued that in order to raise the impact of the social sciences, research should start from a new ontological discursive perspective. This implies that rather than dividing the social and psychological realm into different “disciplines”, the social and the psychological realm need to be imagined as two sides of the same coin. And (...) also, that space and time should not be regarded as the primary referential grid for the social sciences but conversations and people. Within this perspective the “substance” of the social realm can be imagined as a species-wide and history-long web of conversations between people in which speech-acts are the basic forces that create agents and structures. The power of speech-acts is in essence non-local: it does not matter much where and when they occur, but rather by whom and in which conversational contexts they are uttered. This can be captured by the metaphor of social entanglement where social events have particular bonds that transcend space and time. All of this resonates more with the probabilistic realm of quantum physics than with the Newtonian world were causality reigns. (shrink)

The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, Prof. Muhammad Ali Khalidi argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and (...) polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that critical theory needs to make its socio-ontological commitments explicit, whilst on the other hand I will posit that contemporary social ontology needs to amend its formalistic approach by embodying a critical theory perspective. In the first part of my paper I will discuss how the question was posed in Horkheimer’s essays of the 1930s, which leave open two options: (1) a constructive inclusion of social ontology within social philosophy, or else (2) a program (...) of social philosophy that excludes social ontology. Option (2) corresponds to Adorno’s position, which I argue is forced to recur to a hidden social ontology. Following option (1), I first develop a metacritical analysis of Searle, arguing that his social ontology presupposes a notion of 'recognition' which it cannot account for. Furthermore, by means of a critical reading of Honneth, I argue that critical theory could incorporate a socioontological approach, giving value to the constitutive socio-ontological role of recognition and to the socio-ontological role of objectification. I will finish with a proposal for a socio-ontological characterization of reification which involves that the basic occurrence of recognition is to be grasped at the level of background practices. (shrink)

Dewey’s social ontology could be characterized as a habit ontology, an ontology of habit qua second nature that offers us an account of intentionality, social statuses, institutions, and norms in terms of habituations. Such an account offers us a promising alternative to contemporary intentionalist and deontic approaches to social ontology such as Searle’s. Furthermore, it could be the basis of a social ontology better suited to explain both the maintenance and the transformation of social reality. In the first part I (...) will characterize Dewey’s model as a social ontology based on the notion of habit, and present it as an alternative to intentionalist approaches to social reality. In the second part I will argue that habit ontology offers us an account of social norms that is based on a peculiar understanding of the notion of ‘status’, and represents an alternative to deontic accounts. In the third part I will claim that Dewey’s notion of “public” offers us a dynamic understanding of social institutions and a ‘reactive’ notion of collective intentionality as an achievement rather than as a presupposition of social practices. In the final section I will summarize some advantages of the Deweyan over the Searlean social ontology concerning our understanding of acceptance, maintenance and transformation of statuses, and of the role played by the ‘background’. (shrink)

Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types, and contents of intentions or representational states must be construed so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers, and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs, or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, (...) this very issue has not received much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper, I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz’s theory of the social world, often neglected in philosophy, has the potential to capture the interplay of identity and difference which shapes our action, interaction, and experience in everyday life. Compared to still dominant identity-based models such as that of Jürgen Habermas, who assumes a coordination of meaning built on the idealisation of stable rules, Schutz’s theory is an important step forward. However, his central notion of a “type” runs into a difficulty which requires constructive criticism. Against the (...) background of Schutz’s theory of meaning inspired by Bergson and Husserl, his idea of types “taken for granted until further notice” is shown to express a primacy of identity which, in the final analysis, leads into the implausible scenario of ‘ubiquitous tunnel vision’. This makes it necessary to go beyond Schutz and assume an inherently motivated tendency towards difference in meaning termed ‘spontaneity’. Where spontaneity and the opposed tendency towards identity of meaning work together in the application of types, they enable embodied subjects to interact with the world and with each other in the routine yet flexible and sometimes innovative ways which we all know. (shrink)

Despite growing appreciation in recent decades of the importance of shared intentional mental states as a foundation for everything from divergences in primate evolution, to the institution of communal norms, to trends in the development of modernity as a socio-political phenomenon, we lack an adequate understanding of the relationship between individual and shared intentionality. At the same time, it is widely appreciated that deontic reasoning concerning what ought, may, and ought not be done is, like reasoning about our intentions, an (...) exercise of practical rationality. Taking advantage of this fact, I use a plan-theoretic semantics for the deontic modalities as a basis for understanding individual and shared intentions. This results in a view that accords well with what we currently have reason to believe about the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of norm psychology and shared intentionality in human beings, and where original intentionality can be understood in terms of the shared intentionality of a community. (shrink)

There is a long philosophical tradition of skepticism about the possibility of adequate paraphrases for metaphorical utterances. And even among those who favor paraphrasability, there is a tendency to think that paraphrases of metaphorical utterances may themselves have to be non-literal. I argue that even the most evocative and open-ended metaphorical utterances can be literally and adequately paraphrased, once we recognize that they are actually indirect speech acts—specifically, indirect directives that command the hearer to engage in an open-ended comparison. This (...) leads to an overall picture in which trite, unevocative metaphorical utterances admit of just straightforward, usually non-directive literal paraphrases, while the most evocative metaphorical utterances admit of only indirect directive paraphrases, and metaphorical utterances in a third category admit of two literal paraphrases, one of which is straightforward and usually non-directive, and the other of which takes the indirect directive form. This argument for literal paraphrasability is intended to demystify metaphor, but not to undercut metaphor’s tremendous value as a communicative device. (shrink)

A framework is developed for understanding what is “taken for granted” both in philosophy and in life generally, which may serve to orient philosophical inquiry and make it more effective. The framework takes in language and its development, as well as mathematics, logic, and the empirical sphere with particular reference to the exigencies of life. It is evaluated through consideration of seven philosophical issues concerned with such topics as solipsism, sense data as the route to knowledge, the possible reduction of (...) geometry to logic, and the existence and status of human rights. Various dichotomies and the notion of continuity are evidently highly strategic. (shrink)

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle develops a theory of institutional facts and objects, of which money, borders and property are presented as prime examples. These objects are the result of us collectively intending certain natural objects to have a certain status, i.e. to ‘count as’ being certain social objects. This view renders such objects irreducible to natural objects. In this paper we propose a radically different approach that is more compatible with standard economic theory. We claim that (...) such institutional objects can be fully understood in terms of actions and incentives, and hence the Searlean apparatus solves a non-existent problem. (shrink)

Declarations like “this meeting is adjourned” make certain facts the case by representing them as being the case. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the mechanism whereby the utterance of a declaration can bring about a new state of affairs. In this paper, we use the incentivization account of institutional facts to address this issue. We argue that declarations can serve to bring about new states of affairs as their utterance have game theoretical import, typically in virtue of (...) the utterer signaling a commitment to act in an incentive-changing way. (shrink)

Contemporary discussion concerning institutions focus on, and mostly accept, the Searlean view that institutional objects, i.e. money, borders and the like, exist in virtue of the fact that we collectively represent them as existing. A dissenting note has been sounded by Smit et al. (Econ Philos 27:1–22, 2011), who proposed the incentivized action view of institutional objects. On the incentivized action view, understanding a specific institution is a matter of understanding the specific actions that are associated with the institution and (...) how we are incentivized to perform these actions. In this paper we develop the incentivized action view by extending it to institutions like property, promises and complex financial organisations like companies. We also highlight exactly how the incentivized action view differs from the Searlean view, discuss the method appropriate to such study and discuss some of the virtues of the incentivized action view. (shrink)

The ontological turn in anthropological methodology, at least in its conceptualization-oriented formulation, aims to turn away from the concepts and objects found within one’s own social setting in order to turn to indigenous conceptualization processes and take a look at “the things themselves.” This article aims to unpack what such constant reconceptualization amounts to, arguing that when modified to meet certain objections, the ontological turn could provide important ingredients for an alternative version of interpretive social science—one that wishes to understand (...) social phenomena as human kinds in the vein of Ian Hacking, Sally Haslanger and Ron Mallon. (shrink)

A tension between acting morally and acting rationally is apparent in analyses of moral emotions that ascribe an inherent subjectivity to ethical thinking, leading thence to irresolvable differences between rational agents. This paper offers an account of emotional worthiness that shows how, even if moral reasons fall short of philosophical criteria of rationality, we can still accord reasonableness to them and recognize that the deliberative weight of social norms is sufficient to address the moral limitations of strategic rationality.

We are logical pluralists who hold that the right logic is dependent on the domain of investigation; different logics for different mathematical theories. The purpose of this article is to explore the ramifications for our pluralism concerning normativity. Is there any normative role for logic, once we give up its universality? We discuss Florian Steingerger’s “Frege and Carnap on the Normativity of Logic” as a source for possible types of normativity, and then turn to our own proposal, which postulates that (...) various logics are constitutive for thought within particular practices, but none are constitutive for thought as such. (shrink)

The article discusses the connection between theory formation and historical research in the study of religion. It presupposes that the study of religion is conceived of as an empirical discipline. The empirical basis of theories is provided primarily by historical research, including research in the very recent past, that is, the present time. Research in the history of religions, therefore, is an indispensable part of the study of religion. However, in recent discussions on the methods, aims, and theoretical presuppositions of (...) the discipline, research in the history of religions largely is ignored. To shed some light on this blind spot, the article builds on the philosophy of science of Critical Realism. While the first part deals with the role of historical research in theoretical discourses of the discipline, the second part explains fundamental ontological and epistemological positions of Critical Realism and their implications for empirical research. On this basis, some methodological problems of theory formation in the study of religion are discussed in the third part. In particular, it is argued that it is impossible to validate empirically theories of religion that aim to explain what religion is. The concluding part sketches ways of theory formation in the study of religion that does not take religion as the explanandum but as the theoretical perspective that guides research. (shrink)

Education is commonly considered to be a transformational practice that contributes both to forging the personality of individuals and to promoting social entanglements. For this reason, education always has a normative character that rests on a particular concept of what humanity and society should be. However, educational policies and practices are frequently unaware of these theoretical presuppositions, and for this reason, they frequently appear to act in a naïve and superficial manner. This is particularly the case for citizenship education, which, (...) if superficially implemented, risks being distorted into a form of civic education that reproduces established norms and social relations, without promoting any meaningful social change. Thus, the first part of this article aims to deepen the notion of citizenship, in particular by studying what the concept of ‘consensus’ means, conceiving of it not as a synonym of social resignation, but rather as a collective conspiracy towards a common political project. Accordingly, the article defines the basic characteristics that education should always possess to effectively promote a democratic and participative citizenship education. In particular, it identifies five constitutive contrasts in relation to the ways in which information is transmitted, reasoned, emotionally perceived, and then discussed and countered both by individuals and society. The article therefore presents an overall theory of education, seen as a momentous practice of dialogue and common action that opens the way for a democracy in progress. (shrink)